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From Socialist Appeal, Vol. III No. 80, 20 October 1939, p. 1.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
As agents of the Stalin-Hitler war alliance and “peace proposals” the Communist Party has begun an open attack on Roosevelt and the New Dealers as spokesmen of American imperialism who seek to drag the US into the present war.
“Pressed by the imperialist bourgeoisie,”declares the latest resolution of the Political Committee of the Communist Party, “the Roosevelt government despite its avowed intention of ‘keeping out of war,’ more and more takes a course which threatens to involve the the USA in the imperialist war.” (Daily Worker, Oct. 15, 1939)
In the present situation, we are told “the slogans of anti-fascism no longer give the main direction of the struggle of the working class and its allies as they formerly did in the period of the struggle for the anti-fascist peace front and people’s front.” Under such conditions the difference “between the New Deal and anti-New Deal camps is losing its former significance. Both are parties of the bourgeoisie and seek in various ways to realize and promote the predatory interests of American imperialism in the war and both are following policies which threaten to involve the US in the present war.”
As foretold by the Socialist Appeal, the abrupt turn-about-face of the Communist Party from enthusiastic support of Roosevelt’s war program to opposition to it, was in the cards as soon as the Stalin-Hitler military alliance was signed. So long as Stalin sought a military alliance with the democratic imperialist powers and believed that American imperialism would be his ally in a war against German Fascism and Japan, the Communist Party was ordered to support Roosevelt as the champion of the people against Wall Street monopoly, the democratic opponent of the imperialist section of the capitalist class. Whoever challenged this lying propaganda was condemned as an agent of fascism.
The Stalinists hailed every pro-war move of the President as a blow for democracy and against imperialist war. They supported his policy of “national unity” for “continental defense,” that is, imperialist domination over the Latin American peoples, and his pledge to aid Canada in case it was attacked. They supported his rearmament program, and his drive to lift the arms embargo so as to help Anglo-French imperialism.
Even after the outbreak of the war in Europe, the Daily Worker greeted Roosevelt’s fake promises to keep America out of the war as good coin. In the trade unions, at the conventions of the Rubber Workers Union, the Transport Workers Union, and the recent CIO congress the Stalinists supported resolutions which endorsed Roosevelt’s “peace” policy.
Now the Communist Party has thrown overboard these polices. Has it suddenly discovered that Roosevelt, the New Dealers and the Old Dealers are class enemies of the toilers, imperialist spokesmen irrespective of the secondary differences among them? Hardly!However, yesterday Roosevelt was a potential ally of Stalin; today Roosevelt is already an ally of Chamberlain and Daladier who are engaged in a war against Hitler, the present partner of Stalin. Roosevelt has already lined up against Stalin by his letter to the Kremlin on Finland.
These unscrupulous henchmen of the Kremlin autocrat now use the phrases of militant working class struggle against capitalism and for socialism. How strange it must be for members of the CP to read the present resolution of their Political Committee. Their leaders have drilled into their minds that the democratic sections of the capitalist class must be supported against the fascist sections; that democratic imperialist governments could conduct a just war deserving the support of the masses; that anyone who denied these bits of Stalinist wisdom were enemies of the working class, progress and socialism. Now ...
“The merciless enemy of the workers al-ways has been, is and will be: the capitalist class. This is so regardless of the particular political face with which the capitalist class appears, regardless of the political form in which it shields its domination, regardless of the lying and hypocritical slogans with which it masks the imperialist aims, whether in times of war or peace.”
What honest and intelligent worker can any longer be fooled by the lying and hypocritical slogans of the Stalinists who mask their own reactionary aims – the victory of the Stalin-Hitler war alliance – with the cloak of independent workers’ action against war?
The opposition of the Communist Party to Roosevelt’s War Deal has as little in common with genuine working class opposition as the campaign of the German Bund – the agents of Hitler in the US – against American intervention in the present war. The immediate aims of Earl Browder and Fritz Kuhn are identical: the victory of the joint war of their paymasters!
The “united front” of the Communist Party and the Nazi Bund has gone so far that there is not a single word of criticism of fascism in the resolution of the Political Committee of the CP! In fact the resolution prepares the war for open support of German Fascism by the Communist Party.
While stating that all the belligerent powers “are equally guilty” for the present war the resolution states that one of the main aims of Anglo-French imperialism in their war against Hitler is “to try to bring to power in Germany that section of the bourgeoisie which will immediately engage in military intervention against the USSR”.
Yesterday the policy of Peoples Frontism was defended on the theory that fascism (particularly, Hitlerism) represented the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, most imperialistic and most anti-Soviet section of the bourgeoisie. Therefore, it was concluded, a bloc was necessary with the “democratic section”of the ruling class against fascism. Would it be surprising if tomorrow the Stalinists concoct a new theory that a bloc is necessary between the working class, and the sections of the German bourgeoisie which are not in favor of an immediate war against the Soviet Union – the supporters of Hitler, who apparently are less reactionary, etc. – against the extreme German imperialists who are allies of Chamberlain? The new resolution opens the door wide for this development.
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