The current wave of white nationalist attacks has its roots in
specific developments of the past period. But there is also, of course, a
longer history of white supremacist violence, stretching from the
original Ku Klux Klan’s terror campaign against freed slaves during
Reconstruction to the 15th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham
in 1963 to the Klan’s broad daylight massacre of leftists in Greensboro,
North Carolina in 1979.
Frequently in the past, the cross burners, bombers, and lynchers were
aided and abetted by sections of the police and the ruling elite who
have sought to use white supremacist violence to deal blows especially
to black people’s struggles for equality and justice. But the Klan and
other fascists have had other targets including Jews, leftists, and
labor organizers. Today the fascists overlap with the most extreme wing
of the “pro-life” anti-abortion movement.
Historically, fascism in Europe was used as a club in the 1920s and
‘30s to defeat the movements of the working class which threatened to
end the capitalist profit system altogether. In the U.S., racial
division, enforced through segregationist policies but supplemented by
state and white-supremacist violence, was used by the ruling class to
maintain its control.
At this point, the fascists in the U.S. are not in a position to
build a real mass base. But the influence of far-right ideas is growing
and there is no room for complacency. Besides the new wave of murderous
attacks, what is alarming is Trump’s success in increasing racial
division which undermines any effort to push back against the massive
inequality and exploitation which characterize neoliberal capitalism.
And if the labor movement and the left do not rise to the challenge of
the next period, the road would be open to something worse than Trumpism
developing a real base.
Black and white workers, natural-born and immigrant face different
situations but they also have common interests. At the end of the last
decade, tens of thousands of black women were victims of the “sub-prime
loans” pushed by the banks and lost their homes. This was part of the
massive loss of wealth by the black population caused by the economic
crisis. Meanwhile the scourge of opioid addiction has ripped through
white working-class communities in the Midwest and the Northeast where
good, unionized manufacturing jobs have largely become a thing of the
past. Deaths due to overdoses have contributed to a significant increase
in mortality among working-class people. Aren’t all of these working
communities victims of neo-liberal capitalism? Do they not share a
common enemy?
The Role of the Labor Movement
The Congress of Industrial Organizations, a union federation now part
of the AFL-CIO, showed workers in the midst of the Great Depression
that there was a different road: uniting against the bosses. They won
real gains for white and black workers. If a mass working-class party
had been built in 1930s and 40s period, far more could have been
achieved and capitalism itself could have been challenged.
When fascism sought to gain a mass base in Britain in the ‘30s they
were pushed back by the labor movement, socialists, and Jewish workers
at the Battle of Cable Street in 1936. Socialist Alternative’s forebears
in the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party mobilized 50,000 workers to
fight back against a fascist rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden
in 1939.
Today we see the beginning of a real fightback by working people,
which began with teachers in states that Trump won in 2016. Hillary
Clinton dismissed all who voted for Trump as “deplorables” but many
Trump voters joined the mass protests less than two years later in West
Virginia, Arizona, and Oklahoma demanding properly funded schools and
fighting the Republican politicians.
Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign in 2016 appealed precisely to
the common interests of working people against the “billionaire class.”
This is what made the billionaires so worried and what electrified the
hundreds of thousands who came out to his rallies.
Defeating the far right will not be achieved by better police
intelligence or liberal hand-wringing. It requires building a force that
is serious about fighting for all working people, against racism,
inequality, and capitalism which is the source of the hatred and
division. Just as many who voted for Trump would have voted for Bernie
if he had been on the ballot in November 2016, we can win back many
people seduced by the racist right-wing conspiracy theories. But to
truly isolate and defeat the reactionaries and fascists, people need a
vision of the future worth fighting for. This is why the struggle
against the far right is inseparable from the struggle for socialism.
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