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The national campaign directed by the Civil Rights Defense Committee to free the 18 Trotskyists railroaded to prison under the vicious Smith “Gag” Act is becoming more and more recognized within the American labor movement as the foremost labor defense struggle of the Second World War. Warren K. Billings, who was framed up together with Tom Mooney in 1916, has correctly emphasized the fact that the Minneapolis Labor Case is “the same kind of frameup as was perpetuated against Mooney and myself during the First World War.”
The growing realization of the crucial importance of this case is expressed in the rapidly widening support and solidarity among labor and progressive organizations. Already organizations representing well over a million workers and members of Negro, fraternal, civil liberties and other progressive bodies have backed the fight to free the 18 and to wipe out the Smith “Gag” Act. In addition to almost 250 local, district and state trade union organizations, several Internationals of the CIO have officially endorsed the defense campaign: United Transport Service Employees of America; Textile Workers Union; and the United Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Employees. At its June Convention in Boston, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union of the AFL unanimously passed a resolution demanding presidential pardon for the 18.
Support has likewise come from the leading national Negro organizations: the National Association For the Advancement of Colored People and the March-On-Washington movement, The largest labor fraternal bodies, the Workmen’s Circle and the Workmen’s Benefit Fund, have called upon their members to aid the 18.
The series of highly successful meetings held during the national tour of CRDC Secretary George Novack in the principal industrial cities from coast to coast provided another graphic demonstration of the rising tide of labor and liberal support.
Like every great labor defense struggle of the past, the Minneapolis Labor Case has become a touchstone to distinguish the progressive forces in American life from the reactionary and to expose before the very eyes of the workers just who are the servants of the class enemy within its ranks. Leading this treacherous pack are the Stalinists, who have recently capped their strikebreaking activities by a public proclamation of allegiance to Wall Street and its “free enterprise.”
PREVIOUS CONDUCT OF THE STALINISTS
Having stabbed the miners in the back, having scabbed on the Montgomery-Ward strikers, the Stalinist finks are now intensifying their activities in the field of labor defense. When Roosevelt and Biddle at Tobin’s behest moved to railroad the Trotskyists to jail in 1941, the sole objection voiced at the time by the Daily Worker was that the Department of Justice did not go far enough in its frameup. The GPU’s hirelings in this country demanded that Roosevelt stage in Minneapolis a replica of Stalin’s own Moscow Trial frameups. Through the subsequent stages of the case leading up to the imprisonment of the 18, the Stalinists in their press participated in the official conspiracy of silence concerning the case while covertly sabotaging efforts to rally forces and resources for the defense fight within the union movement.
Now that the Minneapolis Case has become one of the major issues in labor’s ranks and the most progressive elements are rallying resolutely behind the campaign, the enraged and panic-stricken Stalinists have moved into the open. They are conducting a nation-wide furious and rabid campaign against the Trotskyists, and especially against the 18 class war prisoners and their supporters.
FINK BRIDGES CALLS FOR RED-BAITING CAMPAIGN
In the very same June 2 issue of The Dispatcher, official organ of the Stalinist-dominated International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union—CIO, in which Harry Bridges announced that the Stalinists intend to continue their strikebreaking policies permanently—in peacetime as well as for the duration—he devoted his entire personal column on the editorial page to incitement of lynch attack upon the Trotskyists. Echoing California’s Associated Farmers vigilante gangs, Bridges ended his attack with the cry: “Let’s go get ‘em!”
Simultaneously the Stalinist West Coast daily, The People’s World, published a series of typical GPU articles, one emanating from Mexico City full of fantastic charges of a “Trotskyite conspiracy” to “wreck the transportation system of Mexico” and to “curb war shipments to the US:’ in particular, by fomenting “wildcat railway strikes.” A second dispatch from London slanders the English Trotskyists and backs Churchill’s persecution of the leaders of the Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist Party. The third, written by the GPU in this country, smears the imprisoned 18 and endorses the frameup engineered by Roosevelt and Tobin. (People’s World, May 22 and 23.)
GPU BUYS SPACE FOR ITS VIGILANTE LIES
This opening phase of the carefully calculated campaign was climaxed in the same week by the insertion of a half-page advertisement in the San Pedro Pilot paid for and signed by the Communist Club of San Pedro. This paid advertisement reiterated the vicious falsehoods in the articles of the People’s World; adds that the Trotskyist program is “the same program which Hitler and Tojo advise American workers to follow”; brazenly includes the infamous Moscow frameups as part of the “record of Trotskyite conspiracy”; and then concludes by raising the same vigilante lynch cry that Bridges uttered in his own paper: “They operate like enemy spies in our midst …. Show these provocateurs the gate.” (San Pedro Pilot, May 27. Emphasis in the original.)
Concurrently issue after issue of the Daily Worker has been making political preparations for the extension of this lynch and red-baiting campaign against the Trotskyists on a national scale. To inflame public opinion the Stalinists have of course resorted to the vilest chauvinist waving of the Stars and Stripes, trying to exploit the Allied invasion of Europe, and every other demagogic trick of the profiteers and Legionnaires. Their immediate aim is to counteract and break up in every way the growing labor support for the 18. Similar methods were pursued by the GPU and its agents in connection with the historical struggle against the Moscow trials when the International Commission of Inquiry headed by John Dewey investigated the Moscow Trials, branded them as frameups, and found the chief defendants, Leon Trotsky and his son, Leon Sedov, not guilty.
<RED-BAITING TRICKS OF THE DAILY WORKER
<>Two days before the CRDC mass meeting in New York on June 8 the Daily Worker openly attempted to terrorize prominent labor figures and to prevent them from speaking. Similar attempts, as the CRDC Secretary reported, had been made at various other cities during his tour. In New York, as elsewhere, these methods were unavailing. The New York meeting proved not only to be the largest public demonstration to date in support of the imprisoned 18 but brought forth from the labor leaders present scathing denunciations of the Stalinist’s role in this case. Thus the chairman of the meeting, George Baldanzi, executive vice-president of the United Textile Workers-CIO, stated:“…. Very frankly, the activities of the Daily Worker and the Communist Party and some of our ‘left-wing’ leaders of recent date, with their endorsement of the Baruch plan, with their re-emphasis that they have always been for capitalism, with their pronouncements of a no-strike pledge after the war—as far as I am concerned, that group has forfeited the right to speak for the working class in America. And I should say that the sooner they get out of the labor movement and stop pouring opium on it which will deaden its militancy, the better it will be for American labor.”
What are the main reasons behind this latest public resumption by the GPU apparatus of its international campaign against Trotskyism? In the first place, broad working class masses are beginning to understand the enormity of the Stalinist degeneration, crimes and betrayals. This is being driven home by the Kremlin’s counter-revolutionary foreign policy (the endorsement of Allied war aims; Stalin’s complot to aid Roosevelt and Churchill in the attempt to strangle the maturing European revolution; the dissolution of the Comintern; the recognition of Badoglio, etc.); by the intensification of reaction within the Soviet Union (the wiping out of the remaining cultural gains of the October revolution; the elimination of free public education, co-education and all progressive legislation for women; the inculcation of national chauvinist ideology in place of proletarian internationalism; the restoration, with state backing, of the Greek Orthodox Church and its Holy Synod; the fostering of a monstrous officer caste with privileges surpassing those of Czarist Russia and Kaiser’s Prussia, etc.); and finally, by the corresponding submission of Stalinist parties to Anglo-American Big Business.
A CONTRAST THAT IS ANNIHILATING
The unwavering and irreconcilable struggle of the Trotskyists for the socialist program of Marx and Lenin stands out before the eyes of the advanced workers in the sharpest contrast to the abysmal perfidy of Stalin and his followers. In the United States and England the Stalinists are crawling before Wall Street and the City; they have underwritten the war policies of Roosevelt and Churchill, especially the drive against labor’s rights and living standards bound up with the execution of that imperialist program. In these two strongholds of world capitalism the Trotskyists have been persecuted, framed up and railroaded to prison because of their revolutionary socialist ideas and activities in defense of the interests and rights of the laboring masses on the road to the establishment of workers’ power throughout the world.
In order to try and check this political awakening of the militant workers and their gravitation toward the Trotskyists, the Kremlin has again stepped up the operations of its slander, terror and murder machinery. This anti-Trotskyist campaign is rendered all the more imperative by the visible disaffection within the ranks of the Stalinists themselves. The Kremlin’s policies have already produced splits within the Communist Parties of Italy and Poland; Browder, Foster and Co., have had to resort to expulsions in this country in order to put over the new line; while in England more and more Stalinist-influenced workers are becoming disillusioned and turning toward the Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist Party.
The growing radicalization of the war-wearied masses throughout the world and their increasing opposition to the decayed capitalist system and all its apologists and upholders presents a mortal danger not only to the imperialists but also to the rule of the usurping Stalinist bureaucracy within the USSR. The GPU will stop at nothing in fulfilling Stalin’s order to behead the rising world revolutionary movement by striking at its Trotskyist vanguard.
ON GUARD AGAINST GPU MACHINATIONS!
When in 1941 prior to the entry of the United States into the war , Roosevelt and Biddle initiated their frameup against the leaders of the Socialist Workers Party and of the Minneapolis Truckdrivers Union Local 544-CIO, we warned the labor movement that this assault upon labor’s rights and free speech was but the opening gun in an all-out offensive against the American working class. Today ever-greater sections of organized labor recognize the inseparable connection between the fight to free the 18 and their struggle to maintain their own organizations and rights in the face of the rabid anti-labor drive.
The current anti-Trotskyist campaign of the Stalinists—centered around the case of the 18—is likewise fundamentally directed against the interests of the labor movement as a whole, against its day-to-day struggles to safeguard gains already made, and above all against its great revolutionary communist future. The Stalinists are concentrating their fire upon the Trotskyists for the same purpose as Roosevelt did in 1941 and Churchill is doing at this very hour—to repress the most conscious and incorruptible anti-capitalist fighters and thus clear the way for the general assault upon the rest of the working class. The Stalinist attack is all the more insidious and dangerous because it issues from within the labor movement.
It is the elementary duty of every progressive element to expose and beat back this latest conspiracy of the Stalinist agents of Big Business. The task of tasks for American labor is to crush Stalinism politically and to completely purge itself of what Trotsky called “the worst plague” of the world working class movement.
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