Foster - Toward Soviet America

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Text originally published in 1932 under the same title.

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TOWARD SOVIET AMERICA

BY

WILLIAM Z. FOSTER

SPECIAL EDITION

Contents

TO ESTHER

THERE is a great and growing mass demand in this country to know just what is the Communist party and its program. The masses of toilers, suffering under the burdens of the crisis, are keenly discontented and want to find a way out of their intolerable situation. They are alarmed at the depth, length and general severity of the crisis. They begin to realize that there is something rotten in Denmark, that there are fundamental flaws in the capitalist system. Their growing realization of this is further strengthened as they see the spectacular rise of Socialism in the Soviet Union. The masses are beginning rightly to sense that Communism has an important message for the human race, and they want to know what it is.

Capitalism is deeply anxious that the masses do not get this message. Hence, from the outset it has carried on a campaign of falsification of the Russian revolution entirely without parallel in history. There has been a veritable ocean of lies in the capitalist press against the U.S.S.R. The American Federation of Labor leadership and the Socialist party, defenders of the capitalist system, have outdone even the capitalists themselves in this wholesale vilification. The effort of the capitalists and their labor lieutenants has been to set off the Communists as willful enemies and destroyers of the human race. But the masses begin to see through this misrepresentation and they want to know the truth.

The present book is an attempt to meet this mass demand by a plain statement of Communist policy, avoiding technical complexities and theoretical elaboration. It outlines simply the program, strength, strategy and perspectives of the Communist party of the United States. It undertakes to point out what is the matter with capitalism and what must be done about it. It indicates where America is heading and it makes a practical application of the lessons of the Russian revolution to the situation in this country. Its central purpose is to explain to the oppressed and exploited masses of workers and poor farmers how, under the leadership of the Communist party, they can best protect themselves now, and in due season cut their way out of the capitalist jungle to Socialism.

WM. Z. FOSTER

New York City

May 1, 1932

THE MOST striking and significant political and social fact in the world today is the glaring contrast between the industrial, political and social conditions prevailing in the capitalist countries and those obtaining in the Soviet Union. Throughout the capitalist world, without exception, the picture is one of increasing chaos and crisis. The capitalist industrial system is paralysed as never before. Tremendous masses of workers are thrown into unemployment and destitution. The standards of living of the producing masses have declined catastrophically, mass starvation existing in every capitalist country, including the United States. War is already here in Manchuria and preparations go ahead upon an unprecedented scale for future wars against the Soviet Union and among the capitalist powers themselves. To enforce their regime of hunger and intensified exploitation, the capitalists everywhere are increasingly developing their dictatorship from its masked form of bourgeois democracy into open systems of Fascist terrorism. And against all this the revolutionary upsurge of the workers and poor farmers becomes worldwide; revolutionary struggle growing acute in many countries. Capitalism is manifestly in serious crisis.

On the other hand, the Soviet Union, born in the midst of the capitalist world slaughter of 1914-18, presents a picture of growth and general social advance. The Russian industries and agriculture are expanding at an unheard-of rate, the Soviet Union being the only country in the world not prostrated by the economic crisis. The masses of producers of factory and farm are all employed; their standards of living and culture are rapidly rising. They are building a new and free proletarian democracy. In short, as capitalism goes deeper and deeper into crisis, the Soviet Union forges ahead faster and faster upon every front.

The meaning of all this, as will be developed in the course of this book, is that the capitalist system is in decline and is historically being replaced by a new social order, Socialism. Capitalism, based upon the private ownership of industry and land and the exploitation of the toiling masses, has exhausted its social role; the revolutionary forces, under the leadership of the Communist International, are gathering to sweep it away and to build in its place a social system based upon the common ownership of the means of production and the carrying on of production for social use. Out of the welter of crisis and mass misery and war, a new social system is born. We are living in the historical period of the revolutionary transition from capitalism to Socialism.

LIKE a tornado the present economic crisis struck the capitalist world. It is a crisis of over-production. The first signs of this threatening over-production manifested themselves in Germany and central Europe generally in the latter part of 1928. The industrial decline began in the U. S. towards the middle of 1929, followed by the great October Wall Street crash, after which every capitalist country was swiftly drawn into the vortex. The inevitable result is the worst economic crisis, by far, in the whole history of capitalism. It is the deepest, the most far-reaching and the longest. Every branch of industry, every capitalist country is affected. Only the Soviet Union is immune. And as Stalin says, The crisis has struck deepest of all at the principal country of capitalism, its citadel, the U.S.A. The crisis is setting in motion forces that threaten the very existence of the capitalist system.

Statistics constantly pile up to indicate the entirely unparalleled severity of the economic crisis. In industry the drop in production has been catastrophic and, after 30 months of crisis, it still declines. Production in the basic industries has fallen more than 50% below 1929 levels and more than 30% below 1930. Steel has dipped to 20% of capacity and even order inquiries for tacks are seized hopefully. Building is off about 70% since 1928, notwithstanding emergency building programs, etc. In 1931 American exports declined about one-third, or $1,418,000,000. The total national income fell from 89.5 billions in 1929 to 52.4 billions in 1931, or 41%. The drop in wholesale prices, 24% between 1929 and 1931, is wholly unprecedented, the previous record being 7% in the crisis of 1873-75. New financing decreased from 6% billions in 1929 to 2% billions in 1931. The general business index, at this writing registering 60, a drop from 113 in Aug., 1929, is the lowest in American economic history, the nearest low to this being 72 in 1894.