On The Anniversary Of Greensboro 1979-Never Forget-From The Marxist Archives-Fascism:How to Fight It And How Not To Fight It

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the Greensboro 1979 events.

Markin comment:

The events of Greenboro, North Carolina 1979, today more than ever as we gear up our struggles in the aftermath of the spark of the Occupy movement, should be permanently etched in our minds. We had best know how to deal with the fascists and other para-military types that rear their heads when people begin to struggle against the bosses. The article below points the way historically.
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Markin comment on this article :

Every year, and rightfully so, we leftist militants, especially those of us who count ourselves among the communist militants, remember the 1979 Greensboro, North Carolina massacre of fellow communists by murderous and police-protected Nazis, fascists and Klansmen. That remembrance, as the article below details, also includes trying to draw the lessons of the experience and an explanation of political differences. For what purpose? Greensboro 1979-never again, never forget-or forgive.

Although right this minute, this 2011 minute, the Nazis/fascists are not publicly raising their hellish ideas, apparently “hiding” just now on the fringes of the tea party movement, this is an eternal question for leftists. The question, in short, of when and how to deal with this crowd of locust. Trotsky, and others, had it right back in the late 1920s and early 1930s-smash this menace in the shell. 1933, when they come to power, as Hitler did in Germany (or earlier, if you like, with Mussolini in Italy) is way too late, as immediately the German working class, including its Social-Democratic and Communist sympathizers found out, and later many parts of the rest of the world. That is the when.

For the how, the substance of this article points the way forward, and the way not forward, as represented by the American Communist Party’s (and at later times other so-called “progressives” as well, including here the Communist Workers Party) attempts to de-rail the street protests and rely, as always, on the good offices of the bourgeois state, and usually, on this issue the Democrats. Sure, grab all the allies you can, from whatever source, to confront the fascists when they raise their heads. But rely on the mobilization of the labor movement on the streets to say what’s what, not rely on the hoary halls of bourgeois government and its hangers-on, ideologues, and lackeys.
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LEON TROTSKY ON FIGHTING FASCISTS:

"In this period it is very important to distinguish between the fascists and the state. The state is not yet ready to subordinate itself to the fascists: it wants to ‘arbitrate.’ ... .Our strategic task is to increase these hesitations and apprehensions on the part of the 'arbiter,' its army and its police. How? By showing that we are stronger than the fascists, that is, by giving them a good beating in full view of this arbiter without, as long as we are not absolutely forced to directly taking on the state itself. That is the whole point." —reprinted in Intercontinental Press, 2 December 1974
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On 15 June 1974 London's Red Lion Square witnessed one of the bloodiest confrontations between police and left-wing forces in recent British history. Countless demonstrators were beaten with police truncheons, a number were trampled under mounted patrols, and one young man, Kevin Gately, was killed by the cops, his head so brutally battered that he died of a cerebral hemorrhage. The occasion was a protest against a rally scheduled by the fascist-inspired National Front.

The NF is one of many extreme-rightist organizations that have been surfacing and spreading in Europe during recent months. Their breeding ground is the fear of economic ruin, in particular an intensified competition for jobs in the wake of a worldwide capitalist economic slump.

As in the past, one of the common fascist themes is race hatred against Jews, blacks and now immigrant workers. Former National Front fuehrer John Tyndall was quoted in 1969 as saying: "the Jew is a poisonous maggot feeding on a body in an advanced state of decay" (Sunday Times, 30 March 1969). Along with NF national organizer Martin Webster and others in the group's leadership, Tyndall was during the early 1960's a member of the now-defunct British National Socialist* Movement, which called for "deportation of all non-Aryans" from Britain.

While many of these groups seek to put on respectable airs, their aim is to recruit petty-bourgeois and lumpen elements for the purpose of brutally smashing "the reds" and organized labor. As the history of the rise of Nazism tragically demonstrated, it is literally a life-and-death matter for the workers movement to crush such reactionary paramilitary organizations while they are still weak.

With the growth of the NF in recent years (it polled 113,000 votes in last October's parliamentary elections), many leftists and labor militants have understood the need to stop this racialist anti-communist outfit. The occasion for their protest last June was a National Front meeting against the Labour Party government's decision to grant amnesty to persons deemed “illegal immigrants" under the discriminatory 1971 Immigration Act.

Police Riot at Red Lion Square

On the day of the rally, the 1,500 NF marchers drew up in military formation, drums beating and Union Jacks Flying. Many of the flags were mounted on steel-pointed poles, some of the marchers were dressed in black shirts while others wore army surplus uniforms. A counterdemonstration of about 1,000 was organized by the Communist Party (CP) and Liberation, with contingents of the International Socialists (13) and International Marxist Group (IMG).

Trouble began as the anti-fascist demonstrators approached Red Lion Square, occupied (according to the IS account) by about 500 police including mounted patrols. The bourgeois press and police claim the marchers were told in advance to make a right turn as they entered the square, moving away from the meeting hall where the NF rally was to take place. The left organizations say they were told no such thing. In any case it is clear that a section of the march, with the IMG toward the front, sought to break through the police lines to get to Conway Hall.

The police thereupon launched a baton charge, kicking and punching their way into the crowd. As the momentum of the march carried more people into the square, units of the elite Special Patrol Group, notorious for smashing workers' picket lines, were brought in. They formed a wedge and drove through the crowd, splitting it in two.

The fighting intensified as they cornered one section of the ^marchers in a side street. Then the arrests began. Blood-soaked demonstrators were dragged by their hair to waiting "'police vans and several bodies were left lying in the square, among them Kevin Gately. Some of the remaining protesters regrouped on the side street and jeered the NF marchers, who were now approaching from a different direction. After a pause of about ten minutes, the police suddenly launched a mounted charge against the leftists, a savage and totally unprovoked attack. The National Front column looked on jubilantly, then paraded triumphantly into Red Lion Square cheering the police and chanting, "We got to get the reds'."

The cops' vicious attack, including an unprovoked horse charge and the death of Kevin Gately, are the responsibility of the Wilson government. Gately's funeral drew thousands of angry marchers and the wanton police assault has been vigorously condemned by numerous socialist and union organizations. Yet, incredibly, the government has sought to blame the left, particularly the IMG, for the violence! The recently published Scarman Tribunal report rejected most charges police brutality and denied any responsibility of the cops in: Gately's death. This is in spite of the fact that the demonstrators used no weapons, only the police had instruments which could have caused the head wounds (truncheons and horses' hooves), and there were witnesses to the beating. This "report" is a shameless whitewash of what was in fact a police riot.

However, our proletarian solidarity with the victims of bourgeois "law and order" must not be an excuse to cover up serious errors committed by some leaders of the antifascist demonstration at Red Lion Square. It is not enough to want to fight fascists—one must know how to do it. A New Left policy of confrontation with police who obviously intended to defend the National Front is not the way.

There is no doubt that the IMG sought to break through police lines in order to arrive in front of the meeting hall. Jackie Stevens, a member of the IMG, gave this report: "We came across a line of police, and behind them were mounted police. When we tried to get through to Conway Hall, the police drew their batons and charged..." (Intercontinental Press, 24 June 1974).

It is less clear why the IMG took this dangerously mistaken step. But whatever the prior arrangements with the police; whether demonstrators had made plans beforehand or simply fell into a police trap; if it was bravado or confusion—in any case, the decision to try to push through the police lines was a disastrous move. The fact that the demonstrators lacked any means to defend themselves from the cops' murderous onslaught, while it refutes police theories of a conspiracy to attack the police, only makes this move all the more grievously wrong.

Marxists do not uphold a spurious "right" of fascists to freedom of speech; we call on the labor movement to mobilize to prevent the reactionary terror gangs from spewing out their race-hate poison in mass rallies and by provocations such as their marches in military uniform. But to prevent them from speaking through militant mass action requires a favorable balance of forces—something that was obviously not present in Red Lion Square.

Yes, 20,000 workers could, and should, have prevented the NF from holding its racist meeting. The failure of the unions to mobilize against these anti-labor scum is criminal. But this betrayal cannot be corrected by false heroics, sending several score demonstrators against well-equipped riot police. Not only was one militant killed and many injured, but the National Front scored a significant publicity victory as a result.

"Far Left" Battles Cops in Paris

Unfortunately, such confrontationism is not an isolated phenomenon. In France, while the Stalinists and social democrats systematically abstain from mobilizing the working class ^against the fascists, the fake "Trotskyists" of the United Secretariat (of which the IMG is the British affiliate) have taken a different approach: adventurist clashes with police protecting the fascists. The classic case of this substitutionism occurred on June 21, 1973.

On that date the Ligue Communiste (now Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire), French section of the USec, organized a counterdemonstration against a rally by the fascist Ordre Nouveau ("New Order"). The ON had for some time been campaigning against "wildcat immigration" with virulently racist rhetoric, and had succeeded in provoking assaults on immigrant workers. They planned to highlight this campaign nationally with a mass rally at the Mutuality meeting hall in Paris.

While traditionally the Paris police had not mobilized heavily in conflicts between the right and left, this time they clearly were preparing to defend Ordre Nouveau. First they looked on as the ON turned the meeting hall into an armed camp, moving in van loads of iron pipes, clubs and other assorted weaponry. Then, by the Ligue Communiste's own report, the Mutuality was surrounded by 2,000 police, a veritable army to protect the fascists, waiting for the "far left" demonstrators to make the slightest move.
The LC, which early in the day realized that the police were ready to break up the anti-fascist demonstration, encouraged people to come to the march prepared for a confrontation. The leftists were heavily armed with clubs and molotov cocktails. Thus it was clear from the beginning that the Ligue fully expected a bash with the cops—a battle which, however, they could not possibly win without massive contingents of workers and left militants from all quarters.

When the police cordoned off the area around the hall they were bombarded by incendiaries. The anti-fascist demonstrators then broke up into small groups and long into the night isolated clashes continued throughout the area. While there was no clear military defeat of the leftists, they were unable to do more than harass the -cops and did not stop the fascists. The next day Ligue headquarters were occupied by the police, 25 of its supporters were arrested and the organization was outlawed.

The Spartacist League immediately and vigorously protested this viciously anti-democratic government attack and called for united defense of the Ligue. But we also criticized its adventurist tactics:

"The Trotskyist movement has a long history o£ resistance to fascist groups, including attacking and dispersing fascist meetings.... In this case, however, the presence of massive police force made the relation of forces unfavorable to the left. It would appear that the Ligue Communiste recklessly entered into an adventurist confrontation by attempting to take on the armed power of the state under circumstances which could lead only to the defeat of the left. The correct tactic, given the government's authorization of the meeting, was to mount a campaign calling on the mass workers organizations ... to mobilize tens of thousands of their members to prevent the fascist meeting. In their absence, the Ligue could certainly have organized a mass protest demonstration. This is not the same thing, however, as a futile attempt to overwhelm the police with 1,000 youths."

—"Repeal the Ban on the French Ligue Communiste," WV No. 25, 20 July 1973
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Portugal: A Hair's Breadth from Disaster

Another instance of stupid guerrillaist confrontation tactics occurred earlier this year in Portugal, where it could easily have had disastrous consequences in an explosive pre-revolutionary situation. On the night of January 25-26 several thousand youth and workers in the northern city of Porto surrounded a meeting hall where the rightist Social Democratic Center (CDS) was holding its national congress. This party's leaders include numerous former officials of the Salazar-Caetano dictatorship.

Four leftist organizations-LUAR, MES, PRP, and LCI-called a demonstration in front of the meeting hall. Their joint communique' merely announced a protest action. After an hour, however, a second demonstration arrived on the scene, this one led by the OCMLP (Portuguese Communist Organization Marxist-Leninist, a left-Maoist group), which in an attempt to stop the congress proceedings attacked the paramilitary police who were protecting the building (Esquerda Socialista, 28 January).

This infantile "heroic" gesture led to baton charges by the special police and a tear gas barrage followed by shots, leaving a dozen demonstrators injured, some seriously. The leftists' only means of defense was to hurl bricks. Then beginning around 8 p.m. the regional military commander sent in several army units. The officer in charge asked the CDS to end the meeting (which it did), while the ranks outside fraternized with the demonstrators.

Due to the hostile attitude of the troops, rightist politicians in the Crystal Palace were afraid to leave the building, however, and during the early morning hours a second paramilitary police unit attacked on horse and in personnel carriers. Soldiers reportedly resisted the police assault. Finally, at 7 a.m. parachutists from a base commanded by conservative officers managed to extract the besieged reactionaries (Luta Popular, 2 February; Revolucao, 7 February).

From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-From "Young Spartacus" -"Mobilize British Labor To Fight The National Front (December1978/January 1979)

Markin comment on this series:

One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.

There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.

The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.

Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:

"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."

This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
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Markin comment on this article:

This is good advise on how to think about fighting the fascists when they rear their heads. Frankly, a lot of it could have been written today, just as well as back in 1978.
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From Young Spartacus -Mobilize British Labor To Fight The National Front (December1978/January 1979)

"When 1 first came into politics...the common term of opprobrium or abuse for your political opponents was, of course, to call them a fascist... What is most interesting in Britain in the last four or five years is that there has been an evaporation of that use of the term 'fascist' as a general term of abuse and a greater precision-in what people understand to be fascism. One of the reasons for that is quite simply, social being determines consciousness. When you see two thousand thugs march down a street chanting 'The reds, the reds, we've got to get rid of the reds,' or 'The National Front is a White Man's Front,' then you begin to understand what fascism is and how it differs and how importantly it differs from just ordinary run-of-the-mill right-wing yobs which abound in any class society."

With these words comrade James Flanagan of the Spartacist League/ Britain (SL/B) opened the Spartacus Youth League forum "Mobilize British Labor to Fight the National Front" held at Barnard College, New York on November 16. Quoting electoral statistics from the past four years, he outlined the dramatic growth of the fascist National Front (NF) since 1974.

In the British general election of October 1974 the NF took 113,000 votes. By the time of the local government (municipal) elections of spring 1977, that figure had more than doubled to 250,000 votes nationally, in London alone the fascists polled 119,000 votes in 91 constituencies, beating the Liberals—the junior party of British capitalism—in 33 areas, and taking up to 20 percent of the vote in certain parts of the mainly immigrant East End. While those votes do not constitute a hardened base of organized support for the NF, they nonetheless testify to the seriousness of the fascist threat and the urgency of mobilizing Britain's well-organized labor movement against it.

The question most obviously posed by these developments is—why Britain and why now? Recalling Trotsky's capsule analysis of fascism as the last resort of a desperate bourgeoisie faced with the prospect of its own overthrow, comrade Flanagan, a former member of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association and the Irish Commission of the Workers Socialist League, sketched the deep social decay and critical condition of capitalism in Britain. With 1.5 million workers unemployed, with wages held down as inflation continues at 8-9 percent, and with social services cut to the bone, leaving the already depressed inner cities even more barren, the social conditions which spawn fascist movements already exist in Britain.

Moreover, the bourgeoisie is faced with a strong, undefeated working class which in the past has fought against and defeated attempts to make them pay for the current crisis—from the 1969 revolt which crushed the Labour government's anti-union Bill ("In Place of Strife"), through the 1974 miners strike which felled the Conservative Heath government, right over to the Ford workers who just recently punched a hole in Labour's wage controls. For the bourgeoisie the situation looks bleak:

"Labour hasn't worked; the Tories haven't worked; a Labour-Liberal coalition hasn't worked. The prospects in store for them are weak, hung parliaments, minority governments supported by minority parties. Ultimately what they have to look for as a way of getting out of this situation is some sort of strong state—take on the unions, beat the unions and resolve it in that way. And that importantly is where the fascists come in."

Clearly, evolution in such a direction would mean a qualitative escalation in the level of class struggle in Britain, and the development of a perilous situation in which the alternatives posed would be socialist revolution or fascist barbarism. Britain is as yet some distance from that, but the recurring clashes between the fascists and the left foreshadow greater battles to come.

The Battle of Cable Street

The willingness of the British bourgeoisie to opt for a fascistic solution is shown by events of the past. During the crisis-wracked 1930's, when the German bourgeoisie turned to Hitler's brown-shirts, there arose in Britain a fascist movement—Sir Oswald Moseley's British Union of Fascists (BUF)—which won significant support from sections of the bourgeoisie. The Daily Mail (a leading capitalist daily), for example, had as its headline in the issue of 15 January 1934, "Hurrah For the Fascists."

Clad in black shirts, Moseley's bands held a series of meetings throughout England during the 1933-36 period, aimed at terrorizing immigrant groups and crushing the unions. ("We've got to get rid of the Yids" was one of their chants, a slogan emulated by the National Front of today.) In June of 1934 they held a 15,000 strong indoor rally at the Olympia building in London, beating up would-be hecklers in the audience and demonstrating openly their vicious determination to silence all their opponents.

As the real character of Moseley's movement became clear, the working class began to fight back. In June 1936, a BUF meeting in the coal mining town of Tonypandy in South Wales was broken up and the fascists were driven out of the area. But it wasn't until a couple of months later that the decisive blow was struck against Moseley, in what became known as "The Battle of Cable Street"— named after the site in London's East End where the BUF was routed. The events of the day were described by comrade Flanagan:

"So the culmination came on the 4th of October 1936. Moseley had organized for that day a demonstration to march into the East End of London right through a heavily Jewish area. This was a deliberate provocation in much the same way as Hitler's fascists had marched through Altona, a working-class area of Hamburg just four years earlier. The reaction of the Labour Party tops and the trade-union leaders to this decision was that they weren't going to do anything about it— The Communist Party of Great Britain, which today likes to pose as being the champions of the fight against the fascists in 1936, as the leaders of Cable Street, also advocated that people not go there. They said there is a rally to take place in Trafalgar Square the same day and people should go and march there.

"As it was the Communist Party eventually made it over. Under pressure from the local Communist Party, from the Independent Labour Party of Fenner Brockway and the working class of that area, they actually did turn out. The result was that something like a quarter of a million workers—some estimates put it as high as half a million—turned out to prevent Moseley's fascists from marching through the area. The London police had mobilized 6,000 of their foot division and the entire mounted horse division but they weren't able to cut a path through the crowd."

Comrade Flanagan then cited an account of the battle by the man who later became a Communist Party member of Parliament from the East End. In his book, Our Flag Stays Red, Phil Piratin recalls:

"It was obvious that the fascists and the police would now turn their attention to
Cable Street. We were ready. The moment this became apparent the signal was given to put up the barricades. Supplemented by bits of old furniture, mattresses, and every kind of thing you expect to find in box-rooms, it was a barricade which the police did not find easy to penetrate. As they charged they were met with milk bottles, stones and marbles. Some of the housewives began to drop milk bottles from the roof tops. A number of police surrendered. This had never happened before, so the lads didn't know what to do, but they took away their batons, and one took a helmet for his son as a souvenir."

Cable Street and Today

A direct consequence of the Cable Street rout was a marked decline in fascist activity in that period. Since the late 1960's/early 1970's, however, the fascist movement in Britain has re-emerged as a force to be reckoned with. Grouping together different fascistic sects to form the National Front (NF), NF leaders John Tyndall and Martin Webster have begun building what the latter once referred to as "a well-oiled Nazi machine in this country." Particularly since 1974, the NF has combined electioneering with provocative street marches through largely immigrant areas as a means of winning support. And since 1974 the left has mobilized in attempts to deny the fascists any platform for spewing their race-hate filth.

As comrade Flanagan put it, the spirit which motivated the left,

"and which drew a large number of people into politics at that time was’ No Platform for Fascists'—we must prevent the fascists from meeting wherever they try; a wholly admirable, supportable sentiment. But what they transformed that into was military-style confrontations when the balance of forces wasn't suitable for actually crushing the fascists and what it degenerated into was a series of drawn-out inconclusive brawls, not with the fascists but with the state, the police..."

The high-point of this type of struggle came on August 13, 1977 in the London borough of Lewisham, when 5,000 antifascist demonstrators gathered to stop a 500-strong NF march through this largely West Indian area. Very rapidly, the counter-mobilization became a confrontation with the police who time ever on the British mainland. (Riot gear is of course a familiar sight in Northern Ireland.) The seriousness of this confrontation, which involved a quarter of the entire London metropolitan police force, stung the bourgeoisie, who were quick to go on a red-baiting offensive against the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the main force behind the" demonstration. Labour leaders likewise joined in the witchhunt, denouncing the SWP as "red fascists"(Morning Star, 17 August 1977).

For the most part, however, the left's counter-demonstrations consisted, of adventurist street confrontations with the fascists. Opportunistically ducking out of the difficult task of fighting within Britain's powerful labor movement for leadership prepared to mobilize the unions against the NF, the left tried to substitute itself for the organized working class. And while they were refusing to fight for trade-union defense squads to crush the fascists, they criminally called on the bourgeois state to deal with the Front.

Precisely how stupid and dangerous appeals to the capitalist state are was confirmed in two incidents during this period. In June 1973, the United Secretariat's (USec) French group, then called the Ligue Communiste (LC), engaged in an adventurist confrontation with cops and members of the fascist Ordre Nouveau in Paris, while simultaneously calling on the state to stop the meeting. As a result the LC was banned ("impartially," of course, along with the fascists). In June 1974 the British USec group, the International Marxist Group (IMG), likewise got involved in a brawl with British police in London's Red Lion Square outside an NF meeting the IMG had previously called on the government to stop. In the course of the confrontation the police truncheoned to death a young IMG supporter, Kevin Gately.

Although the SWP at first defended its Lewisham actions, it soon capitulated to the pressure and was instrumental in launching the Anti Nazi League (ANL)—a popular-frontist bloc with liberals, Labour Party "lefts" and other "respectable" figures, which shuns street confrontations with the fascists in favor of social-patriotic appeals to "anti-Nazi" (anti-German) sentiments within the British working class, calls for state bans, and "magic" carnivals to halt the National Front. The creation of this strictly legalist, pacifistic outfit—the right opportunist flip-side of the SWP's previous left adventurism—predictably led to an abdication of any serious struggle against the fascists.

As comrade Flanagan made clear in his talk, the question of a revolutionary strategy to fight the National Front revolves around the question of the pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy and the Labour Party, the mass reformist party of the British working class. The common thread between adventurist street confrontations and wretched appeals to the state is a refusal to take on the question of defeating Labourism, in both its trade-union and parliamentary forms, through intransigent political battle to win over its proletarian base. When the reformist and centrist left appeal to the state to ban fascism they address themselves to the same Labour Party officials who send out the cops in droves to protect the fascist rallies. The task is to mobilize the masses of British unionists, the Labour Party's rank and file, to deal a death blow to the fascist
scum.

No Support to the ANL!

From the outset, the Spartacist League/Britain refused to tail after the ANL, uniquely denouncing it as a popular-frontist formation which would soon lead to outright betrayal. On September 24 this analysis was confirmed. On that day 2,000 NFers marched through London, while the ANL took some 80,000 would-be antifascists miles off in the opposite direction to a carnival in Brixton (in South London)! Only about 1,500 leftists— including the SL/B, who turned out one of the largest single organized contingents—refused to go carnivaling, and went instead to the East End. As it was their forces were pitifully inadequate to stop the fascists who, protected by the usual ranks of police at their side, marched triumphantly into the area. (For a more detailed account see Spartacist Britain No. 5, October 1978.) Interestingly, after comrade Flanagan had concluded his presentation of the ANL's betrayal, two British defenders of the ANL rose to support its decision to go ahead with the Carnival. The Spartacists were "far too damning" of the ANL, they maintained, and "wrong-headed,"
"in suggesting that the Anti Nazi League should have called off a mass demonstration in order to respond to a small counter-demonstration called in another part of London..."

In his summary, Flanagan took issue with this classic reformist argument, virtually identical to the ones used to try to keep the working class away from Cable Street in 1936:

"So what happened with the Anti Nazi League? They heard a month before¬
hand that the fascists were marching through the east of London. This is not
just an ordinary demonstration. It was a march against communism when the
reds were away, through the most oppressed area of London where the
minorities lived. They said they were going to be there and that night they
were. 'There are no "no-go" areas for us in London,' they said, 'we can march
where we want, and we will terrorize this area.' And that's what they did.
Then later that night they rampaged down nearby Brick Lane.

"So the purpose of our sharpness is to actually say: yes, there was a class line
on that day. The people who went to the Carnival were scabs, and people who
went to Brick Lane were not. There was a class line, and it was very, very
clear.

"You see they marched off in the opposite direction. Now you would think their response to that might be: 'Oh god, we ballsed up,' or something like that. 'We're sorry, you know, but...' But they didn't. Socialist Challenge, the paper of the International Marxist Group, had on its back page: yes, we were right! We were right to go, they said, to the Carnival. We were right to leave the black community of the East End defenseless.

"Tony Cliff, now, was more honest in Socialist Worker. He was more honest—he said: ‘If the Anti Nazi League Carnival had been diverted from Brixton, then the ANL would have disintegrated. And that's why they didn't go to the East End but went to Brixton. Because they didn't want to lose the support of Lord Avery, or Peter Hain, or Jonathan Dimbleby, Panorama reporter for the BBC. They didn't want to lose the support of those people, because they’re respectable, because they want mass influence.

"Mass movements are important things. But there's an interesting thing that Trotsky said years and years ago: mass movements are of different characters. The pilgrimage to Lourdes is a mass movement. So was the imperialist invasion of the Soviet Union a mass movement. The bombing of Hanoi was a mass movement. The Anti Nazi League Carnival was also a mass movement, but so was Cable Street in 1936. And that's the spirit we stand on. That's what we say should have happened. On that day, the Communist Party wanted to go to Trafalgar Square. But they at least made it over to the East End and the fascists were routed. The SWP and the IMG can't even claim that. We said in the issue of Spartacist Britain which appeared after this that September 24 has drawn the line. Make your choice

*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-No More Greenboros! Labor Must Smash The Fascists: Communist Workers Party Zigzags Between The Communist International-Derived "Third Period" And Popular Front Strategies (1980)-A Remembrance

Markin comment:

One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.

There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.

The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.

Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:

"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."

This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
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Markin comment on this article :

Every year, and rightfully so, we leftist militants, especially those of us who count ourselves among the communist militants, remember the 1979 Greensboro, North Carolina massacre of fellow communists by murderous and police-protected Nazis, fascists and Klansmen. That remembrance, as the article below details, also includes trying to draw the lessons of the experience and an explanation of political differences. For what purpose? Greensboro 1979-never again, never forget-or forgive.

Although right this minute, this 2011 minute, the Nazis/fascists are not publicly raising their hellish ideas, apparently “hiding” just now on the fringes of the tea party movement, this is an eternal question for leftists. The question, in short, of when and how to deal with this crowd of locust. Trotsky, and others, had it right back in the late 1920s and early 1930s-smash this menace in the shell. 1933, when they come to power, as Hitler did in Germany (or earlier, if you like, with Mussolini in Italy) is way too late, as immediately the German working class, including its Social-Democratic and Communist sympathizers found out, and later many parts of the rest of the world. That is the when.

For the how, the substance of this article points the way forward, and the way not forward, as represented by the American Communist Party’s (and at later times other so-called “progressives” as well, including here the Communist Workers Party) attempts to de-rail the street protests and rely, as always, on the good offices of the bourgeois state, and usually, on this issue the Democrats. Sure, grab all the allies you can, from whatever source, to confront the fascists when they raise their heads. But rely on the mobilization of the labor movement on the streets to say what’s what, not rely on the hoary halls of bourgeois government and its hangers-on, ideologues, and lackeys.
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From Young Spartacus, May 1980, No More Greenboros! Labor Must Smash The Fascists: Communist Workers Party Zigzags Between The Communist International-Derived "Third Period" And Popular Front Strategies (title edited for educational purposes-Markin)

November 3: Five members and supporters of the Communist Workers Party are massacred in broad daylight by KKK/Nazi scum in Greensboro, North Carolina. The fascist guns are aimed at every black, leftist and trade unionist. A Nazi draws 43 percent of the vote in the Republican primary for North Carolina attorney general, almost winning the election. His program: the Greensboro massacre.

Response to the Greensboro Klan killings is swift. Emboldened, the KKK threatens to march in the black and union town of Detroit. In a demonstration initiated by UAW militants and the Spartacist League, five hundred protesters, mostly black auto workers, rally November 10 in Kennedy Square chanting "The Klan Won't Ride in the Motor City!" The Klan does not march.

The Nazis announce that they will "celebrate" Hitler's birthday in downtown San Francisco. Trade unionists and the Spartacist League/Spartacus Youth League initiate the April 19 Committee Against the Nazis (ANCAN) and call for a mass demonstration at Civic Center to crush the fascist threat. The broad support for ANCAN, especially from the labor movement, forces the city government to cancel the Nazis' rally permit and the Nazis announce they will not march. Over 1,200—including a powerful trade union component representing over 22 unions—rally. The Nazis do not show their faces.

The labor-centered anti-fascist mobilizations in Detroit and San Francisco were a far cry from the liberal, preacher-dominated mobilizations supported by much of the left since Greensboro. The five slain members of the CWP are indeed martyrs of the entire working class. The entire labor movement must defend the six CWP friends and supporters who, after surviving the Greensboro massacre, face charges of felony rioting. Nevertheless, the CWP chose to split away from the main anti-fascist mobilization in San Francisco and to appeal to the city mayor rather than the power of the organized labor movement to stop the Nazis. The CWP later wrote about the April 19 demonstration:

"San Francisco's Civic Center and UN Plaza were filled with fiery masses. So strong was the spirit in the march and rally, the cowardly fascists dared not show their faces. They knew if they had, the masses would surely have smashed them."

— Workers Viewpoint, 12 May

The article goes on to cite "the leadership of the CWP in the San Francisco Coalition to Stop the Klan/Nazis" (SFC). But what Workers Viewpoint failed to mention was:

• That the April 19 Committee AgainstNazis, initiated by trade unionists and
the Spartacist League, organized and led the rally in Civic Center—site of
the Nazis' planned "birthday party" for Adolf Hitler

• That the ANCAN rally was endorsedby a broad array of unions and union
leaders, left and minority organizations and prominent individuals

• That if the Nazis had shown up, the CWP wouldn't have been among the
outraged masses who would have smashed them, because their sectarian
rally of at most 400 was at UN Plaza, several blocks awayl

"A Heavy Lesson..."


In Greensboro, the CWP found out what role the cops, courts and capitalist state apparatus play in defense of the fascists against leftists, union organizers and blacks. As reported to Blanche McCrary Boyd in the Village Voice (26 May) by CWP spokesman Nelson Johnson, the Greensboro cops insisted that the marchers be unarmed when the CWF applied for its parade permit. The deep illusions that the CWP has in the bourgeois state are revealed as Johnson is quoted as saying:

"It was a heavy lesson. We made a complete and total mistake. They kept insisting how they would protect us, so we thought the cops were planning on violence, that if there was going to be trouble it would be because they would plant a provocateur or something— And it was eerie, you know, when we got here. After all this discussion, where were the pigs?"

According to the Voice article, the cops turned over a copy of the parade permit to a known Klan member. The cops knew where the KKK/Nazis were assembling, that the Klansmen were armed and intended to follow the CWP march route. There is overwhelming evidence indicating that the cops were complicit in the massacre. Meanwhile, a North Carolina grand jury has indicted the Greensboro Six on charges of felony rioting, while the KKK assassins are walking the streets. The CWP itself charges the state with conscious complicity in the murders.

But did the CWP learn this "heavy lesson," paid for so expensively with the blood of its comrades? Amazingly, confronted with the need to mobilize
against the Nazi Hitlerfest in San Francisco, the CWP runs to... the state! Defending the CWP "strategy" of calling on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to revoke the Nazis' permit and endorse their SFC demonstration, a CWP supporter speaking at an SL forum in San Francisco April 25 argued that contradictions within the ruling class could be exploited by demanding that "anti-fascist" politicians take a stand. As stated in their paper:

"At times, this means uniting with certain low-level politicians such as those in the City Council. It also means utilizing the differences and contradic¬tions among the enemy, such as pressuring the government to take a stand against their fascist tools. That's why the Communist Workers Party is asking the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to endorse the upcoming April 19 anti-Nazi demonstration."

— Workers Viewpoint, 19 April

"People's Front" or Independent Working Class Action?

Adventurist actions of a handful of militants and abject reformist appeals to the "liberal" bourgeoisie and its state are but two sides of the same coin. Both are based on fundamental pessimism that the enormous social power of the working class can be brought to bear in the struggle against the fascist threat. When the CWP-led SFC foreswore any confrontation with the Nazis on April 19, it claimed that the working people of San Francisco were unprepared. The ANCAN rally showed that it was the reformist policy of the CWP which was found lacking—not the determination of the labor movement and oppressed in the Bay Area.

The refusal of the social democratic and Communist parties of Germany to mobilize the working class in a united struggle against fascism independently of the capitalists paved the way for the Nazi victory in 1933. The CWP mirrors the policy of the Stalinized Communist International after 1935 when, following the spectacular failure of the "Third Period" sectarian adventurism, Dimitrov's class-collaborationist"United Front Against Fascism" was adopted. Having abandoned the struggle for proletarian revolution, the European CPs sought a political bloc with the "anti-fascist" capitalists. In his report to the Seventh Congress of the Communist International, Dimitrov put it thus: "Now the toiling masses in a number of capitalist countries -are faced with the necessity of making a definite choice, and of making it today, not between proletarian dictatorship and bourgeois democracy, but between bourgeois democracy and fascism."

The bloody consequence of this policy in Spain in 1937—where the Stalinists disarmed the proletariat and crushed its revolution in order to maintain their "anti-fascist" bloc with what Trotsky called the "shadow" of the bourgeoisie—was the Francoist victory. Spain in 1937, Indonesia in 1965, Chile in 1973—in each case reaction triumphed and the proletariat was led to bloody defeat under the banner of the popular front. The Stalinists promulgate the absolutely false conception that a basic social conflict exists between bourgeois democracy and fascism. But fascism appeared in Europe following World War I as a necessary development of the epoch of capitalist decline and decay—a last resort of the bourgeoisie when it is no longer possible to rule through normal parliamentary measures. The popular front is simply another bourgeois solution to the conditions which lead to fascism, a period when the bourgeoisie is unable to crush a combative working class with the "legal" mechanisms of bourgeois terror. At the same time, the working class movement lacks the revolutionary leadership to resolve the ensuing social crisis on its own terms through the establishment of its own state power. The popular front—by inviting the workers' misleaders into the capitalist government—is the mechanism by which the bourgeoisie disciplines the workers through the reformist and Stalinist parties. The demoralization engendered in both the working class and petty-bourgeoisie by the popular front experience opens the road for fascist reaction.

The Trotskyist strategy to smash fascism is counterposed to the opportunist/adventurist- zigzags of the Stalinists; the April 19 anti-Nazi mobilization was a historic reconfirmation of the Trotskyist program by uniting workers, minorities and socialists to stop the Nazi threat. No faith can be placed in the bourgeois state which covers for the KKK/Nazi butchers, indicts the leftists, and uses every "anti-extremist" law to persecute the left and working class movement. There is no substitute for the independent action of the organized proletariat.

CWP: Revolutionary Verbiage, Liberal Practice

As Stalinists, the CWP has never rejected class-collaborationist blocs in principle. The CWP and its predecessor, Workers Viewpoint Organization
(WVO), eclectically adopted "Third Period" Stalinist verbiage including the dogma of "social fascism." In 1974 Workers Viewpoint polemicized against the Dimitrov/Stalin "united front against fascism":

"...we disagree with comrades who uphold the united front against fascism as the strategy for the present— We, however, feel that even though the menace of fascism is increasing due to the changing material conditions, the ruling class at this point still holds the same strategy."

— Workers Viewpoint,
September 1974 (emphasis in original)

In 1975, in a tawdry defense of its opposition to busing in Boston as a minimal means to achieve school integration, the WVO labeled the "'liberal' bourgeoisie" as "even more dangerous." The May 1975 issue of Workers Viewpoint dribbled on that "In the busing issue, the split of the working class signals a greater menace of fascism than the K.KK, the Hicks and Kerrigans." According to the infantile and reactionary raging of Workers Viewpoint, everything from busing to "decadent" movies like Polanski's Chinatown to democratic rights for homosexuals is considered a liberal plot for "fascisation." Most recently the CWP joined the social-democratic Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee and right-wing bourgeois feminists (!) to demonstrate against Deep Throat at Harvard

That the defeat of busing in Boston and Louisville by racist reaction, the reactionary anti-homosexual campaign of Anita Bryant and, most importantly, Carter's anti-Soviet war drive have fueled the growth of the fascist organizations should be obvious. The workers movement can have nothing but contempt for so-called "communists" who align themselves with the most reactionary forces in U.S. society as the CWP has. Now, it wants to turn toward the "liberal" bourgeoisie it accused of being responsible for the "fascisation" of America. But liberal politicians don't provide much aid to the CWP's popular front illusions. Even the New York Times, organ of the "enlightened" bourgeoisie, tried to pass off the broad daylight assassinations of the CWP 5 by the fascist filth as a "shoot out" among "extremists" of the right and left. On the one hand, the CWP blocs with reactionary bigots like Hicks and Anita Bryant and on the other with the "progressive" union-busters on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. No matter which wing of the bourgeoisie they capitulate to, the CWP's Stalinism renders it a roadblock to effective mobilization of the labor movement to crush the fascist threat.

American fascism is not simply fueled by racism but represents the extreme right-wing, militant fringe of Carter/ Brzezinski's anti-Soviet war lust. The restoration of the draft coupled with the imperialist war drive opens up those possibilities further.
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Defend the Greensboro Six!

On November 3, 1979 Klan and Nazi thugs poured gunfire into an anti-Klan demonstration in Greensboro, North Carolina. When this murderous cold¬blooded assault was over, five members and supporters of the Communist Workers Party were dead and many other demonstrators were wounded.
Films of the massacre shown on nationwide TV demonstrated beyond doubt that the fascist gunmen systematically went for prominent CWP supporters. This was no "shootout," as it was labeled by the capitalist press. It was cold-blooded murder in broad daylight!

Now "felony rioting" charges have been leveled against six survivors of the Greensboro massacre! The Greensboro Six—Nelson Johnson, Rand Mandella, Lacie Russell, Alan Blitz, Dorothy Blitz and Percy Simms—are supporters or friends of the CWP.

Mass mobilizations of black people and the labor movement are urgently needed to demand, "Drop the charges against the Greensboro Six! Jail the Klan Greensboro Murderers!"

The Partisan Defense Committee (PDC) is" a working-class defense organization in accordance with the political views of the Spartacist League.

The PDC has contributed to the Greensboro Justice Fund. Young Spartacus readers are urged to send donations to: Greensboro Justice Fund, P.O. Box 2861, Grand Central Station, New York, NY 10017.

Young Spartacus reprints below a telegram sent by the Partisan Defense Committee in defense of the Greensboro Six

Western Union Telegram


Michael Schlosser
Guilford County District Attorney 1 Governmental Plaza Greensboro, N.C. 27401

WE DEMAND THAT FELONY.CHARGES RECENTLY RAMMED THROOGH A GRAND JURY AGAINST SIX GREENSBORO ANTI-KLAN/NAZI PROTESTERS BE IMMEDIATELY DROPPED. FROM THE 1958 MONROE "KISSING CASE" TO THE RACIST FRAME-UPS OF ROBERT F. WILLIAMS, THE WILMINGTON TEN AND CHARLOTTE THREE, TO THE BLOCKING OF UNIONIZATION AT J.P. STEVENS JUSTICE "NORTH CAROLINA STYLE" IS NOTORIOUS. THOSE WHO SURVIVED THE NOVEMBER AMBUSH BY COLD-BLOODED KLAN/NAZI MURDERERS ARE BLAMED FOR THE DEATHS OF THEIR OWN COMRADES. YOUR POLICY OF THREATENING OPPONENTS OF THE KLAN/NAZIS WITH ARREST AND IMPRISONMENT TRIES TO GAG ANTI-FASCISTS AMD PUTS THE POWER OF THE STATE BEHIND EMBOLDENED FASCIST THUGS. THIS IS AN OUTRAGE TO ALL THOSF OPPOSED TO THE HITLER-LOVER RACK-HATE KILLER KLAN AND NAZIS. JAIL THE KILLERS OF THE GREENSBORO FIVE. HANDS OFF THE ANTI-KLAN/NAZI PROTESTERS.

Toni Randell
Partisan Defense Committee P.O. Box 99, Canal St. Sta. Mew York, NY 10013

Hard Right Extremism in America and Europe - by Stephen Lendman

Hard Right Extremism in America and Europe
by Stephen Lendman

Hard Right Extremism in America and Europe - by Stephen Lendman

Anders Breivik's July 22 Oslo rampage highlighted a problem far greater than him, a topic three previous articles discussed, stopping short of what this article addresses. More on how Europe is affected below.

In America, hardline anti-government groups like the Sovereign Citizen movement highlight how far right America's shifted since the 1980s. Their adherents (Sovereigns) believe they alone should decide what laws to obey or ignore, not elected officials, judges, juries or law enforcement bodies.

They also oppose paying taxes, promote racial hate, attract white supremacists, and resort to violence to assert their will. In addition, they subscribe to other extremist views, advocating a subculture run exclusively by their rules. Without central leadership, it's impossible to know their size, though it's believed to be many thousands.

America's Militia movement is also politically significant, paramilitaries against government restricting their rights, especially to bear arms. It represents an outgrowth of independent survivalist, anti-tax, and other right-wing Patriot movement subculture groups, believing government is hostile to their sovereignty.

More recently, America's Tea Party phenomenon represents political Washington's sharp right turn. A previous article discussed them, accessed through the following link:

http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2010/10/americas-tea-party-phenomenon.html

Stressing fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government and free market fundamentalism, demagogic extremists aroused millions of working Americans to support policies against their own interests, thinking they're doing the right thing because their minds have been manipulated to believe it.

Funded by extremist right-wing groups, as well as billionaires like David and Charles Koch, the movement gained national recognition in media-hyped mid-2009 congressional town hall protests against Obamacare, banker and other bailouts, fiscal excesses, and bogus claims about Obama's social agenda. In fact, he's rock-hard conservative without one.

Then in February 2010, its Nashville, TN national convention increased its prominence, highlighting an agenda to shift America further right on the pretext of popular opposition to big government and fiscal irresponsibility.

As a result, hardline extremists mostly attracted middle income Americans facing lost jobs, homes, and economic uncertainty at a time they should have shifted left, not right. Instead of blaming big government, a groundswell for addressing popular needs should be demanded.

It didn't. Demagogues took advantage and aroused millions, aided by daily Fox News support and its lunatic fringe hosts. Among them, Glenn Beck (now gone), Bill O'Reilly, and others rage against big government, hyping an extremist agenda. Maliciously, they spread fear effectively enough to attract growing numbers of adherents, largely mindless that their best interests are compromised, not helped.

Media power manipulation, of course, is essential, whether against big government, alleged terrorists, or anything diverging from right-wing politics, easily able to morph into something more sinister.

In his 2003 article titled, "Fascism Anyone?" political scientist Laurence W. Britt discussed its 14 common elements, saying:

"These basic characteristics are more prevalent and intense in some regimes than in others, but they all share some level of similarity."

In 2003 America, decades earlier and today, it's present, worrisome, and growing, post-9/11 and earlier. More on that below.

Elements of Police State Fascism

(1) "Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism," including display flags, lapel pins, and other patriotic nationalist expressions, rallying people for a common cause.

(2) "Disdain for the importance of human rights" and civil liberties, believing they hinder ruling elitist power.

(3) "Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause," shifting blame for failures, "channel(ling) frustration in controlled directions," and vilifying targeted groups for political advantage.

(4) "The supremacy of the military/avid militarism," allocating a disproportionate share of national wealth and resources for it.

(5) "Rampant sexism," viewing women as second-class citizens.

(6) "A controlled mass media," in public or private hands, promoting power elite policies.

(7) "Obsession with national security," using it as an instrument of belligerence and oppression.

(8) "Religion and ruling elite tied together," portraying themselves as militant defenders of the nation's dominant religion at the expense of one or more others, deemed inferior or threatening.

(9) "Power of corporations defended," for economic power, military production, and social control.

(10) "Power of labor suppressed or eliminated," leaving political and corporate dominance unchallenged.

(11) "Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts," because they represent intellectual and academic freedom, subversive to national security and political control.

(12) "Obsession with crime and punishment," handling them by draconian criminal justice measures and practices.

(13) "Rampant cronyism and corruption," power elites enriching themselves at the expense of others less fortunate.

(14) "Fraudulent elections," manipulated for desired results by disenfranchising opposition voters or simply rigging the process.

All these characteristics describe America, a democracy in name only, run by powerful elitists for their own interests at the expense of all others.

Huey Long once said fascism will arrive "wrapped in an American flag." In his book "Friendly Fascism," Hunter College Professor Bertram Gross called Ronald Reagan its prototype ruler, distinguishing 1980s America from classic models in Germany, Italy and Japan.

He described a slow, powerful "drift toward greater concentration of power and wealth in a repressive Big Business-Big Government," Big Brother alliance. It leads "toward a new and subtly manipulative form of corporatist serfdom," its friendly face turning dark as hardline policies are revealed - Machiavellian harshness exploiting others for wealth and power.

Today's Duopoly-Run America

On issues mattering most, little distinguishes Republicans from Democrats. Supporting militarism, permanent wars, corporate dominance, and police state harshness, they represent wealth and power interests at the expense of public needs and rights.

As a result, more than ever, American democracy is bogus under a police state apparatus, sacrificing human rights and civil liberties for national security, wealth, power, and control. Examples include:

(1) An array of pre and post-9/11 anti-terrorist measures.

(2) Decades of illegal surveillance of individuals and activist groups, more virulent and sophisticated than ever under Obama. He's wicked, morally compromised, duplicitous, corrupt and lawless.

Notably, he usurped unchecked surveillance powers, including warrantless wiretapping, accessing personal records, monitoring financial transactions, and tracking emails, Internet and cell phone use to gather secret evidence for prosecutions.

As a result, more than ever under his leadership, America's a repressive Big Brother society, targeting anyone lawlessly for unchallenged rule.

(3) A war on free expression, dissent, and constitutional freedoms, using the courts to enforce repression. It's especially true since the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Penalty Act. It eased surveillance restrictions, as well as enacting draconian death penalty and habeas-stripping provisions. Its passage smoothed the way for the 2001 Patriot Act and other repressive measures that followed.

Alone, in fact, the Patriot Act erodes four Bill of Rights freedoms, including:

-- Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments due process rights by permitting indefinite detentions;

-- First Amendment freedom of association; and

-- Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, and more.

In November 2002, the Bush administration's Homeland Security Act (HSA) combined formerly separate government agencies into a more sweeping authoritarian apparatus. Thereafter, it's been used repressively.

Obama's uses it like Bush, usurping unprecedented power for total control, sacrificing freedoms for national security.

As a result, America enforces police state harshness. Merriam-Webster defines it as:

"a political unit characterized by repressive governmental control of political, economic, and social life usually by an arbitrary exercise of power by police and especially secret police in place of regular operation of administration and judicial organs of the government according to publicly known legal procedures."

America has in place constitutional/statute laws, administrative and legal procedures, yet skirts them routinely and willfully to assert control.

It's a short leap to tyrannical rule. Whether or not announced, its iron fist leaves no doubt about unfriendly American fascism.

Right Turn in Europe

Anders Breivik's rampage signifies a far greater problem than him, symptomatic of growing European ideological extremism, transcending a single atrocity.

Xenophobia is one of its expressions, Merriam-Webster defining it as "fear(ing) and hat(ing) strangers or foreigners or anything strange or foreign." During hard times, large numbers of people are affected, though few commit violence.

In America, Tea Party protests reflect it, supporting far to the right of center policies, railing against big government, mindless about flourishing state socialism, yet wanting to take back the country and restore its ill-defined honor.

Throughout Europe, nearly all countries have parties wanting foreigners evicted, returning them to their "rightful citizens," whatever that means, given how many have had roots elsewhere at other times.

Moreover, fascist parties notably once had leftist leaders who turned right. Mussolini, in fact, invented the word "fascism," practicing it destructively with his Axis partners. Today's model is more subtle, but just as dangerous, eroding democracy and social justice for unchallenged power.

As a result, socially democratic rule virtually disappeared. Neoliberalism replaced it, notably in Nordic countries. Right-wing parties rule them, except Norway, run by a Labour/Socialist Left/Centre Party coalition, its so-called red-green alternative.

Challenging it is Norway's Progress Party - conservative, xenophobic, and hard-line. Perhaps Breivik's rampage warned Labour to shift right, tone down its Israeli criticism, think twice about supporting an independent Palestine, and remain committed to NATO's global imperialism.

Sweden's right turn got some observers to ask about European social democracy's future. Is it quiescent or lost? Last September, its Social Democrats lost badly, its worst showing since 1914. Its right-wing Alliance prevailed. A far right anti-immigrant party won seats for the first time.

It matters because Sweden's virtuous middle straddled capitalist and communist extremes. Now, however, for the first time in over 80 years, it's over. It no longer represents social democratic values. If lost in Sweden, Norway, and other Nordic countries, can they exist anywhere? Is tyranny over the horizon?

Notably since the 1990s, Social Democrats systematically undermined former policies, losing popular support as a result. After its electoral loss, Svenska Dagbladet (a daily newspaper) said Sweden's political landscape changed fundamentally under "a center-right government without a majority, a crashed social democracy, and a kingmaker party with roots in the far right."

Rising ethno-nationalist/anti-multiculturalism throughout Europe resides there, in Denmark and Norway. Is fascism a short leap ahead? Nazism arose from hard times. They demand change that can include more than planned, including radical right turns, intolerance, totalitarianism, and global wars, creating upheaval and unfit to live in societies.

It threatens Europe, America, and everywhere conditions exist to transform liberal democracies to tyranny. It destroyed Weimar Germany and shifted Great Society America to right-wing/hardline rule, perhaps headed toward full-blown fascism.

Famed journalist George Seldes (1890 - 1995) saw it flourish in the 1930s, worrying it could derail New Deal America. In his 1934 book titled, "Iron, Blood and Profits," he discussed a "world-wide munitions racket," citing WW I militarists and weapons makers in Europe and America.

"Merchants of death" he called them, promoting "imperialism (and) colonization - by means of war....the healthfulness of their business depend(ing) on slaughter. The more wars," the greater their riches.

His 1943 book titled, "Facts and Fascism" returned to the theme, explaining "Fascism on the Home Front" in Part One, called "The Big Money and Big Profits in Fascism."

In Parts Two and Three, he discussed "Native Fascist Forces" in industry and his day's media. They were a shadow of today's in influence and reach, cheerleading for wars and corporate extremism, elements one step from fascism, in more or less intense forms.

In his 1935 novel titled, "It Can't Happen Here," Sinclair Lewis feared its emergence in hard times, led by a charismatic, self-styled reformer/populist champion.

Con men like Bush and Obama exploit conditions to enact police state laws, crack down on dissent, wage imperial wars, homeland ones on scapegoats, and serve powerful interests at the expense of others.

September 11 accelerated extremism in America. Breivik's rampage may notch it up in Europe. Fascist seeds there already took hold. Maybe now they'll grow and flourish. That prospect should arouse popular resistance against what no one should tolerate anywhere.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen (at) sbcglobal.net.

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.
See also:
http://sjlendman.blogspot.com


This work is in the public domain

From The "In Defense Of Marxist" Website Via The "Renegade Eye" Blog-Norwegian massacre: “This is an attack on the Labour Movement” - Labour must respond!-Written by Alan Woods

Norwegian massacre: “This is an attack on the Labour Movement” - Labour must respond!-Written by Alan Woods

Saturday, 23 July 2011

World public opinion has been shocked by the news of the bloody massacre in Norway. At least 91 people have been killed, including 84 members of the Labour Youth Organisation (AUF) in a summer camp.

The AUF summer camp only a few days ago. The massacre began with a bomb blast in Oslo that killed seven people. But the real bloodbath took place a little later on the island of Utøya, where hundreds of young people had gathered for a summer school of the Labour Youth (AUF). The island was given to them by the trade unions of Oslo and is a place of great symbolic importance for the whole labour movement.

“He travelled on the ferry boat from the mainland over to that little inland island posing as a police officer, saying he was there to do research in connection with the bomb blasts,” NRK journalist Ole Torp told the BBC. Another eyewitness explains that he arrived claiming he was a police officer and was there to talk about the bombing in Oslo and when he had gathered enough people he started shooting.

In a horrific moment, young people in bathing costumes were mown down. In scenes of indescribable panic, they jumped into the sea to save themselves and were shot at as they tried to swim away from the scene of carnage. Others cowered behind rocks or hid in caves, terrified, as the gunman proceeded to shoot one defenceless person after another.

The gunman wandered around the island posing as a police officer, calling people forward and then shot them as they emerged from their hiding places. 15-year old Elise saw a police officer and thought she was safe, but then he started shooting. “He first shot people on the island. Afterward he started shooting people in the water,” she said.

Several victims pretended as if they were dead to survive. But after shooting the victims with one gun, the gunman shot them again in the head with a shotgun. The Norwegian press this morning showed pictures of beaches covered with bodies. These were the actions of a cold and calculating killer.

Who is Anders Behring Breivik?

The finger of blame was immediately pointed at al-Qaeda. Who else could it be? The possibility of such attacks by Islamic extremists was always a there, given that Norway has sent troops to Afghanistan, and this is backed by the Norwegian Labour Party and not opposed by its youth organisation. President Obama lost no time in conveying his most sincere sympathy, and making good use of the opportunity to drum up support for continuing the “war on terror”.

Such has been the effect of the propaganda campaign since 9/11 on the public psyche that terrorism is immediately associated with men with a dark complexion dressed like Arabs or Afghans. However, the information subsequently released immediately exploded this theory. It was revealed that the Labour Party Youth (AUF) camp was attacked by someone described as a man with blond hair and of Nordic appearance, dressed in a police uniform. The murderer is neither a Muslim nor a member of al-Qaeda but a member of the Norwegian middle class.

Anders Behring Breivik is a Norwegian petty bourgeois. He went to business school in Norway and runs a small business. He was evidently not short of money, as he bought a farm, on which his small business was run, which had previously been used by elements in the criminal underwold as a marijuana plantation. The plantation was also connected to a famous bank robbery (NOKAS robbery). Probably in preparation for yesterday’s events Breivik bought six tonnes of artificial fertiliser, which is commonly used for home-made bombs, on May 4th, using his farming business as cover.

He is also a right-wing extremist. He was an active member of the racist Fremskrittspartiet, which is currently running at 20% or so in the polls, and their youth organisation, supposedly for 10 years, until 2007. He's an opponent of multi-culturalism and viciously anti-Muslim. He has apparently suggested recreating the US Tea Party in Europe and expressed support for the English Defence League. He wrote things like:

“All hate ideologies ought to be treated the same:
“Islamism has killed 300 million
“Communism has killed 100 million
“Nazism has killed 6-20 million”

He calls former prime minister Gro Harlem Brundlant a "fatherland killer”, for having put forward the idea that anyone who lives in Norway is a Norwegian. He also constantly refers to how “Marxists” supposedly have infiltrated everywhere, including culture, schools and the media.

There can be no doubt that this was a political act. The targets were not haphazard, as is usually the case in attacks by mad people. They were carefully selected for political reasons. It seems likely that the main target was The Labour Norwegian Prime Minister Jan Stoltenberg. Hundreds of young people were awaiting a speech the prime minister was to give there today.

The international media is unanimous in regarding these atrocities as the act of a “mad gunman”. In this way they try to draw attention away from the political content of these events. A madman is not responsible for his actions, which are of a purely random and accidental character. But there was nothing either random or accidental about this.

Norwegian terror “experts” are perplexed at the fact that it was a Norwegian right-wing terrorist that committed the crime and not a Muslim. Some have commented that the Norwegian intelligence services have not given enough attention to the threat of right-wing extremism in the last few years. Did they not know of Breivik’s extreme right wing views?

There are many aspects of this case that are unclear. Did Breivik act alone or was there more than one gunman? The impression was initially given that he acted alone. But there are witnesses saying there was also at least one person without uniform on the island participating in the slaughter. Time will tell. Interestingly, Labour leader Stoltenberg stressed that the police were investigating the possibility of international links.

Labour must act!

The leader of AUF, Eskil Pedersen, held a press conference this morning calling the attack an attack on democracy and said that AUF would continue to stand by its values of anti-racism and for democracy and equality.

Soltenberg, the Prime Minister, obviously shaken by this atrocity, told the television cameras: “This is an attack against the Norwegian labour movement, against the Norwegian Labour Party and its youth organisation.” That is absolutely correct. However, this message was immediately diluted by the BBC News, which said it was an attack “against Norway’s political system and Norway’s values.”

Right wing politicians like Sarkozi and Angela Merkel pander to anti-Muslim sentiments to curry favour with the right wing, as do the press, with people like Rupert Murdoch. They encourage extremist and anti-immigrant elements. In the case of Norway, the Conservative Party is preparing to form a coalition government with Fremskrittspartiet, if the present left-wing coalition is defeated at the next election. It is therefore wrong to suggest any kind of agreement with the right wing bourgeois parties to “defend democracy” against the far right.

The Labour leader, having correctly emphasized that this was an attack against the Labour Movement, then went on to say that the matter should be left in the hands of the police. This is a mistake. The state cannot be relied upon to provide effective defence against the fascists. The state intelligence services have ignored the activities of fascist groups, and a section of the state always has fascist sympathies. Blind belief in the efficacy of the state to protest us can lull us into a false sense of security with fatal results. Let us remember that this assassin was able to commit mass murder because he was dressed as a policeman.

The attack has unleashed an atmosphere of fear that needs to be fought. The Socialist Youth (SU) were forced to cancel their summer camp which was due to take place next week, on the very same island. They have released a statement of solidarity with the AUF, in which their leader, Olav Magnus Linge, put it very well: “for all dead comrades, not a minute's silence, but a life of struggle”.

The attack poses the question of how to defend the Labour Movement and its youth organisations from fascists. The Labour Youth, the Youth Wing of the trade unions, and the Youth of the Socialist Left party should immediately link up to form self-defence committees, linked to the trade unions and the shop stewards committees. Every public activity should be patrolled and defended, and every act of aggression responded to energetically.

The organised working class must learn to depend only on itself. Only the Labour Movement can combat the menace of fascist and right wing groups. But to do so effectively, it must respond to every fascist provocation by mobilizing the full might of the organised working class. The Norwegian Labour Movement is very powerful. It must use its power to teach the fascists a lesson. The Norwegian trade unions should call a 24-hour general strike to protest this attack.

The labour organisations of the world must show solidity by mass action. Commemoration events are now being organised in Sweden. But what is needed is not just an outpouring of mourning but international solidarity action. The unions in other countries should organise protest meetings and demonstrations – starting with Sweden. Let the world see that the international Labour Movement will not be cowed by any fascist aggression, and that we will come out onto the streets to meet any threat to our rights! Let our slogan be: an injury to one is an injury to all.

It is time to wake up! For many years Norway seemed to be an island of peace and tranquility in a turbulent world. Now this comforting illusion has been brutally shattered. The military are now on the streets of the Norwegian capital guarding public buildings, while many families mourn their dead children. The world crisis of capitalism spares no country and no individual. It is, to use the phrase of Lenin, horror without end.

London, 23rd July, 2011

*From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Leninism vs. Stalinism On The United Front: What Strategy To Fight Fascism? (1980)

Markin comment:

One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.

There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.

The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.

Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:

"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."

This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.
********
Markin comment on this article:

This article is a rather succinct description of the differences between the early Communist International Lenin-Trotsky-derived united front tactic and the later Stalin—derived popular front strategy. In practice, the difference between pushing the international proletarian struggle forward and acting primarily as agents for Stalinized Soviet foreign policy- against revolution, in short. I have, periodically addressed the question of the united front tactic and have placed a number of previous articles from historic sources, and commentaries on those historic sources so I will only address the united front question as it applies to the struggle against fascism. Not because the tactic works differently on that question but rather that it takes added urgency to try to create a united front against our mortal enemies on the streets when they raise their heads.

In the best of situations, of course, a mass communist party with authority in the working class and few social-democratic opponents would not need to use the united front, or its use would not be as pressing. Call the demonstration or other action, bring out your membership, and see who else shows up. And a lot of others will, as the experience of the Bolshevik revolution demonstrated when the deal when down for real. For the rest of us, as a sign of our individual organizational weaknesses (or in a case when there is more than one authoritative working class organization with a mass following) the united front is the supreme tactic to get a mass to come out in defense of their organizations. We now know, if previous generations didn’t know or chose not to know, that is what it comes to.

I, and not I alone, have always argued that we need to “nip the fascists in the bud” whenever they ill-advisedly try to show themselves on the streets for some “celebration.” We have no other recourse than to try to create the united front under the traditional practice of marching separately (under your own banners and with your own propaganda) and striking together (united on this particular issue). As this article argues that is easier said that done with the political consciousness at the level it is (or was, since this is a 1980s article but, if anything, it is even lower these days-particularly on the issues of reliance on the state to "ban the fascists" and on “education” (the debate issue) rather than confrontation. On this question, however, there is nothing to debate, there is no will on the part of the state to break these para-military thugs up and we are left to cobble on own resources for a united front. By any means necessary.
*********
From Young Spartacus, October 1980-Leninism vs. Stalinism On The United Front: What Strategy To Fight Fascism?


We publish below a letter Young Spartacus received in June in response to our polemic against the Communist Workers Party (CWP) last May on the strategy to fight fascism and YSp's reply.

June 17, 1980 Los Angeles
Young Spartacus:

I enjoyed your discussion of Dimitrov ["CWP Zigzags Between Third Period' and Popular Front," Young Spartacus No. 82, May 1980] and its particular relevance to the fight against fascist groups in this country. But, if you want to discuss Dimitrov, I think you should complete the discussion.
It is true that his views were presented at the CPSU's 7th Party Congress in 1935. But he only represented one half of a debate! True, it was the winning side, but the alternative position of a "united working class front" of different elements calling for dictatorship of the proletariat (The only real alternative to Dimitrov!) was written by R. Palme Dutt in his Fascism and Socialist Revolution [1934-35]. In this volume he clearly and brilliantly outlines the linkages of the failures of capitalism to inter-imperialist contradictions on one side and the failures of the social democrats on the other. The line which you are taking is diluted Dutt, so why not go read him and draw him into the discussion. Another Marxist discussion from the period which is also very good is Daniel Guerin's Fascism and Big Business. He is stronger than Dutt in explaining how fascist ideology and organization work, but weaker in explaining the causes of fascism within the contradictions of capitalism and imperialism.

Several other points remain, however:
1 By your definitions Dutt was aStalinist. He was the head of the-British CP. How can this be?

2. If you want to clearly present apolitical alternative to the latter day
Dimitrovs, you must work out a few bugs in your line. To begin, you are
correct in criticizing the CWP's [Communist Workers Party] reliance on the
state, but what about your reliance onbourgeois unions and petty-bourgeois
nationalist organizations? The alternative to Dimitrov is not going to liberal organizations, whether labor unions or minority organizations, as an alternative to the large bourgeoisie. This is really an extension of Dimitrov, because you are saying there are some good factions of the bourgeoisie—in the person of union leaders and minority leaders. If you are to make a clean break with Dimitrov, as you suggest, you must make a clean break with the bourgeoisie and their immediate (and politically dependent) representatives.

3. The alternative is to turn directly to people, but not to liberal organizations in which they may have been drawn in.Furthermore, if the basis of this united front from below (qualitatively different
than alliances with petty bourgeois organizations) is simply opposition to
fascism (under some old CP slogan, such as the preservation of democratic
rights) you have also replicated Dimitrov, not repudiated him. The clear
repudiation, again as outlined by Dutt,is to call for a united front from below which is committed to the dictatorship of the proletariat.

In other words, if the basis for the united front is the watering down of a communist line to draw in the good (petty) bourgeoisie—as your organization seems to be doing—you have unwittingly committed the errors which you criticize the CWP of, that is exhuming Dimitrov. It is true they do it deliberately, and you appear to do it unwittingly, but the result is the same.

4. A final point needs to be clarified, and this is the debate between Dimitrov and Dutt which you partially analyzed has already been brought up to the attention of the left. In 1971 PL Magazine carefully followed through
the discussion, and pointed out the long list of theoretical and practical errors generated by the International Communist Movement turning to the Dimitrov formulation and abandoning the concept of the united front from below. How is it that one of the groups you decry as Stalinist figured out what your [organization] recently became aware of nine years earlier and with greater theoretical and practical precision? Is this organization really not Stalinist (and Dutt too for that matter), or does
Stalinism not automatically lead to Dimitrovism?

I realize this is a long letter but I would like your reactions to some of the points I have raised, especially about how your line does not represent a clear break with Dimitrov.

Rick Platkin

Young Spartacus replies: Platkin raises once again (ostensibly from the "left")the question of Stalinism versus Trotskyism on the united front. While his slightly crackpot letter contains a number of historical inaccuracies and political absurdities and could be easily dismissed, it provides an opportunity for Young Spartacus to review the elementary Leninist tactic of the united front. Particularly in the aftermath of our successful anti-fascist mobilizations in Detroit and San Francisco, we are pleased to discuss the history of the united front and its particular application to the American labor movement in the fight against the increasingly visible fascist movement.

Without specifically referring to the April 19 Committee Against Nazis (ANCAN) demonstration in San Francisco, called to combat a threatened "celebration" of Hitler's birthday by the Bay Area fascists, Platkin argues that this mobilization—heavily built and organized by the SL/SYL—was inherently opportunist. He accuses us of "exhuming Dimitrov." The reason? Because in addition to the communist SL/SYL, 35 elected trade-union officials as well as nine local unions endorsed and actively built the ANCAN rally along with a number of community, minority, gay and civil rights organizations. For the first time in decades, a genuine united-front action of socialists and organized labor defended the rights of the working class and oppressed, independent of and against the efforts of the bourgeois state and politicians.

No gang of Nazis went goosestepping into San Francisco's Civic Center to celebrate Hitler's birthday and not because the police canceled their permit or the Board of Supervisors passed resolutions against the little storm-troopers. As the endorsement list for the ANCAN rally steadily grew, the cops announced that they could not guarantee the safety of the Nazi scum. The Nazis failed to show because thousands of unionists, minorities and socialists intended to sweep them off the streets. Ever since the April 19 rally, the fake-lefts have been falling all over themselves to explain away the undeniable success of the ANCAN mobilization.

Based on the simple proposition that a massive mobilization of the labor movement and its allies could stop the Nazis, the ANCAN rally was a victory and a vindication of the Leninist tactic of the united front. In contrast the Maoist-dominated Anti-Klan/Nazi Coalition held a little sectarian rally, which attracted 350, a quarter mile away from the site of the proposed Nazi Hitlerfest. Fundamentally pessimistic about the ability of the working class to turn out in force to stop the brownshirts, the Maoist-dominated coalition turned instead to the strikebreaking Democrats in City Hall. Their "strategy" hinged on pressuring Mayor Feinstein and the Board of Supervisors to revoke the Nazis' permit and pass a resolution condemning the Hitler-lovers. But the Maoists found that there were very few bourgeois politicians interested in building a mass demonstration against fascism. Even after they pledged not to lay a finger on the Nazis, the Anti-Klan/ Nazi Coalition could only dig up one black councilman from Oakland. The opportunists, albeit empty-handed, were a quarter mile away from the action.
Platkin accuses the SL/SYL of "watering down... a communist line to draw in the good (petty) bourgeoisie" ind counterposes turning directly to the 'people." In doing so, he echoes Progressive Labor's (PL) rejection of the united front in Road to Revolution III:

"We reject the concept of a united front with the bosses. We reject the concept of a united front with Trotskyists and the herd of various fakes in the left "We believe in a united front from below that takes the form of a left-center coalition."

—PL, November 1971

Platkin speaks approvingly of the "theoretical and practical precision" of the sometime left-sounding Stalinists of Progressive Labor and is in fact a longtime supporter of their sub-reformist front group, the Committee Against Racism (CAR). It is worth noting that PL also came unglued by the success of the ANCAN demo. Before the April 19 rally PL—true to form—denounced both ANCAN and the Maoist-led splinter coalition as "calls for a pacifist counter-demonstration [which] amount to calling for 'peace to the Nazis'." After the fact, in an article entitled "1500 Protest Against Nazis" (Challenge, 30 April) PL waxed eloquent about the Civic Center rally participants who were "just itching for the Nazis to show their faces," proving that when it's opportune PL will even tail the Trotskyist SL/ S YL. (Naturally, they omit any mention of the SL/SYL's central role in building the ANCAN rally.)

The United Front— A Leninist Tactic

The united front is a tactic employed by the vanguard party to unite the working class for practical action and to win the allegiance of non-communist workers from the reformists, centrists, labor bureaucrats and at times the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois nationalists. We wrote in "On the United Front":

"The UF can only be a reality during periods of social struggle, when the need for sharp class battles makes class unity a burning objective necessity that shakes the ranks of the non-communist workers organizations from their le¬thargy and day-to-day humdrum or¬ganizational parochialism, and places strongly before them the need for class unity that transcends their particular organizations..."

— Young Communist Bulletin No. 3, p. 8

There is a reason that the united front became a central question at the Third Congress of the Communist International in 1922. At the time of the First World Congress in 1919 it was expected that the working-class offensive in the wake of the First World War would lead to the direct overthrow of the bourgeoisie under Communist leadership. The need for the united front tactic flowed from the fact that the majority of workers in most countries had gone through the postwar revolutionary upsurge retaining their allegiance to the reformist leaderships of the trade unions and the social-democratic parties. At the same time, in the wake of the receding revolutionary tide, the bourgeoisie went on the offensive. The capitalist offensive was forcing even the reformist-led organizations into partial and defensive struggles for their lives, simply to maintain the organizational gains and standard of living they had won in the past. This situation placed on the agenda the need for a united workers front.

The Third World Congress had two tasks before it: 1) to cleanse the working class, including the ranks of the Communist parties, of all reformist and centrist elements who did not want to struggle; and 2) to learn the art of struggle, and master revolutionary tactics and strategy. Much of the ideological struggle at the Third Congress was directed against the "Lefts"—those whose revolutionary impatience caused them to lose sight of the most important preparatory and preliminary tasks of the party. The Bolsheviks counseled the young communist "Lefts" at the Congress: "Comrades, we desire not only heroic struggle, we desire first of all victory." Trotsky explained:

"Does the united front extend only to the working masses or does it also include the opportunist leaders? "The very posing of this question is a product of misunderstanding. "If we were able to unite the working masses around our own banner or around our practical immediate slogans, and skip over reformist organizations, whether party or trade union, that would of course be the best thing in the world. But then the very question of the united front would not exist in its present form

"It is possible to see in this a rapprochement with the reformists only
from the standpoint of a journalist who believes that he rids himself of refor¬mism by ritualistically criticizing it without ever leaving his editorial office but who is fearful of clashing with the reformists before the eyes of the working masses and giving the latter an opportunity to appraise the Communist and the reformist on the equal plane of the mass struggle.

"Behind this seemingly revolutionary fear of 'rapprochement' there really lurks a political passivity which seeks to perpetuate an order of things wherein the Communists and the reformists each retain their own rigidly demarcated spheres of influence, their own audiences at meetings, their own press, and all this together creates an illusion of serious political struggle."

—"On the United Front," The First Five Years of the Communist International, Vol. 2

Platkin argues, "If you are to make a clean break with Dimitrov, as you suggest, you must make a clean break with the bourgeoisie and their immediate (and politically dependent) representatives." Why should Trotskyists make a "break" with Dimitrov? Unlike the Stalinists, we never supported his class-collaborationist line in the first place. And what does Dimitrov have to do with the Leninist united front tactic? Nothing! Dimitrov supplied the theoretical justification not for the united front but for class-collaborationist political blocs with the bourgeoisie which came to be known as popular fronts. At the Seventh Congress of the Stalinized Comintern in 1935, (not the CPSU's Seventh Party Congress as Platkin says) Dimitrov was quite explicit:

"Now the toiling masses in a number of capitalist countries are faced with the necessity of making a definite choice, and of making it today, not between proletarian dictatorship and bourgeois democracy, but between bourgeois democracy and fascism."

For Platkin, included in the category of "immediate representatives" of the bourgeoisie are the trade unions. Caught in the stranglehold of the pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy, the trade unions are nonetheless workers organizations. And in the United States, they are the only mass organizations of the proletariat. To insist that revolutionaries never conclude united front blocs for action with the trade unions is simply a recipe for sealing off commu¬nists from the organized working class. We refer our readers to Trotsky's polemic against the sectarian policies of Stalin's "Third Period" in What Next? Trotsky noted that "just as the trade union is the rudimentary form of the united front in the economic struggle, so the soviet is the highest form of the united front under the conditions in which the proletariat enters the epoch of fighting for power." He goes on to argue that "the refusal by the Communist Party to make arrangements and take joint action with other parties within the working class means nothing else but the refusal to create Soviets" (emphasis in original in both quotes).

Moreover, Platkin's attitude toward the unions is totally at variance with the practice of Progressive Labor which he upholds as the real "left" alternative to Dimitrov. In the history of the commu¬nist movement, there are and have been ultra-left and anarchist organizations which refused on principle to work in the unions, but PL is not one of them. Far from a "leftist" policy, PL's left-center coalitionism in the unions has led to the worst kind of sub-reformist economism and support to "lesser evil" bureaucrats in the United Auto Workers, Communications Workers, AFSCME and other unions.

Cloaked in the phraseology of revolutionary intransigence, blanket opposi¬tion to the united front actually represents political passivity, conservatism and a lack of revolutionary will. "No united front with the reformists" is simply an inverted non-aggression pact with the reformists, an implicit agree¬ment not to fight them on their own turf. Far from such a pact, the united front implies a sharpening of the political struggle with the reformist misleaders. For instance, the unions, black organizations, Chicano, Jewish and gay groups all had a vital interest in stopping the fascist filth. The proposal of a concrete joint action to these organizations gave their respective leaderships the choice of either openly opposing the action or appearing on the same platform with the communists. The vanguard party must retain full freedom to criticize its temporary allies in the united front, something that the Spartacist League took full advantage of on April 19. The dual nature of the united front is captured in the slogan, "March separately, strike together," and the party must be ready to break with the reformists and centrists when they become a brake on the struggle.

Such was the case in Detroit on November 10. The SL and militant auto workers attempted to mobilize the powerful UAW to stop a planned Klan march in Detroit, a march called to "celebrate" the Greensboro massacre. Criminally, the UAW tops refused tc put the weight of the Detroit labor movement behind the anti-Klan rally The "liberal" black mayor, Coleman Young, threatened to arrest any demonstrators—Klan or anti-Klan. We were de facto forced into a united front "from below" under these circumstance and took the call for the demonstration directly to the factory gates an working-class neighborhoods. The result was a rally composed of the "hard core" of largely black, advanced workers willing to defy the criminal inaction of the UAW tops and stand up to a hostile city government and the possibil¬ity of arrest. It was critical that the Klan be stopped in the labor/black town of Detroit. And they were stopped despite the sabotage of the union bureaucrats— a victory for the entire working class and oppressed. However, we did not choose to limit the strength of the anti-Klan mobilization, the only such action to occur in the wake of Greensboro, to a hard core of 500. Much more powerful would have been thousands-strong contingents from the unions putting the Klan and City Hall on notice that "The Klan Won't Ride in the Motor City!"

"The United Front from Below"— History of Betrayal

Platkin fails to address the fact that the revolutionary-sounding "united front from below" has a history: it was the policy of the Stalinized Comintern from 1928 to 1935, the "Third Period." Is Platkin really unaware of the results? The triumph of Hitler and the decimation of the German proletariat were a world historic defeat for the working class.
The policies of the "Third Period" followed the cumulative failures of Stalin's 1924-27 policies of conciliating the colonial bourgeoisie and the trade-union reformists abroad as well as the kulaks at home. During this period, Lenin's united front tactic was degraded to an instrument for class collaboration and counterrevolution. In China, Stalin's "united front" with the bourgeois-nationalist Kuomintang (KMT), resulting in the complete liquidation of the Chinese Communist Party, led to the massacre of tens of thousands of Communist and working-class militants in the Shanghai insurrection of 1927 and killed for two decades the possibility of anti-capitalist revolution in China. In Britain, Stalin allied with the British trade-union bureaucrats in the "Anglo-Russian Trade Union Unity Committee." The Comintern did not see this as a temporary alliance with British trade-union leaders but as a long-lasting co¬partnership. This alliance was preserved through the betrayals of the 1926 General Strike and the miners strike, lending the prestige of the Bolshevik Revolution arid Communism to the strikebreaking Trades Union Congress tops.

From these disasters of Stalin's rightist course were born the ultra-left policies of the 'Third Period." In Germany, Stalin proclaimed....(missing part) .. the reformist Social Democratic Party (SPD) to be "social fascist" and thus eliminated any possibility of an SPD-KPD (German Communist Party) united front against Hitler's increasingly strong forces. Of course, it's quite true that SPD was complicit in the murders of Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg. In 1929 the Social Democrat Zoergeibel drowned the KPD May Day march in blood. At every step on Hitler's road to power the reformists capitulated rather than fight.

Trotsky called the Social Democratic bureaucracy the "rottenest portion of putrefying capitalist Europe." But despite the counterrevolutionary be¬trayals of the leadership of the SPD, the Social Democrats still led millions of workers and within certain limits were constrained to reckon with their deluded proletarian constituency as well as with their bourgeois masters. The victory of fascism would mean the annihilation of the organizations of Social Democracy. While the SPD leaders did not want to fight, for the Social Democratic ranks it was a matter of life and death. The KPD's refusal to utilize this contradiction was an act of gross stupidity and treachery. The united front would set class against class, defending the workers' organizations against the stormtroopers and at the same time expose in action the hesitations, vacillations and abhorrence of socialist revolution that lie at the heart of Social Democracy. Trotsky insisted that in the war against fascism the Communists must be ready to conclude practical military alliances with the devil and his grandmother, even with 'Noske and Zoergeibel.

But the Stalinists continued to follow their sectarian-defeatist logic, captured in the slogan "After Hitler—Us." Millions of workers organized in the SPD and KPD were ready and eager to crush the Nazis, but Hitler came to power without a shot being fired because of the policies of the Stalinist "Third Period."

The Popular Front

At the end of 1933, with the triumph of Hitler and the renewed threat of imperialist attack, the panic-stricken Stalinist bureaucracy zigzagged once again. In a desperate search for allies, the Comintern sought to ingratiate itself with the "democratic" imperialist bourgeoisies through calculated contain¬ment of revolutionary proletarian movements in Europe. Where a year before the Stalinists had refused blocs with bourgeois workers parties, they were now prepared to make alliances with the bourgeoisie itself, including participation in capitalist governments. Enter Dimitrov, who provided the justification for these treacherous class-collaborationist political blocs at the expense of proletarian revolution under the catch phrase "the united front against fascism."

Platkin claims that the positions of R. Palme Dutt were the only real alternative to the Dimitrov/Stalin line. From the 1920s through the mid-1960s denounced those who declared the "existing bourgeois dictatorship" to be a "'lesser evil' than the victory of Fascism," but to see this as a polemic against Dimitrov is absurd. The change in the Comintern's line was so abrupt and unevenly implemented that initially even some of the most loyal Stalinist hacks were caught marching out of step. Dutt spoke in favor of Dimitrov's resolution at the Seventh World Congress and was for the first time elected as a candidate member of the Executive Committee of the Comintern. How can Dutt be called a Stalinist? In addition to his grandiloquent praise for Stalin himself ("the genius and will of Stalin, the architect of the rising world of free humanity," etc., etc.) suffice it to say that for 40 years he popularized and promoted every twist and turn of Moscow's line in the pages of Labour Monthly.

There is an organic unity between the methodology of the "Third Period" and the popular front. At bottom both represent a lack of confidence in the proletariat's ability to conquer state power. During the "Third Period" the Stalinists abstained from fighting class collaborationism; with the popular front policy they simply embraced it. The net result was the same.

Who opposed the Dimitrov/Stalin line which led to bloody defeat for the working class in Spain and headed off a pre-revolutionary situation in France during the 1930s? Only the Trotskyists. To the popular front, the Trotskyists counterposed a working-class united front to smash the fascists. Instead of depending on the republican generals and the police, the Trotskyists called for workers militias based on the trade unions.

This Trotskyist tradition is today embodied in the program of the Spartacist League/SYL. Against the "ban the Klan" reformism of the Stalinists, the revolting defense of "free speech for fascists" of the social democratic SWP, and the episodically substitutionist antics of PL/CAR and the CWP we have successfully fought for labor/black mobilizations to smash the fascist scum. No other left organization in the U.S. can claim to have responded to the Greensboro massacre by mobilizing black and white trade unionists against the KKK as we did in Detroit; nor has anyone but the SL/SYL put forward and implemented the mass mobilization of the organized labor movement against the fascist threat as occurred in the ANCAN demonstration. The basis for Leninist principles and tactics, as proven by the history of the world working class, is what works.
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A cattle dealer once drove some bulls to the slaughterhouse. And the butcher came nigh with his sharp knife.

"Let us close ranks and jack up this executioner on our horns," suggested one of the bulls.

"If you please, in what way is the butcher any worse than the dealer who drove us hither with his cudgel?" replied the bulls, who had received their political education in Manuilsky's institute.

"But we shall be able to attend to the dealer as well afterwards!"

"Nothing doing," replied the bulls, firm in their principles, to the counselor. "You are trying to shield our enemies from the left; you are a social-butcher yourself."

And they refused to close ranks.

—from Aesop's Fables

—Leon Trotsky, "What Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat," The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, 1932