MARXISTS IN U,. Se DENOUNCE ASSASSINATION
All the groupings in the United States of any significance whatever that proclaim adherence in general to Marxism united November 26 in explaining to the public that the assassin of President Kennedy could not be a "Marxist." If Oswald proves to be the actual killer, all of them held, then no matter what he asserted he was no adherent of Marxism,
The united front on this subject was reported in a rather lengthy article in the November 27 New York Times which, however, does not make clear whether the compilation of views was obtained by its reporter Peter. Kihss or whether the representatives of the various groups participated in a public forum. | American Trotskyist Statement
Farrell Dobbs, national secretary of the Socialist Workers party and -its presidential candidate in the last four elections, made the following . statement;
"The only way that the political and basic social problems of the human race can be settled in a civilized way is for society to be guided by majority decision, which is reached after full and free public debate in which all points of view are heard,
"Individual acts of terrorism in the last analysis can serve only the forces of reaction who want to repress political and constitutional liberties because they seize upon the individual terrorist act as a pretext to attack the rights of-society as a whole,"
Dobbs cited a pamphlet written “by Leon Trotsky on the assassination of Kirov in 19354 in which the founder of the Fourth International stressed tthe negative aspect of Marxism towards the tactic of individual terror,"
As to Stalin's use of assassination, Dobbs said that the killing of Leon Trotsky by one of Stalin's agents in 1940 "refuted Stalin's conten= tion that he had remained a Marxist," Views of Communist Party
Arnold Johnson, a long~time leader of the Communist party of the USA, said that the party's constitution advocates a peaceful road to socialism through "the developing constitutional process, "
‘The party's constitution calls for expulsion of anyone "who advocates force and violence or terrorism,"
"We constantly see the role of the working class and of the mass movements and mass struggles of the people as decisive," said Johnson. "We always warn against any short cuts, any methods of individual terror, individual acts which divert from and would basically prove defeating both | as to immediate as well as to ultimate objectives,"
Earl Browder, expelled former general secretary of the Communist
a: a
party, who still reflects the most crassly class-collaborationist sector of the party and its periphery, agreed that StaLin had “practiced! individual terrorism, but had "never defended it.
On the Marxist view concerning individual terror, Browder ‘cited the eulogy which Karl Marx wrote in behalf-of the Central Council of the Inter~ national Working Men's Association on May 13, 1865, in relation to the — assassination of President Lincoln.
As an example of Marx's view, Browder said that the eulogy “could be applied to Kennedy."
He quoted Karl Marx's tribute to Lincoln in. part as follows:
"Even the sycophants who year after year and day by day stuck at their Sisyphus work of morally assassinating Abraham Lincoln and the great republic he headed stand now aghast at this universal outburst of popular feeling and rival with each other to strew rhetorical flowers on his open grave.
trey have now at last found out that he was a man neither to ‘be ‘browbeaten by adversity, nor intoxicated by success, inflexibly pressing: on to his great goal, never compromising it by blind haste, slowly matur= ing his steps, never retracing them, carried away by no surge of popular favor, disheartened by no slackening of the popular pulse, tempering stern acts by the gleams of a kind heart, illuminating scenes dark with passion by the smile of humor, doing his titanic work as humbly and homely as fieavenborn rulers do jittle things with the grandiloquence of pomp and state, in one word one of the rare men who succeed in becoming great without ceasing to be good,
"Such indeed was the modesty of this great and good | man that the world only discovered him a hero after he had fallen a martyr,' Former Left-Wing CPers
Milton Rosen, chairman of the Progressive Labor Movement, a new group ing that emerged from the Communist party under the impact of the Cuban Revolution and the Sino-Soviet conflict and which has some forces ina few areas, said that an attempt was being made "to utilize the alleged acts of Oswald to whip up further the anti-Communist hysteria in the country."
"This," he said, "is all part of the atmosphere that lends itself to - these acts. of violence, Marxist-Leninists find it necessary to reject assassination as a conceivable form of political struggle, The killing of aman cannot alter the. course of history."
Rosen pointed out that "assassination and individual violence is part and parcel of the capitalist system," De Leonist Opinion
~ Arnold Petersen, national secretary of the Socialist Labor party, ‘which was founded by Daniel De Leon and which still confines itself largely to promulgating his doctrines, cited Marx's hostile attitude toward the
se
anarchists of his time who "preach tyrannicide as a 'ttheory and panacea,'"
The coming issue of The Weekly People, the newspaper of the Socialist Labor party, carries an editorial denouncing the assassination of Kennedy.
"It is this deep-seated, guilt-inspired, ruling class fear," the . editorial says, “that created the climate in which it is commonplace for — overwrought, unstable and mentally unbalanced characters to commit irra~ tional acts of violence,
"They have had it drilled into their weak minds by.the incessant propaganda of capitalism that, on the one hand, the individual is the architect of his ow fate, and, on the other, that evil men (or those whom the irrational victims of capitalist madness imagine to be evil) are respon- -sible for their private miseries and for the world's woes," a View of Norman Thomas's Party |
Miss Betty Elkin, national secretary of the Socialist Party-Social Democratic Federation, whose leading figure is Norman Thomas, said that her organization contains both Marxist and non-Marxist members.
"The Socialist party has always firmly and wnequivocally rejected violence such as assassination and terrorism, against political opponents, as being utterly contrary to Socialist principles and incompatible with membership in the Socialist party," she declared,
“Assassination, terrorism and all such forms of personal violence contribute nothing to social progress, It only strengthens the forces of reaction and repression," ~
Dr. Sidney Hook, professor of philosophy at New York University and a former Marxist who is still considered among his fellow liberals to be an authority on the subject, said that "Marxist theory does not. believe in individual violence as a method of social change and transformation."
"However, many Marxists would on occasion not condemn an individual act of violence if it served some important social-purpose., But they would condemn most actions of violence, especially on the ground that they would act as provocations or pretexts for repressive measures,"
Hook referred to the assassination of Trotsky as -an exanple of Thundreds" of such individual killings. oo os
He sought finally to picture the guerrilla warfare now flaring up in Venezuela as another instance of the same kind of tactic,