Rising fascism grounded in American racism

The tens of thousands who participated in the reactionary Sept. 12 march on Washington, D.C., signaled an ominous new challenge from the far Right. The march was filled with racist attacks: pictures of President Obama as a "witch doctor" with a bone through his nose; signs telling him to "go back to Kenya," questioning his U.S. citizenship; Obama as Hitler, as Stalin, as Satan. It conjured up images of the worst in U.S. history, and attempted to negate everything that is revolutionary in that history as well.

Obama's response has been measured and pragmatic, even to denying that racism is an issue. But this open display of the most vile racism toward him was also directed at the heart of the needed American revolution. It is no accident that on Sept. 12 racist signs and slogans were side-by-side with fascist ones such as "Oust the Marxist dictator! They did it in Honduras, we can do it here!" and "We came unarmed--this time!"

THE RADICAL RIGHT'S BID FOR POWER

This rhetoric is the mark of such reactionary and neo-fascist groups as the John Birch Society, the neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan and the LaRouche organization, who all participated. These forces are making a bid for control of the Republican Party--the march was addressed by a number of "mainstream" Republican politicians, like Sen. Jim DeMint (SC) and Rep. Mike Pence (IN).

The organizers of this movement are highly conscious of what they aim for--state power. To gain it they have even studied the Left, as announced on the organizers' FreedomWorks website: "...the Left...[has] us beat when it comes to symbolism, activism, and dominating the public debate....We have to remember that this is a March on Washington, which should conjure up images of the street protests in other countries. If we want the politicians to pay attention, we believe it is imperative that we keep our edge, tailor our message narrowly and maintain the populist imagery."

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, right-wing militias have again begun recruiting and spreading across the national landscape. A number of law enforcement officers have been shot and killed by right-wingers upset by Obama's election, and a census worker in Kentucky was recently found lynched with the word "Fed" written across his chest. The potential for much greater violence was seen in Oklahoma City in 1995. When the idea of armed opposition to the government comes together with the historic racism embodied by the far Right, it becomes nothing less than a warrant for genocide.

DIALECTICS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

All of this reactionary rage is directed against the multi-racial support that brought Obama to the White House. As N&L said at the time, "It is impossible to discount the percentages of youth, women, immigrants, and Black voters who participated in the election, some for the first time in their lives. But the dimension most crucial was the number of white workers who cast their vote for a Black candidate" (Dec. 2008/Jan. 2009). The Right aims to demoralize and destroy the movement that carries this hope for a real change.

There is much that President Obama can be criticized for, including his conciliationism and pragmatism, and his continuing support for Bush's wars. But care must be taken to separate that critique from the attacks by the Right. N&L has challenged the anti-war movement to take a revolutionary internationalist ground, as opposed to that of reactionaries like Hitler-apologist Patrick Buchanan, or racists like Lew Rockwell and others who have courted the anti-war movement.

In the dialectics of the needed American revolution, the Black masses as vanguard come together with labor at historic turning points. Today, revolutionaries have both opportunity and responsibility to connect with the legacy of Abolitionism and of Marx's development of the philosophy of revolution in permanence. It is our responsibility to the needed American revolution, to world revolution, to human history.

This has always been the Marxist-Humanist position: "By the 1860s, the Black dimension became, at one and the same time, not only pivotal to the abolition of slavery and victory of the North in the Civil War, but also to the restructuring of [Marx's] Capital itself. In a word, the often-quoted sentence: 'Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black skin it is branded,' far from being rhetoric, was the actual reality and the perspective for overcoming that reality. Marx reached, at every historic turning point, for a concluding point, not as an end but as a jumping-off point, a new beginning, a new vision" (American Civilization On Trial: Black Masses as Vanguard, Raya Dunayevskaya).

--Gerry Emmett

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