The Daily Worker Newspaper, August 29, 1931, Page 5

IN TWO SECTIONS TWO) (SECTION (Section of the Communist International) NEW YORK, SATURDAY, AUGUST 29, 1931 DON’T STARVE, FIGHT! FIGHT AGAINST HUNGER! The Communist Party Program for Unemployment Relief and Social Insurance---Against the Capitalist Program of Starvation TO THE WORKERS AND TOILING FARMERS OF AMERICA: President Hoover has announced the policy of the United States government on the ques- tion of unemployment and farmers’ relief, The sum of Hoover’s policy is: The federal government will do nothing for the unemployed. The 11,000,000 and more jobless workers, together with the millions of their families, are brutally told that they must depend upon the “charity” of rich individuals for food and the park benches for shelter in the coming winter. For the admitted purpose of smothering the demands of millions of hun- gry and desperate workers, to confuse and divert this demand from the doors of the Con- gress which will convene on December 2nd, Hoover has appointed Walter S. Gifford, head of the American Telephone and Telegraph Co., (who has just cut the wages of his own em- ployees to the starvation point and discharged many workers), to take charge of collecting a few dollars of miserable “charity” in order to save the billionaire taxpayers the cost of “ment unemployment relief. “relieve” the desperate condition of the £ 2rs, the federal government advises them to burn their wheat for fuel and to plough un- der one-third of the cotton which they have la- bored a full year to produce. PROGRAM OF STARVATION This is the announcement by Hoover of a winter of starvation and death. It is a pro- gram of eviction of working class families tccm their homes into. the streets to starve ed freeze in the worst winter that shall ever ke been seen up to this time. It is a pro- gram that has already begun with the use of « ned forces in Chicago where the police on August 8rd fired with riot guns upon the werkers in the streets for protesting against tie eviction of an aged Negro woman. The program of Hoover is the program of fore- c.csure of mortgages on farms, the seizure of household goods and the turning of farmers and their families out onto the open road with no prospects but to find their way as best they can to the cities to join the already swollen ranks of the unemployed, to join in the hope- less contest for jobs, while they sleep in parks and beg for bread. Hoover speaks for those who placed him in power, for the finance capitalists, the heads of the big trusts, the Wall Street gang that rules this country. And speaking for them he has declared that there will be no answer to the starvation of the masses except more starvatioun—and whatever degree of police brutaligy may be necessary to suppress the starving masses’ demand for relief. The masses of working people demand Un- empioyment, Relief and Social Insurance! The government refuses. The Communist Party declares that the masses themselves must act to compel the capitalist government to grant these demands. ECONOMIC CRISIS DEEPENING The American working people are today plunged into the worst, the deepest, and al- ready the longest economic crisis in all of the history of the brutal system of capitalism. Fully 35,000,000 workers are now unem- ployed in ‘the big industrialized countries of the capitalist world, and the uncounted .mil-- lions of unemployed in colonial lands probably smounts to scores of millions more. In the United States not less than 11,000,000: workers are unemployed and have been with- | out means of living for many months. Mil- lions of others are partly unemployed—work- ing part time. Hundreds of thousands of working farmers are giving up the desperate struggle against starvation on the farms, are leaving their land in the hands of the money sharks and wandering to the cities to look. for work which cannot be found. Never before has such wholesale ruin, such a blasting of human life been known in times of “peace.” In this immensely rich country, with its countless billions of stored up wealth, the tens of thousands of millionaires and multi-million- aires with all their luxury and waste cannot even spend the wealth that has been extracted by them from the toil of the workers and farmers. Why is it that not one dollar can be turned by our capitalist ruling class gov- ernment to prevent the starvation of those who have created all of this wealth and from whom it has been taken by robbery? Why are millions of bushels of wheat being burned and dumped into the sea while men, women and children are starving for bread? Why are fruit trees uprooted and farm produce de- stroyed? Why does Hoover's Farm Board advise the farmers to destroy millions of bales of cotton that they have labored one year to produce? The answer to these strange questions is: That this is the capitalist system. If IS THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM This wholesale ruin of the lives of millions, this economic crisis is not some strange, mys- terious thing that cannot be explained—as the capitalist professors, “economists” and “states- men” pretend to think. It is only the logical and inevitable result of the capitalist form of production. Such “hard times” for working people cannot be separated from the capitalist system. It is the price the workers and their families pay for the “privilege” of living under a system in which all of the industries, all of the means by which people live, are private property in the hands of a rich and powerful parasite class. It is the system of capitalism— the system in which goods are produced in fac- tories and on farms, not for the human needs of those who labor, but for the private profit of an idle and useless class of parasites, the capitalist class. While hare-brained lies are told by well-fed professors, to the effect that the economic crisis and starvation are due to “human nature” or to ‘sun-spots,” as Professor . ~ Jevons solemnly declared, or to “Soviet. dump- ing” as the banker-bandits who are robbing the farmers declare—all: serious persons know that such crises are an inevitable part of capitalism, and while capitalism exists, must come once in every few years, whenever the stocks of goods produced by the labor of work- ers and farmers are piled up in larger quan- tities than the laborers who have made them are able to buy with their miserably low wa~es. (During the past 106 years, since the after- math of the Napoleonic wars in Europe, there have been thirteen economic crises on a world scale. These crises have been coming more frequently and in sharper form as capitalism decays, and the present crisis is the worst and longest of all.) NO JOBS THIS WINTER As long as it was possible to deceive the masses, President Hoover at first falsely de- clared that the worst would be over “within sixty days,” and then, from month to month he made further misleading predictions in- tended only to deceive and quiet the masses. But now the last lie about this that the masses could be induced to believe has been told. All of those who speak for capitalism now admit that there will be no jobs, that there will be no end this winter to the desperate plight of the unemployed workers and farmers. And each of the apologists for the capi- talist system now comes forth with a “policy” for the coming winter of mass starvation. STARVATION IS THE “WHIP” THAT | DRIVES WAGE SLAVES But, some may ask, why cannot the enor- mous stocks of goods and clothing (that can- not be sold) be diverted by the government to those who will starve this winter without it— instead of being destroyed? The answer to this question shows the cruelest fangs of capitalism. Starvation is a necessary part of capitalism. Hoover and the class for which he cake will not abolish starvation—and do not wish to abolish starvation. Starvation and the fear of starvation are a necessary “whip” that cap- italism must have to drive the working masses to slave in the big industries at jobs in which they have no interest, to make profits for a wealthy parasite class. The fear of hunger is useful to the capitalists. The fear of starva- tion is as necessary to the capitalist system as the blacksnake whip was necessary to the over- seer to drive the chattel slaves to labor on the southern plantations under the old slave sys- tem. The capitalist class and capitalist class government will not abolish this useful “whip” over the working class. STARVATION PROGRAM TO AID WAGE CUTS The big employers are frankly interested in having the working class close to the starva- tion line—but meek and helplessly disorgan- ized—this Winter. Why? Because the capi- talist program for this fall and winter is to put through enormous wage cuts and to speed up the labor of the workers in factories—to “rationalize” the factories, still further to re- duce the standard of living to a lower level than has ever been known in this country within the memory of living man. To accomplish this reduction of the wages of the American working class to a stand- ard of half-starved existence, which capi- talist spokesmen among themselves openly de- clare is necessary “to meet competition” of their capitalist rivals, a winter of hunger and of ‘desperate competition for jobs at any price is necessary for the interests of the big ¢or- . poration employers! : So, not only the immediate cost in taxes moves the capitalist government to refuse un employment relief, but also the plan for fur« Ae ape RENEE DEEPA RE RR EF CM