The Daily Worker

THE DAILY WORKER
'DON'T SHOOT!' SLOGAN IS NOW MASS DEMAND
Communist Prestige Raised by Strike
WILLIAM F. DUNNE
Fifth Article.

The Communist Party of Great Britain told the workers last summer in their press and at meetings that the government was prepared to smash the trade unions. They said also that a campaign against the use of the military as a strikebreaking agency was necessary and that the struggle of the miners would inevitably involve the whole labor movement.

The party issued its now famous "Don't Shoot!" leaflet to the soldiers and sailors and twelve members of the central executive committee were sent to prison under the Mutiny Act of 1797.

No sooner were they convicted than a nation-wide campaign for their release began. The rank and file of the trade unions were aroused and even the right wing leadership had to go along with the tide. Sir William Joynson-Hicks, the home secretary in the Baldwin government, derisively called "Jix" by the workers, succeeded in raising a storm of protest against himself. The right wing of the labor party and of the trade unions tried hard to show the jailing of the Communists as a personal enterprise of an egotistical reactionary, but the rapid development of the coal crisis, the organization by the government of the O. M. S. with fascist participation, were indications that the drive on the Communists was no isolated incident.

The prosecution and imprisonment of the leading staff of the Communist Party can be said without exaggeration to mark a new period in the development of the British labor movement.

It dramatized sharply the decadence of the boasted British democracy because it showed clearly to thousands of workers that under the Tory regime sedition unaccompanied by any overt act had become a punishable act in time of peace.

It is my opinion that even considerable numbers of Communists were surprised at the drastic measures used against them.

The response of the masses to appeals for the defense of and financial aid to the dependents of the imprisoned Communists was splendid. International Class War Prisoners' Aid reached hundreds of thousands of workers by mass meetings, demonstrations and literature.

The treatment of the prisoners, their imprisonment as common criminals with no distinction because of the political nature of their offense became topics of wide discussion in the capitalist as well as in the labor press.

On April 12 a parade, mass meeting and demonstration was held in London in honor of the six Communists who were released after serving their sentences. (Arthur McManus was held three days longer because he had "insulted" a warder.)

Ten thousand workers gathered at King's Cross Circus and marched the four or five miles to Clapham Common. Half of them had already walked from five to fifteen miles to reach King's Cross.

Twenty thousand people took part in the meeting at Clapham Common where speakers of all shades of political opinion addressed the huge crowd from a dozen platforms.

Then the crowd marched three miles more to Wandsworth Prison, where another meeting was held, while 20,000 workers following the lead of a chairman in the most disciplined fashion, made the walls of the prison shake with thunderous shouting for more than two hours.

I have never seen a hoarser or happier crowd.

The direct attack on the Communist Party as a preliminary to the attack on all of organized labor, the complete correctness of the slogans and program of the party increased its influence tremendously.

The general strike and the massing of the military by orders of the government actuated by an obviously deadly purpose has shown the masses that the jailing of the Communists was the signal for the offensive of British capital.

The slogan issued by the Communists to the soldiers and sailors has taken on life. "Don't Shoot!" is now a mass appeal of workers in industry to workers under arms.

On May Day the United Press correspondent in London cabled as follows about the May Day parade:

Conservatives and Laborites alike were dumbfounded by the discovery that the sharp rocks of the day's developments had changed the status of the Communists in London.

Today... the red from Battersea proudly led off the procession. They simply took the lead, none said them nay and there they marched in place of the usually acknowledged leaders.

Not actually but with a relentless potentiality the social revolution marched with the London workers on May 1.

The British working class has been given an entirely new set of standards by the general strike. They look at Britain and its empire with new understanding.

(Sixth Article Tomorrow)