‘Puge Four BC WwW) OF RUKGE RIS NEWS B.C. WorKERS REWS Published Weekly by THE PROLETARIAN PUBLISHING ASS’N Room 10, 163 West Hastings Street - Vancouver, B.C. 7 — Subscription Rates — Qne Year ______ $1.80 Half Year ———__ 1.00 Three Months__$ .50 Single Copy ——_ -05 Make All Checks Payable to the B.C. WORKERS NEWS Send All Copy and Manuscript to the Chairman of the Editorial Board ——- Send All Montes and Letters Per- faining to Advertising and Circulation to the Business Manager. Vancouver, B.C., December 20, 1935 AN INFAMOUS PROPOSAL HE perfidy and doubie-dealing of British 4 imperialism never appeared clearer than in the effort of the Baldwin government, in cahoots with Laval, the tool of French im- perialism, to carve up Ethiopia among the imperialist powers, with Mussolini getting a good half of the swag. The efforts of the capitalist press to make it appear that the Baldwin government “blun- dered” will not stick. Baldwin with “his pigs and his pipe” and his bucolic David Harum appearance is no fool. There is every reason to believe that the Baldwin-Laval scheme was cooked up before the British elections. Knowing that such a scheme would expose the national government and bring about its defeat, Baldwin sprung the elections before he sprung his robber scheme for the dismem- berment of Ethiopia. And the position of the leaders of the British Labor Party played into his hands. These leaders, who are easily fooled into believing in the ‘‘peaceful” inten- tions” of the Baldwin government, and the outright labor imperialists, had been express- ing their faith in the Baldwin government's foreign policy. So much so that Baldwin conducted his election campaign on the issue of maintaining peace, and was victorious. The British government was never sincere about the application of sanctions, particu- larly sanctions against oil, coal, iron and steel against Mussolini. They were bending be- fore public opinion as expressed in the peace plebiscite in which 11 million people voted for maintaining peace, and could not flaunt that opinion with an election coming up. Tt is also becoming clearer that the action of the Ganadian government in repudiating the sanctions on oil as proposed by Canada’s representative on the League of Nations council was done at the instigation of the British government, with whom Canada has a military. alliance. The Baldwin and Laval governments are still impudently posing as champions of peace by saying that the reason for rewarding the ageressor Mussolini was to prevent a Euro- pean or world war. They are trying to make the world believe that if Italy were denied oil she would attack the British fleet in the Mediterranean and thus launch a world war, when the one thing that would prevent Mus- solini from not only attacking a great power, but would compel abandonment of his attack on HEROD, would be his inability to procure oil! While the great imperialist powers, with Britain at their head, had no intention of im- posing sanctions against oil, they were try- ing to jockey the Soviet Union into alone doing so. For the Soviet Union alone to re- fuse oil to Italy would be of no use in stop- ping Mussolini from getting all the oi] he needs. He would get it in abundance from other countries. It was for this reason that the Soviet Union stood for a collective em- bargo on oil to the aggressor, for sanctions to be of any use must be collectively imposed. The desire of the imperialists to have the Soviet Union refuse sale of oil to Italy is easily understood when one understands the years of plotting for war against the Soviet Union by Britain, Germany and other pow- ers. The refusal by the Soviet Union of oil, while other nations of the League supplied oil to Italy, would serve as an excellent op- portunity for Italy to attack the Soviet Union. What Italy would start would be taken up and carried on by a great imperial- ist coalition, and Italy would have a free hand in Ethiopia. It is regrettable that many labor leaders, including Norman Thomas of the U.S., supported the scheme by their at- tacks upon and denunciation of the Soviet Union for not placing an embargo on oil against Italy. : The robber imperialist nations are not hav- ing it as easy for their plotting, however, as formerly. In every capitalist country the united front of labor is being built; and in France this united front has been extended to include all opponents of war and fascism. It is along this line of unity and the role of the Soviet Union as the world’s greatest champion of peace that the murderous insti- gators of war and promoters of fascism can be successfully combatted and defeated. FINKS ON REQUEST WN advertisement carried by the local capi- talist press bears the imprint of the sinis- ter hand of the fascist Citizens’ League. It reads in part: “Trained men are now available for em- ployment as Investigators, Store Detec- tives, Patrolmen, Watchmen, Body Guards, Confidential ‘Work of any kind . . . Write R.N.W.M.P. Employment Committee .. .” The foregoing means that Vancouver is to be cursed with an organized band of strike- breakers, provocateurs, frame-up experts, POSCOOOSOS B.C. Workers’ News Radio Broadcast \ FRIDAY—8:45 to 9:00 P.M. WEDNESDAY—9:15 to 9:30 P.M. CKMO 1999 9900000O90O4 snoopers and such vermin. Trading on the good name the Mounted Police enjoyed be- fore Bennett and McBrien transformed them into political Black Hundreds and gangs of stool-pigeons and strike-breakers, this gang is operating under the aegis of the “R.N.W. M.P. Veterans’ Association” in order to cover their skullduggery under the purloined man- tle of an erstwhile respectability. Parallel with this development, if not closely associated with it, is the call by the Citizens’ League chief fascist ranter, the Tom Thumb imitation of Hitler’s Goebbels. Tom MaciInnes, for not only a larger police force, but for the organization of an armed private force of “citizens” to “supplement” and “assist,” extra-legally, the work of the police in the interest of “morality” and “law and order.” If complacent people think that fascism is not organizing in an underground manner in Vancouver, it is about time they opened their eyes. The struggles of the camp boys and the waterfront workers have been taken advantage of by these anti-social elements to raise the Red bogey and to demagogically pose as the defenders of the liberties and the safety of the people,—all in a language com- mon to all fascists, the same language Hitler and his fellow fascists used to befuddle the people, but which they cast aside when the gun and the headsman’s axe were firmly in their murderous hands. The fascist reptile that scurries about in the dark in Vancouver must be scotched be- fore the poison Sacs behind its fangs become filled and its venom is injected into the veins of the social body. THE DUNDERN STRIKE fee strike in the Slave Camp at Dundurn, = Sask., has brought to the public notice the fact that the forced labor compounds set up by Bennett are still under the control and management of the Department of National Defence, despite the promise of MacKenzie King to transfer the control and management to the Department of Labor. The strike, which is against discrimination and ejection of boys who protest against the rotten conditions in the camp, is meeting with the same kind of rotten, lying propa- ganda that the strike of the camp boys of B.C. and the trekkers met with last summer. The Brass Hat officer in command at the Dundurn concentration camp is yowling about “agitators” who are “‘paid by sources not in Canada.” This is a disgusting aping of the caterwaulings of Gerry McGeer, and as false. The promise of MacKenzie King to trans- fer the control to the Department of Labor was exacted from him by the camp strike and the historic trek to Ottawa, and by nothing else, and shows the power of the strike when properly organized and ably led. But Mac- Kenzie King can not and will not be permit- ted to get away with a mere promise. And not only that, the struggle against the forced labor camps will go on not only for the aboli- tion of control by the military authorities, but for their complete abolition. Instead of allowing King to perpetuate the institution of forced labor in concentration camps in Canada, he will be called upon to carry into effect the promise he made during the pre-election campaign, viz: to open the factories if the owners will not open them, and use them to put the youth to work pro- ducing the necessities of life that are so badly needed by people without means to buy them. PROMISES AND “HOPES” REMIER PATTULLO and his ministers are back home after attending the con- ference at Ottawa, and are proudly declaring that “hopes” of a constructive policy for meeting unemployment are more “vigorous” than ever before. Pattullo already has in ef- fect a vigorous policy, 1f not for meeting un- employment, at least for meeting the un- employed, and that policy is using his pro- vincial police to club and terrorize them if they do not go hungry without protest, and above all if they organize, and to herd the youth into the Slave Camps established by Bennett and kept in operation by King. It will do the famishing families on hun- ger relief and the blacklisted Slave Camp boys no good to be told that Pattullo has “hopes” —if he HAS hopes —or that his dupes have hopes. They cannot eat Pattullo’s hopes; what they demand is the speedy ful- fillment of his pre-election promise of Work and (Wages. By a “constructive policy” we are to be- lieve that the Promising Premier means put- ting into effect the long-deferred Work and Wages program. Such a program would be a constructive one — if the work provided were under decent conditions and hours, with fair wages, and if the public works did not mean building golf courses for the rich, air fields for war purposes, or roads to mountain parks to permit the rich to go to remote places, away from the suffering population, for their week-end orgies, but that they were to tear down the slums and erect decent habi- tations for the poor and provide better school, hospital and recreational and other needed facilities. There has been a Liberal government at Ottawa for more than two months, and now Pattullo comes back almost empty-handed from the much-heralded conference, chas- tised, chastened and admonished by Finance Minister Dunning, agent of finance capital; and the “hopes” he is peddling to the peoplé of the province are the false hopes he hopes the people will be satisfied with. The only hope he entertains is the hope of putting across another scheme in the form of a sales tax with which to further grind the faces of the poor by filching from them by means of higher prices of the necessities of life, a part of their already inadequate rations, pensions pnd wages. Art and Propaganda By BILL BENNETT Mr. Guy Glover makes a contribu- tion on the above subject to a local paper that shows the unconscious desire of many artists to escape the implications of the class struggle. Me approaches the subject in a very sincere manner, but he has aj- lowed himself to be influenced by ihe renegade intriguer, Max East- man, and, through him, that other eounter-revolutionary, Trotsky, who is now exploiting the reputation earned for him by the revolutionary Russian workers. Weither of these writers are Marxians and whatever Eastman may be, Trotsky certainly is not an artist; if he was he would not allow the products of his facile pen to ap- pear in a vulgar rag like Mcradden’s “TLiberty.’ Grotsky Not an Authority Wevertheless Mr. Glover, whose point of view is that of “the revo- lutionary, the socialist artist,” imagines Trotsky to be an authority en the attitude of Mars and Engels to art and its relation to propaganda and on this point I would like to correct him if he is not averse to the well-meaning efforts of one who does not belong to the chosen of God, one of the hoi-polloi living in outer darkness, a Philistine in fact. I am not an artist; I don’t know the difference between Wagner's “Neibelungenring”’ and Michael Angelo’s ‘Moses,’ but I have kept pretty close to Marx and Engels and I believe that they and Lenin are much better authorities on the Marxian method than Trotsky, and if Mr. Glover will consult them in the original he will get a much better conception of the place of art in modern life than he can possibly get from the distorted Marxism of “the dull ass Eastman,’ as Bob Minor calls him. Art and Its “Own Law” The quotations used by Mr. Glover, wyhich justify the statement made above that Trotsky is not a Marxist, are short but definite: “Art must make