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From The Militant, Vol. VI No. 50, 4 November 1933, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Dear Comrades:
There is some noise in bourgeois circles about refusing to buy German goods as a protest against Hitler’s persecution of Jews. There is, of course, very little action. For example, R.H. Macy & Co., owned by a Jewish family which includes the U.S. Ambassador to France, declines to join the boycott movement. Even if there were consumers’ action, a decline in the sale of German eye-glasses and cameras, or even a complete stoppage of the sale of German crockery, would be but a pin-prick in the leathery hide of the Nazi monster.
And, look at the demands of the Jewish boycott! Dr. Fritz Schlesinger, a leader on the liberal side in the recent row in the German-American societies in New York, has made the position of bourgeois Jewry clear. “We have not rejected the Nazi flag,” he said; “the flag has rejected us.” So what? Accept us and we’ll accept Hitler. A nice piece of petty-bourgeois horse-trading. Let the Jewish consumers’ boycott be effective and Hitler will compromise with bourgeois Jewry. He will not only protect Jewish bankers and department store owners, which he does already, but he will come to an understanding with the whole Jewish upper crust as to just what share they may have in Fascist Germany. And at that moment “liberal” Jewry will grow silent and the boycott will be over from labor’s viewpoint, and even from a genuinely democratic viewpoint, the whole thing is a joke. Nothing better can be said of the similar consumers’ boycott called for by the Second International, A.F. of L. and other reformist organizations.
Your editorial advocating “a well-organized international boycott – suspending transport and communication for a definite time” is the most sensible proposal I have seen for immediate mass struggle against Hitler, world Fascism and the war they are preparing.
The idea is rooted in spontaneous mass action. The press has published only a few of the instances of such action. Let me give you some samples thus far unknown, I believe, iu New York:
July 2: the S.S. Charlotte Schroder, Rostock, sailed through the Brussels Canal. The Captain later reported to Hitler’s official organ that some 500 men, women and children on the banks showered the boat, which was flying the Nazi flag, with about 300 kilos of stone, smashing the whole superstructure.
July 12: the S.S. Storman, Hamburg, docked in Odense, Denmark. The protest strike against the Nazi flag was so tumultuous that the local trade union council fell all over itself to endorse the workers’ action. The flag came down.
August 8: the S.S. Delia, Bremen, docked in Follafuss, Norway, to load wood. The Captain refused the longshoremen’s demand to lower the Nazi flag. The sawyers came down from the mills, demonstrated on the pier, and gave him an hour to change his mind. The flag came down. When the boat sailed, the workers massed on the pier and sang the Internationale. Punished by a three-day lockout, they held fast and forced the bosses to rehire them.
In the same week in Apenrade, Denmark, workers protested against the Nazi flag on the S.S. Maja. Danish Nazis were called in to load. The trade unions of Apenrade went on a one-hour general strike of protest. The flag came down.
August 24: the S.S. Delfin IV docked at Valdesmarskvik, Sweden. Not even threats of expulsion by reactionary union officials deterred the protest against Hitlerism. The flag came down.
You will doubtless be glad to learn that others endorse the idea of an organized international transportation boycott. An early discussion of the idea was by the Neue Weltbuhne, a German-language paper published by exiles in Prague. This group is the feeble voice of the remnant of left bourgeoisie which has not abandoned its fight against Hitlerism; of its outstanding leaders, Carl von Ossietsky is in a Nazi concentration camp, and Kurt Tucholsky has vanished completely. These people have called on “the organized socialism of all countries” to join in such a boycott as you favor. A formal call was sent to the 2nd and 3rd Internationals, the Amsterdam T.U. center, the R.I.L.U., the cooperatist internationals and to many minor workers’ organizations proposing a united front conference to draw up slogans and the detailed strategy of the boycott.
This proposal has been accepted by the Independent Labor Party of England, the I.W.W., and several other labor organizations. Apparently without knowledge of this action, a congress of Scandinavian workers’ sport clubs met in Copenhagen on July 7-8 and resolved on behalf of 92,000 members (mostly Social Democrats) “to isolate Hitler Germany” by such a boycott. In the Arbeiderbladet of August 12, Tranmael, chairman of the Norwegian Labor Party, (which belongs to no International), wrote that his party interprets the vague Brussels Resolution of the Second International as meaning a transportation boycott and nothing less. Most important of all, a joint resolution adopted by the I.L.P., the Norwegian Labor Party, the German S.A.P. and the Dutch O.S.P. (the last two being cosignatories of the Manifesto of Four along with the International Left Opposition) favors “direct organized action against Fascism of all marine, railroad, transport and other workers” in the form of an industrial and transportation boycott. It proposes the following slogans: reestablishment of elementary political rights of workers; liberation of all political prisoners; abolition of concentration camps; cessation of violence against political dissidents.
Supplementary action of many varieties may be cited. For example, the C.C. of the Norwegian trade unions has ordered a protest strike against the visit of any Nazi representative to Oslo, Norway’s capital. Only hospital and firemen are exempted from the strike. However, fine all this sounds, not much has yet been done. The resolutions are noble in purpose but they haven’t been carried out. How can they be made effective is a question which throws us face to lace with some familiar, unfortunate facts. The bureaucrats of the 2nd International, the A.F. of L. etc., won’t move unless shoved.
Some Communists oppose the boycott because it will mean loss of jobs to German workers, as though German workers who (those same Communists claim) can approve the U.S.S.R. having relations with Hitler, would not understand the boycott and approve the loss of jobs. Some say that the boycott will benefit capitalists of France, America, etc. if the USSR – and rightly – trades with such capitalists despite the fact that they make a profit, why should workers’ hesitate in the boycott? Some say that boycott provokes war. And they are the same people who proclaim that Hitler is war that whatever helps smash him is a peace move, that to refrain from hitting him is to expedite war.
Most fantastic of all Stalinist arguments against the boycott is that it can not overthrow Hitler any more than trade union action can, that only a revolution will do the job. No doubt. But a boycott can undermine Hitler so that the German workers can hope to finish him off by a revolution. The boycott is just one move in a long struggle. Its limitations are no more a ground for rejecting it than are those of trade unionism for rejecting that.
Armed insurrection is only (a big only, of course) the final stage in a long process of which both trade union struggle and a real boycott can be important parts. As the Militant said, such a boycott can be “a means of lifting up the spirits of the German workers and helping them to their feet again ... a demonstration which would revive and strengthen the international labor movement.”
But to the C.I. all this is senseless! No wonder the Captain of the German tanker Mal-Kah was surprised when, on August 17, Communist workers at Loudden, Sweden, refused to service his boat as long as it flew the Nazi flag, even though they were employed by a naptha firm belonging to a Soviet trust. No wonder he complained to reporters, saying that they do such things better in Leningrad where he flew his filthy pennant unmolested for nine days!
A long way the C.I. has come! On January 14, 1921, for example, the Executive Committee of the C.I. proclaimed a boycott of Spain in response to the appeal of the Spanish Confederation of Labor. “The workers of all countries”, declared the E.C.C.I., which was then under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky, “should refuse to load or unload goods coming from or destined for Spain. They should refuse to buy any Spanish products. Isolated from the rest of the world, its barbarism exposed by the proletarians of all lands, the Spanish bourgeoisie will have to capitulate.” The story of the boycotts against the Hungarian White Terror Government and against the Polish intervention in the U.S.S.R. are too well known to need repetition here. They were bold working class tactics, and they had their fruit. They were initiated by the C.I. to its glory and benefit at a time when the U.S.S.R. was far weaker than it is today.
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