Marxists’ Internet Archive: ETOL Home Page: Trotskyist Writers Section: Farrel Dobbs
Source: The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 41, 11 October 1948, pp. 1 & 2.
Transcription & Mark-up: Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
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The following is the major section of the keynote address entitled, Big Business and America’s Future, delivered by Farrell Dobbs, SWP Presidential candidate, to the Connecticut SWP state convention on Oct. 3. The convention was held at the Bond Hotel at Hartford and the address was carried over the main radio stations of Connecticut. |
Delegates to the first Connecticut State Convention of the Socialist Workers Party, Friends of the radio audience:
If you have listened carefully to the campaign speeches of the major candidates in this campaign, you will have noticed – as I did – that there is one refrain that runs through all of them. They say, in essence, that conditions may be bad in the United States but they are worse in the rest of the world.
The housing shortage may cause heartaches and suffering to millions of Americans – but the housing situation is worse in Germany.
Prices may be. too high for families in Hartford and New Haven to make, ends meet – but prices are higher in Shanghai and Hong Kong.
Negroes may be victimized and humiliated, civil liberties curbed and undermined by government-inspired reaction – but there are less democratic rights under the Stalin dictatorship.
Since the dawn of class society, this has always been the argument of the vested interests and powers-that-be to resist change and progress. It was against such insidious poison that Patrick Henry shouted his famous battlecry: “Give me liberty or give me death!”
The politicians who today peddle this narcotic either reveal the most downright ignorance of the laws of history and political economy or they are deliberately deceiving the people to protect the material interests and huge fortunes of the few.
History is in constant motion and it is unlikely that the Republicans or Democrats will produce a Joshua to stop this movement. States and systems advance or degenerate. They never stand still.
Let us take an example. About thirty years ago, a capitalist democracy like ours was established in Germany. Trade unions flourished, social legislation more advanced in many respects than burs was enjoyed by large numbers and the right to vote was extended to all.
But as ih this country, ownership of industry was in the hands of a few giant corporations and banks; the people suffered from unemployment, poverty, lack of housing, anti-labor laws and re-. strictions on civil rights – as they do here. A change to socialized ownership and workers’ control of industry, to planning for production for use instead of anarchy for private profit, was an imperative and unpostponable necessity.
But the German Deweys and Trumans, and especially the German Wallaces and Norman Thomases, resisted and fought this change. They convinced the German people to bear their present ills rather than risk a change to socialism. They succeeded in halting progress but not change – a change for the worse; that is, to Hitler and fascism, to the rule of slave labor laws and concentration camps.
Woe to him who thinks that America is different from Germany and is excluded from this historic law of change!
A hundred years ago, America was a nation of small farmers and traders. There were rich and poor, capitalists and workers, it is true. But wealth was more evenly divided than it is today. Despite the desires and fears of men like Jefferson and Jackson, an irresistible change uprooted and overwhelmed the society of our forefathers.
The small farmer has been displaced by large scale factory farming controlled by absentee owners. Small business has been gobbled up by giant corporations. Sven the manufacturer, who knew production and was acquainted with his workers, has been pushed aside by Wall Street financiers and parasitic couponclippers. The small artisan’s shop, where the worker owned his own tools, has given way to the system of mass production, where thousands labor under one roof: on monotonous chores created by an infinite division of labor.
This change was inevitable if mankind was to emerge from primitive conditions of life always at the mercy of uncontrollable forces of nature, prisoners of unending and backbreaking toil.
But with this change has come a terrible evil which has robbed the great majority of the people of the security, the luxury, the comfort which should have been the fruits of their collective industry and creative science. And now this evil threatens to rob the people of life itself.
A financial despotism dominates America today. This group, which owns and controls the industries, the natural resources, the transportation – yes, even the land and the air – is so small that Ferdinand Lundberg, a reliable economist, said that 60 families rule America. Rockefeller, Morgan, DuPont, Whitney, Swift, Harriman, to mention but a few, are. names which are as well known as were the names of kings and princes in another age. And their number constantly grows smaller, not larger.
The Federal Trade Commission, watching this process, reports that more than 2,400 formerly independent industrial companies have disappeared into mergers since 1940. Nearly one-third of these companies have been swallowed up by corporations with assets totaling $50,000,000 or more.
Just name the problem – any problem – that besets the working people and the cause springs readily to mind. Take anti-labor legislation. Everyone knows that the National Association of Manufacturers Association rushed the Taft-Hartley Bill through Congress with the aid of the Republicans and a majority of Democrats, despite Mr. Truman’s campaign oratory to the contrary.
Big Business is a totalitarian force. It cannot permit the workers to have a voice in deciding the speed of production, the safety and healthfulness of working conditions, the rate of wages or the length of hours.
Under Big Business ownership, minority rules and majority submits.
Just the other day we had an example of this in New England. A textile manufacturer in Nashua, New Hampshire, decided he could extract more profits in the open shop south. So, after years of profit-making in Nashua, after milking the federal government for subsidies and the local government for all manner of tax exemption and other rights, he served notice that he was closing his plant and laying off 3,500 workers.
Did he care that hunger and misery would stalk the 20,000 people of Nashua, a one-mill town? Did he even consult them? Why should he? The capitalist rules his factory as kings once ruled subjects.
How far is Connecticut from New Hampshire and how different are capitalists in this state? Think that over, workers of Connecticut!
Take prices. Here the connection may seem somewhat more obscure because of all the propaganda about the natural economic laws. But that is all bunk. Big Business fixes prices. They are keeping prices up now by forcing the government into war production, more profitable to them than serving the peace-time consumer.
Dewey says he has no quick answers to solve the problem of high prices. Naturally. The darling of Park Avenue and the servant of Wall Street knows that it is bad business to monkey with Big Business.
Truman thought he had an answer in 1946, but the Meat Trust showed him how mistaken he was. When they wanted the price of meat raised and Truman resisted, they declared a meat famine – and Truman surrendered.
Truman surrendered because the government is controlled by Big Business just as the chemical industry is controlled by DuPont. It was once said that the government was controlled by “unseen powers,” meaning Big Business, which exercised its controls by lobbying, intimidation and bribery. A robber baron stated that it was easier and cheaper to buy a few hundred legislators than millions of voters.
Today this control is exercised openly, brazenly, without attempt to conceal.
The most important posts in the executive branch of the government are occupied by bankers, industrialists, speculators and corporation attorneys. Most of these plutocrats were brought into the government by Harry Truman – although Roosevelt and Wallace also did their share – by Harry Truman who is now running up and down the country warning of the danger of Big Business control of government if the Republicans win.
Big Business control is so secure today that the most fateful decisions on the Berlin crisis – on whether there shall be war or peace – are being made this minute while Congress is in. recess and the President is campaigning. They are being made by six men, four of them money kings and two brass hats and none of them elected by the people.
It would be no different if the legislature were in session. A National Security Council, consisting of financial tycoons and brass hats, presided over by James Forrestal of the Dillon, Read House of Investment bankers – none of them elected – has been making all the decisions on foreign policy and handing them to Congress of its bi-partisan rubber stamp.
Mark my word! Big Business is determined to drag us into another war. Their billions of surplus capital must be invested in shrinking and poverty-stricken foreign markets. This is a far more profitable venture than building homes for veterans, providing decent education for the youth and medical care for the millions bf sick and ailing too poor to afford high-priced doctors.
They are bent on driving all competitors from the field, exploiting the peoples of all lands end all colors, forcing upon them unwanted and despotic governments even though America’s name becomes anathema in the world, even though a war of atomic destruction may be the outcome.
Their banners read “free enterprise” and “democracy” but the plans of Big Business spell out two diametrically opposite words: Police State and Dictatorship.
Trial by jury is being replaced by trial by inquisition and kangaroo “loyalty” courts. The right to strike and to choose a union of one’s own choice is overthrown by government by injunction. America, once the haven of oppressed from all over the world, now sees a frenzy of deportation proceedings against aliens who will not kneel at the altar of Big Business.
Free speech, guaranteed by the constitution, is now being gagged by the courts. Only a week ago, AFL Painters Local 481 here in Hartford was fined $809 and its former President John O’Brien $200 by a New Haven Federal Judge for carrying on political action during an election campaign.
If Thomas Jefferson who once said, “The tree of liberty should be watered with the blood of tyrants at least every twenty years” – if he were alive today he would see the name of his party on a Department of Justice “subversive” blacklist, placed there without prior notification, without charges and without a hearing. Then he would see veterans of the revolutionary war fired from government positions because of membership in the party.
For saying far less – that is precisely what happened to the Socialist Workers Party and to James Kutcher, the legless veteran who is being fired from his job with the Veterans’ Administration because he is an admitted member of the party.
It is only natural that Big Business, should carry over its despotic practices from industry to government. Those who prohibit free thought and free speech in the factories must eventually attempt to prohibit these rights in the voting booth, on the street and wherever men gather to voice their grievances and discontent. They must do so, else freedom of speech in public places penetrate into the factories and destroy their dictatorship.
It was once said that a poor man sleeps with his door unlocked, because he has no valuables to protect. By the same token our present rulers sitting on a fabulous hoard of ill-gotten wealth, looted and stolen from the people, must constantly multiply the guard against the rightful owners. They must increase the number and the power of the police and decrease the rights and the liberties of the people.
Last week, Mr. T.K. Quinn, an industrialist of Darien, Connecticut, told a Congressional committee that Big Business was an economic monster. The natural habitat of this beast is a totalitarian state. That explains why Mr. Quinn said there was “little difference between the Politburo of Stalin and the economic monster.” And Mr. Quinn should know; he was formerly vice president of the General Electric Company.
If permitted to continue unchecked and unchallenged, these "economic monsters” will eventually substitute fascist mobs for their present bi-partisan servants.
But how shall they be checked and challenged? The Socialist Workers Party rejects trust-busting as futile, utopian and reactionary. For fifty years, politicians, big names in American life such as Bryan, Roosevelt, LaFollette, Wilson, have pursued this will o’ the wisp. Anti-trust legislation was written into the statute books and innumerable legal actions were prosecuted.
In the end, however, the corporations were stronger and bigger than ever. It is impossible to turn the economic clock back. Modern machinery and modern industry is unsuited to small units and small business.
The Socialist Workers Party rejects equally the proposal of Henry Wallace to malke capitalism progressive. This is a demagogue’s snare. It is as impossible to cure capitalism as it is to cure arterio-sclerosis in a person of advanced age. Wallace should know this from his experience as Secretary of Agriculture and Secretary of Commerce – but this is the season for vote-catching.
I might add here that Norman Thomas would join with Wallace tilting at windmills if only Wallace were more friendly to the State Department and less friendly with the Stalinists.
The totalitarian rule qf Big Business over our economy must be broken. The trusts and corporations must be socialized – that is, given back to the people who built them and keep them running – and operated under the democratic rule of the masses of workers.
The totalitarian grip of Big Business over the state must be broken. The despotic rule of the 60 families, the banks and the monopolies, must be replaced by the democratic rule of the workers and farmers who constitute the overwhelming majority of the American people.
This is the program of the Socialist Workers Party. It strikes deep at the root of the modern evil and thus alone can solve the problems of prices and housing, civil rights and war. All other programs, no matter how radical-sounding, touch only the symptoms, not the causes, or are intended for malicious deception of the people.
Who shall accomplish this transformation? Why, the working people. The workers who have been brought together under one roof by the trusts and monopolies, are the greatest power on earth.
The Socialist Workers Party says: Organize this power politically as you have done in your unions. Build a class party, a party of labor, controlled by the unions, and start the march to a government of workers and farmers which will bring peace, security, abundance and socialism to America and the world.
Before I conclude let me say a word about the first State Convention of the Socialist Workers Party in Connecticut and its first candidate for Governor, Morris Chertov. This is a great beginning for the cause of truth in the state of Connecticut. It is in the tradition of Roger Williams, the pioneer fighter for liberty.
The withdrawal of the Wallace party leaves Morris Chertov the only real opponent of the bi-partisans in the race for Governor. Tell the workers of Connecticut about this – and tell them about our program and our record – and I am sure that they will vote for Dobbs, Carlson and Chertov on election day, they will join the Socialist Workers Party, the great new force in American politics whose star is just beginning to rise in the labor movement.
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