THE THREAT TO THE LABOR MOVEMENT
the socialist, party, is trying with might and main to become the official organ in English of the reactionary drive. In its issue for December 28 it had no less than eight news stories and articles directed against the left wing and the Communists. It accompanies this truckling to the right wing of trade union officialdom with a front page appeal for funds.
The national executive committee of the socialist party, meeting in New York last week, officially assured the needle trades officialdom of its support. Its resolution on the subject, published in the New Leader, after making it plain that the N. E. C. will not oppose the present officialdom, or allow socialist party members to do so in the name of the party, goes on to state:
We rejoice that the members of the needle trade unions have united in a campaign to save the unions from the influence that has brought them to the brink of ruin. To the extent that socialist party members can be of service in this work we pledge their willing co-operation. …
That the real policy of the socialist party is in conflict with its professed neutrality can be seen by a comparison of the above with the following statement which is made in the first part of the N. E. C. resolution:
The socialist party has always been opposed to any capturing of the trade unions by political parties and TO ANY ATTEMPTS TO DIRECT AND CONTROL THE AFFAIRS OF TRADE UNIONS BY OUTSIDE PARTIES. (Emphasis mine.)
One statement negates the other. The position of the socialist party officialdom amounts to this:
No struggle in the unions against any party except the Communist party—the only revolutionary working class party in the United States.
That this is its actual policy is to be discerned by the fact that its official organ chronicles approvingly denunciations of the Communists and left wing made to meetings under right wing control by such well-known Tammany Hall revolutionists as Matthew Woll, Hugh Frayne, New York organizer for the A. F. of L., and Joseph D. Ryan, president of Mayor Walker's labor club, the Central Trades and Labor Council of New York City.
The program of the "Committee for Preservation of the Trade Unions," dominated by the Jewish Daily Forward and supported by the New Leader, is too long to quote in full, but one or two extracts will give a clear idea of the objective of this body. Point 5 reads:
To make a survey of the "innocents' club" and camouflaged organizations formed by the Communists or the Communist Party thru which they have received funds ostensibly for the protection of the foreign-born, the Negroes, the Filipinos, for release of political prisoners, for the protection of civil rights, etc., all of which are intended to further the destructive work of American Communism.
As in the case of Sacco and Vanzetti, the various non-partisan mass movements mentioned cannot be stripped of Commuinst workers and sympathizers without either crippling or wrecking them. It is apparent that the socialist party leaders are quite willing to wreck these movements, all of them of vital importance to the labor movement as a whole, to get a crack at the Communists.
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