So if your analysis is correct, than various factions of the working class see
their interests very differently. For example, think of the Police or those
Immigration folks who are mounting raids on immigrants right now. And then
there are the folks who work in the fossil fuel industry. Just imagine trying
to educate all of them to see that their interests are the same as fast food
workers and opposed to those of the owners of banks and oil companies and then
try to organize them to prevent our current system from working.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Sunday, February 12, 2017 10:55 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
As I've said before, being a stubborn cuss, my definition of "Working Class"
includes anyone who is working to support the Elite Ruling Class. I know my
definition gets cut down by all sorts of folks much smarter, more articulate
and far more experienced in the social science fields than I, but that is what
I mean when I talk about the working class. Sure, snobs want to hug the super
rich and pretend they are their good buddies, and some working class people
like to pretend that by dressing "better" and living "finer" than those they
refer to as Blue Collar Labor, they are superior. But if we're going to clear
the crap and get to the root of the problem, we need a clear understanding that
there are only two divisions, Workers and Keepers.
Keepers are few in number, but they have spent generations refining a complex
System that has multiple controls over the Workers. Many of the controls are
designed to divide Workers into small groups, suspicious of each other, seeds
of contempt are sowed into their midst, ensuring that they will never accept
each other as equals.
And of course there is the use of Fear in controlling the Workers.
Religion, in its many forms, has been a most valuable tool for controlling the
Workers.
Another important control used by the Keepers is distraction. We know it
better as Entertainment. We are encouraged to be self indulgent, spending our
"Free Time" in idle pastimes. We have been deceived to believe that after we
have labored all day in order to provide our Keepers with the sweat from our
brows, that we have "earned" the right to a little relaxation. So we rush to
the "big game", or we slip into the tavern or lounge to veg out. We don't want
to be bothered with boring stuff like union meetings, community meetings,
school board meetings, planning meetings, in fact we turn away from anything
with the word, "Meeting" in it.
So of course we are ripe for the picking. A skilled con artist...let's call
him the Trumpster, comes along and stirs our differences, driving us even
further apart. He bad mouths the Press, which has always been the punching bag
of politicians, sometimes called too liberal and other times called the tool of
the Ruling Class, and he sneers at the incompetent government, calling it a
swamp that needs draining, and he promises to make America Great Again, which
is code for making America White again.
And out of every village, off every farm, out of the cities and from the
factories and the small businesses come angry, frightened, men and women,
declaring the Trumpster to be their "Great White Hope". With so much
deception. With so many deliberate lies. With the constant spread of such
anger, suspicion and contempt for those who are not "like us", America, like
the Fatted Calf, is ripe for the slaughter.
And the Trumpster has gathered the team of pros who can do the job.
Carl Jarvis
On 2/12/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home
