Your

Doparfinent

Events in Korea
menace to peace

E. H. TUDOR, Morningside, Al-
berta: On May 29 Leslie Morris
Save us a forecast of things to
come, which during the past week
has been carried out in Asia.

In the April edition of the La-
bour Monthly, Palme Dutt sized
up the result of the British elec-
tions, pointing out that the Amer-
ican bloc having monopolized for
itself 99.6 percent of broadcast
time, 99.6 percent of press publi-
city, successfully secured 99.6 per-
cent of the popular vote. This lat-
ter was fully confirmed this week
when Churchill said that Attlee
spoke for all parties including the
Tory party re events in Korea.

So, the lid is off and progress-
ives everywhere can view reaction
in its grim nakedness, The British
see the government which has re-
cognized the People’s Government
of China, sitting in with the Amer-
ican puppet government of For-
mosa on the Security Council of
the UN to impose armed force in
civil affairs of the people of Korea.
Attlee sells out to Wall Street,
which at the same time blockades
the coast of Formosa with their
navy, a gross infringement of
Chinese sovereignty, which in it-
self could provoke a new confla-
‘gration and is a direct menace to
world peace.

FOR A
PEACE
SONG

| PACIFIC

In conjunction with

_ ANNUAL
LABOR PICNIC

CONTEST

|

In each contest a First Prize of $25, Second
Prize, $15 Third Prize $10 are being offered.

SPONSORED BY

As Leslie Morris so ably pointed

out, any country which in the
future kicks out a corrupt and
reactionary government, can im-
mediately be assailed as “Com-
munist aggressors,” and have to
face the armed might of a capital-
ist world dominated by the lords
of Wall Street. Had such a situ-
ation developed in the past, we
would have had no Magna Carta,
no Bill of Rights, and Washing-
ton’s America would have perished
at birth.

During the past week, we have
seen the rights of the United Na-
tions usurped by the U.S.A. and
the rights of 650 millions on the
Security Council absolutely ignor-
ed. We hear a lot of the “captive
world” versus the “free world”
from John Foster Dulles. But
with a captive press and radio
catering to the orders from Wall
Street finance it behooves Cana-
dians to ask the question, “Which
side of the fence are We on?”

Yours for a real Canadianism
and a free democracy.

Swan song for
Elmore Philpott

L. TOMBLAD, Vancouver: This
week I sent the following letter to
Elmore Philpott:

Paraphrasing John Steinbeck’s
“The Moon Is Down,” the dark
hour of decision has arrived for

FOR A
PEACE
POSTER :

TRIBUNE

FOR FULL DETAILS SEE
PACIFIC TRIBUNE, JUNE 30 ISSUE

All entries will be on dispay at Annual Labor
Picnic at Confederation Park, August 13.

Name

All entries must be delivered or mailed to Pacific
Tribune, 650 Howe Street, postmarked not later than
midnight, Sunday, August 6. ;

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you Pleate

you. Too bad that you had to
crawl off your fence; your pre-
tensions are gone, you had to take

your stand.

But with whom? With Amer-
ican big business, alias American
gangster democracy! What
strange bedfellows you now have.

The Quislings the world over
are hastening to the aid of their
new masters, International Gang-
sters Unlimited. Bankrupt Chiang
has promised three divisions, just
“peanuts”. Franco can always
bring the “Blues”,

So how many divisions have you
to pledge with your pen? Do you
really think that your pen is
mightier than Chiang’s sword?

- Don’t you see that your pen is

“too little and too late”?

But the flies will conquer the
flypaper (shades of Steinbeck)
and we, the people, are telling you,
Mr. Philpott and Co., “Hands Off
Korea.”

Death, misery
if war comes

A MOTHER, Vancouver: War
is the path that neither the brave
nor the weak want to tread. It is
a path of destruction, death and
misery which is felt by people of
all walks of life. When war is
thrust upon us countless thous-
ands of bodies are mangled, crip-
pled. Mass extermination begins
of young and old. Monuments
built by men, showing his genius
in construction, are destroyed and

‘life itself is lost in the wounds of

a tortured world.

I saw patients in Shaughnessy
Military Hospital, Desolated peo-
ple in agony thrusting their an-
guished hearts forward in a piti-
ful hope of recovery.

These men had to pay the sac-
rifice of war. War took them from
their homes, from their country,
to fight; only to return home unfit
to take up the lives they had left.
Men like these cannot be forgot-
ten. They were our athletes and
workers, our dear relatives and
friends. Hundreds of minds twist-
ed and now useless. Legs and arms
gone. Young bodies braced with
steel.

- I've reminded you of Shaugh-
nessy Hospital, but let us not for-
get the millions of military hos-
pitals all over the world where
helpless, broken minds and bodies
will never mend, 2

Go to the hospital, talk with
these men and see for yourself
the horrible results of war. Then
stop and think what will happen
if another conflict should engulf
the earth. And when you leave,
leave with determination in your
heart. Let each and every one
unite in the appeal for peace,
which is the appeal of life. Of war,
let us say, “We shall not tread
that path again.”

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342 E. HASTINGS ST.
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’

BATTLE OF IDEAS

Creative artists must

enter class

SPEAKING OF  twentieth-
century may at the anniversary
of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology last year, Winston
Churchill declared:

“While he nursed the illu-
sions of growing mastery and
exulted in hig new trappings,
man became the sport, and
presently the victim of tides,
currents or whirlpools and tor-
nadoes amid which he was far
more helpless than he had been
for a long time.”

In these words the most arti-
culate and perceptive spokesman
of the bourgeoisie, speaking
at an institution where the atom
bomb and many of the most ad-
vanced techniques of capitalist
production in the U.S. have been
elaborated, summed up the bour-
geois view of the world.

Obscurantist, unscientific and
profoundly pessimistic, it is the
view of a dying class, surrounded
by problems which it has created
and cannot solve, turning its
back on its former humanist and
Scientific traditions. And -since
values, culture and ethics as
the bourgeoisie regards its own
eternal and above classes, Chur-
chill talks of the crisis of capital-
ist civilization as if it were the
crisis of all civilization.

This crisis, based in the final
analysis upon the fundamental
crisis of capitalist production,
extends to the whole of the su-
perstructure — to the political
forms, to religion and ethics,
morality and the arts. It is with
the crisis in the arts that we are
here concerned.

“The ideas of the ruling class
lose their intrinsic value at the
rate at which that class ap-
proaches extinction,” said Plek-
hanov, “and the art created in
the spirit of that class decays at
the same rate.”

Since all culture in class so-
ciety is class culture, under cap-
italism art reflects class ideas
and serves the purposes of par-
ticular classes. The artist may
live in a cottage, paint apples all
day, and tell himself he has es-
caped from the world. The poet
may live in South Kensington,
write verse that only he and six
other people understand, and
tell himself that he has escaped
the influence of current fashions,

The fact remains that both live

in capitalist society, that the very
flight of the painter and of the
poet into gibberish is a direct re-
sult of the conditions of that so-
ciety, and, whether they know it
or not, both are victims of the
collapse now so far advanced
in process of disintegration
that artistic creation finds itself
stifled, discouraged, and without
hope,

There are certain themes one
would expect to find issuing from
‘a class which has long since re-
ceived the first intimation of its
impending doom: pessimism, an
obsession with death, triviality,
eroticism, escapism. Current
writing, painting, architecture
and music reflect them all,

The state of affairs in the
theater and the novel is no dif
ferent. J. B. Priestley, who once
wrote warm, human plays, now
writes of Britain after atom
bombs have reduced her to a
desert. Priestleys’ refusal to sign
the Stockholm peace appeal is,
of course, of a piece with the
pessimism and anti-humanism
of his current artistic produc-
tions. This turning away from
reality has also had its inevitable
effect upon his technique as a
playwright. How dull his plays
are nowadays! ‘

In France the bourgeois critics
acclaim Existentialist novels
which set out not to elevate,
move or inspire the reader but
to nauseate him. In the United
States, Steinbeck and Heming-
way have degenerated into triv-
iality, John dos Passos has be-
come Savagely reactionary.

e ~*~

It is no use giving way to the
natural temptation to brush all
these unhappy people aside. The
problem goes deeper.

struggle

No artist today who conscious-
ly aligns himself with the bour-
geoisie and its aims is any long-
er capable of giving his talent
full scope and of producing art
of lasting value. The day of the
great bourgeois realists and hu-
manist is past, because the
bourgeoisie has long since ceas-
ed to be a progressive, optimistic
class with a belief in man. Only
Such a class can face reality, and
thus only such a class can pro-
duce great realistic works of
art.

Today the artist sees the pain-
ful product of his inspiration
treated like any other commod-
ity. His most cherished ideas and
achievements are hawked on the
market, victims of fads, fashions,
market speculation and sharp
commercial practice, often with-
out the slightest relation to the
intrinsic value of the works
themselves. After all, the laws
of capitalist production and dis-
tribution apply to fishmongering,
steel manufacture, book publish-
ing, art dealing, and opera pro-
duction with precisely equal
force.

e

Capitalism is not collapsing of
its own weight. It is collapsing
because it has brought into exist-
ence a class destined historically

_to destroy it and take its place.

The working class—already vic-
torious in one-third of the in-
habited world and pressing ir-
resistibly forward everywhere
else—is not only a part of the
reality of our century, being the
class of the future, it is the most
significant and important part.

Marxism stresses the great
power of new ideas and the great
role in the development of the
class struggle that the arts in-
evitably play. Indeed, the very
rewards offered to obedient art-
ists by the bourgeoisie bear elo-
quent witness to this fact. And
if the arts are a potent weapon
for the bourgeoisie, they are no
less potent a weapon for the
rising class, the worker,

It also has special problems of
its own. Unlike the bourgeoisie
in its early days, the working
class cannot easily produce its
own art. The bourgeoisie had
leisure and wealth before it had
political power, and it was able
to express its aspirations in
Plays and poems, books ,music
and painting long before it car-
ried through its revolution
against the feudal order. These
artistic creations, indeed, were a
potent factor in bringing the
bourgeois revolutions about. The
working class, on the other
hand, has no wealth, little leisure
and grossly inadequate educa-
tional facilities,

And for these reasons much
(though not all) of the art which
is to serve its needs must be
produced by men and women
who come from the middle
classes — men and women who
have seen through the sham of
bourgeois “culture”, and who
have gone beyond the stage of
escapism or mere revolt within
the bourgeois system. These are
artists who ally themselves with
the working class, because they
understand that only in the com-
mon people’s struggles for eman-
cipation can true values and new
inspiration now be found.

Revolt against the worst fea-
tures of capitalism is not new,
of course. But what is new in
the twentieth century is the ex-
istence of a clearly defined, his-
torically possible and partly ac-
complished alternative: Social-
ism. And since Socialism is now
on the agenda, mere rebellion
against this or that limited as-
pect of bourgeois nastiness is no
longer adequate. The only logical
position that remains for the
honest artist is a position of al-
liance with the working class, In
that alliance he will find the
themes that he needs and the
great public for his work that
has been missing since the latter
half of the last century,

—DEREK KARTUN

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PACIFIC TRIBUNE—JULY 14, 1950—PAGE 10