NATIONAL FIGHTBACK CONFERENCE
A period of reaction but not defeat
Excerpts from a talk by WWP Secretariat member Deirdre
Griswold at the Nov. 13-14 National Fightback
Conference.
That you are here means you already agree that this is no
time to be passive or in retreat. However, people are also very
worried about the ultra-right, and for good reasons. They're
afraid of the ultra-conservative tendencies of the Bush
administration and its allies, who have opened up a war not
only on countries that refuse to accept U.S. domination but
also on the workers at home, on women, on the
lesbian/gay/bi/trans community. They're whittling away at our
right to join unions, to hold protest rallies and marches, to
exercise free speech and even to vote.
Many who worked very hard for John Kerry did so not because
they liked his program but because they thought that another
Bush victory would open the door to fascism.
Well, Bush won. Should we now be heading for the hills?
We don't think so. This is not to minimize the utter
viciousness of this group of political servants of big capital.
They are awful.
But this is not Germany in 1933. When Hitler came to power
it was after a period of economic collapse and great turmoil.
The Nazis came from outside the political establishment and
even claimed to be "national socialists." But behind them, very
much in secret, were the biggest German industrialists. Their
victory marked a monumental and historic defeat for the working
class and the whole progressive movement and paved the way to
another horrendous world war.
What we're seeing now in this country is a period of
political reaction coming very much from the traditional
parties of big business and Wall Street. This has happened
before in U.S. history. It happened after World War I and the
Russian Revolution, when the newly formed FBI conducted massive
sweeps in working class communities and deported thousands of
so-called "Reds" who had been agitating for better wages and
working conditions. They were called the Palmer Raids, after
Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, and were a lot like the
roundups today of Arabs, Muslims and South Asians.
Let's not forget that in those days, racism was open and the
Democratic Party was the party of lynching and segregation in
the South. In 1925, 40,000 uniformed members of the Ku Klux
Klan marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C.
Nothing like that could happen today--not because the rich
establishment isn't racist, they are, but because the people
wouldn't allow it. Even Bush has to pretend he's for
"diversity."
The 1950s were another period of deep political reaction as
Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the House Unamerican Activities
Committee hounded leftists out of their jobs and out of
leadership in the trade unions they had built. That happened
during another war--the Korean War--and it was also a period of
the deepening Cold War against the Soviet Union.
In the 1960s, when the movement started against the Vietnam
War, the Johnson administration tried to activate HUAC again
and investigate "subversives" in the anti-war movement. But
thousands of young people, many of them high school age, lined
up around the block to attend the hearings and disrupt them.
They closed the hearings down after three days. As opposition
grew to the war, there were many battles in the streets--like
the police riot in Chicago at the Democratic National
Convention of 1968. Eight antiwar leaders were later indicted.
The Chicago Eight managed to put the war itself on trial, and
although they were convicted, they won their freedom on
appeal.
The government wanted to lock up the movement, but every
time they tried to do it they made things worse for themselves,
alienating the population even more and leading to the
demoralization of the troops themselves.
During all these periods of reaction there was a struggle
going on. The United States has never been a land of perfect
freedom and democracy that suddenly is being threatened. That's
a myth. This is a country that was built on slavery and the
bloody suppression of the indigenous people. Women had no
rights at all. Unions were illegal and the robber barons were
warlords with their own private armies of strike breakers. It
is only because the labor movement became too powerful that
they had to abandon these tactics and today have created a
global labor market to super-exploit workers in other
countries.
Every right we have we fought for. Great mass movements have
grown up and broken new ground--the abolitionists, the struggle
for women's suffrage, the labor movement, the civil rights and
Black Power movements, the lesbian/gay/bi and trans movement,
and the increasingly mass antiwar movements.
None of these rights were won by toning down the struggle in
order to get the liberal imperialists on our side. That's what
is wrong with the "anybody but Bush" scenario. It assumes that
the only effective way to fight the right wing is to hand over
the struggle to the liberal capitalists and hope they don't
sell you out. Except they always do.
This problem will always be with us, until we get rid of
capitalism itself. The ruling class will always have a soft
spot for the ultra right and will try to trot them out when
they need them. We just have to show them that repression
breeds resistance.
Reprinted from the Nov. 25, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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