Vol. 71/No. 35      September 24, 2007

Mason, a city councilman in Seaside, California, is a leader of the Socialist Workers Party. His supporters gathered 214,699 signatures to place him on the ballot, but California Secretary of State March Fong Eu has invalidated more than half the signatures, claiming the socialists’ petitions contain only 88,157 valid names.

Mason’s campaign has focused on opposition to the draft and U.S. intervention in Central America and to Washington’s war at home on the unions, Blacks, women, and working farmers.

“It’s these ideas that win us support among working people,” says Mason, “and it’s these ideas the Democratic and Republican party officials don’t want to let voters hear.”  
 
September 23, 1957
The Democratic Party has been the traditional party of racial oppression. Before 1865, it stood for slavery and secession. Since the defeat of the slave-holders, the Democratic Party has been the political haven and fortress of the vilest Negro-haters, exploiters and segregationists. This party is permeated with the stench of the slave pens and the scorched flesh of the lynched.

For leaders of the Democratic Party to put on a show of indignation at Eisenhower’s miserable conduct in the Arkansas school integration crisis is brazen hypocrisy.

Certainly [Harry] Truman is the last man who should be criticizing a President on the issue of civil rights. He was President for almost eight years just before Eisenhower and there is no record of his taking any effective action whatsoever to enforce the Constitutional and human rights of the Negro people. Another Democrat, Franklin D. Roosevelt, held the lease of the White House for more than twelve years just before Truman.  
 
September 24, 1932
When Marx and Engels issued the “Communist Manifesto” in 1848, Japan was still in its dark ages of feudalism, shut in as a hermit nation to hold back the threatening inundation by the rising tide of world economy. Less than a century after its issuance, a scant sixty-four years after the beginning of the modern era in Japan, the spectre of Communism haunts Asia as well as Europe. And in fact the spectre has materialized and taken on flesh and stands with a foot in either continent, so that even as Japan reaches maturity as a world capitalist power, world economy already includes within itself at least the framework of a more advanced stage of society.

Japan, the last of the powers to abolish feudalism, has itself become one of the capitalist powers. The unprecedented speed with which this process occurred has been the admiration of those bourgeois writers who attribute the “successes” of Japanese capitalism to the planful foresight of its ruling class.  
 
 
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