The daily worker., 1930-06-20
By A. LANDY.

PRESIDENT HOOVER has signed the Smoot-
Hawley T,liff Bill The capitalist sponsors
of the tariff have attempted to "popularize"
it as a tariff of BLESSINGS" for the working
class and the farming masses. The millions
of workers, poor farmers and small shop
keepers who are carrying the terrific burden
of the economic crisis are now being told to
place their faith in the Smoot Hawley Tariff
as the magic weapon which cannot fail to
dispel the crisis All the capitalist parties are
preparing to carry the tariff into the coming
election as vital tissue"
In what way is the tariff an issue for the
working class and its revolutionary party?
The entire question of the tariff moves within
the bounds of the capitalist system. For us
Communists who are organizing the workers
for revolutionary struggle to abolish this
system, the tariff is only of indirect and
subordinate interest. This does not mean that
it is not of Importance to US or that we can
afford to ignore it. 1t merely means that the
tariff must be related to the general class
struggle of the workers; that it must be ap-
preached as an immediate means of drawing
the working class into the wider, more fun
damental and more comprehensive struggle
against the entire capitalist system as such.
The basic tasks of Communists in this re-
spect is to peal out the class issue involved
and to present it to the working class in the
sharpest form. We must not only peal it out
for ourselves, but primarily for those work
ers who are enmeshed in thousand and one
illusions which the capitalist class, through its
various political parties, is Systematically at
tempting to create, particularly at this time.
Our task is to supply living class analysis
that will leave the workers more class con-
scious and more enlightened as to the role of
the various strata and their political parties
in this respect.
We cannot explain to the workers the full
significance of the Smoot-Hawley tariff; we
cannot develop the class lines sharply and
adequately enough if we content ourselves
with adequate generalzations and careless
statements and fail to characterize its funda-
mental features. We had an example of this
in a recent discussion in New York at which
the tariff was defined as the policy of the
bourgeosie which used to adhere to a policy
of free trade but which in the present period
has changed to policy of protection.
This, of course, is entirely wrong. We can
not merely refer to the Smoot-Hawley tariff
as the policy of the bourgeosie without point
ing out that it is the policy of the bourgeoisie
in the period of Imperialism. But this does
not mean that the bourgeoise, having devel-
oped from progressive industrial bourgeoisie
into a reactionary finance-capitalist bour-
geoisie, has substituted policy of protection
for a policy of free trade. This formulation
is not only incorrect, but tends to ignore the
real change that has occurred, that is, dis
tracts attention from the basic fact that capi-
talism has become capitalist imperialism, and
has changed it's tariff policy accordingly.
Generally speaking, one might have ex-
pected the course of development in the United
States to have been from policy of the pro-
e H,,,f, .,,J, &r,o 10 &c fyoo
trade on the part of country that has be-
come industrially mature. But just the op-
posite happened, and the reason for this is
precisely the fact that industrial capitalism
in America developed into finance capital
with giant trusts carrying on production. In