The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1934-07-27
Socialist Party Stand on General Strike
Re0eaLs Support Of Capitalist State Po,Oer

This is why the A. F. of L. leaders,
secretly working to break the
strike while they we're leading it,
sent kilograms to Roosevelt asking
him to settle the strike as an aloof.
non-participant in the class strug-
gle.
If the Socialist Party were to do
its duty in the San Francisco
strike it would have tried to ex-
pose these tactics and reveal the
unity of the Roosevelt government
with the capitalist class.
Instead, in its entire ANALYSIS of
the strike it zealously strove to
maintain the bourgeois illusion
that the Roosevelt government is
something above and apart from
the exploitation of the capitalist
eXploiters.
For example, in its official state
ment on the strike, the National
Executive Committee of the Social
list Party writes as follows:
I'm San Francisco apparently
-. prominent business men have
usurped the police powers of the
city government. :"
The statement continues: "The
same reactionary business and
political interests that rule San
Francisco and California have sue
ceeded in having the military and
police powers modified in behalf of
their selfish aims"
And Norman Thomas, comment
ing editorially in this same issue
of the New Leader, declares indig-
nantly:
ut is the employers who AFRO
gantly demand that the public
shall back up their legal rights
against the interests of the public
by means of troops, police and
deputy sheriffs, no matter what
these arms of the government cost
in money, and possibly in blood"
Here we have in these quotations
the typical method of the way the
Socialist Party seems to attack
capitalism when it is actually pro-
tecting it. For in these quotations
all the righteous indignation, all
the verbal assaults on the employ
ers, are nothing but verbiage which
never reveals to the strikers that
which they ought to know-that
the Roosevelt government is the
tool of the employers, the instru-
ment through which Wall Street
carries through it's dictatorship.
Notice how subtly the Socialist
Party leaders and Norman Thomas
convey to the strikers and the en-
tire working class that it is the
employers who are responsible for
their criminal activities in winning
over the government to their side.
Before the employers succeeded
in having the military and police
powers modified in behalf of their
selfish aims" the Socialist Party
leaders would have us believe, these
military and police powers of the
government were some supra class
above the battle, neutral force in
the class struggle!
The Socialist leaders do not help
the strikers by revealing to them
that Roosevelt is the arch-strike-
breaker in the capitalist state ap.
paratus, but, on the contrary, paint
a picture where the capitalist state
which Marx and Engels described
as "the oppressive instrument Of
the exploiting class" has suddenly
become an impartial arbiter in the
class struggle between the workers
and their employers.
1t is in this way that the Social
ist Party leaders, despite all theil
pretended support of the Sar
Francisco strike, aligned them
selves with the employers in the
propaganda drive to deceive tn,
workers into placing their hopes If
the impartial judgments of the
Roosevelt government, the govern.
ment which really leads in the
organization and execution of Ink
strike breaking activities of thu
entire capitalist class.
THE Socialist Party supported the
strike breaking propaganda o
the employers in other ways.
It is the great political signifi
| canoe of the Coast general stril