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310      THE COMMUNIST

but above all, to keep intact the structure of capitalism and the capitalist state which is being threatened with collapse by the acute crisis of world capitalism and the growing militancy of the workingclass and the oppressed colonial peoples.

I will here confine myself to the manifestations of social-fascism in the Socialist Party, both on the political and economic fields.

The International Ladies Garment Workers Union, which is controlled by the Socialist Party, offers an example of social-fascism in and advanced state.  An American Mussolini could incorporate this "union" into his fascist state with little or no modification. Class collaboration was long ago an active policy of the "socialist" officialdom of the I.L.G.W.  They have now gone much further.

To understand this we must recall the history of the union-wrecking campaign inaugurated in December, 1926, by the famous coup d'etat of ex-President Sigman of the I.L.G.W., with the expulsion of the militant New York Joint Board and the victimization of thousands of workers.  Sigman's campaign finally landed this once-powerful union on the rocks.  The I.L.G.W., in New York at least, was sounding the death-rattle, and not even the blood-money transfusions of the corrupt and degenerate Jewish Daily Forward seemed able to save it.

The "rehabilitation" of the I.L.G.W. began officially at the Boston convention of the union in May, 1929, from which all left wing delegates were barred.  And it reached its fine fruition in the fake strike of last July, a "strike" which is destined to serve in the future as a model of social-fascist trade union tactics.  The fact that this "rehabilitation" was effected not only with the aid of the cloak bosses, but with the active support and intervention of Wall Street finance capital, the employers' state and the policy -- coupled with the shameless use of the most corrupt social demagogy -- is the decisive feature differentiating it from "normal" class collaboration and giving it an unequivocal social-fascist character.

In May, 1928, shortly after the Boston convention of the I.L.G.W., Col. Herbert Lehman, a member of the banking firm of Lehman Brothers, turned over $50,000 to Benjamin Schlesinger, newly elected vice-president (now president) of the International, for the purpose of "rehabilitating" the union.  (Shlesinger, after an absence of several years, had come back into the union through intrigues of the Jewish Daily Forward whose advertising manager he was at a salary of about $17,000 a year.)  Whether this money was a loan or a gift is unimportant; whether Schlesinger promised Lehman the votes of the cloak and dressmakers in the coming state elections, in which the banker ran for lieutenant-governor on the Democratic ticket, is also not a decisive point.  The fact remains