The Daily Worker Newspaper, September 26, 1931, Page 4

Page tour SILKOVKY OVA. cow. a. lot nothing. When land, he wrote the Shadows. As is to be geois sia. and he ¢ country 01 describe his int ication Russia was not acquainted with the ma But this did-not. prevent him f moralising on this ques confidence of ignorance. he wrote “For Lenin orthodox Marx “Utopians” has to Utopia, the tricians. te weight into a scheme for velopment of great power in Russia to serve whole p! with light, with transport, industrial power. Two experimen- tal districts, he said, had already been electrified. Can one imagine rom ion In his book denounce all cumbed of the ele at last a more courageous project in a vast flat land of forests and illiterate peasants, with no water power, with no technical skill available, and with trade and industry at the last gasp? Projects for such an electrification are in process of development in Holland and they have been discussed in England, and in those densely-populated and industrially centers one can imagine them as successful, economical, and alt gether beneficial. But their appli- cation to Russia is an altogether greater strain upon the constructive imagination. of the sort happening in, this dark crystal of Russia, but this little man at the Kremlin can; he sees the decaying railways spreading through- out he land, sees a new happier Com~ munist industrialism arising again. While Italked to him he almost per- suaded me to share his vision.” But it was difficult to persuade| gramme for the restoration of the} Wells, The author of fantastic novels ome to Rus Ten Year: highly-developed | I cannot see anything | DAILY WOkKER, Nig YORK, SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 1952 sia in itiow to be strong. obered up after at that is the main an stated iern R R change: d fettered produc- dooming tens of ces and wa s of work: m was crumbling. The of capitalist economy And before his de- from the U. S. S. R. Shaw I leave the land of lands of despair!” When Wells was in Soviet Russia, | was glimmering | nin” ly in a country devastated by |last ct s of the civil war were being written in Crimea. Now the “lamp of Lenin” is shining out like 2 migh By its light, Bernard saw and understood very much. | “When you carry your experi- | ment to its final victory” said Shaw | in his speech in the Hall of Col- | | | umns in the Moscow Trade Union League, “and I know that you wil! in the West, we who are playing at socialism, we do it ‘our steps or not.” tatement shows the extent erings of the petty bou- are shaken and ruined y the world economic crisis, and shows the enormous impression pro- duced socialist construction on the best and most honest represen- tatives of the petty-bourgeoisie of the capitalist countries. ‘The visits of Wells and Shaw to the Soviet Union at an interval of 10 years, their conversations with Lenin and Stalin, are sufficiently characteristic to define the various stages of a great epoch. | Lenin explained to Wells the pro- country, took his stand on the “firm ground” | calculated on a period of ten years. of reality. He objected to Lenin. “But these. are only sketches and beginnings.” “Come back and see what we have done in Russia in ten years time” answered Lenin. Wells understood nothing. | At the first All-Union Conference in socialist industry, Stalin set a | task for the next ten years: | “We are 50-100 years behind the | foremost countries. We must cover | Ten years have passed. Wells still} this distance in ten years.” doubts, still does not believe, when | @ single 50,000 horse power turbine from the Stalin factory gives the game power as the whole of the Volkhov station which the USSR was building at that time with such tre- mendous difficulty. Wells doubts still, at a time when the USSR is com- pleting the Dnieper hydro-electric station, when new powerful sectional electric stations have been built and @re at work, when about 2 million k. w. of new high voltage cables have became a regular feature of Soviet landscape! Even now when the } Judging by the speeches of Shaw in the U. S. S. R. and after his return home, he understood much |of this programme. Bernard Shaw should follow the example of Wells, | and write a book not “Russia in the | | Shadows” but “Europe and America |in the shadows.” life.” | w repeat the words of | of the world | ‘s and their families | 1 from starvation. The facade | n to the Western | imperialist war and blockade. The | whether | the plan of electrification | |STEEL WORKERS—ANSWER THE WAGE CU TS WITH MASS STRIKES! BY GROPPER ‘ | By A. MARKOFF wus the beginning of the Fall Te: the Workers School starts the ninth year | of its activities in the training of workers for | the class struggle. The past eight | been years of steady progress. ‘The progress | made by the Workers School is manifest not only in the tremendous increase in an effective instrument in the class movement, the struggle is being so planned entity.” growing sharper, when capitalism in formists and the social-fascists to workers into docile slaves; meet with so much social demagoj etc., it is especially important to acquire a clear theoretical understanding and knowledge of the class struggle. ‘The Workers’ School, through its | ber of students, having reached a registration | of over 1,200 in the fall of 1930, but what is | more important, the school has developed into the working class against capitalism. F. Engels in the preface to the second ed- ition of “The Peasant War in Germany” said: “For the first time in the history of the labor that its three sides, the theoretical, | tical and the practical economical (opposition to the capitalists), form one harmonious well- In the present period, when class struggles are against the workers is utilizing the social-re- when the workers | socialist party, the A. F. of L., the Muste group, | THE WORKERS SCHOOL IN NEW YORK varied courses, based on rm of 1931 Engels and Lenin, gle. years have the num- York and vicinity. he School lays s Strugele ot | Of tHe School lays special for the courses in Party conducted the poli- etc. its struggle | of Communism is an turn the | ers from various parts wy by the | this course. supplies the workers necessary weapon, the theory of the class strug- The School thus becomes an integral part of the revolutionary labor movement, Special Courses. Under the guidance and leadership of the Communist Party of the United States of Amer- ica the Workers’ School has, during the last eight ‘years, trained hundreds of workers of New This year the curriculum ing of the members of the Party in District Two. ‘The District Committee is actively co-operating | with the School Committee in getting many members from the units and nuclei to register Strategy, Social Insurance, Marxism-Leninisim, Public Speaking and many other special courses such as Work Among Women, Negro Problems, y Correspondence Courses. The Correspondence Course in Fundamentals curriculum of the School. Canada and Mexico have taken advantage of The Workers’ School thus reaches many workers who otherwise would be deprived the teachings of Marx, the viewpoint. ried on emphasis on the train- Structure, Trade Union added feature to the Already many work~- of the United States, of the School. outside the school have the opportunity of ac- quiring additional information and understand- ing of the current events from the Marxian Here the students and workers The Party Units, Revolutionary Trade Unions, Industrial Leagues, Workers’ Clubs, etc., should remember that the tlass struggle cannot be car- successfully without the theoretical training in the Marxist-Leninist theory. Let us also remember the following words of Lenin: “How, indeed, can you expect a perfectly ignorant peasant to understand the difference between wars and wars, to understand that there are just wars and unjust wars, progres- sive wars and reactionary wars, wars of ad- vanced classes and wars of backward classes, wars serving to consolidate the class yoke and wars serving to overthrow it. THIS RE- QUIRES AN UNDERSTANDING OF THE CLASS STRUGGLE, OF THE FUNDAMEN- TALS OF SOCIALISM, AND SOME AC- QUAINTANCE WITH THE HISTORY OF REVOLUTIONS.” at the Congress on Extension School Educa- tion, held May 19, 1919.) ‘This applies to all problems arising in the Revolutionary Movement. is ready to serve the needs of the movement. It (Emphasis ours.) (Speech ‘The Workers’ School of a chance for a Marxian training. ‘The weekly forum conducted by the Workers’ can do it successfully with the co-operation of the Party and the revolutionary unions. School at the Workers’ is an important part of many and Center, 35 E. 12th St., the educational system Let us all work for a successful 1931-1932 in the Workers’ School. * Capitalist ‘The super-structure of society (gov- ernment, art, science, etc.) is based on the prevailing mode of production. And of course when the foundation, | the productive forces, begin to col- lapse, the super-structure goes under. The defenders of science “above clas- ses and politics” have lately suffered quite a shock. The factories, and re- search institutes attached to them have shut down, building has ceased. Consequently, engineers and scient- ists are dumped out unceremoniously. American engineering journals carry letters from engineers who bemoan their fate no jobs. College gradu- ates enter the economic system with university degrees and apply at -de- partment stores for shoe-salesmen jobs. Some have themselves placed on the public-school teachers lists. and wait patiently for years. In European countries where the crisis has been in existence since the close of the war, conditions are worse. We. read in a report of the German Engineers’ Ass’, the 8,000 students who are turned out of the technical high-schools every year only 20 percent are employed as engineers. Twenty percent take any sort of jobs, 10 percent continue their studies (they have nothing else to do) and half remain unemployed. Those who have families with money sponge on their parents, the rest you will find in free lodging houses. Once in a while they hire themselves out as dancing partners, or maybe peddle cigarettes. Every year 4,000 unem- ployed engineers are added to the roll, By 1934 there will be at least 130,000 unemployed university graduates jn Germany. we ‘The same report that gives these figures moans that too many students are coming to the schools. And they only count them in the tens of thous- ands. Over in the Soviet Union the num- bers mount into the hundreds of thousands and the amount of quali- fied scientific research workers re- ches 70,000. Yet the Soviet Union is starved for qualified men. They import them from every country in- cluding the U. S. Comrade Stalin delivered a speech early this year which set the Bolshevik task—‘We Must Become Masters of Technique.” Factory schools, schools for the era- dication of illiteracy, technical schools, universities. Every nerve strained to push the workers and peasants to become specialists. We can still the echo of the cry “no art or science wil be created in Red Russia, because there is no intellectual freedom.” But we begin to hear a cry of another sort. Many of the scientists and in- tellectuals, hit by the crisis are dazed. They look for a way out. They find it by “getting religion” or spiritual- ism, They cry “the machine is des- troying us, let us go back to handi- crafts.” Stuart Chase finds paradise in a stupid, feudal village in Mexico. Oswald Spengler, the German phi- losopher sees catastrophe facing the white race. It is the machine! But there are others, for the most part younger, who are still able to reason, to apply the scientific method to life, and these come to the same conclu- sion that Romain Roland, Theodore Dreiser and hundreds of others have THE ROAD BACK, by Erich Maria the Five-Year-Plan is being sur- passed in four years, Wells still| Remarque. Translated om doubts the practicability of the Five-| German by A. W. Wheen. Little, Year-Plan. Evidently the “time ma-| Brown and Co. $2.50. ehine’ ’of Wells is going full speed stern. (Wells is going full speed astern. Ten years later, on the eleventh year after the visit of Wells to the USSR, another prominent English writer, Bernard Shaw ed. The revolution is rushing ahead at full speed. The USSR is a con- struction camp: The foundations of socialist economy are being com-| pleted. A new socialist country is fm creation. “Come back and see what we have done in Russia in ten years’ time.” Shaw was able to see what had been done, that the words of Lenin ‘had been converted into hundreds of industrial giants, into Soviet farms, into hundreds of machine and trac- vor stations, into tens of thousands of collective farms, that the country -one-sixth of the globe—was pro- pering! Shaw was able to see the short-sightedness of his friend Wells. Shaw's statement that “my per- sonal feeling when I see your great Communist experiment is the same as the feeling of many other people in the part of the world from which | Reviewed by A. B. MAGIL. | APour a year and a half ago the | International Union of Revolu- tionary Writers addressed an inquiry to a large number of writers, artists and intellectuals throughout the world: what would be your attitude in case of an imperialist atteck on et Union? Many answers received; but perhaps those were that were not received are just as interesting as those that were. Among those who failed to reply, de- | spite repeated messages sent to them, were two internationally famous writers. One was the pioneer of the modern literature of social protest, the illustrious humanitarian and pacifist (whose humanitarianism and pacifism didn't prevent him from whooping it up for “the Fatherland” during the last war), Gerhardt Hauptmann; the other was Erich Maria Remarque. For those interested in problems of | personal psychology perhaps The | Road Back, the much-praised suc- \cessor to All Quiet on the Western | Front, will help to clear up the mys- |tery of Remarque's silence. But for | us the social content of the book and I have come—a feeling of shame) it. possible effect on its readers is that England was not the first to| the important thing. And the social content of ‘The Road Back is defi- | nitely reactionary. All Quiet por- | trayed the horrors of war without | showing a way out (the way of the | proletarian revolution). The Road Back attempts to show a way out— or at least a way back to peace—but it is the way of the intellectual who turns his back on the proletarian | | masses and seeks an individual solu- tion, a solution that plays into the stitutes objectively a betrayal not only of the workers, but of the in- tellectuals as well. The Road Back is the story of a group of German soldiers, most of them young school kids, who, on their return from the war, find that they cannot take up life where they left off, find that something has, been shattered inside of them and they have grown alien to all they left behind. Written in the same impassioned, lyrical prose that dis- tinguished All Quiet, The Road Back expresses the befuddlement and despair of the sensitive middle-class intellectual before the harsh reali- ties (in this case the war and the social disturbances that followed it) of capitalist society. It shows that it is possible for a man to have gone through the horrors of the last world war and the terrible, desperate years that followed and—to have learned nothing. Sentimental and humani- tarian in approach, the book con- tains no criticism of capitalism, no understanding of the causes of the wars by which the rival capitalist rulers seek to extend their power. So completely preoccupied is Re- marque with the problems of his own post-war adolescence (mentally he seems never to have outgrown that period) that he constantly implies that the armies that for 4 yeare were hands of the impetialists and con- | Unity ‘of black and white miners’ kids! Hunger, which the coal bar- ons are trying to enforce, spares neither black nor white miners’chil- dren, and as a result there is being forged a closer bond of struggle and were concerned with such prosaic things as getting something else to eat for themselves and their fam- ilies than the turnip soup which the ingenious German men of science had discovered was more nourishing than the best beefsteak. And they were so “insensitive,” so thoroughly unlike the mooning, introspective Paul Baumers and Ernst Birkholzes of Remarque’s books, that they even took it into their heads to try to wipe off the face of the earth the entire parasite system that makes wars and mass misery inevitable. But of this, of all those stirring heroic days immediately following the ar- mistice, when German capitalism shook under the blows of the en~ raged working class, only to be res- cued by the Scheidemanns, the Noskes and the other “socialist” snipers and stoolpigeons—of all this there are but shadows in Remarque’s i | Th e Roa d B a ck Is A Trap RELIEF HELPS TO Sear NEW STRIKES solidarity between the two in their fight against hunger. Help these miners’ kids fight hunger. Send your share of food now to the Penn-Ohio | Miners’ Relief Committee, 611 Penn Ave., Room 205, Pittsburgh, Pa. for his lost youth, Remarque does find a way out. Here it is: “I mean to teach my youngsters what their Fatherland really is,” says Willy, one of the leading characters in the book. “Their homeland, that is, not a political party. Their home- land is trees, fields, earth, none of your fulsome catchwords.” Yes, Remarque has found the road back—to the Fatherland. ‘Trees, fields, earth”—where have we heard that stuff before? And he concludes with: all will be well, “for something will always be there to sustain me, be it merely my own hands, or a tree, or the breath- ing earth.” The mountain labored and brought forth—a phrase. It is too bad that these hands of Re- marque’s and this tree and the breathing earth will sustain only Re- marque, and that the millions of German workers, peasants, the lower The Longest Trial in History By JAMES LERNER. The present revolt of the Indian workers and peasants started to gather strength in 1928, year mass strikes of railway workers, steel and iron and also jute workers took place. A total of 31 million working days were lost because of these strikes, more than during the whole of the preceding five years. But the most important and largest struggle was that of the cotton tex- tile workers in Bombay. It lasted for six months. At the start there was only a reformist union of 6,000 mem- bers. When the strike was called off @ revolutionary union, known as the “Red Flag Union” because of its ban- ner, with a membership of 65,000 was in existence. Also in the other in- dustries that had struck revolution- ary unions were leading the workers. The textile workers won a partial victory. In order to smash the unions and the Workers and Peasants Party, the Indian section of the Communist International, the British government arrested 31 of the leaders of the trade union movement in March, 1929. ‘This arrest marked the beginning of what most likely !s the longest trial in the history of working class struggle. Today two and a half years later the men still on trial and the trial is e: crisis is purging of bourgeois i!lu- sions, and to make them so much putty in the hands of the Briands and Hoovers and MacDonalds who know how useful such books as The Road Back are in the preparation of the next war. ‘The road back that Remarque has found is a trap and a delusion. For the workers and revolutionary intel- In that ted to last another year and a half. These workers are being tried without a jury. ie charge is “waging war, or attempting to wage war, against the king-em- peror.” Arrested by the conservative gov- ernment the trial was undertaken by the “socialist” MacDonald-Henderson regime which refused to let English Communists go to India in order to testify in behalf of the prisoners. | Those responsible for this nolicy, Hen* derson and Lord Passfield, are now members of the opposition. ‘The arrest of the leaders did not break the union. Soon after a new series of strikes broke including a Bombay textile strike. Many more union leaders have been arrested, some unions having to change their executives three times. Some of the men on trial have been removed to hospitals. because they collapsed in the disease-infested prisons. But no bail was allowed. ‘ ‘The men on trial have utilized their testimony in order to spread Communism. The Indian correspond- ent of the New York Sun wrote re- cently that the men “are conducting a brilliant and interesting defense. It is unique in that it is planned to expound fully upon the Soviet sys- tem of government, and its applica~ tion to conditions in India.” One pris- oner spent several days In a discus- sion of the Dictatorship of the Pro- letariat. Another dealt with collec- ivization of agricilture, a subject which closely affects the millions of Indian peasants, and other prisoners have’ each taken different subjects. ‘The Communist Party of India ts illegal. Under ordinary circumstances it would be impossible to reach such a large mass of workers and peasants, But since the testimony of the pris- oners is printed in all newspapers, the men on trial have turned this trial of themselves into a huge tri- that of | Science Is Bankrupt reached in the last year—the Soviet Uniott, the workers’ revolution. This cnodition of debility amongst the bourgeois scientists contrasting with the growth of science across the Soviet border was vividly brought out at a recent Congress on The History of Science and Tech- hology that was held in London in June: For the first time, a delega- tioii of scientists who use Marxian dialectics met the “intellectually free” minds of capitalism. The delegation was’ headed by Bucharin. We will let» Cambridge professor, ‘Bernal, express the reaction of capitalism’s best. “What was impressive about the discussion was not so much the anti- thesis, of the importance of the indi- vidual and the mass—that we were familiar enough with—but the totally different attitude displayed towards the history of science. It was quite apparent that on the English side both. the historians and the scientists were, as far as the history of science Was concerned, essentially amateurs. Primarily each pursued his own branch, with occasional attempts at correlating them. The Russians pro- ceeded quite differently. The history of science was plainly, vitally im- portant to them; it was not only an academic study, but a guide to action, They proceeded integrally with the social aspect dominant, in the past. as ‘in the present. There could. be no“ effective argument. They had a point of view, right or wrong; the others had never thought it necessary to acquire one.” | The: professor proceeds: “It’ will take Some time to appreciate the ef- fect of this first contact between the thought of the USSR and the west~- ernsworld. In an immediate ‘sense it was a failure. The time was too short, the gulf between the points of ‘view too great, for there to be any real understanding. The Rus- sians came in a phalanx uniformly armed with Marxian dialectic, but they met no organized opposition, but instead an indisciplined iost, unpre- pared and armed with ill-assorted in- dividual philosophies.” Mr.'Bernal concludes: “The more intelligent of bourgeois scientists re- alize the appalling inefficiency of Sciente at the present time, tied as it. is.to academic and impoverished universities and to secretive and com- petitive industries and national gov- erments. This is not only in its ap- plications which are fully effective when noxious, but in its intellectual processes themselves. They tolerate this-inefficiency because they seé no way out of it but slow spontaneous organization, because it is taken as the.price of dearly cherished indivi- dual liberty of thought. In contrast ‘o this we have now a rapidly grow- ing -relatively efficient mechanized science. “There are 850 link research insti- tutes in the USSR, and 40,000 re- search workers. This forces on us two insistent questions as to whether our individualist methods in science are not as obsolete and as effectively doomed as was the craftsmanship of thé middle ages and whether after all they are worth saving. Is is bet- ter to be intellectually’ free, but so- cially totally ineffective, or to become @ component part of a system where Knowledge and action are joined for one Gommon purpose?” These paragraphs explain them- selves. The bourgeois professor is bewildered. He still thinks that ca- pitalism allows intellectual freedom. We recollect the professors who were kicke@jout right here in America for “discussing Marx, or speaking against war (only this year professor Miller of Ohio state was given his walking papers for preaching pacifism). But he and the’ thousands whose thoughts this ‘represents are up against a’ stone wall. The bourgeois econo- mists foresaw eternal prosperity, or- ganized capitalism, collapse of the economic plans of the Soviet Union. They were shown up as amateurs. ‘The‘ bourgeois scientists lived in the cloistered cells of universities or re- search institutes attached to huge in- dustrial corporations. They brought out inventions for war, for competi- tion; for making of new millions by their employers.They were turned out by the overproduction they helped create: They must orientate them- selves towards a new life. Either of hope or disgust. The Soviet Union intends inviting foreign scientists to its congresses, to participate in the work, of building Socialism. And in the future Soviet Scientists will make every effort to be present at foreign congresses, Just as the honest peace proposals of the Soviet Union made by Comrade Litvinov at the fake dis- armament conferences places in bold relief the differences between two civilizations so will the Soviet scien- tists ‘armed with Marxism hammer down’ the remaining dikes of capi- talist knowledge. IN THE LAND OF “EQUALITY” book, Shadows that are only so much stage props for the greater drama of the bruised emotions of Ernst Birkholz and his comrades. On those few occasions when Remarque does look on the revolutionary work- ers, it is with the mingled hostility, ‘awe and fear that are characteristic of the bourgeois intellectual. But after all this breast-beating and wearing of sackcloth and ashes strata, of the petty-bourgeoisie—yes, and the intellectuals too—will have to find more substantial, if less lofty, means of sustenance. There isn't a iiterate imperialist in the world (I don’t speak of the moron Fish variety) who wouldn't approve of this book. More clearly and completely than All Quiet is it | mility, to despair, to agony for the calculated to disarm the workers and ' millions that toil—that road we shall the young intellectuals whom the | not follow bunal for the spreading of their ideas. ‘Three of the prisoners are members of the British Communist Party. One of these is an ex-serviceman who fought in the world war. Thus the trial is an expression of the solidarity of the English workers with the In- dian masses against the common en- emy—the British Imperial Govern ment, headed by the “socialist,” Ram- say MacDonald, at each other's throats considered of nothing but college boys. But The Road Back is not, as the inside jacket of the English translation claims, “in spirit the story of every ex-service man.” ‘The workers and poor farm- ers who composed the bulk of the im- armies were not at all plagued by this intellectualistic stew- ing in one’s own juice. ‘Those Ger- man toilers who came back alive lectuals of the world the only road is the road forward, the road of Lenin, of revolutionary struggle against the war and the transforma- tion of the imperialist’ war into the civil war that shall put an end to capitalism. The road back—back to spineless pacifism, to Christian hu- ‘This is not a line of unemployed looking for a job but representa~- fives of the managing staff of various industrial enterprises giving orders for labor to the Moscow Labor Department