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SOCIAL-FASCISM--"REJUVENATION" OF S.P.      315

for real union conditions, found a strong response, resulting in substantial gains for the left wing and in the reestablishment of the confidence of thousands of needle trades workers in a fighting union. 

The question arises: why the deep interest of the capitalist state and city officials - Governor Roosevelt, Lieutenant-Governor Lehman, Mayor Walker -in the needle trades industry and its company union, the International Ladies'Garment Workers? Why the great concern of these representatives of big capital with the welfare of the small manufacturers of the ladies' garment industry?

The answer to this questions involves one of the essential features of capitalism in the imperialist era: the growing dependence of industry on the banks and the fusion of industrial with bank capital. And "the close connection between the banks and industry is completed by the close connection of both with the state." (Lenin: "Imperialism," Chapter II). Governor Roosevelt doesn't care a row of beans for the needle trades employers, but he cares a great deal for his masters, the Wall Street bankers, to whom the need trades employers are bound by a thousand ties. And with the insertion of a direct representative of finance-capital, Col. Lehman, into the state government as a lieutenant-governor, the union of industry, the banks and the government has been made stronger than ever.

Wall Street's reorganization of the ladies' garment industry, which has foe its purpose the strengthening of its control, has been in three directions:

1. The organization of strong employer's associations in the various branched of the industry to drive out the competition of smaller independent manufacturers, thus effecting a greater centralization of industrial capital dependent on Wall Street banks. 

2. The organization of a strong company unions, the I.L.G.W., as an instrument for throttling and diverting into impotent channels the increasing discontent of the workers, and also as a threat against those employers who refuse to join the bosses' associations or who sign agreements with the left-wing union. 

3. The establishment of coercive policing machinery in the interests of the employers under the guise of an "impartial" commission to "regulate the industry."

All this bears a strongly fascist character. Like all fascist tendencies, it is a product not of the strength of American capitalism, but of its fatal weakness. The reorganization of the ladies' garment industry along fascist lines and the social-fascist rehabilitation of the I.L.G.W. coincided with the development of one of the most acute crisis in the history of American capitalism. And the new "rejuvenated" I.L.G.W. is not simply a reformist union of the old class-collaborationist type. Nor is it an ordinary company union