Hi Frank,
ARE you saying that the fear of Bernie motivated folks to vote for Trump?
How could the left truly support Clinton given Bubba's rotten record in the
White House?
Shame on the Democratic leadership for trying to force Clinton down our
throats. IF they hadn't rigged the thing, Bernie would have won and he'd have
likely beaten Trump given that he had way more enthusiasm behind him than
Hillary ever could. Lots of Clinton votes were done very half-heartedly.
Bob
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Miriam Vieni
Sent: Sunday, February 12, 2017 6:58 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] RE: [blind-democracy] RE: [blind-democracy] RE:
[blind-democracy] Re: [blind-democracy] Calling Trump a ‘fascist’ disorients
the working class
That's not my analysis. I didn't meet any working people who liked or voted for
Hillary. The more educated and politically moderate people did. And apparently,
3 million more voted for her than Trump.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Frank Ventura
Sent: Sunday, February 12, 2017 6:20 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] RE: [blind-democracy] RE: [blind-democracy] Re:
[blind-democracy] Calling Trump a ‘fascist’ disorients the working class
Miriam, all true and to look it at deeper the left put most of its energy (this
election cycle) attacking the Clintons, although only one was running, and the
Democratic Party as w hole. That didn't sit well with middle of the road
working class folks who viewed it as a radical attempt against democracy. The
result was that it pushed the folks that we would consider the working class
further and further to the right and that is why Trump was so unstoppable, by
anyone.
Frank
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Miriam Vieni
Sent: Sunday, February 12, 2017 1:27 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] RE: [blind-democracy] Re: [blind-democracy] Calling
Trump a ‘fascist’ disorients the working class
And then there's the question of just who the working class is. Remember that
only a small percentage of people voted at all. So when we say that Hillary got
the majority of the popular vote, what does that mean? Talk to working people
on Long Island and you'll find that most of them supported Trump. When the
Left talks about the working class as if the working class actually agrees with
its positions, and I've seen numerous articles saying this, my response is that
the Left is in as much of a bubble as was the DNC.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Sunday, February 12, 2017 11:18 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: [blind-democracy] Calling Trump a ‘fascist’
disorients the working class
"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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