After a decade of decline since Morris Hillquit won over 20% of the 1917 mayoral vote the Socialist Party’s Norman Thomas ran a strong campaign for the Socialist Party in New York’s 1929 mayoral election, which also saw the Communist Party run a candidate, William Weinstone, for the first time. The C.P.’s result was negligible, while the S.P.’s vote rebounded winning over 12%.

‘Only One Workers’ Party–Vote Communist!’ from The Daily Worker. Vol. 6 No. 207. November 5, 1929.

Today the New York municipal election brings to the attention of the workers the fact that while there are three capitalist parties, there is only one workers’ party—the Communist Party.

The three capitalist candidates for mayor, Walker, LaGuardia and Thomas are so many names for the same thing—the dictatorship of the capitalist class. Thomas, it is true, trades upon the illusion created around the word “socialist” to attract many workers who resent the open police brutality against labor, the strike-breaking regime of Walker, to register their resentment at the polls. Many of these workers have not read the recent issue of the official organ of the socialist party, where a cartoon show’s a policeman unable to use his club because his hands are tied by ropes labeled “republican” and “democrat” parties. Thomas, the demanding the cops’ hands be “freed” so they can use their clubs!

No working class party would for one instant sponsor such a slogan or such a policy, but then the socialist party is not a workers’ party. It is a party of small capitalists, the store-keeper party, the party of dissatisfied doctors and briefless lawyers, with a scattering of labor aristocrats—the skilled and highly paid few who follow the lead of the small capitalists.

The socialist party has abandoned any pretense of being a revolutionary party. It has discarded the idea, though that idea is derived from the facts visible to all, that there is a class struggle in society between the capitalist class and the working class. That fact being clear, it is equally clear that any political party reflects in its policy the interests of one class or the other, and the socialist party rejects the working class, it cannot but champion the interests of the enemy of the workers—the capitalist class.

This explains why the capitalist press gives acres of space to the socialist party, which appeals vaguely for “hope and faith,” when there is no hone for the workers so long as capitalism exists, and no faith to be had in demagogs who use such abstractions to divert the masses from the only path of emancipation from the daily miseries they bear under capitalism, class organization and class struggle daily in the shops and factories, knowing that only when they overthrow capitalism can they escape the evils of capitalism and advance toward a society of workers’ freedom and working class rule.

Thomas, the socialist, is supported by the “Citizens’ Union.” An organization of bankers and open-shopper, precisely because the socialist party is one more leg besides the republican and democratic parties with which the capitalists kick the working class in the face. The socialist party is part of the second international, which supports the robber League of Nations oppress colonial toilers, a party which in every country supports, when it does not initiate, preparations for war on the Soviet Union, the First Workers’ Republic of history. With tens of thousands of unemployed, while the employed are speeded to death in factories at wages below the government estimate for healthful living standard, Thomas, the socialist, comes forth as opposed to what he calls “special favors” to the only useful class in society, the working class, robbed in peace and butchered in war for centuries to fatten a class of slave-driving parasites.

The Communist Party comes to the workers in this election with a program of class struggle, not only for demands of immediate betterment—for which the workers must struggle not only on election day but every day in shop and factory, but with the revolutionary demand, enforceable only by organized class struggle of the broadest masses, for the establishment of a workers’ and farmers’ government, a Soviet Government in the United States.

Unemployment cannot be abolished, low wages and poverty are permanent, and the death-dealing speed-up will remain—under capitalism. Neither Walker of the infamous Tammany Hall, nor LaGuardia the fascist, nor Thomas, the socialist spokesman of small capitalists, is against capitalism. The only political party that leads the workers now in their daily struggle against capitalism, the only political party that will continue to lead the workers in struggle until capitalism is overthrown, is the Communist Party.

Vote Communist!

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1925/1925-ny/v02b-n252-NYE-nov-04-1925-DW-LOC.pdf