HE GROWING number of de-
tailed briefs and other repre-
sentations made by organized labor
to governments at all levels on the
growing unemployment crisis, rules
out any and all excuses on the
part of such governments that they
_ don’t know how serious the crisis
is. Only this week the B.C. Federa-
tion of Labor added another com-
ptehensive and workable program
tc the Bennett government’s file;
a program to provide jobs instead
of optimistic promises for the un-
employed of this province.

Meanwhile, in Ottawa, Tory La-
bor Minister Michael Starr is busy
propagating a peanut vendor’s do-
it-yourself “solution” to unemploy-
ment, while Finance Minister “Flim-
Flam” Fleming earnestly seeks a
“solution” to inflation with a stand-
ardized Tory slide-rule; by allow-
ing big monopoly all the price hikes
it demands, at the same time de-
flating the people’s living stand-
ards with increased unemployment
and reduced wage standards.

While these Tory evasions and
acrobatics continue, Tory cold war
policies, unchallenged by any pro-
vincial government, remain intact,
as evidence in its armament budget
spending. Bomarcs before butter!

Obviously fine briefs and resolu-
tions froms organized labor are not
in themselves going to impress re-
actionary governments nor improve
the employment situation. The
struggle for work and bread for
three-quarters of a million unem-
ployed and their families is not a
“silk - glove - hat - in - hand” matter.
That much should be eminently
clear to organized labor by now.

Nor can the organized labor
movement, which should be pro-
viding militant political leadership
in this crisis, concern itself only

_ with its “own” jobless members. Of
the 2.5 million or more wage earn-
ers still outside the ranks of the

Canadian Labor Congress, there is

Pacific Tribune

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__ Editor — TOM McEWEN
Managing Editor — HAL GRIFFIN

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Take off the gloves

EDITORIAL PAGE

a heavy percentage of jobless work-
ere who must be mobilized for a
concerted nation-wide struggle for
work and wages, and against the
belly-robbing policies of Tory, Lib-
eral and Socred governments alike.

This job can and must be done.
It is part of organized labor’s strug-
gle for a political alternative to the
old-line political henchmen of big
business. But it won’t be done by
evading the fundamental class is-
sues involved; by labor red-baiting

eitself to the delight of its class
exploiters, or by passing-the-buck
of responsibility onto governments
labor already knows will do as lit-
tle as they can about the situation
—-until compelled to do more by an
all-inclusive working class unity and
pressure. :

It’s time labor took off the gloves
and discarded the niceties which
prohibit naming “a spade a spade.”
Those hundreds of thousands of
workers and their families con-
demned to the hunger and hard-
ship of unemployment, demand
nothing less.

we the smashing victory — of
Dr. Fidel Castro’s rebel forces
in the early hours of 1959, the pro-
American regime of dictator Ful-
gencia Batista of Cuba was ended,
with Batista and his “government”
in flight.

For almost 30 years the Batista
dictatorship has ruled Cuba with
a military-police junta of ruthless
terror and fascist outlawry. Jails,
torture and murder were the key
weapons of “government” employed
by Batista and his henchmen to
keep Cuba “safe” for American,
British and Canadian monopoly
exploiters of the island’s basic econ-
omy — sugar.

All progressive organizations were
proscribed and outlawed and their
leaders imprisoned, tortured and
killed. The Cuban‘ trade union
movement, the Popular Socialist

A victory for democracy

(Communist) Party, and progres-

sive peasant and plantation workers’
movements; all were outlawed by
Batista and everywhere Cuban dem-

* ocracy was strangled.

The Castro rebel victory, backed
by the vast majority of the Cuban
working people from factory and

Comment

plantation, is essentially (at the
moment) a popular revolution for
sweeping economic and political re-
forms.

The widespread unity of the
Cuban people in support of Castro’s
rebel forces and their universal
hatred of the Batista dictatorship,
is a happy augury for the future
success of Cuban democratic gov-
ernment. It is also an effective op-
position to any attempted reversion
to the Batista methods of “govern-
ment.”

For all freedom-loving Canadians
the rebel victory in Cuba holds a
special interest, since Canadian
monopoly capital, through the
medium of the Royal Bank of Can-
ada and Canadian-Cuban Sugar,
play a dominant role in the con-
trol of Cuba’s economy and influ-
~encing of its government.

We salute the workers and peas-
arts of Cuba in their magnificent
victory for democratic government,
independence and freedom, and
trust that never again will they
permit any monopoly subsidized dic-
tatorship to haul down the flag of
democracy in Cuba.

Tom
McEwen:

the word

EEDLESS to say,
N “commune,” when used in
reference to forms of huinan. soc-
iety, produces a very depressing
effect upon the capitalist men-
tality. This depressing effect is

_ aggravated ,by the realization
that there just isn’t a damn thing
that can be done about it.

Take the current spate of spe-
culations, crocodile tears and ap-
prehensions in the columns of our
monopoly “free’’ press on the
growth of rural “communes” in
People’s China since 1958. How

they weep and bemoan the fate -

of this “. . . 630 million people
... geared to one of the greatest
and most thorough regimentations
of human effort in history.”

So says the Vancouver Prov-
ince in a recent editorial, adding
that “‘the great bulk of the Chin-
ese — the peasants — have been
taken into communal life to such
a degree that they don’t even
own a skillet.” _ :

I like this “skillet” touch.
Basically it is the nub of the
quotation. It may be remembered,
since there are volumes of auth-

entic history on the subject, that
under the “free enterprise” of
foreign exploiters, native war-
lords, and capitalist brigands of
one species or another, who prey-
ed upon the Chinese people be-
yond the limit of human endur- ~
ance, the Chinese peasant may
have “owned” a skillet, but for
over a century or more was left
with little or nothing to cook in
it.

In point of fact, it may also be
observed that in our own coun-
try there are probably: half a
million families who “own” a
wide variety of skillets, and who
are wondering at this precise
moment just what (if anything)
they are going to fill these “free
enterprise” skillets with. Particu-

‘ larly since Tory promises. of “two
chickens in every pot” have taken
flight with the promises.

.

The Province editorial wails
that the Chinese people wnder
their new communal way-of-life,
“own no homes, no personal be-
longings, no land . . . nothing.”
Even their food supply and rec-
reation “is communal!”

So what? This is the sort of
journalistic claptrap which the
outstanding Canadian scientist and
author, Dyson Carter, deals in
detail with in one of his latest
books,. The Big Brainwash. The
“process of capitalist brainwash-
ing, designed specifically to ob-
literate truth with the big lie.

Visitors to People’s China, re-
gardless of who they are or what
their. social status, come away
with one idea firmly fixed in
their many impressions — that

.

China’s ‘‘skillet’”’ during the short
nine years since liberation from
foreign imperialists and their
Chiang Kai-shek agents is steadi-
ly filling to overflowing; that
hunger and famine have been
eliminated, and that this “com-
munal” skillet is producing vast
industrial giants, destined to out-
strip the best that modern capi-
talism can do — and in a very
short time at that.

The. important thing in this
rapidly changing world is not the
possession or “ownership” of a
skillet, but who and what class
determines what and how much
goes, into it.

The Chinese people, under the
leadership of their great Commu-
nist party, made that important
decision over nine years ago.
Since then their * “communal”
skillet has not only increased in
size, but its capacity in terms of
food, clothing, housing, health,
education, agricultural production,
scientific endeavor, industrial and

socialist acheivement, has taken a. ~

‘leap forward” unparallelled in
human history.

Already their “communes,” like
the latest Soviet Lunik encircling
the sun, command the attention
and the admiration of the whole
world, and no amount of mon-
opoly-dictated editorial wails will
upset their skillet. To date it
provides the Chinese people with
“the most important and most re-
liable sacial insurance” in the
long history of their nation.

Perhaps a timely New Year’s
resolution for The Province —
and the rest of us — would be to
look to our own shrinking skillets.

January 9, 1959 — PACIFIC TRIBUNE—PAGE 5