The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1930-05-07
ANSWER THE SOUTHERN
BOSS ATTACK

from the border-line of starvation have created
a depth of misery approaching famine condI-
tions among the workers of India and China.
Starving men, women and children, drift from 4
city to city, from state to state, in hope l
less search for jobs, or trudge the roads backk
to the farms desperate chance of aid from
kin equally distitute while at the same time
there is constant flow of starving cotton and
tobacco farm aborers and tenant farmers to
to the city who swell the ranks of the unem-
ployed. The Southern worker, absolutely prop
ertyless, has no reserves. The little furniture,
bedding and clothing he possesses are all
bought on credit. Unemployment, even for
very short period, means losing everything,
complete restitution.
With unemployment as bludgeon, employ
ers are carrying on a wholesale wage-cutting
campaign 90 to SO per cent? in the textile
mills, metal plants and mines of the South,
and a constantly increasing stretch-out to a
still higher degree
Under these unbearable attacks the South is
smouldering with revolt. q
Jobless, starving, constantly bounded by the
police, pulled in vagrancy charges, unor-
gained workers who have never heard a
a revolutionary speech or read revolutionary
literature of any sort talking revolution
of the coming war between ''the capitalists and
the laboring classes of people," The Southern
workers responded to the first call for May
Day demonstrations ever issued in the South,
Negroes and white together, despite the ut
most attempts of the bosses to terrorize them.
They distributed May Day leaflets in the face
of the bosses gunner, formed workers defense
corps and defended the speakers against fas-
cist thugs.
Workers Entering Struggle.
Under pressure their understanding of the
class struggle is steadily growing. The bat
tering of exploitation is ever breaking down
the wall of race hatred erected by the bosses
to keep the Negro and white workers of the
South divided. Slowly but steadily, despite
lurid capitalist lynch propaganda the workers
are realizing the correctness and accepting the
policy of united struggle on the basis of full
economic, political and social equality.
Southern capitalists realize that any strug-
gle in the present situation under T.U.U.L.
leadership means not merely a fight for higher
wages shorter hours, but political strug-
gle against the whole sem-feudal system of
suppression by which they have managed to
hold the Southern workers on such a low level
so long; and, above all, a struggle against
race discrimination and race oppression
The situation is now at point where fall
ure to carry on counter-offensive against
the terrific offensive of the Bosses culmin-
ating in the present attempt to put through
the legal murder of Powers and Carr, means
retreat.
Without the leadership of the T.U.U.L. and
the Communist Party, the struggles of the
Southern workers will resolve themselves into
the sporadic spontaneous outbursts of the past,
which ended either in defeat without leaving
behind any organization, or betrayal by the
chief lieutenants of capitalism in it's attack
on the workers of the South-the officials
of the A. F. of L. The revolutionary unions
must make every effort to push organization
in every industry in the South-in textile, rail-
road, mining, metal, tobacco, agriculture-and
give leadership to the masses of Negro and
white workers of the South, ready and eagerI
for struggle.