The daily worker. [volume], November 07, 1929, Final City Edition, Page Page Four, Image 4

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Page Four
PARTY LIFE
Active Units! —Not Ticket Agencies
The following quotation from a recent letter to the National Office
is a good demonstration of how NOT to conduct a unit meeting:
“At the meeting of Unit BF, Section 1, District 2, the following
calls for financial support were made at the meeting held on Oct. 16.
Section affair, tickets per member 25
Women’s Committee Affair, per member 50
Ad in Election Rally Journal, per member 50
Honor Roll for Election Rally Journal 25
Ad in Russian Revolution Issue Labor Defender 50
Daily Worker Election Issue, per member 25
Madison Sq. Garden Election Rally, per ticket SI.OO
Ad Bazaar Journal, per member 50
Daily Wo.ker Sustaining Fund, per member 25
Daily Worker, Campaign for South, per member 25
Purchase Labor Defender and Communist, per member 35
Banner for Soviet Fliers, per member 50
Mobilization of Members for Tag Day
Gastonia Collection Lists and Tag Day
$5.10
Many of these are recommended as compulsory by the Unit Execu
tive. Is it any wonder why new members don’t come back to meet
ings—why members drop away—when instead of the nucleus having a
political and organizational content, our Party units are turned into
Ticket Agencies. The outstanding thing about this is that it demon
strates that neither the section or district organization department are
coordinating the work of the Party.
This bad example, which is by no means an exception, should teach
us to observe the following:
1. Every DEC should control all affairs arranged. While limiting
the number of affairs, those agreed upon will bring in greater revenue.
2. Absolute prohibition of collections in the nuclei unless passed
upon by the District Office.
3. We must not take the road of least resistance. All Party af
fairs must be brought to the workers in the shops, unions, etc. In this
way we will gain mass support.
4. The auxiliaries shall fulfill their function as bridge organiza
tions and organize their activities to reach the non-Party workers, in
stead of being parasitic organizations on the Party.
5. The Nucleus Executive must meet regularly before every meet
ing and work out the agenda and activities of the meeting, thus elim
inating all these unnecessary appeals.
6. The Party members must be called upon first, to support the
Party as such, which also means the national office, and its activities.
The Party finances must be put on a budget and rational base.—W.
Statement by District Disciplinary Committee
of the Young Communist League, District 2
on the Expulsion of Harry Eisenman
The Disciplinary Committee of District Two, Y. C. L., at its last
meeting expelled Harry Eisenman from the ranks of the Young Com- j
munist League. Eisenman was expelled from the ranks of the League j
for expressing views of the crassest form of white chauvinism.
However, not only did Eisenman have views intolerable for a
League or Party member on the question of race equality, but generally ;
had proven himself to be a degenrate irresponsible type, not fit for
membership within the ranks of the Communist Youth.
The expulsion of Eisenman is part of the general drive of the
League to cleanse its ranks of all unhealthy and irresponsible elements.
The Young Communist League will not only drive out of its ranks those
elements who openly accept the counter-revolutionary right line of
Lovestone, but also all eelments who in this period of growing class
struggles show any manifestations of a right ideology, whether same
be expressed through white chauvinism or in general irresponsibility.
D. DAVIS, Secretary.
Against the International Right
The following telegram has been sent to the Swedish Young Com
munist League at Stockholm, Sweden:
“We hail the Swedish Young Communist League for its militant
struggle against opportunism within the ranks of the Communist
Party. We are confident that the Swedish Communist Party nad the
Young Communist League, under the leadership of the Communist
International and the Young Communist International, will defeat
the Kilbo-Samuelson group as we have annihilated and smashed the
Lovestone renegades. Keep up the traditions of your League as an
example to others! Clean the ranks! Intensify the revolutionary
struggle aganist Swedish imperialism!
Executive Committee, Young Communist League of the U. S. A.”
THE LITTLE ENTENTE AND HUNGARY IN
THE ANTI-SOVIET WAR FRONT
By LOUIS KOVESS.
After the world war the “Little Entente,” Czecho-slovakia, Jugo
slavia, and Roumania, was organized as a means of security of the
“victorious” states against conquered Hungary, Austria and Bulgaria,
for keeping these states armed only to the extent sufficient for op
pression of their workers, peasants and national minorities, and for
assuring the rule over the territories taken from them.
The relation between the Little Entente and their former “enemies”
has definitely changed. While there are still deep-seated differences
between the states of the Little Entnt and thir former “enecy” states, .
reflecting the antagonism within the imperialist camps of France,
Britain and Italy, and to some extent the imperialist expansionist aims
of every one of these states, these differences take secondary place at
present. Historical changes altered the basis of the Little Entente.
It is not a sentinel over the spoils of the world war any more—it has
become a unifying force of the great imperialist powers in the Balkans
for war against the Soviet Union.
The empty promise of Masaryk, president of Czecho-slovakia, to |
return the territory taken from Hungary, is aimed at giving a helping
hand to the Horthy government of Hungary in disarming its own
followers, who still want armed revision of the Trianon “peace” treaty.
A DIFFERENT J3NEMY.
No matter how empty this promise is, it is welcomed by the bloody
fascist government of Hungary, which wants to get rid of its own ir
redentist program only in order to participate actively in the anti-
Soviet war preparations. This irredentist program was used by the
Horthy government for years ot divert the attention of the oppressed
workers from their class enemies at home to the irredentist foreign
policy. But this irredentist propaganda had to be stopped for the
sake of unity with the Little Entente. And it really has been stopped,
signalizing the readiness of the Horthy government to unite with its
“enemies” against the Soviet Union.
In place of the “external revision” there is the new slogan of “in
ternal revision,” that is, “democratization” of Hungary. The mur
derers of masses, the Horthyites, wholeheartedly accepted this slogan
put out by the social “democrat” fascists, and now with phrases about
“democratization” on their lips, they are murdering hundreds of poli
tical prsioners who are on a hunger strike for over two weeks.
DEMAGOGY OF “DEMOCRACY.”
The slogan of the Hungarian MacDonalds having been accepted
by these hangmen, they appointed Julius Gombas, master of the art
of inquisition, as minister of war, whose first official act was the re
vival of the law abolished 70 years ago, permitting the lashing of
soldiers. In the name of “democratization” they made a sword attack
against thousands of workers who, under Communist leadership, dem
onstrated against the fascist terror.
The tomb of Comrade Loewy, fearless fighter for the cause of the
working class, murdered with “artificial feeding” when he was on hun
ger strike in prison, will be a monument to the pact of the social
“democratic” fascists and the Horthy government.
Right now there is a strike wave in Hungary. Miners, wood
workers, building workers, and others, are on strike. New Mass trials,
of Communists, new arrests —and at the same time social-demagogic
slogans on “democratization,” the bringing home of the chief leaders
of the socialist party from abroad, making intensive use of the “left”
social democrats like Rustem Vambery, all these go to prove that the
revolutionary feeling of the working class at this period of the grow
ing crisis in world capitalism is developing at rapid tempo.
In Czecho-slovakia the growing crisis is compelling the ruling
OMKS to come to an understandnig and to place the social fascist
r $
THE DIFFICULTY IS HOW TO SLIP THEM ON By Fred Ellis
■ ‘ . » ... , . .? si' V i • ,
:v : *
1 « ' ~
Nat Turner, Negro Champion and Martyr
Put to Death By the Bourgeoisie of the South, November 11, 1831
By CECIL BRIGGS.
On November 11th, when the bourgeois democratic state celebrates
its victory in the “war to make the world safe for democracy,” the
Negro masses of America whose experience with bourgeois “democracy”
has been bitter in the extreme, will do well to seek inspiration, not in
a victory which means nothing to them and which, in spite of their part
in it, did not help to better their condition one iota, but rather in an
event of tremendous significance to them as an oppressed group under
bourgeois democracy.
It was on November 11th in 1831, that the daring Nat Turner was
put to death by the white slave-holders of Virginia following the col
lapse of the slave revolt he lead.
John Brown invaded Virginia with 19 men, and with the expressed
resolution to take no life but in self defense, Nat Turner, more reso
lute and capable, attacked Virginia from within, with only six men and
with the determination to spare no life of the slave-owning class until
slavery was completely crushed.
Upon the night of August 31, 1831, Nat Turner with his six fol
lowers set out upon their mission from the woods on the plantation of
Joseph Harrison. As swift and stealthy as the Arab and white slave
traffickers on their murderous missions through Africa, the black men
passed from plantation to plantation, from house to house of the op
pressors, not pausing, not hesitating, in the grim work of retribution.
In one thing they were more humane than white and Arab raiders of
African towns and homes: there was no gratuitous outrage beyond the
death-blow itself, no insult, no mutilation; but in every house they en
tered, that blow fell on man, woman and child, no member of the white
ruling class was spared. They entered only the homes of the planta
tion owners and overseers. The poor whites they didn’t molest. From
every house they took arms and munitions. On every plantation they
found willing recruits; these tortured slaves, so obsequious before their
cruel masters the day before, so prompt to sing and dance and clown
before his northern visitors, were all eager to chance their lives in the
battle for liberty. Eagerly they grasped musket and sword, eagerly
they followed the daring revolutionary.
The white slave-owners and their families quaked with fear in
memory of wrongs inflicted upon the insurrected slaves, of Negroes
savagely beaten, of many wantonly murdered. Remembering countless
Negro women habitually polluted—the sisters and wives of the insur
rectionists—the whites feared for their women a fate worse than death.
But this fear was needless.
With a force of sixty adherents, Nat Turner judged it time to strike
to the forefront in the oppression of the working class and its leader—
the Communist Party—and in the preparation for war against the
Soviet Union. *
LOVESTONE’S PALS.
The Czeeho-slovakian “comrades” of Lovestone, Messrs Hais and
Jilek, are actively helping the anti-Communist acts of the government
and the social fascists, and are trying to weaken the Party’s struggle
for defense of the Soviet Uniori.
In August they held a big military maneuver, the biggest ever
held in the country, under the supervision of President Massaryk and
a social fascist leader.
In Lupeny, Roumania, the bloodbath following the militant resist
ance of the exploited miners to the armed forces, was only a signal
light of the onmarching revolution. Here the social democrats have
less nifluence than in n-eny ohter countries, so they are only helpers
of Mania’s hangmen.
In Jugoslavia, the military-fascist dictatorship created with the aid
of British and French imperialists vainly hopes to break the fighting
spirit of the proletariat and poor peasantry by mass arrests and mur
der. Since the birth of the dictatorship 40,000 workers, peasants and
revolutionary intellectuals have been arrested and more than 10,000
are still in prison. In four months alone, 39 workers have been mur
dered, in the hope by this terror to clear the road of opposition to
war on the Soviet Union. But the Communist Party, despite the
growing terror, is at the head of the leftward swinging working class,
peasantry and national minorities. The social democrats are detested
by the workers nad they can get but few silver pieces for their police
agent services.
PROOF OF WAR PLANS.
In all these countries the preparation for war against the Soviet
Union is developing rapidly. The capitalist “Journal de Geneve” on
Sept. 4, published a document proving that the Little Entente has its
plan all perfected for military invasion of Soviet territory. It says
in part:
“Jugoslavia agreed to open the Dalamation harbors for
munitino shipments, intended for use in the war against the
Soviet Union. The munitions will arrive from Frame or some
other country, at Cattaro and Spalatto. It will reach the Russian
frontier through Zagrab, Bosnabrod. Zimony, Ujvidek; Szabadka,
Arad, Temesvar and old Roumania.”
The visits of generr is of Pilsudski to Bucharest, Prague and Buda
pe»t, and the instigation of the Horthy govrnment for war aganist the
Soviet Union with their slogan of “Sescue the 10,000 Hungarian war
prisoners still suffering in the lead mines of Soviet Siberia” (a pure
fiction!), all serving the same purpose. They are all !n line with the
preparations of the Hoover-Wall Street government and that of Mac
donald for the counter-revolutionary war against the Union of Social
ist Soviet Republics, for the defense of which every wroker and poor
farmer must fight against his “own” ruling class.
I
Worker
. n of the Communist Party of the TT. S A
at the county seat, Jerusalem. This plan was eminently wise, and the
revolt would have had a different history had not other counsel pre
vailed. Three miles on the way to Jerusalem, the insurrectionists had
to pass 'a plantation owned by a man named Parker. Some of the men
wished to stop here. Nat Turner was opposed to this, feeling that any
delay might prove ruinous to his plans. Finally, however, he yielded,
and it proved fatal. During the stop, a party of thirty armed white
slave owners came up suddenly, dispersed the small guard at the gates
and attacked the main body of the revolutionaries. The slaves responded
to this attack with a volley of shots and a reckless charge on their
armed masters, whereupon the latter broke and fled. Pursued they
were saved from annihilation only by falling in with, another band of
whites. Turner, faced with overwhelming odds, withdrew hie men in
perfect order. Later that night, however, he was attacked by superior
forces and most of his men scattered. With only a few men left, Turner
agreed that it was best for these to scatter and try to enlist more of
the slaves for a fresh offensive.
At the outset, all his plans had succeeded; everything had gone as
he predicted; the slaves had responded eagerly to hs call; the master
class had proved itself cowardly and incapable in the face of the revolt.
Had he not been persuaded to pause at Parker’s plantation, hs would
have been master of Jerusalem with its huge stores of arms and muni
tions and would have been able to arm great numbers of slaves. His
capture of Jerusalem would have further demoralized the slave holders.
His exploits had already caused utter demoralization, not only in Vir
ginia, but throughout the slave-holding section. Finally, if pressed, he
could have taken refuge in the Dismal Swamp and there sustained his
force indefinitely against the enemy, while he rallied additional forces
to the cause of liberation.
All sorts of rumors filled the air and were reflected in the news
papers of that day. Reports flew thick and fast; the militia was said
to be in retreat before the revolutionaries; the regulars had been de
feated; thousands of slaves had joined the revolt. Blind panic took
possession of the guilty white slave owners. Only with the arrival of
U. S. troops and naval detachments did they recover from their scare,
and then not completely until the capture of Nat Turner.
Nor was the range of these insurrectionary alarms confined to
Virginia. Every slave-holding state was in the throes of terror! In
Delaware there were arbitrary arrests and executions of slaves sus
pected of militancy. In North Carolina, many slave owners fled with
their families to the swamps. In Alabama, the master-class'trembled
at the report of a joint conspiracy of two wronged races: the Indians
and the Negroes. In Tennessee, in Kentucky, terror manifested itself
in widespread arrests and murders of slaves. In Maryland, in Georgia,
it was the same. But the greatest terror was in Louisiana. Captain
Alexander, an English tourist, arriving at New Orleans at the begin
ning of September, found the whole city in tumult. Reports flew thick
and fast of Negro uprisings throughout the South. And the state of
mind of the master class was not helped by the reports which were
constantly arriving of insurrections in Brazil and the West Indies.
The fact of thousands of white men in arms in all the slave state
did not inspire the master class with any great sense of security. “Had
not the blow been struck before by only seven men? Was not Nat
Turner still at large?”
Meanwhile, the main cause of demoralization of the master class,
the daring leader of the Virginia insurrection, was made the object of
the most desperate search. Thousands of men hunted him in groups of
one hundred and more. Huge rewards were offered for his capture.
Several times the slave owners breathed with premature relief as false
reports of his capture appeared. It was not, however, until October
15th that his whereabouts were discovered, and so able was he in con
cealing or in defending himself as the need might be, that it was not
until October 30th that he was finally captured.
With Nat Turner captured, the slave owners launched a bloody
reign of terror against the Negro slaves. Negroes were murdered in
cold blood irrespective of whether they had taken part in the, revolt.
The slave owners were actuated by the usual motive of the ruling class
of discouraging future rebellions against their exploitation by striking
terror into the hearts of the slave—or working class. It was a reign
of terror as ruthless, and as purposeful as that which the French ruling
class wreaked upon the French workers following the collapse of the
heroic Paris Commune.
Most of the revolted slaves refused to surrender, preferring to die
fighting, to accepting the fate in store for those who fell into the
hands of the enraged master class. Os those captured, many were tor;
tured to death, ipaimed, and subjected to nameless atrocities. Any
slave who showed, the slightest spirit, or was noted for intelligence,
was put to death by the slave owners who were in terror at the thought
that there might be other. Nat Turners among their slaves.
Nat Turner took his capture with the utmost equanimity. Cool and
fearless to the last, he made no denial of his leadership of the revolt,
but like a good revolutionary he utilized the courts of the master class
as a tribunal from which to thunder his denunciations against the op
pressors of his race. He was sentenced to death on the sth of No
vember, 1831, and was executed six days later, in November 11. Even
his enemies record that “he met his death with perfect composure,”
that “he betrayed no emotion, and even hurried the executioner in the
performance of his duty.” Not by the slightest movement of limb or
muscle did he give any satisfaction to the huge crowd of sadistic slave
holders who gathered to witness the “execution.”
Unlike the Negro petty-bourgeois misleaders of today, Nat Turner
sought no personal advancement nor affirmed loyalty to a system under
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TUB f ITV
S VVH ■ ■ W ALEXANDER \EWEROFE
FROM ODE
THE RUSSIAN Et ■■ U
Reprinted, hr permlnelon, Irom “The City of Brend” by Alexander
Neweroff, published and copyrtchted by Donbleday—Doran, New York.
■ a i 1 ... - I
\ * wo,«
(Continued.)
Another mujik oined them. Good company . . . good talk to listen
to. • • • •
“But why do you never get off the train, young fellow?’
“What for?”
“Oh, t ostretch your legs a little.”
Mishka smiled.
“What do I need to stretch my legs for? . .
The peasants bad eaten their fill of warm food, and were growing
more cheerful. Three of them lay with their heads in the laps of their
wives, three had untied their pouches to count their money. One had a
whole mountain of Czarist notes, another a lapful of silver. The men
whose beads rested in the laps of their wives struck up a song. Yer
opka ran around trying to sell his watch.
All day long beggars kept passing through the car: women with
babies, barefoot mujiks. They gathered the bones that had been dis
carded nad stared through the car doors with terrible sunken eyes.
They wept, they pleaded, they stretched out their hand imploringly.
The sight of the hunger-agony of these strangers was terrible to
Mishka. If only the train would leave this place quickly. It was a
good thing the mujiks believed him, else he would have been thrown
off the train . . . Then he too . . .
During the night th mujiks began to clamor, stamping through
th car in alarm. Yeropka came running through like a madman.
“The engine-driver refuses to go any further! In the last car
they’re making a collection for him. If we have to stay here it will
cost us more.”
“How much must we give?”
“A hundred rubles a piece.”
“Ach, the robber!”
“Be quiet, Uncle Ivan, don’t start cursnig! If we stay here,
it will cost us more.”
The mujiks sat around in a circle in the dark, crowded car, quiver
ing beards thrust forward, like ragged gnomes. Reluctantly they un
did theri trouser buttons, and with trembling hands drew out from
their underclothes the carefully concealed ten-ruble notes. Hard earned
is the mujik’s kopek! The bills rustled in the darkness, matted beards
wagged, colliding with one another.
“Have all given?”
“All.”
“How abou tthe boy?”
“That’s right, wake him up.”
“Hey there, nephew! Give money!”
Mishka thought of hiding his head in the sacks, but his legs
would stick out, and if he hid his legs, his head would show. And
the mujiks were standing around like jack-daws, pulling at him from
all sides.
“Can’t you hear?”
“Give us some money!”
He mustn’t stop to think long, they .vould get suspicious, but he
couldn’t go ahead without thinking first. Mishka raised his head, feel
ing around hesitatingly in his pocket. ■;
“Who lias a knife?”
“What for?”
“The money’s sewed in my lining.”
“Marya, give him a knife!”
Mishka discovered a piece so paper in his pocket, picked up at
some station, and holding it out in his shaking hand, he said in a
loud voice:
“Who’s collecting the money? Here, take it,”
“How much?”
“A hundred.”
The darkness of the car had saved him.
Yeropka clutched Mishka’s note in his sweaty fist and ran to
find the engine-driver. Mishka’s head whirled with excitement, and
relief, his heart beat stormily for happiness.
What a crew! Tell them a yarn about an uncle, they believe it!
Give them paper instead of money, they take it!
Either Mishka had great luck or the mujiks were very stupid.
Strange!
Still things were bad enough.
Yeropka might return and say:
“Throw this thief out of here! It was paper that he stuck into
my hand ...”
Mishka pressed his head between his hands in dismay and tried
to think. He might make fun of Yeropka, the Buzuluk mujik, but
beneath his shirt fear stabbed at him like a sharp thorn.
Yeropka returned and whispered to the mujiks:
“All fixed! We’ll travel three hundred versts with this engine
without a stop. We’ve struck a good engine-driver this time. ‘l,’
he said, ‘comrades, will get you there in a second, because I understand
completely the fix you are in.’ ”
“That means it’s all right then?”
“Absolutely.”
“That’s good!”
And Mishka smiled to himself in the darkness:
“It is very good.” ■
(To be Continued)
A Home for All Virile Captains
LONDON, Nov* 6.—Captain George Garro-Jones, well-known as a
former liberal member of parliament, informed Prime Minister Mac-
Donald by letter today of his intention to join the labor party.
Garro-Jones said he believed that “all virile and progressive opinion,
if it is to be effective, must identify itself with the great movement
of which you aye leader.”
which his race was oppressed. He was “no soft-tongued apologist” in
defending the.rights of his race, but like the fearless Frederick Douglas,
an uncompromising fighter against the ruling class of the day, the
slave owners, he was a revolutionary fighter, in every sense of the
term. When he struck for the liberty of his enslaved race he struck
without fear, without hesitation. He sought the absolute destruction,
the annihilation of the class responsible for the sufferings of his race.
He struck at this class “without a throb of compunction, a word of
exultation, or an act of outrage.” And he knew the use of terror to
strike fear into the hearts of the enemy class.
While his plans did not succeed, Nat Turner nevertheless made his
mark upon American history, and particularly upon the history of the
oppressed Negro masses of America and upon the abolition movement.
The famous hand of abolitionists, whose fearless eloquence prepared
the white masses of the North for the move of the northern industrial
ists against southern competition through the price-cutting slave system,
were but the unconscious mouthpieces of Nat Turner and other famous
slave insurrectionists.
The Negro masses, whose oppression today, more than sixty years
after “emancipation” is in many respects mere deadly than under
chattel slavery, should strive to keep our revolutionary traditions alive
as an example in the present phase of that long struggle our race has
waged for real emancipation. The names of Nat Turner, of Gabriel,
of Denmark Vesey, and of that famous revolutionary of Haiti, Tous
saint L’Ouverture, should be indelibly engraved upon the consciousness
of every Negro throughout the world. The revolutionary lives and
deeds of our heroes must be made the example and guides for the
prosecution of the struggle against the vicious capital system under
which we suffer today as wage-slaves and exploited tenants.
.Celebrate November 11 as Nat Turner Day!