Veil Torn

In 1935 Communists the world over, including those in the U. S., took a raincheck on revolution. Object: by joining a "united front" for capitalist democracy, to make the democracies allies of Soviet Russia against Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and Imperialist Japan. Last week world Communists, including those in the U. S., turned in the raincheck, came out from behind their false whiskers, and announced that they had just been fooling: they want their revolution after all. The new Communist name for revolution is "quick transition."

Indicted Earl Browder, Communism's No. 1 spokesman in the U. S., made the announcement in Boston. Because it was Browder who spoke, his hearers knew that the "new party line" was really Moscow talking. A quick transition to socialism in the U. S. is now the object of his party, said he, returning to Joseph Stalin's old theme: that the U. S. is ripe for collapse and revolutionary restitution. Of his more recent declarations (that socialism is not now practicable for the capitalistic U. S.) Earl Browder made no mention last week. Said he, abandoning Communist support of Roosevelt's foreign and domestic policies:

". . . Imperialist war . . . is tearing away the veils of hypocrisy behind which the monopoly capitalists were hiding their ruthless dictatorship. . . . Thus 'democratic' America, even while it is technically neutral, forgets its liberal dream about a 'New Deal' and loses itself in a wave of reactionary sentiment. . . . Only the working class, rising in alliance with the rest of the toiling population, and taking the decisions out of the hands of the capitalist class, can prevent war. . . ."

What moved Joe Stalin and his Earl Browder to doff their democratic whiskers was the Russo-German pact and the consequent reaction against the U. S. S. R., in which Franklin Roosevelt shared last week (see p. 15). The Browder speech last week was the first realistic thing which he and his party have done since the Stalin & Hitler marriage of convenience. But Browder and friends, free again to take up their old cries of international class war, down-with-capitalism, etc., were not in an altogether happy position. To portray Joseph Stalin's totalitarian regime as the flower of revolutionary socialism will be as tough a thesis as it was to maintain for four years that "Communism is Twentieth Century Americanism."

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