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From Labor Action, Vol. 12 No. 35, 30 August 1948, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
In spite of political differences with the Socialist Party, the Socialist Labor Party and the Socialist Workers Party, the Workers Party and Labor Action have advised sympathizers and readers to vote for the candidate of any one of these parties in the coming presidential election, since the Workers Party itself is not in a position this year to run its own candidate. The votes cast for all these parties will represent the total socialist protest against both old capitalist parties and against the Stalinoid Wallace party.
But the political criticisms that the Workers Party makes of these other groups requires presentation so that those who are sincerely working for a socialist world may judge what kind of program is most likely to bring a socialist victory. It is for this reason that the acceptance speech of Norman Thomas at Reading, Pa., on May 8, 1948, delivered as presidential candidate of the Socialist Party, needs to be scrutinized by all socialists.
Certainly no fault can be found with Candidate Thomas when he says that the “great concern in this campaign must be with the winning of peace.”
“Any politician is a liar,” said Thomas, “who will promise the people to stop price inflation or to provide them with houses, hospitals and schools, if annually from 20 to 30 billion dollars’ worth of resources and human energy are to be wholly withdrawn from the satisfaction of human needs to the provision of more gigantic instrumentalities for mass destruction.”
Good, sound words, Candidate Thomas.
“And – I say it weighing my words – any militarist is a liar, or at least dangerously deceived, who says that there will be protection in such hysterical armament, or that the denial of liberty implicit in peacetime military conscription will contribute to our national safety. On the contrary, it makes more war likely.”
Again, one hundred per cent perfect!
Since Candidate Thomas has stated the war issue so irrefutably and has brushed aside all other issues as subordinate, eagerly one wants to know how Norman Thomas and his party are going to work for peace. What is their program to lead the people to peace, to end the mad expenditure of human effort for destruction, to terminate the threat of annihilation by atomic warfare?
Again, here are the words of Candidate Thomas:
“Of course abiding peace requires world government. But world government will be either impossible or else a monstrous tyranny unless it is based on a democracy of race relations and economic and political controls beyond our immediate grasp. But not beyond our attainment, perhaps sooner than we think, if we will seek peace as passionately as we have waged war.”
So now Thomas has made the form of world peace more concrete: world government embodying bona fide political and economic democracy.
“World government” is now a phrase employed by most well-intentioned capitalist liberals. Socialists, on the other hand, have placed their hopes in the international brotherhood of socialist nations, which gradually would develop into higher forms of internationalism as the whole idea of nationalism loses meaning and use.
This socialist version of internationalism is based, first and foremost, upon the abolition of the capitalist system and exploitation in the nations and the establishment of socialist workers’ governments. But Candidate Thomas, along with the well-intentioned capitalist liberals, thinks there can be some magic way of getting their world government without the awful bother of the working people of the nations getting rid of their respective capitalist governments.
To quote further from Candidate Thomas’ speech: “... America through her every voice, official and unofficial, should cry out to the nations of the world ...” Before waiting to find out what official and unofficial “America” should cry out, we pause, for there is already something wrong. There is an America which is the sum total of the politicians, the militarists, the capitalists, the imperialists, whom Thomas so rightly blasts, and there is an America which is the mass of working people.
But Thomas does not base his hope on the working people recognizing themselves as a class distinct from the rest. He does not call on the working people of America to cry out to the working people of Europe. It has always been and still is typical of the Socialist Party to blur class lines. That is why, in a crisis, the reformist Socialist Parties have so often gone over to the side of those very politicians and imperialists whom Candidate Thomas calls liars.
They preach the hope of a world dedicated to peace and plenty without preaching the necessity of a revolutionary transformation which will eliminate imperialism and its power conflicts.
Thus Candidate Thomas and the Socialist Party are still among those political antediluvians who after World War I believed in the League of (Imperialist) Nations, and who now, after World War II, place their hope in the United (Imperialist) Nations.
As a matter of fact, the one concrete idea contained in the whole speech reveals Candidate Thomas’ reliance on the United Nations. He desires the official and unofficial voice of America to cry out to the world: “We want reform to make United Nations effective in providing security.”
After the performance of the United Nations and the damning revelation of its character, Candidate Thomas’ optimism about reforming it – for no less a purpose than to bring security to the world – is exactly tantamount to the Socialist Party’s unchanging hopefulness about reforming capitalism itself in spite of the fully exposed innate rottenness of that system.
There are plenty of capitalist liberals who give out with phrases about reform. Socialists – real socialists – have a different job: to bring to the fore the necessity for a SOCIALIST world before man’s hopes of peace and security can be achieved. A “socialism” which makes itself indistinguishable from liberalism – like Candidate Thomas’ – is simply a piece of futility.
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