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From Socialist Appeal, Vol. II No. 6, 5 February 1938, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
One relation of Mr. Earl Browder to the impending “Robinson-Rubens” frame-up, which is already clear, and which he wishes could be kept obscure, is the contribution of his party to the groundwork of the frame-up in the United States. All trails have led to the door of the Communist Party, and some behind the door, nine floors up. Despite the reticence of Mr. Hull and Mr. Yezhov, which was absolute this week, new facts that point in the same direction continue to come to light.
Mr. Browder has another relation to the case through his politics, which today consist chiefly of “struggling against Trotskyism,” and “implementing Roosevelt’s Chicago speech.” The Communist Party, however, is a feeble arm to wield such a big speech.
Franklin is implementing it himself with Uncle Teddy’s big stick: the billion dollar armament program. No one is better aware of the feebleness of 13th Street’s blatant jingoism than its absentee proprietor, Stalin himself. But the Stalinists have other methods of “implementing” speeches: the spy scare and the program against “foreigners.”
In a most candid statement of the war program of the Communist Party, Mr. Browder in the current New Republic advocates a Soviet-American alliance against Japan. He says that a continuance of weakness at Washington will cause Japan “to take over the Philippines, Hawaii, Guam and Alaska, as guarantees against the future, when the United States might dare [to fight]. From that it would not be a large step to recall how much more successful are the Japanese than Americans in cultivating the beautiful and rich lands of California.” Any Jew in Rumania today could tell you what that means.
Browder’s chauvinist remark “implements,” in addition to Roosevelt’s, a recent speech of a Vice-Commissar of the G.P.U., who declared that California is overrun with Japanese spies. The Japanese-in-California crack is a tip-off on the “Robinson-Rubens” frame-up. Double R will supply the link in the Trotsky-Mikado formula. The locale will be California.
There are of course both Trotskyites and “ Trotskyites,” as well as Japanese in California. According to the 1930 census (not a 1917 Baedecker), about 70 per cent of the Japanese in America are concentrated in California, and fully 90 per cent on the West Coast. And anyone who has a slight acquaintance with that part of the country knows how rampant is the anti-Japanese chauvinism. The soil is rich, as Browder says. A hotel in San Francisco, Los Angeles, or San Diego looks like a better proposition than the Bristol in Copenhagen.
Another time we will take up the deeper implications of the Browder remark and the frame-up, in the matter of national minorities. Abandoning principle, the question of whose minority rights the Stalinists will champion and whose they will attack becomes one of expediency. Italians and Germans may come next. And who can say for sure that it will never be expedient for Browder to unload even those racial groups that have no mother country?
The Soviet action in rebuffing the State Department’s attempt to visit Mrs. Rubens is remarkable in view of the enthusiastic efforts of the Stalinist government to court the “democratic nations,” especially the United States. That Stalin should risk the, loss of much of the good will obtained through the 7th Congress of the Comintern and reactionary moves on all fronts, by treating the United States like hostile Fascist Germany in a case involving an American citizen is, at first blush, inexplicable.
Perhaps the G.P.U. has been caught in its own trap. Refusing the interview strains diplomatic relations; but permitting it might expose the magician of the Moscow Trials, and strain everything.
If a trial is held, it may be taken for granted that Stalin will attempt to recoup his diplomatic fortune by involving Americans for the apparent benefit of the American Government. Certainly Washington is not above allowing Moscow the courtesy of proceeding with its frame-up. The two governments share hostility to the left. Diplomatic developments, the present situation of the American Government, and certain differences between Browder and Roosevelt seem, however, to be against, not the possibility, but the probability of such collaboration.
The Stalinists here are trying to be more American than the Americans; but their parvenu vulgarity sets them off from the real McCoy. Browder announces that he is an American more often than a Legionaire in his cups. The affectation is consistent with Stalinist politics. For the American Stalinists are not the garden variety of nationalists. They do not reflect or represent, however hard they try, the total national interests of the American bourgeoisie.
The only genuine international interest is that of the working class, which the Stalinists have long since ceased pretending to represent. The Stalinists represent the interests of the Soviet bureaucrats, and only through them the historical interests of capitalism. There is, however, a considerable gap in immediate interests between the patriotic Roosevelt and the double-dyed Browder.
Browder’s patriotism is simulated for the purpose of bringing about an alliance between the Soviet bureaucracy and the American Government. With or without an alliance, however, the American Stalinists tend to push the American Government toward war with any nation that is threatening the Soviet Union. Hence Mr. Browder’s super-patriotism. From the viewpoint of an imperialist diplomat like Hull, to whom war is military politics to be handled with finesse, Browder may well look like an irresponsible provocateur.
Roosevelt really does represent the American bourgeoisie, which, unlike the European, has had little experience or use for the peculiar contribution offered by the Stalinists: the policing of the revolutionary workers. At present Roosevelt is satisfied with Lewis; and although Lewis is sheltering the Stalinists, they are not indispensable to him.
It seems unlikely that Washington will at this time assist Moscow in getting control of labor by further frame-up drives. There is more reason to believe that Washington feels that, as long as a left exists, it is better split than a Moscow-controlled monolith.
The State Department in the “Robinson-Rubens” affair is evidently out to catch as big a fish as it can. It is releasing only such data as it finds advisable to release. The impression already given by the bourgeois press, is that the political left is composed of conspirators, chiefly foreign, engaged in shady rackets – a variation of the impression Browder seeks to create. But Washington may try to turn the affair into a scandal of the left with a plague on all its houses, including the one with the American flag and the red light. It may sometime release information on its findings; but pressure must be brought to get this information released now.
The labor movement can look for trouble in the “Robinson-Rubens” affair from Mr. Browder and both governments. From Moscow the spy scare frame-up. From Washington the “alien agitator” campaign. From Mr. Browder a continuance of his Yellow Peril.
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