This kind of article enrages me because of its knit picking. Of course, our
government has not become a completely Fascist government, in the true sense of
the word. The fact is that none of the Communist countries were actually what
Communism was supposed to be either. Of course, we've gotten to this point
because of the actions of both our major parties and the rule of the
corporations in our country and the world. However, one has to be living in
one's own world, not to see that there is a takeover of our government by the
extreme right wing. When all the appointees are people who wish to abolish the
very departments that they're appointed to head, it's obvious that there is an
attempt to destroy our government as it has previously existed. When you choose
a person to be attorney general who is opposed to civil rights and civil
liberties and this person will be representing the government's point of view,
that says something about where we're headed. We're at a point where the
government won't even be giving lip service to our democratic values. And it is
an error to ignore Trump's individual qualities and beliefs because it is his
personna that attracts the kind of followers who will openly attack Muslims,
mosques, Jewish synagogues, and peaceful demonstrators. He can , and does,
mobilize the White Nationalists, the American Nazis among us, and give them
permission to act. We're also reading that the FBI now defines terrorism only
in terms of Islamic terrrorism, and has removed resources from combatting
American White Christian terrorism. They are not even considering it a category
anymore. I'm the first to say, and I have, that drone murders by Obama and by
Trump, are drone murders and should not be differentiated from each other. On
the other hand, where very clear differences are emerging in terms of how our
ruling class is ruling, we should be cognizant of them.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Roger Loran Bailey ;
(Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
Sent: Sunday, February 12, 2017 10:38 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Calling Trump a ‘fascist’ disorients the working
class
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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