JOSEPH STALIN
There the wo'rking class won .

MAO TSE-TUNG
- China freed of its shackles ae

- BOLESLAW BIERUT
People’s Democracies ...

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Centur

“IE twentieth century is to all

- others as the jet plane is to
a Spanish galleon. Who can doubt
that it is the swiftest of all times,
and today, half of it is gone.
Where, is this speeding world
headed the sécond half>

You may recall reading that.

millions of the faithful, gaunt with
hunger, deprived of knowledge,
fearfully watched the skies that
midnight, fifty years ago, for the
prophecy was abroad that the
world had reached its end. It was

the time of the Millenium, yet no -

majestic voice spoke from heaven.
But today, as the world crosses
the threshold of 1950, almost the
half of mankind — 800,000,000 —
know the world has just begun.
And for them, it has.

They have marched from the
murk of capitalism. To them,
man’s history is at its start: all
before was, as Frederick Engels
put it, “pre-history,” Man’s history
truly begins where he stands
erect: in the socialist Soviet Un-
ion, in liberated China, Poland,

_ Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgar-
' ia, Hungary, Albania.

e
They assemble on the broad, fer-

tile plains to which all roads lead:
socialism. For the twentieth cen-

tury is the socialist century. It,

is as inevitable as springtime af-
ter the long winter

There were other prophets. Not
those who preached the Millenium
or who prophesied by the stars,
the astrologists, or those who fore-
cast from the stock market, the
economists. Not seers like Herbert
Hoover who prophesied in 1930
that prosperity was around the
corner.

I speak of the prophets who
lived in the century preceding
ours, and founded a science, a
philosophy that penetrated the in-
nermost mysteries of our social
life, our economic structure. They
are the working-class scientists,
men named Karl Marx and Fred-
erick Engels.

They forecast in the nineteenth
century what would happen in the
twentieth. And it happened. In
their Communist Manifesto of 1848
they foretold that capitalism had
given birth to its grave-diggers,
the working class. And that work-
ing class would, for the first time

in man’s history construct a so-

ciety without.a rich class or a poor
class, but a classless society where
all who work are free and are
equal. A society called socialism.

And Engels, in a marvel of pre-

science wrote in 1888 about a quar-

ter century before World War I:

“And finally no, war is any long-
er possible: for Prussia-Germany
except a world war and a war in-
deed of an extension and violence
hitherto undreamt of.” And with
scientific precision unmatched by
any prior thinkers he continued:
“Eight to ten millions of soldiers
will mutually massacre one an-
other and in doing so devour the
whole of Europe until they have
stripped it barer than any swarm
of locusts has ever done.”

He said this war oilla surpass
the devastation of the Tay

By JOSEPH NORTH

Half-way mark in the

y of Socialism

Years War “compressed into
three or four years; and spread
over the whole Continent.” There
would be famine, pestilence, hope-
less confusion, “collapse of the old
states and their traditional+state
wisdom to such an extent that
crowns will roll by the dozens on
the pavement and there will be
nobody to pick them up.”
\

Only one outcome of this war
could be absolutely certain, he
predicted: “The establishment of
the conditions for the ultimate
victory of the working class.”

This is the prospect when the
System of mutual outbidding in
armaments, driven to extremities,
at last bears its inevitable fruits.
This, my lords, princes and states-
men, is where in your wisdom
you have brought old Europe.”

Is it possible to read this with-
out a sense of awe? Consider the
world when he wrote. Nothing,
neither Alps nor stars seemed
more fixed than the thrones of
Emperor, Kaiser, Czar, King. No
Samson could pull down the pil-
lars of the Stock Exchange.

At the turn of the century the
brokers of London’s Street ruled
or controlled most of the earth.
The subcontinent of India was the
Crown’s fairest jewel, and most
of Africa Australia, Canada. Brit-
tania ruled the seas and the great-
er part of mankind.

The Czar of all the Russias
waved his sceptre and moujiks on
a sixth of the earth’s surface
trembled. His gendarmes stood in

Warsaw and Vladivostok and the -

Okhrana—the Czar’s FBI—hustled
any man who whispered dissent
to Siberia.

Kaiser Wilhelm merged the roy-
al house of Hohenzoliern with the
arms industry of Krupp and
dreamed that he would conquer
a world from his British and Rus-
sian cousins.

Emperor Franz Joseph stroked
his sideburns contentedly in Vien-
na master of all the fertile lands
south of Germany to Greece.

The stockbrokers of the Paris
Bourse had buried the Revolution
of 1789 beneath the stolen gold
they brought, home from Africa,
IndoChina, Martinique, Schneider-
Creusot owned steel, coal and the
Chamber of Deputies.

McKinley in America had had
his imperial] dream when God told
him, he said, to fulfil our “mani-
fest destiny’ and conquer Cuba,
the Philippines and Puerto Rico
for Wall Street. And distant Maoris
hung on bayonet steel manufac-
tured by J. P. Morgan. The Maxim
gun spoke the language of the
pound, the dollar, the franc, the
mark, on all the continents. “Civil-
ize ’em With a Krag!” they said as
the twentieth century opened. The

Krag was the time’s deadliest

rifle.

Then, as the Marxist Engels
foretold—came 1914.

Then 1918.

', Crowns rolled on the pavement.

There were none to pick them up.
Royal Wilhelm of the Hohenzol-
lerns ended his dynasty sawing
wood on a Dutch farm.

Germany would have been spar-
ed the awful tragedy of Hitler
and a second world war could
have died ‘a’borning had not the
social-democrats betrayed the
workers and returned soldiers, a
job Bevin and Blum plot to re-
peat.

Emperor Franz Joseph?

The Austro-Hungarian empire
collapsed into pieces.

The Czar of all the Russias?
His land was first to fulfil the
prophesy. There the working class
won. The party of working men
founded by Marx and Engels—
the Communists—had led the Rev-
olution for peace, bread, land and
the Russian peoples were eternal-
ly freed from Czar, Rasputin, gen-
darme and darkness.

And the consequences rolled on,
irresistible, inevitable: within
little more than a quarter century
colossal China freed itself of its
shackles: warlord, compradore,
imperialist scurried from Peking,
Nanking, Canton. A Wall Street

envoy, Angus Ward, came to ga-_

ther Cathay gold and was expelled
for beating a Chinese house-ser-
vant. And in Eastern Europe the
lands of the Hapsburg flourished
as people’s democracies. Hungary,
Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Roman-
ia and Albania rose from the
wreckage.

Thus far have we come in the
twentieth century. It requires no
great powers of prophecy to see
the obvious: one needs only eyes
.that will see. In the socialist land
the working people—masters ‘of
factory and boundless farmland—
will advance, as they have, at a
pace undreamt of. Men raze moun"
tains to change climates, reverse
the tide of rivers. They have un-
locked the power of matter to
harness it for man’s good,

Giant China—freed of its sHack-
les, will shackle nature, transform
its. denuded mountains into for-
ests, saddle’ the rushing Yangtse
and the Yellow River to bring
electric power for construction
and end the perennial death-deal-
ing floods: 450,000,000 hungry will
be fed well for the first time since
history began and China will ad-

_vance with a velocity to amaze

the world. The millions of India,
already astir, shall take their

place in the league of liberated

nations, and stand by China, the
USSR, as Lenin predicted.

The great peoples of Africa, al-
ready on the move, will march
from the slavery of the Kimberley
mines to independence. And not
all the frantic heads of state in
the world can stop them.

e f

In America we will see similar
wonders: the bustling, prideful,
freedom-bred people who conquer-
ed the forest and plain will gather
their strength to vanquish those
who would destroy their goods

and their liberties in a shrieking .

chaos of atom bomb war.
This is the land where, a brief

-

generation ago, every child im
Iowa or Kentucky grew to mam-
hood believing Wall Street was a
curse that meant corruption, brib-
ery, stealth, panic, industrial ex-
ploitation, police spy, farm mort-
gage, depression, war—as it was
and as it is.

That tradition, that knowledge
is not dead. It lies momentarily
buried beneath the vast weight
of propaganda—‘“free enterprise,”
“cold war,” “Communist menace.”

But it isn’t dead, for truth can’t
die. We see how resilient that
truth is as the Democratic chiefs
—Wall Street’s reserve contingent
--win election after election on
the pretext that they stand
against the Economist Royalists.
Truman, in his Chicago speech
last year, won the Presidency “de-
crying” Wall Street.

But thoughtful Americans of all

parties will see that the dangers.

Wall Street propaganda conjures
up are artificial Mao Tse-tung
once used the phrase, “paper tig-
ers.” That they are, and they will
wilt in the rain of reality. Then
will come the resurgence of our
people’s strength. They will stand
together—working man, farmer,
professional; for their heritage
against the corporations, the mon-
opolists, the ambitious warmak-
ers.

Mankind need not vanish in the
smoke of atom Hemp war. Nor
will it.

For this we know: the foremost
Marxist in the world has repeated
it time and again. through the
decades—peaceful cooperation be-
tween capitalist and _ socialist
states is possible and it is neces
sary. As Stalin said to Harold
Stassen, as to many other spokes.
men for capitalism, “If two sys-
tems could collaborate in war,

why can’t they collaborate in -
peace?’ Provided, of course, Stal- —

in said, “there is the eee to co-
operate.”

That desire to ponhente for:

peace is growing among people
and will grow to achieve the peace
all common men want. And the

people of North America shall —

march with the men and women
of all lands, who, too, dream of
peace and who know that today,
for the first time in all history,
it can be won. It can be because
there is a working class. science,
Marxism, and there is a world
working class, tested by hunger,
torture, cold and fire. There ex-
ists a chain of states—run by
workers, farmers, intellectuals—

_that can contain the warmakers,

if we extend them our coopera-
tion, give them our hand for
peace.

And as their representative said

at Paris recently, speaking on be—
half of 650,000,000—“We shall im-

pose peace on the warmakers.”
Never before have the spokes-
men for 650,000,000 common men

met in one hall. Halfway through :

the twentieth century it was pos-
sible.

Before the century ¥ ended, the
delegates of all’ mankind will be
able to meet under one roof. _

The brotherhood of man will :

have been achieved. -

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—JANUARY 13, 1950—PAGE 4

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