‘Capitalism breeds war, unemployment and fascism’

Teamster Bureaucracy is one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for July. It is the last of a four-volume series, including Teamster Rebellion , Teamster Power and Teamster Politics . The book describes the fight in the labor movement led by Minneapolis Teamsters Local 544 to oppose Washington’s entry into World War II, and how the capitalist rulers, backed by the top labor officialdom, attempted to silence class-struggle-minded workers. Eighteen leaders of Local 544 and of the Socialist Workers Party, including the book’s author Farrell Dobbs, were charged with sedition in a 1941 trial, culminating in their imprisonment. The excerpt below from the chapter “‘If that is treason…’” summarizes SWP leader James P. Cannon’s testimony on the witness stand. Copyright © 1977 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY FARRELL DOBBS
The government had turned reality upside down in charging the Socialist Workers Party with a plot to undermine the existing system. A social crisis was developing in the United States not because of any revolutionary conspiracy, but through the operation of two internal laws of capitalism, which make inevitable its decline and its replacement by socialism.

One of those laws involves private ownership of the means of production, he explained, and employment of wage labor at less than the value of the products produced by wage laborers. … The remaining value created by labor becomes surplus value, for which the capitalist appropriators must find fields of exploitation at home and abroad. The resulting contradictions of the capitalist system inexorably lead to periodic crises.

The post-1929 economic depression, which resulted from one such crisis of what political science terms overproduction, was an unmistakable sign of the unhealthiness of the social organism called capitalism. It brought upon the working class a scourge of unemployment that operated on a world scale. …

Social relations are further aggravated by competition between capitalists, a trend that leads inevitably to the bigger ones freezing out the smaller fry. More and more wealth becomes concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer monopolists. …

Fundamental structural factors of the foregoing nature, not socialist propaganda, are the cause of the unending class struggle under capitalism. …

Trade unions appeared in this country as the basic organizations through which the workers struggle to defend their interests from day to day. The Socialist Workers Party supports the trade union movement, so as to help the workers resist oppression and strive for improved conditions of life. In doing so we advocate democratic practices through which the unions can be controlled by the rank and file. The party does not seek dictatorial control over those mass organizations, as the government wrongly charges. We strive for leading influence in the trade unions by demonstrating ability to fight for the workers’ interests. …

In talking about perspectives for organized labor we place special emphasis on the need for the working masses to take over the leadership of the country. As the first step toward that end, we urge the workers to make a clean break with the capitalist parties, develop an independent party of their own, and adopt a political program that will genuinely serve the interests of labor and its allies.

The second internal law of capitalism, Cannon continued, involves a conflict between the further development of productive forces and the confinement of those forces within national barriers. In their efforts to solve crises of overproduction, the capitalists look for foreign markets in which to sell their products and in which to invest their excess capital. … They tend to become imperialist powers, which means they seek to exploit other peoples.

But when capitalism enters some new territory, the world sphere open for exploitation begins to narrow down, because the laws of capitalist competition follow like a shadow. The rival imperialists have less and less room for expansion of their spheres of influence, and as a result they come into conflict over redivision of the territorial spoils.

Global clashes of that nature became so intensified early in the twentieth century that they led to the war of 1914-18. The outbreak of bloody struggle on such an immense scale was a signal that the capitalist world system had run up against a profound crisis of historical development. Since then the capitalist nations had continued to be either in a state of war or in the process of preparing for war, and it took only two decades for another world holocaust to begin. …

Roosevelt’s claim that he was leading the United States into a war of democracy against fascism was a subterfuge, Cannon warned. The conflict would be imperialist in character. Although fought at the expense of the working class, its purpose would be to advance the world ambitions of this country’s capitalists, who stood among the greatest enemies of democracy. … War could be prevented, unemployment abolished, and dangers of repressive rule overcome only by doing away with the capitalist system which breeds war, unemployment, and fascism.

The Socialist Workers Party stands unalterably opposed to imperialist war, he declared from the witness stand. We speak against it, write against it, try to create mass sentiment against it. … What is more, we shall remain opposed to involvement in an imperialist war even while this country is engaged in such a conflict. We will express that opposition on a political plane, seeking to exercise our constitutional right to call for a different foreign policy. …

The imperialist war, for which workers were being conscripted, was in itself an expression of a terrible social crisis, and that crisis would not be solved by war. … Deep-seated unrest would result, as bitter experiences caused the masses to yearn for a fundamental change in social conditions.

By definition, that is what the term social revolution means, Cannon stressed — a basic political and economic transformation of society. An example from U.S. history is the Civil War of 1861-65. That was a social revolution because it destroyed the system of slave labor and property in slaves, replacing it by the complete domination of capitalist enterprise and wage labor.

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