Communist discussions on racism and fascism fire up workers here ♦ Collective Discussions Build ICWP here ♦ Democratic Party Main Danger here ♦ Fight Looming Fascism here ♦
More Potential for Party Growth:
Communist Discussions on Racism and Fascism Fire Up Comrades and Friends
The communist fight against racism is—and always has been—central to the battle to bury fascism. Only communism can rip out racism by its roots and the white supremacist ideology it fosters.
Boeing workers are passionately debating what caused the D.C. fascist riot.
“The cause? It’s history,” said a longtime friend, Comrade C.
He spelled out how racism helped develop a mass base for fascism. He put the blame at the feet of the capitalists. Every step of the way, they used racism to inflate their profits and maintain their power.
“The phrase ‘the chickens came home to roost’ upsets some people, but that’s what happened in D.C.,” said C, borrowing Malcolm X’s words. Four hundred years of racist lies propelled these white supremacist fascists to attack the very institutions that have been seeding and exporting racist violence throughout the world.
“The fascists fear they are losing ‘their’ country,” C said in amazement.
“But who built this country?” he demanded. From the slave plantations before emancipation to the convict labor in the steel plants afterwards, black workers have been super-exploited and slaughtered to secure the capitalist’s profits and power. From the sweatshops to the fields and food processing plants, this racist plague of super-exploitation of people of color and millions of immigrants filled the bosses’ coffers.
“I also hate racist Native American stereotypes,” he continued. Native Americans took in runaway slaves because they, too, suffered genocide at the hands of U.S. capitalism.
C made no excuses for the fascists, but he didn’t rule out the potential of the white working class. For example, he commented on a religious TV show. The church leaders were bragging about their “good works” when a white guy called up. “How can you brag about your good works, when you don’t do a thing about the rampaging racists,” the caller demanded.
C punctuated his history lesson with his personal story. After World War II, his family migrated north for jobs in the burgeoning industrial factories. His first job involved building missile guidance systems.
“I didn’t know what I was doing,” he confessed. “Those guidance systems killed workers all over the world. I won’t do that again. Now I know that we were just convenient workers to exploit.”
The history, so elegantly presented over an hour’s worth of conversations, was actually the history of capitalism. C has been isolated by the pandemic, but now is fired up. The struggle is for him to share his passion and knowledge with his family and friends.
Shedding Illusions
The bosses’ press and the Biden administration frame the fight against fascism as one for democracy and national unity. Nothing can be further from the truth.
“The ruling class will try to silence Trump and his Nazi, racist supporters. They went too far, exposing the rulers’ plan for US-style fascism,” declared a hospital worker. She, too, must share her insights more widely, as well as join and recruit her friends.
The capitalists face economic, political and military crises. These crises force ruling classes around the world to turn to fascism. U.S. bosses will implement their plans under the cover of a call to preserve U.S. democracy with national unity.
Meanwhile, the ruling class spreads the illusion that capitalism can contain racism and avoid fascism with a mass, militant reform movement. The capitalists designed every governmental, cultural and educational institution to guarantee their rule. Only communist revolution can smash these capitalist roadblocks to ending racism and fascism.
Advance Under Attack
The vision of communism opens up new avenues of struggle against racism. For the first time, the potential to end racism becomes real.
Communism thrives on international, multi-racial unity. The collective might of the working class will be unleashed and aimed at the racist scourge that plagues humanity. Capitalist competition, the wage system and the bosses’ need for racist super-exploitation will no longer hold us back. Communism will destroy the material basis of racism.
Racism is an ideological prop that fascism needs to build a mass base. In the U.S., this revolves around white supremacy. Communist revolution will permanently remove that pillar.
The debates over communist answers to racism and fascism are firing up comrades and all those around the party. Everywhere, our party collectives can advance under attack.
Use Collective Discussions to Build ICWP
“I know that a revolution would mean lots of injuries and death,” said a comrade’s friend when they were discussing the riot at the Capitol. “How do I know that it would be worth it?” They were talking about what communists and their friends, families, and co-workers should do in the face of these fascist, racist attacks.
One young couple said they had been afraid of just such a fascist outbreak. They are activists. They said, “[We] may be in a bubble, but almost everyone we know is either socialist or communist.” Although comrades had talked to them before about the contradiction between socialism and communism, they still think of socialism to communism as some kind of progression.
A laid-off Boeing worker said that it was hard for her to put her thoughts into words when she is learning something new (i.e., about communism). A comrade offered to help her with the math in her machinist classes. This led to a short discussion about the best way to learn new things, particularly political things. Our comrade said he learned about politics by discussing and debating with his friends. He asked her to discuss the attempted fascist coup with her friends, then to get back to him with the results. “I will. I appreciate your encouragement!” she responded.
Many of our friends are asking two specific questions: As anti-racists and anti-fascists, what should they do next? And what will we, as communists, do next? We are using these discussions to develop our relationships with our base and are urging them to spread these discussions to others.
We are inviting the people who have been asking these questions to join an online group chat. Together we can struggle to enlarge and enrich our ideas about life in a communist world and how to get there. Collectively discussing anti-fascist, anti-racist ideas and visions of a communist world will help our Party grow. We will develop more and deeper communist relations with our base. As they discuss these ideas with their friends, our base will widen, our struggles will sharpen and our Party will have more input to develop our line and pave the way for a communist future.
This is a clear opportunity to build the ICWP and increase the confidence of the working class in itself and in our Party.
Democratic Party Politicians Are the Main Danger
In the immediate aftermath of the attempted coup in Washington, D.C., we met twice on Zoom to hammer out a statement that would serve as a basis for discussion with our friends about the situation. It is posted on our website, and says in part:
Many of our friends see hope in the elections in Georgia, where voters mobilized to elect two Democrats to the Senate. This will give the Democrats a narrow majority in the Senate.
Fighting to go back to capitalism-as-usual pre-Trump is no solution. One of the biggest illusions we have to overcome is that there are good [progressive] capitalists and bad [Trump and Hitler] capitalists. Capitalists are capitalists who will [and do] jail, bomb or impoverish anyone as long as there are profits to be made.
While some wonder if Democratic politicians like Biden, Pelosi and Harris can be counted on to oppose fascism, we think it’s more correct to say that, in fact, the Democratic Party leadership united with the anti-Trump Republicans are the main danger…
The illusion of democracy is extremely important to the US ruling class. Biden’s choosing a multi-racial cabinet, the impeachment of Trump, and the move to restore order on January 20 are all measures being taken to win the allegiance of the working-class masses to US imperialism.
It is also key to the continued US pretension of global leadership, especially as they move towards war. The measures that they will take now to suppress the Trump faction are a small taste of the fascism they will use to keep masses in line when they do decide to go to war. That’s why we say the Democratic Party leadership and their allies are the main danger.
“Amazing and powerful,” responded a friend. . “Gives me something to think about when I’m in “hope” that Biden/Harris can do good things.” She added, “I’ve been duped, and shouldn’t be.”
Another friend said, “I like your point about how dangerous the anti-Trump but still pro-capitalism-as-usual forces are….I, too, want to aim for a society in which racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. are extinct and in which no one has to struggle to survive and in which we live as one human family…and to bring about this state of affairs, capitalism would have to be replaced with something radically different.
“What do you think a communist revolution would look like?” he continued. “For most Americans, I think the words “communism” and “communist” have very negative connotations… Of course “revolution” as opposed to, say, “transformation,” also conjures up some pretty scary images for many people. Do you worry at all about whether your terminology may alienate more people than it wins over?”
It’s good that the leaflet was able to bring up these key points—about communism and revolution and armed insurrection. People all over the world are having exactly these discussions. Red Flag at its best sets about answering these questions from all corners of the world and from all sectors of society. We urge our friends to continue reading our paper and we promise to continue having these discussions with them and writing them up for Red Flag.
—Comrades in a US schools collective
“Fight fascism. It is looming. I will do the same.”
“Appalled by law enforcement’s lax reaction to storming of capital and disruption of procedures!” a long-time Red Flag reader texted to a comrade. “If we had done that in ‘69 they would have shot us down like dogs!!! If Black Lives Matter had done that, they would have been shot in mass.
“We are stuck between the fascists (Trump and company) and the neoliberals (Biden and the Democratic National Committee),” this friend continued. “And, of course, we are the bogeymen… creeping socialism. Sounds like the Weimar Republic all over again. Hoping for a different outcome,” he concluded.
The Weimar Republic was Germany’s socialist-led government from 1919-1933. It came to power after a year of mutinies and strikes throughout Germany in 1918. That November, communists had led a revolutionary uprising inspired by the Russian revolution a year earlier.
Ultraconservatives and the military opposed the Weimar capitalist democracy. But so did German communists. The Weimar constitution guaranteed a “right of private property” and Article 48 allowed the President to suspend civil rights and ignore the Parliament in an emergency.
Almost immediately, the ruling socialist party ordered the assassination of communists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. They intended to smash the revolutionary workers’ movement.
Then the imperialist victors of the world war imposed punishing “reparations” on Germany. The Weimar government ordered German workers to strike but not to resist the imperialists’ attempt to collect the reparations. Conditions for the working class went from bad to worse, especially after the global capitalist crisis of 1929.
The Communist Party regrouped around elections and reforms, growing rapidly. Meanwhile, the fascist Nazi Party also grew under the banners of “national socialism.” Communist-led workers fought pitched battles against Nazis in working-class neighborhoods.
The Nazi Hitler had led a failed coup attempt in 1923. Ten years later, the president Hindenburg (who succeeded the socialist Ebert) appointed Hitler chancellor. He quickly invoked Article 48 to suppress communists and other opponents. The seats in Parliament that communists had fought so hard for proved useless, as they were forcibly prevented from voting.
We know the rest of that story. If the US is “the Weimar Republic all over again,” we need to fight like hell, and with a better strategy, to change the outcome. That means mobilizing for communist revolution, not elections or democracy, right now.
“Fight fascism… it is looming. I will do the same,” the friend texted a few days later. “In the meantime, I suspect the threat of massive force will hold the fascist stormtroopers in bay this next week.”
“Probably, and going forward, too,” replied the comrade. “But the massive force, prosecution, etc. show the fascist essence of the US capitalist state even, or especially, under the new management.”
The Red Flag reader agreed. “The actions of the tech companies couldn’t make that any clearer. We are stuck between the outright fascists and the neoliberals,” he repeated. “Between a rock and a hard place. It is all a battle in the cultural apparatus. We don’t have that kind of influence.”
We don’t, yet. But we’re not permanently “stuck.” Masses of workers aren’t committed to any faction of the US ruling class. Our battle is to influence and organize them into the revolutionary communist force that will smash the rock and blow up the hard place. That will empower masses to liberate themselves and create the communist outcome we need.
Front page of this issue
