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318     THE COMMUNIST

S.P. press, but in the big bourgeois newspapers as well. The "rejuvenation" process found concrete expression in the municipal elections in New York City last November, when Norman Thomas, S.P. candidate or mayor, received nearly 175,000 votes. Only a year before Thomas, running in the national elections for president, had polled only about 35,000 votes in New York, one-fifth of his 1929 figure. Part of the increase may be accounted for by the fact that an opposition party would tend to be stronger in a local than in national election; part of it was undoubtedly the result of a shrewd exploitation of Thomas' personality (an election leaflet of the S.P. carried as its slogan: "Vote for the Man- Not the Part"!) But undoubtedly the greater part of the increased vote was due to the conscious building up of the Socialist Party by the capitalist class. This was evidenced in the unparalleled publicity give the S.P. by all the capitalist newspapers, including Wall Street's chief organ, The Times, reaching its climax when for the first time in its history a section of the bourgeois press in the stronghold of American capitalism openly endorsed a candidate of the Socialist Party: the Tammany World and the Telegram, which had supported Hoover in the national elections, both urged their readers to vote for Norman Thomas. In addition, Thomas was endorsed by the Citizens Union, and organization which includes many leading open-shoppers.

As in the case of the "rehabilitation" of the I.L.G.W., it is significant that the "rejuvenation" of the Socials Party coincided with the maturing o the present sharp economic crisis that is shaking American capitalism to its foundations. It is a sign not of the strength of the Socials Party, but of the weakness of the capitalist structure. It indicates, moreover, how deep and inexorable is that whirlpool of world economic crisis into which American capitalism-- the strongest, the most arrogant, the most "independent"-- has been swept. And in the hour of crisis the american capitalist class, like the capitalist class of other countries, is preparing to call upon social-democracy to save it from destruction.

But it is no longer the same social-democracy that betrayed the workingclass and international Socialism during the last imperialist war. It is social-democracy that is developing under the tremendous pressure of the increasing contradictions that are being reproduced on a vaster and waster scale and are forcing capitalism along the desperate road toward fascism and war. And social-democracy too, in the United States as elsewhere, is being forced along the desperate path. 

The American Socialist Party has not yet had the incomparable