fo:r- the FEPC, but it is common knowledge that the only reason he granted it was because Negroes organized under the leadership of A. Philip Randolph and threatened to embarrass the war program by a march on Washington if he did not come across. Despite all the liberal flimflam, Jim Crow was more firmly seated in the saddle in Washington when Roosevelt died than when he entered office. Wallace, the millionaire businessman, really means it when he says: "I look on myself as the best friend capitalism has in the United States today." (Speech in Portland, Oregon, May 24, 1948.) He has started a new party, but he clings to his old brand of politics-capitalist politics. He uses radical phraseology because he knows that many people are looking for a radical solution to their problems, but like Truman and Dewey he will fight to the last ditch to preserve the capitalist system which is responsible for those problems. Knowing that capitalism is becoming more and more discradited, Wallace says that what he stands for is "progressive capitalism." But "progressive capitalism" is a flagrant contradiction in terms. As I tried to explain in discussing the Civil War period, capitalism once played a progressive role but now it has turned into a wholly reactionary system. To talk about "progressive capitalism" in 1948 is as ridiculom as it would have been to talk about "progressive slavery" in 1860. It is just as impossible for capitalism to be progressive today as it i& for Jim Crow to he progressive. You can't eat your cake and have it too; you can't keep capitalism and get progress; you can't have capitalism without race prejudice any more than you can have capitalism without depressions and wars. For the time being it may not be very popular to tell the truth about Wallace to some people, but the Socialist Workers Party would rather lose votes by telling the truth than get votes by hiding it. And this is the truth: Henry Wallace is another capitalist medicine-man peddling quack "cures" that dope the patient but can only prevent his recovery. Because Wallace wants to preserve the economic and political cause of Jim Crow, he is using the Negro issue in this election just as capitalist politicians have used it in the past, and he will sell out the Negroes in the same way that they have been betrayed so many times by the Democrats, Republicans and Stalinists. That is why the Socialist Workers Party is opposed to Wallace Biblioteca Gino Bianco
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