"What working people need is to organize independently of both
capitalist parties."
Well said. But the hard part is in the doing. With so much confusing
propaganda by the Ruling Class, and so many years in refining their
control over the working class, the task of teaching people to think,
is daunting.
Call Donald J. Trump a Fascist and his opponents eagerly agree, while
his defenders snarl and hurl curses. And nothing changes. But
challenge the corrupt capitalist system and you could well wind up
like Leon Trotsky or Doctor Martin Luther King, Junior. Or you might
find yourself living in poverty and shunned by your former friends,
like Paul Robeson. The Great American Capitalist Oligarchy can allow
us to tear down their shills and front men. They have unlimited
numbers of eager ass kissers waiting in the wings. What we, the
working class, lack are ass kickers.
Let's turn our attention away from Donald J. Trump and pull on our
steel toed boots.
Carl Jarvis
On 2/12/17, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
http://themilitant.com/2017/8107/810702.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 81/No. 7 February 20, 2017
(front page, commentary)
Calling Trump a ‘fascist’ disorients the working class
BY SETH GALINSKY
Many liberals, some conservatives and almost the entire middle-class
left call President Donald Trump and his administration fascist. Drawing
on the rich history of the revolutionary workers movement, the Socialist
Workers Party has a different view.
Is there something fundamentally different about the Trump
administration compared to previous Democratic and Republican ones? Is
Trump really a new Adolph Hitler or “Mussolini in a blue suit and tie,”
as Norman Pollack wrote on the Counterpunch website Feb. 3?
Or is Trump simply the new chief executive officer of the U.S. ruling
class, who won election because of the widespread distrust in his
opponent Hillary Clinton and interest in the working class for political
change at a time when they’re being battered by the effects of a
deepening worldwide capitalist economic crisis?
The answer to this question has serious political consequences for
anyone who is interested in defending the interests of the working class
in the United States and around the world.
Because of the decline in Marxist political culture in the world today,
“fascist” is an epithet used by many on the left to mean any demagogic
politician. They care little for seeking to learn the rich history of
the revolutionary working-class movement’s writings on fascism from
Germany and Italy to the U.S.
Fascism is the name given to reactionary mass movements that arose
leading up to World War II — like those led by Benito Mussolini in Italy
and Hitler in Germany and with echoes in the U.S. and other imperialist
countries — that were backed by the capitalist classes in those
countries when the existing dictatorship of capital could no longer
survive by normal “democratic” means.
Leon Trotsky, a leader of the Russian Revolution, who was expelled from
the Soviet Union in 1929 by Joseph Stalin as part of a broader
counterrevolution against the program of V.I. Lenin that led the workers
and farmers of Russia to power in 1917, wrote extensively about fascism.
His goal was to lay bare the class dynamics that led to its rise and to
politically prepare revolutionary-minded workers to fight against it.
Through the fascist movement “capitalism sets in motion the masses of
the crazed petty bourgeoisie and the bands of declassed and demoralized
lumpenproletariat — all the countless human beings whom finance capital
itself has brought to desperation and frenzy,” Trotsky explained, and
then uses them as thugs to smash the labor movement and its vanguard
communist organizations.
The fascists “initially rail against ‘high finance’ and the bankers,
lacing their nationalist demagogy with anticapitalist demagogy,” notes
Socialist Workers Party National Secretary Jack Barnes in Capitalism’s
World Disorder. In order to divert ruined petty-bourgeois elements and
demoralized workers from seeing capitalism as the problem, the Nazis
scapegoated the Jews as responsible for the growing economic and
political crisis and whipped up calls for a “final” solution to the
“Jewish question.” At the same time, the fascists “ape much of the
language of currents in the workers movement. ‘Nazi’ was short for
National Socialist German Workers Party.”
“Fascism is not a form of capitalist rule, but a way of maintaining
capitalist rule,” Barnes said.
Fascist groups, which exist on the fringes at first, only get financial
and political backing from a significant section of the bourgeoisie when
the working class “puts up an increasingly serious challenge to
capitalist rule itself,” Barnes said.
In Germany and Italy the working class was unable to unify and mobilize
its allies to overthrow capitalism and take power because of the
betrayal by the Stalinist Communist Party and the reformist Social
Democrats.
In 1930 the Social Democratic Party received 8,577,700 votes and the
Communist Party 4,592,100 votes compared to 6,409,600 for the Nazis. If
the Social Democrats and Communist Party had formed a united front, if
the trade unions they led had built workers defense guards, if they were
on a political course to lead the working class to overthrow capitalist
rule, they could have stopped fascism on the road to power. Instead,
they did nothing to stand up to the fascist gangs and Hitler came to
power without a fight.
Workers paid the price of the Stalinist and Social Democratic betrayal
in blood. Millions of Jews and gypsies were sent to their deaths in
concentration camps. The unions were destroyed. The working class was
driven off the political stage.
Counterpunch’s Pollack says the election of Trump is “a forward space in
what I term a pre-fascist configuration, i.e., analogous to Germany in
1938.” Hardly.
Trump surprised bourgeois politicians and pundits across the political
spectrum. He convinced a layer of workers that he was the lesser evil
compared to Clinton; not so hard to do given the anti-working-class
record of Bill and Hillary Clinton when they occupied the White House.
Hillary Clinton helped Trump win by calling workers who were considering
a vote for him “deplorables” and “irredemables.”
That’s the same language many on the left still use today. Andrew
Levine, says in Counterpunch Feb. 3, that “Trump’s supporters fall into
three broad categories: dupes, deplorables, and opportunists.”
Levine says it’s “the lowlifes whose cages he [Trump] had rattled and
whose passions he had inflamed” that are the problem, showing his scorn
and fear of the working class.
In fact, Trump’s policies are a mix of steps designed to attract
working-class support, like his disdain for the government’s fake
unemployment figures and his call for infrastructure building and a
repair program to provide jobs, with demagogic nationalist rhetoric that
divides the working class. Like other bourgeois politicians he seeks to
shore up capitalism.
Facts don’t matter to the ‘left’
To those crying “fascist,” however, the facts don’t matter.
Workers World Party leader Larry Holmes, to take just one example, said
in a Jan. 29 speech, “Building the ‘Wall’ and this ban on Muslims are
fascist acts.”
Holmes leaves out that about 650 miles of the “wall” along the
U.S.-Mexico border has already been built, mostly by the administrations
of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Does Holmes think Clinton and Obama
are fascists?
Labeling Trump a fascist, helps pave the way for resuscitating the
Democrats, the rulers’ other party, as the answer.
There is another danger in mislabeling Trump and his administration as
fascist. It disarms the working class politically for when fascism
really does raise its ugly head once again — as it inevitably will when
the ruling families see no other way to maintain capitalism.
Communist workers don’t care which bourgeois candidate any individual
workers voted for — or didn’t — in the presidential election. What
working people need is to organize independently of both capitalist
parties.
Far from the political space for workers to discuss, debate and fight
having been smashed by fascist gangs, the field is wide open. The
Socialist Workers Party’s candidates take its revolutionary program and
win support on workers’ doorsteps in cities, towns and the countryside,
as well as on strike picket lines and social protest actions.
We say the Socialist Workers Party is your party. What we do now in
building a revolutionary workers party will be decisive in the years ahead.
Related articles:
Anarchist ‘black bloc’ politics pose threat to working class
Berkeley: Anarchists shut down speaker, attack workers
Fascism rises when capital must crush working class
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