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From New Militant, Vol. I No. 49, 30 November 1935, p. 7.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The threat of a general strike of the English miners attracts the immediate attention of the class-conscious workers everywhere. For they remember the last great struggle which paralyzed British imperialism. That struggle, on the widest scale ever experienced in England, came as a defensive stand against the reactionary drive of the entire bourgeoisie to lower production costs so as to meet competition by a relentless lowering of wages. The strike developed into a general strike involving the railroad, transport and mining industries, under the “leadership” of the General Council of the Trade Unions. The Triple Alliance was betrayed by the General Council whose leaders were given the prestige of Stalinist endorsement through the abortive Anglo-Russian Committee (committee of trade union centers of both countries – Ed.). In the present instance, a vote has already given authorization to the miners’ executives to call a strike if necessary in order to obtain an increase of fifty cents a day. The strike would come at a time when a considerable recovery of business and of industrial production has taken place. This means that the miners are taking the offensive to regain the ground so heavily lost during the years of crisis.
The imminence of a further advance by Japan into North China has aroused the keenest apprehension among English capitalists. With the British fleet tied up in the Mediterranean due to Mussolini’s war, the British are helpless to offer much resistance to Japanese penetration in the Far East. The vast investments of British imperialism in China are seriously endangered. Just as the United States was forced to recognize the Soviet Union in order to make the Japanese militarists pause temporarily, so now England is forced to turn to the Soviet Union with an eye to alliance in the common struggle (from totally different standpoints) against Japan. Although this is not the only factor involved, it is nevertheless a major cause of the recently opened negotiations between Russia and England in regard to a large loan to be floated for the Soviet Union by the English banks. Part of the interest on the loan would go to the purchase of railroad equipment in England. Japan cannot help understanding the meaning of this move. It is possible that the “timely” publication of the facts concerning the loan, accomplished its purpose of halting the immediate steps by the Japanese army for engineering an autonomous North China. Whether the Japanese will feel this mood of caution for any length of time remains to be seen. The contradictions that antagonize Japanese and British imperialism have reached the point where the traditional friendship resulting from the military alliance that existed up to 1922, begins to turn sour and to give way to hatred.
The situation in France becomes more threatening to the workers daily. The battle between the Fascist Croix de Feu and the Socialist and Communist workers at Limoges, in which fifteen workers were seriously injured and none of the Fascists, is a lesson from the life of the need for an armed workers’ militia to meet the armed Fascist bands. The policy of the “People’s Front” becomes in this respect a worse and worse betrayal of the interests of the proletariat. It is the medium through which the workers are lulled into passivity, through which working class policies are made dependent on and subordinate to the bourgeoisie. The workers are being misled into relying on the “liberal” and “radical” bourgeoisie whose interests can only be identical with those of the finance-capitalists. The only salvation for the French workers and toilers is the leadership of a Bolshevik party based on a revolutionary program aiming at seizing the power for the working class. In the coming period it is either Fascism or communism that will triumph. The vicious policy of the People’s Front can only assure the victory of the Fascists, helped into power by the Herriots and Daladiers – and the Blums and Cachins.
Whose government is it? Roosevelt’s treaty with Canada would almost by itself prove that the government follows the demands and the interests of big business, of industrial and commercial capital as against the interests of the farmer. Industry thrives at the expense of the agricultural sector of the capitalist system. The Treaty is indeed “cold comfort to the farmer” whose interests are sacrificed wherever necessary to those of the factory owners. In the main it is the manufacturers of autos, machinery and farm implements, including tractors, who are helped, while the American farmer is forced to meet added competition from Canadian farmers. Our main interest is not particularly in the farmer-capitalist. But the working class will have to learn ultimately to utilize the contradictions that exist in American economy, – and one of these contradictions is illustrated in the Canadian Treaty, namely, that tariffs are for the benefit of the financiers and industrial capitalists, not for that of the farmer. His interests come second, if at all.
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