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   Vol. 68/No. 44           November 30, 2004  
 
 
25 and 50 years ago
 
November 30, 1979
Twenty-nine Arab mayors in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip resigned en masse November 13-14 to protest the Israeli cabinet’s decision to go ahead with the deportation of Nablus Mayor Bassam al-Shaka.

Amid demonstrations and strikes in Nablus, Hebron, Ramallah, Jenin, Bir Zeit, and other towns, the mayors issued a statement saying: “We shall never kneel, we shall never bow, we shall never bargain and we shall never give up a grain of our national soil.”

Shaka was arrested November 11, presented with the expulsion order, and imprisoned pending deportation, because of remarks he made in a private conversation with Gen. Danny Matt, the military governor of the West Bank.

Shaka was accused of supporting terrorist actions because he told Matt that “operations like these, if they occur, are only a reaction to other acts.” He added: “As long as there is occupation and killing, you can expect many operations of this type.”  
 
November 29, 1954
Since Nov. 5 the Daily Worker has been making an extensive analysis of the election returns. The analysis boils down to these principal points: Labor played a decisive role in the Democratic victory; this vote expressed labor opposition to McCarthyism and the Big Business policies of the Republican Party; the Democratic victory was not as decisive as it could have been because the Democrats failed to put forward a program for peace and jobs, and in fact permitted the Republicans to appear as the “peace” party.

The conclusion drawn from this by the Stalinists is that the unions must organize for the 1956 elections so that they will become a strong enough force within the Democratic Party to compel it to adopt a program for peace and social progress.

According to the Stalinist reasoning, the Democratic leadership simply doesn’t understand on which side their bread is buttered and it is Labor’s job to bring them to their senses.

Down through the years, one of the persistent illusions prevalent in the American radical and labor movement has been the utopian scheme that “due to peculiarities of our two-party system,” with its direct primary device, Labor will someday capture the Democratic Party. This is one idea that the Stalinists do not share. Even if it were a realizable goal the Stalinists would want no part of it. Their objective is not to dislodge the capitalists from control of the Democratic Party but to establish an alliance with them.

This was explained last May in the Stalinist magazine, Political Affairs, which declared that a progressive new administration would be established “ by an exceedingly broad class alliance—the working class, the poor and middle farmers, the urban middle class, non-monopoly groupings of capital, and the less reactionary circles of Big Business.”  
 
 
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