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Withdraw troops from Greece

| ple scale civil war is raging in Greece. The return of
the nazi-minded king in a British plane and backed by
British bayonets has added fuel to the fires of civil war.
The British Foreign Office and the Tsaldaris government
have sought to explain their terrorist acts against the demo-
cratic forces ef the Greek people by the cry of ‘communist.
“It will be remembered that Hitler, Mussolini, and the men
of Munich raised the same cry with respect to Spain, thus
enabling the crushing of a democratic republic and the rise

‘of a fascist bastion. :
It is rumored that the British government is consider-

ing the Greek government’s plea that it supply arms to.

Greek reaction to crush the anti-fascist resistance move-
ments and the trade unions; to arm those who collaborate’
with Hitler against those who fought Hitler. This met De
happen. The demand for the immediate withdrawal of ee =
ish forces from Greece must be raised anew. That is e
minimum demand of all who desire peace-

The ‘more production chorus

URING recent weeks a number of pseudo-economusts

have come forward with what is hailed as a sure cure for
inflation. The number of quack doctors applying new
remedies to this disease inherent im capitalist economy are
many and varied. Everyone has heard of the remarnaple
discovery made by Labor Minister Humphrey Ree ra
discovery which has won for him the title of ‘10-cent Mit-
chel?. Donald Gordon, head of the WPTB,:*is another
‘economist’ who pays homage to the same alma mater, hav-
ing recently expounded his 10c cure-all in detail before nS
House Industrial Committee. Its ingredients are simple;
more production, less wages, higher prices; a formula well
calculated to lift the morale of any monopolist.

The latest to join the ‘more production’ chorus is C. G.
Cockshutt, president of the Canadian Chamber of Com-
merce and big shot in farm machinery and financial circles,
who declares that ‘production must be increased to offset
the false prosperity of the post-war’. _According to Mr.
Cockshutt, the only value of price ceilings has been to
give purchasers a “greater incentive’ to buy, compelling
industry to make a ‘desperate’ effort to keep up with the
demand. And, in the opinion of Mr. Cockshutt, three things
militate against real prosperity; ‘labor strife’, which means
higher wages; price controls, and taxation. Therefore, let’s
have more production without these obvious fetters to in-
dustrial ‘incentive.’

In simple language, let’s have price controls totally
eliminated. Let’s crack down on the communists who in-
sist on higher wages to meet increased living costs Gn
Cockshutt’s circle, all who fight for higher wages are com-
munists), and let’s organize production so that we can
undersell our competitor anywhere, anytime.

A brief study of production indexes with 1939 as a
base year would show Cockshutt that the productive ca-
pacity of Canadians has risen by at least 40 percent during
the war years; that profits have trebled and quadrupled,
and ‘that wages, even with ‘10-cent Mlitchell’s’ dime or
more, are still trailing along at the 1939 level or less.

But the ‘economists’ of the Cockshutt ‘more produc-
tion’? school are not interested in cooperative production,
and wage indices. They are primarily interested in profits,
in keeping their wartime profit levels in the postwar. To
do this they will resort to every artifice of confusion and
misrepresentation, the while they stage a sitdown on pro-
duction, yelling for ‘more production.’

Take one case in point to give the lie to the monopol-
istic propaganda of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce
chief. The profits of the big logging companies are at an
all-time high. Lumber production in this province has
also hit an all-time high during the last three months. The
wages of the lumber workers, increased only through the
necessity of strike action, are already eaten up in increased
living costs. Has the increased lumber production aided
in the building of needed low-cost homes for veterans and
workers? Of course it hasn’t, because the class for which
Cockshutt speaks has found a lumber black market much
more profitable than servicing the needs of home seekers.

Certainly Canada needs more production, but not in
the language of the Chamber of Commerce and the UMA

PACIFIC TRIBUNE — PAGE 4

Can't

tz

The decue

S one who listened attentively

to every word of the debate

on independent political action at
the CCL convention last week,
the writer feels that the report
of the debate and its lessons for
labor should be brought home to
every union local, every LPP’er
and every CCF’er.

The deeper causes of the de-
bate are to be found in the new
stage reached by the struggle
of labor in Canada, above all
expressed in the biggest strike

_ movement ever to embrace the

working class. Fifty thousand
members of the CCl are on
strike; for endless weeks they
await the fruits of their strug-
gies, inspired and held firm by
good leadership; misled and
flummoxed by bad leadérship
such as Charles Millard’s, whose
central plant, Stelco, is the only
struck plant in Canada seriously
bedevilled by scab production.
Se.

Congress, therefore, being

" the home of the most wide-
spread and prolonged class bat-
tles, was quite naturally the
seene of struggle over what kind
of political _action the workers
must take. Political action be-
came the main question, and na-
turally so. if the strike move—
ment and the strike gains are to
be limited to purely economic
matters, the militancy of the
workers will be run into the
ground If that militancy is di-
rected to higher levels, tg_ the
level of politics, then the wage
movement will take on that poli-
tical character which is the very
essemce of the fight against
capitalist monopoly. Thousands
of mew workers are coming to
see this.

Many non-party delegates,
hitherto largely concerned with
trade-union matters, sensed the
need for such a development.
And the leaders of the congress

emains

executive, and their CCF advisers
Saw the fact. And they were
worried, deeply anxious lest the
flood of demands for a new kind
of large-scale political action, the

sweeping tide

political
thought, would
break through
the dams so
carefully erect-
ed at previ-
ous congress
conventions —
the dam of
the CCE-CCL
: tie-up.

Yes, they were deeply worried
men. They were afraid that the
stifling, crippling, enervating
commital of the congress unions
to the CCF as “their” “political
arm,” which has produced in the

present crisis not one thing in °*

the shape of concrete solidarity
action or development, and which

stultifies the true development -

of mass political action, would
be swept aside by the workers.
@.
AS opportunists do when they
are in a corner, the CCE
Strategists, aided by Pat Conroy
and Alex MacAuslane, decided to
try to by-pass the issue, and
then when the Jackson-Pritchett
amendment made that impos-
sible, sought to exploit the genu-
ine desire for real political ac-
tion for sectional, bureaucratic
and plain CCF party reasons, by
the use of the mendacious argu-
ment that the issue was one of
the LPP trying to gain control of
the congress !

They thus allied themselves
with the Financial Post’s current
feature articles, Col. Drew, Hum-
phrey Mitchell, Duplessis, Wil-
liam Green and the rest of the
motley crew who, fearful of la-
bor’s growing strength, seek to
direct the normal development of

NRTA

monopolists.

‘More production’ in their language means
Starvation wages and industrial feudalism.

Canada needs

tens of thousands of homes; thousands of miles of new

and rebuilt highways;
centres, hospitals;

automobiles,
everything that makes life better and

refrigerators, health

fuller for the people in city and country. The ‘more pro-
duction’ of the monopolists is the negation of these needs.
The ‘more production’ cry of the monopolists simply means

more profits, less wages.

: Happily labor is fully conscious of the fact that 1946
is not 1920, and is aware that the monopolists are seeking

to have history repeated,
That will not happen.

in a broken labor movement.

of progressive.

by Leslie Morris

the trade unions and labor poli-

tical action into a drive against

the Communists. :
So a cunning strategem ‘was

- worked out, and various peopie

assigned various jobs. The stra-
tagem was: confuse, confuse; at
one moment to deny that the
present political action program
of the congress committed the
unions to the CCF; at another
te claim that it did. At one mo-
ment to appeal for “unity”

_ around the 29 points of the ‘non-

party cengress PAG program,
at another to claim that the CGF
was the true labor party. And
when the confusion was com-
plete, to force it into red-baiting
channels.
eWes you say. “Why this
cunning manoeuvre?” Be
cause these gentlemen were ob-
viously on the defensive. Sure
ly any party that is proud of its
record and unafraid of the work-
ers would not stoop to the skull-
duggery of CGotterrill and the
outright lying of the Seftons.
Why should a working-class party
lie, when the truth is on its side?
The answer is that the CGE is
not a working-class party, but 2a
party of middle-class liberalism
which seeks, as always, to ham-
Sitting the independent class line
of labor consciousness, which
can only reach its full maturity
along the road of mass unity.

The vote showed ‘that the
Jackson-Pritchett amendment re-
presented the real, developing,
“becoming” interests of labor in
the present and future political
struggles. That reflected itself
in the speeches of the progres-
Sives: Harris,, England, Burt,
Maclean, Gamache, Pritchett,
Jackson and, the rest. No, the .
stampede vote, corralled by Tam-
many methods and spawned by
confusion, has decided nothing,
except to reveal the unscrupulous
opportunism of the CCE leaders
to more and more people.

The fight for genuine labor
farmer unity, inner trade-union
unity, correct strike strategy, in-
dependent political action, for the
People’s coalition and genuine
labor and people’s governments
in the next election, goes on
apace. ;

The CCE strategists have won
a battle but they will lose the
war. They must be very nervous
and unhappy men, for they: know.
that they have placed their par
ty’s paltry prestige above the
interests of the people:

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 11, 1946