The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1930-09-02
Campaign Notes
By PAUL NOVICK.

MR.. NORMAN THOMAS has declared in a
AVA letter to the Telegram that he is not
Marxist and Mr.. James Walker has declared
before certain Citizens" that his administra
ton is reeking with graft. One declaration
was as superfluous as the other. Nobody eve
suspected Mr.. Thomas of being either a Marx
ian or socialist, and hardly anybody expected
the Walker Tammany administration to be any
thing else but graft machine.
Mr.. Thomas gives number of excuses, and
chat is superfluous, too For the American
socialist party, even in it's hey-day, when it
did give some lip-service to Karl Marx it had
little to do with Marxism, except perhaps, for
the fact that its leader, Morris Hillquit, al
ways had an intimate knowledge of capital,
whether as shareholder of the Burns coal trust,
or as gambler on Wall Street. Conditions are
different" MARX himself would have changed
his mind" were always the passwords among
the leaders of the socialist party.
But there was Debs, revolutionary by tenn
permanent, cheering for the revolution, and
there were some proletaran elements in that
party, to whom the name of Marx and Engels
were the symbols of the movement. 1t was
only after the proletarian burden was removed
and the socialist party openly became petty
bourgeois swamp, that the Socialist" edition
of Hearst, Abraham Cahan, had proclaimed:
"Marxsm is bunk" That was in 1928 To
repeat the same in 1880 is as original as
preachers sermon.
Meanwhile, the capitalist press, which is
doing everything to keep out of it's columns
anything which will remind it's leaders of the
Communist Election Campaign, is freely fea-
turing the statement and speeches of the
Socialist" reverends and corporation lawyers.
AS the third capitalist party, the socialist"
party is now actually on the same basis with
the other two parties. The more reason for
the workers to strengthen their own press and
make the capitalists feel the Communist cam
pai~- through all kinds of propaganda among
the King masses.
Republicans and democrats for years have
engaged in Stealing" platform planks from
each other. Now that the socialist" party
has become the third party of capital the dem
ocrats, as the Socialists" complain, are try
ing to incorporate into their platform the $50
cialist" unemployment insurance plank Natur-
ally, any plank that is good for Norman
Thomas is good for Walker and Roosevelt.
But neither of these capitalist parties can
"steaP' the Communist unemployment in
surance plank, just as the employer cannot
"stealp from his employees their demands
which they are trying to wrest from him. What
the three capitalist parties want is that kind
of bluff, as the "free" employment" agency
Tammany opened as one of its election maneuv-
ers.
Isn't that what Norman Thomas had asked
Jimmy Walker to do after March 9Th? A free
employment agency, that is the thing! Comrade
Foster, at the meeting of the Tammany Board
of Estimate, pointed out that Thomas was
proposing fake measures, in order to fool the
workers, just as Hoover has been trying to
fool them by his fake prophesies. Now we
have it, Thomas own invention, "free"
agency-free of jobs!
The democrats can "steal" any plank or
measure from the Socialists. That is why
the socialist" party is the agitation depart
ment of capital.
AS our candidate for lieutenant governor of
New York, Conrade Engdahl, has already
pointed out no one is mentioning the beastly
anti-labor record of the racketeer Ewald. The
needle trades workers remember too well the
sentences Ewal imposed upon the pckets of
the fur strike in 1927 when he was racketeer-