NEWS & LETTERS, November - December 2010
Lead
Campaigns intensify counter-revolutionary onslaught
by Gerry Emmett
The FBI raids upon the homes of anti-war and international solidarity activists on Sept. 24 were an eerie moment. They brought back memories of similar attacks upon the right to dissent, from the Palmer Raids of 1919 with their mass arrests and deportations, to the shame of 1950s McCarthyism and the vicious COINTELPRO attacks of the 1960s. Recent Court rulings that extend the government's oppressive powers of surveillance, and that redefine "terrorism" so loosely as to cover almost anything it chooses to label as such, guarantee future civil liberties battles in the courts and in the streets. It is sadly ironic that at this moment, when the crisis of capitalism has shown itself as both deep and intractable, some of the most reactionary impulses from U.S. history have moved to take center stage. As the 2010 mid-term elections approach, the bankruptcy of bourgeois politics stands clear.
HOPE RUNS INTO WALL OF PRAGMATISM Many who supported President Barack Obama's historic campaign now feel a deep sense of disappointment. His "pragmatic" approach to crises in jobs, housing and healthcare has satisfied no one except perhaps some Wall Street investors whose stock market gains have not translated into real economic growth or job creation.
The gulf between Obama and his electoral base was clear at the Oct. 2 march on Washington. Although the leaders of various labor and civil rights organizations were campaigning for the Democratic Party, the agenda they stated in their demands was far to the left of that--a demand for jobs and a sustainable recovery; funds for human needs, not militarism and war; withdrawal of all troops and mercenaries from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan; and justice, civil rights and a renewable energy future at home.
The march was a restatement of the genuine hope for change that was felt when the Bush administration was ended two years ago. This is what brought the tens of thousands who attended.
In contrast to such serious demands, President Obama's pragmatism has led him to simply preside over an economic crisis that is rooted in the nature of capitalism itself. A new stage of crisis can be traced back to the 1970s and it has been worsening since then, with every seeming recovery ending up as a popped bubble and new crisis. This stagnation has long been the great unspeakable taboo for U.S. politicians. Segments of the Right and the bourgeoisie have gone to great lengths this year to make sure this remains true.
The Achilles heel of American "civilization" has always been its profound racism. In response to the election of this country's first Black president, sections of corporate America that opposed his "mandate for change" allied with racists and conspiracy theorists who had long existed in the depraved netherworld of history.
As counterpoint to Obama's failure to truly challenge the system, the rise of the Tea Party to ascendancy in the Republican Party represents nothing less than the threat of neofascism. A hard look at some of the current crop of candidates proves any other conclusion to be a simple delusion. For example, the Republican candidate for New York Governor, Carl Paladino, was revealed to have sent the most vile racist and misogynist emails out to a wide circle of friends and acquaintances. He didn't hesitate to joke about the deaths of Black men.
ULTRA-RIGHT CURRENT ROILS MAINSTREAM Yet Paladino won his primary, even though every single voter who supported him had to know full well what he represented. The racist proclivities of other Tea Party candidates are also undisguised, from Rand Paul (Kentucky Senatorial candidate) saying he opposed enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for "private businesses," to Rich Iott (Ohio Congressional candidate), who dresses up in Nazi uniforms and celebrates the military prowess of Nazi Germany. And the sorry list goes on.
It isn't just the candidates, or even the Tea Party itself, but the eruption into mainstream politics of all sorts of ultra-reactionary elements that even the Republican Party used to keep at arm's length. There has been a shocking return of the conspiracy theorists of the John Birch Society, given a kind of validation by the rantings of TV host Glenn Beck. He has brought back conspiracy theories as old as the clerical attacks upon the French Revolution, which form the basis for much anti-Semitic literature. He has echoed the Birchers' paranoia about Communist infiltration of everything from the White House to the Civil Rights Movement to fluoride in the water supply.
Neo-Confederates, racists, and nativists have also been heavily involved in promoting anti-immigrant sentiment as seen in Arizona's unconstitutional racial profiling laws. These were followed, by no accident at all, by laws against "ethnic studies" programs in schools--for example, Black History.
Despite the ridiculous façade of Sarah Palin and her "mama grizzlies," attacks upon women's rights are integral to this reactionary upsurge. The overwhelming number of Tea Party candidates hold views that would oppose a woman's right to choose abortion even in cases of rape or incest. Needless to say, their ranks are heavily salted with the kind of theocrats who would like to introduce the teaching of "Creationism" in schools as equally valid with the scientific theory of evolution.
Five of the six major national Tea Party organizations have serious ties with these right-wing extremist groups. The only one that ostensibly doesn't is Dick Armey's FreedomWorks, which is most closely corporate America.
If these Tea Partiers actually attained power, in fact, the current situation in Arizona shows the possible face of the future. As Ken Silverstein wrote in Harper's Magazine (July 2010):
"...today's Arizona legislature...is composed almost entirely of dimwits, racists, and cranks. Collectively they have bankrupted the state through a combination of ideological fanaticism on the Republican right and acquiescence and timidity on the part of G.O.P. moderates and Democrats. Although dozens of states are facing budget crises, the situation in Arizona is arguably the nation's worst." Arizona threatens to model the national future: endless cuts in public services and public workers' jobs, in education and healthcare; openly racist legislation designed to wipe away history itself. Most sinister, perhaps, are punitive measures for any who might be inclined to resist, as demonstrated by the abuses of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and the open reliance upon neo-Nazi armed militias as "border patrols," which has been accepted to a frightening degree by some of the public.
It is argued by some that the Tea Party represents an irreconcilable union of opposites which will inevitably fall apart. That is probably wishful thinking. The economic "libertarianism" that allegedly sparked the movement has always coexisted with such Religious Right views as anti-choice and homophobia in people like Texas Congressman Ron Paul and his son Rand Paul. Their ties to racist groups are also well-known.
In truth, all these elements are not separate but are rooted in a common nostalgia for the primitive accumulation of capital as it actually happened in the Americas, through the displacement and genocide of the Native Americans and enslavement and exploitation of Blacks. The Tea Party, wrapped in its red, white and blue lie of U.S. history, is telling a specific story. It says, if only these rebellious Blacks, these workers with their union struggles, these women demanding equality could be stricken from history, then all would once again be well with capitalism. The springs of wealth would be free to flow once again.
NOSTALGIA FOR CAPITALISM'S BLOODY PAST They stare into the smoking cauldron of the past and see the ghostly forms of Confederate generals, of the bloody 7th Cavalry, and of robber barons with their militias exercising the "Second Amendment rights" that Sharron Angle, the Nevada Senatorial candidate, has threatened to use if the Tea Party doesn't get elected. Anti-Muslim hate blogger Pamela Geller sees more recent figures--Karadzic's Balkan "ethnic cleansers" and the neofascist thugs of the English Defense League who march through the streets of English cities attacking Muslim families in restaurants.
The demand for a return to such an imaginary reactionary utopia will do nothing to solve capitalism's problems. But it has its echo in the nature of capitalism itself, which gives it a power that shouldn't be underestimated. Capitalism in its moments of crisis will return to what Marx called (for this reason) the "so-called 'primitive accumulation'" of capital. That is, it will use all forms of piracy, wars that destroy not only the existing machines that embody capital, but people and entire cities, as has happened again and again even on the scale of genocidal World Wars.
Even if some--or all--Tea Party candidates were to lose, the fact of their existence needs to be taken with deadly seriousness. This kind of openly racist rhetoric and thuggish behavior is unprecedented in recent U.S. politics and bodes ill for the future. Even if some sectors of the bourgeoisie recoil from the rise of U.S. fascism, they can't be depended upon to fight it.
The looming threat of environmental devastation through climate change--also a problem that is denied by all current Tea Party (and almost all Republican) candidates only underlines the urgency of fighting this rise of the Right with a total revolutionary philosophy.
Humanity doesn't want a future of endless war, of deprivation, alienation and crisis, as anyone knows who talks to the myriads of dissatisfied and disgusted workers, women, Blacks, GLBT people and others who are under the guns of the Right and are left to fend for ourselves by a Democratic Party that has shown its first loyalty is to capitalism and its survival. We have already felt the consequences of the wrong turn American "civilization" has taken in opting for the prison-industrial complex as a way of dealing with an economy that now has no use for a large portion of the working class--not even as a reserve army of labor. Rather, millions have been condemned to a slow genocide of warehousing in prisons and dispossession of the rights of citizenship comparable to the era of Jim Crow.
The situation makes utterly concrete Marx's original idea of tying together the independent revolutionary organization of the workers with a total philosophy of liberation from capitalism, as set out in his lifelong writings on organization from the Communist Manifesto to the 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program. Or, as Raya Dunayevskaya wrote in 1964:
"What therefore becomes of paramount importance to Marxist-Humanists is to see that continuity is not the continuity of the unfinished revolution which forces of reaction are determined to keep unfinished. Continuity is, rather, the continuity of the Humanist and American roots of Marxism in the full Abolitionist tradition that will, once and for all, act on the truth that time has indeed run out on all compromises, come they from the Far Right or only 'near' Right. The road to embark on, the task to dedicate oneself to, is the movement that will tear up racism at its root in the capitalist exploitative system. For only the reconstruction of society on totally new, on truly human beginnings can make Freedom Now a reality." ("Goldwater Primary Victory in California: or Under the Backlash of Counter-Revolution," Archives #3139.)
Whatever the outcome of the November 2010 elections, the need for revolutionaries to grasp the absolute opposite to this corrupt mess can hardly be more clear.
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