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“Rose, I’
in a straitjacket.”

m no Einstein, but | know that these folks ought to be put

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withoaeee OD

25 years ago...
SPEED-UP SLAYS 16,000

United States official govern-
ment figures reveal that speed-
up since the Korean war began
boosted the 1951 toll of indus-

trial accidents to 16,000 working.

men and women dead and
- 2,000,000 maimedis) sicecs

The report, issued by the Na-
tional Labor-Management
Manpower Policy Committee,
acknowledged that the lack of
safety measures in some areas
contributed to the rise in deaths
and injuries. In 1949 there were
1); U.S. workers killed and
1,870,000 injured.

Wall Street profits in 1949
were $23,200,000,000. With the
boost in deaths to 16,000 profits
climbed correspondingly to
$25,900,000,000 in 1951.

Tribune,
Sept. 8, 1952

FLASHBACKS FROM |
THE COMMUNIST PRESS

50 years ago...

‘THEY WILL TROUBLE

THE CONSCIENCE ...’

“ |.. in the long run the vic-
tims of public injustice suffer
less than the government that
inflicts the penalty. We can die
but once and the pang of death
will be momentary. But the facts

which show injustice cannot be
‘obliterated’ APGSTQOW -f

“hey will not be. forgotten
and through the long years to
follow, they will trouble the con-
science of those whose intoler-
ance has brought us to our
death, and of generations. of
their decendants. A mistake of
justice is a tragedy. Deliberate in-
justice is an infamy.

“Weare foremost concerned
to save what no human power
can deprive us of, our faith and
our dignity, since we have al-
ready been deprived of almost
all of what men can deprive
men.” Reprint of part of Vanzet-
ti’s appeal to Governor Fuller.

? : Worker,
Sept. 10, 1927

ag
—_

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—SEPTEMBER 16, 1977—Page 4

EDITORIAL

COMIMUEINT

Danger from new SS force

How many millions of dollars would it
take to silence the protests of workers
across Canada?

How much would it take to bury.

French Canadian demands for the right
to determine their own future?

The signs point to hundreds of mill-
ions being spent on this vast muzzling
effort. If it can’t be done by propaganda,
by incitement to chauvinism, and by
tripartism, then more extravagant
means will be tried.

Both alarming and an indictment of
the government is the establishment,
training and equipping of a military

force prepared essentially to meet civi- .

lian demonstrations with bloody sup-
pression.

This (currently) 3,500-man_parat-
rooper body in the tradition of the in-
famous U.S. green berets, bearing the
initials SS for Special Service force, is “an,
air-droppable, air-portable, quick reac-
tion force,” says SS Commander Brig.-
Gen. Andrew Christie.

They'll sport armored vehicles whose
purchase was condemned in these pages
in March. It may be recalled: 700 were
ordered at a cost of $300-million for use
variously with British Scorpion tank tur-
rets and 76-millimetre guns, as armored
personnel carriers and as repair and re-
covery vehicles. They can also be
mounted with water cannon.

ire Wasw Staw wind + arnt +04 white A Sheree
“Reactionary elements in Canada’s rul-

ing class have made it clear they would
approve the use of force in Quebec to
“solve” the constitutional crisis. A suita-
ble force is being developed.

Denials from the Defence Department
are meaningless. It is time for an un-
equivocal assurance from the elected
government that these forces are not
being readied for use in Quebec — or
agaist the working people in other parts
of Canada.

A fundamental question challenges

workers today as they defend their
families’ living standards, their right to
collective bargaining and employment,
or the right of a people to decide its own
future.

Who runs the state?

The question: is: Who controls the
state? In whose hands is the machinery
of law-making, the courts, the police, the —
military and, not least, the economy?
The answer determines whom the state
serves and whom it will attack.

Look about Canada — at the 1.5 mill
ion jobless, the legion of working poor,
uncontrolled inflation matched by un-
controlled profits, the Anti-Inflation
Board manacles on labor, the fanning of
racism, a soaring armaments budget,
and for the youth, a blank future, barren
of culture, ethics or meaning. :

There are rational solutions to Cana-
da’s problems. But the system which con-
trols the state — capitalism in its
monopoly stage — cannot apply such
solutions. They would weaken its power
and increase the power of the worker
and democratic majority.

Recognition of Canada as a two-nation
state with rights guaranteed in a new
made-in-Canada constitution ‘to pre-
serve Canadian unity, and policies of full
employment, of public:‘ownership and

_ democratic control of industry and

finance are among the Communist Par-
ty’s steps to solving our present crises.
Needless to say, the wealthy news media
kept by those who control the state do
their best to keep these real answers hid-
den.

In the sense. that it affects working
people’s lives every day, strives to keep
them in check, control of the state by the

capitalist class comes close to being 4

bread-and-butter issue after all.

Mac’s wage controls next

The working people’s daily struggle to
protect their living standards — and
often simply to raise them above the
poverty level — runs. head-on’ into

government policies.as‘some Labor Day-

proclamations said.

These policies and the system they
serve have thrust Canada to the brink of
depression. Government statisticians,
scrapping their modest hopes for
economic improvement, of just two
months ago, now see a bare 2% GNP rise
this year. :

Workers, deep in the battle for jobs,
for reinstitution of free collective bar-
gaining (also crushed by government
policy), and for a say in all matters con-
cerning workers, need unity as never
before. .

Yes, the labor movement can take
some credit for the resignation of Fi-
nance Minister Donald Macdonald, the
man who clamped on wage controls and
cruelly applied them on behalf of
monopoly capitalism. And wage controls
should be thrown out with Big Mac. But

his demise by no means promises an au-
tomatic change of heart.in the Trudeau

-Cabinet.

Only an/all-out workers’ struggle, with
efforts to build a coalition of forces un-

 . ited for jobs regardless of other.differ- |
ences, will come to grips with the mass

unemployment crisis. (Not that that is
the final battle. The crushing out of
employment opportunities by the system -
is accompanied, sometimes almost un-
noticeably, by the crushing out of human
development in all its potential variety.
The fight to be free of capitalist brain-
washing must also be won.)

A relentless and solid fightback by
labor is the only answer for what can be
seen today on all sides — an increase in
legislative, judicial and propaganda at-
tacks on civil liberties, on democratic
rights and on all sections of the labor
movement. A united fightback is the
answer to attempts to try to fragment
labor and allow the monopoly system
unhampered exploitation of working
people. |