Above: Thousands of white supremacists and other right-wing extremists storm the U.S. congress building on 6 January 2021
As a Smooth-talking Imperialist and
Upholder of the Racist Capitalist Order Prepares to Replace a Brazenly Racist Billionaire as President
How to Resist the Growing Threat
of the Violent Far-Right in America
- The same forces that spearheaded the January 6 riot are the very ones that have been inciting and perpetrating racist violence and abuse on the streets against black people, Chinese background people, Muslims and other people of colour.
- It is urgently necessary to organise workers at multiracial workplaces together with black communities, other non-white communities and anti-racist activists into disciplined action squads to physically resist the threat of violent attack from far-right forces.
- As their system decays, as they take fright at the bitter grievances of their own population and as they worry about the emergence of a socialistic power in the Peoples Republic of China, the U.S. ruling class is tearing itself to pieces as it scrambles to find a strategy that will best protect its rule of exploitation.
- No to Trump! No to Biden!
- America’s “Democracy” is a Dictatorship of the Capitalists, a Democracy for the Rich. But We Must Mobilise to Oppose Fascist Attacks on It.
- We Can Never Rely on the Capitalist State to Stop Violent Far-Right Attacks.
- The Fascist Threat Will Not End With the Departure of Trump from the Presidency.
- Fascism is a mass movement of those sections of the middle class – or to use the more precise Marxist term the petit bourgeoisie – who in a time of capitalist crisis are whipped into extreme opposition to the struggles of the working class, oppressed communities and the Left.
- In reality the Far Right’s “anti-establishmentarianism” is really an ultra-establishmentarianism!
- Mobilising Against the Fascist Threat Will Advance the Struggle for Workers Rule.
- The U.S. Capitalist “Order” Suffers a Big Blow to its International Prestige. Good!
- Support the Struggle Against Fascism and Capitalism in the U.S. by Mobilising Against Australia’s Capitalist Rulers and the Fascist Shock Troops That They Spawn.
11 January 2020: The storming of the U.S. congress building (known as the Capitol) five days ago by thousands of right wing extremists, including neo-Nazis, shows how emboldened violent far-right forces are in America. Some brandishing weapons, the rioters occupied the building for several hours while making death threats against politicians that they oppose. Incited by current president Donald Trump, many of the rioters thought that they could stage a coup by intimidating congress members into confirming hard-right Trump as president for another term rather than actual election winner, Democrat Joe Biden.
Even though far-right groups had made clear their intentions for weeks preceding their January 6 rampage, the police presence as they besieged the seat of the U.S. parliament was conspicuous by how strikingly light it was compared to the size of the mob. Many have contrasted the relatively gentle treatment meted out to the far-right rioters by the police with the extreme brutality that police have unleashed on those protesting against racist state attacks on black people. Indeed! But many police were not just gentle in the way that they handled the rioters. Some downright colluded with the right wing extremists! Some cops stood aside to let through the far-right forces, others assisted the rioters to climb over obstacles and barricades and some even took selfies with the rampaging extremists. Most telling were the decisions of the United States Capitol Police to reject offers of reinforcements in the lead up to the long-planned pro-Trump action and the minimal numbers that this lavishly funded and massively staffed force deployed for the event. Then even after the riot had started, Pentagon officials repeatedly delayed the deployment of the National Guard and then minimised the role it was authorised to play in quelling the riot. In short, the storming, occupation and vandalising of the Capitol could not have occurred without the complicity of significant sections of the American regime’s forces. It is evident that U.S. state agencies are deeply divided. This is just like the capitalist ruling class that they serve. As their system decays, as they take fright at the bitter grievances of their own population and as they worry about the emergence of a socialistic power in the Peoples Republic of China, the U.S. ruling class is tearing itself to pieces as it scrambles to find a strategy that will best protect its rule of exploitation.
The same forces that spearheaded the January 6 riot are the very ones that have been inciting and perpetrating racist violence and abuse on the streets against black people, Chinese background people, Muslims and other people of colour. This was evident at a far-right, pro-Trump rally in Los Angeles held at the same time as the march on the Capitol in Washington. When 25-year-old black woman, Berlinda Nibo, walked past the demonstration as part of her usual stroll through her own LA neighbourhood, some 40 of the far-right activists turned on her. They brutally assaulted and pepper sprayed her while screaming out the N-word and chanting, quite ironically, “All Lives Matter” (in opposition to the slogan of “Black Lives Matter” used by the anti-racist movement). Such white supremacist attacks, as well as far-right terror against LGBTI people, have escalated during the Trump presidency. In response to the anti-racist resistance that erupted during the U.S. summer, triggered by the horrific police murder of 46 year-old black man George Floyd, white supremacists have rammed their vehicles into anti-racist activists and even opened fire on Black Lives Matter protesters. They have murdered many anti-racist protesters. Last August, a member of a fascist militia shot dead two people, Anthony Huber and Joseph Rosenbaum, who were protesting against the heinous police shooting of 29 year-old black man, Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. As with the storming of the Capitol there has been plenty of collusion between far right militias and the state enforcement organs in their attacks on the Black Lives Matter movement. Police in Kenosha encouraged the racist armed patrols of the fascist who murdered Huber and Rosenbaum by giving water bottles to him and his militia squad and by encouraging them with the words, “we appreciate you guys, we really do. ” And that was just minutes before he started shooting at the anti-racist activists!
That the fascist-led forces were able to storm into the parliament building, occupy it for several hours, intimidate many congress members inside it and all the while gain assistance from some in the state organs has given them great encouragement. This means that they will pose an even greater threat. That is why it is urgently necessary for politically aware workers, black liberation activists and leftists to organise workers at multiracial workplaces together with black communities, other non-white communities and anti-racist activists into disciplined action squads to physically resist the threat of violent attack from far-right forces. Black liberation protests must be defended! The Left and workers movement must be defended! Black communities, ethnic Chinese people, Muslim people, Jewish people, all people of colour and LGBTQI people must all be protected! All violent attacks by the Far-Right must be combated – even those on liberal and mainstream conservative politicians which if they succeed embolden the fascists to physically attack the Left even more intensely.
No to Trump! No to Biden!
Just because it is urgently necessary to mobilise resistance to the physical attacks of fascists and other rabid Trump supporters, that does not mean that one should give any political support to his Democrat rivals. No political support, no matter how critical, should be given whatsoever to the new Democrat president Joe Biden – not even on the basis that he is a “lesser evil” to Trump. Biden must be 100% opposed! The correct stance to have taken at last November’s presidential election was to oppose a vote to both Trump and Biden.
To be sure many black and other people of colour, class conscious workers and progressive-minded youth voted for Biden not out of much faith for him but merely to get rid of Trump. Trump is indeed vileness personified! He is a billionaire capitalist exploiter, a racist and a misogynist who revoltingly boasts about groping women. Soon after assuming office in early 2017, Trump issued racist orders to ban people from several Muslim majority countries from entering the U.S. In the middle of 2020, as a mass movement opposed to racist police terror against black people swept the country, Trump denounced protesters and pushed for ever more brutal repression against the mobilisations. His main economic and social policy has been to cut tax rates for corporations and the rich while denying millions of poor and sick people access to medical care. Then when the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world, Trump resisted the social distancing, masking and lockdown measures needed to curb the pandemic. As a result the U.S. has been the worst affected country in the world from the pandemic with over 380,000 lives lost.
The Trump administration’s main “response” to the pandemic has been to blame China and Chinese people. Trump despicably called the coronavirus the “China Virus.” He and his ultra-hawkish secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and his warmongering vice president, Mike Pence, even fabricated a ridiculous conspiracy theory that the virus was deliberately leaked out of a Chinese research lab. All these claims helped incite a terrifying torrent of white supremacist attacks on ethnic Chinese people residing in the U.S. The U.S. regime also used their crackpot claims over the pandemic to further escalate their hostility to socialistic China. Even before the pandemic hit, the Trump administration had ratcheted up by several gears the regime’s Cold War drive against the Peoples Republic of China (PRC). Now in the last days of the administration, Trump, Pence and Pompeo’s anti-China drive has been on super overdrive. Earlier the administration had taken measures to slap tariffs on Chinese imports, restrict Chinese companies operating in the U.S., persecute Chinese researchers and international students residing in America and block visits by members of the Communist Party of China. Meanwhile, the administration provided finance, technical aid and political support for the pro-colonial, anti-PRC rioters in Hong Kong and spread a conspiracy theory – just as ludicrous as its claims of large-scale cheating in the November elections – that Beijing was persecuting Muslim Uyghurs in the country’s northwest.
The other features of the Trump administration’s foreign policy include a drive towards a U.S. war on Iran, increased support to the Saudi monarchy’s brutal war on Yemen and encouragement of its Israeli ally to conduct an even more murderously severe persecution of the Palestinian people. Meanwhile, Trump and Co. loosened the already very nominal requirements that U.S. pilots and drone operators had to minimise civilian casualties in air strikes, leading to even more carnage of civilian women, children and men in U.S. military strikes in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq and drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen.
Yet Biden’s planned foreign policy agenda is not fundamentally different. On the key aspect of Trump’s international agenda of Cold War against Red China, Biden is at one with Trump. The election campaign saw the two try to outbid each other in their hostile promises against the PRC. And while Biden’s China policy may end up being a little less hysterical, let’s not forget that Biden branded PRC president Xi Jinping a “thug” during the election debates – an extraordinary statement by a presidential frontrunner about the leader of a country that the U.S. is not officially at war with. In the end, U.S. foreign policy depends not primarily on the personal preferences or character of who is president but on the interests of the U.S. capitalist class that any administration serves. And America’s capitalists cannot tolerate the presence of a socialistic superpower because it undermines their ability to superexploit the peoples of the developing world and because it potentially gives their own masses “bad ideas” – that is, the knowledge that there is an alternative to the misery and insecurity that they endure under capitalism. That is why whether it is Trump or Biden or even a hypothetical more progressive president like Bernie Sanders, whoever presides over capitalist rule in the U.S. will be waging an aggressive Cold War against socialistic China. Indeed, today, the most progressive Democrats like Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez fully enlist in the imperialist campaign of lies against China over Muslim Uyghurs in China’s northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and are strident supporters of the anti-communist, anti-China opposition in Hong Kong.
Photo credit photo on right: Reuters/Caren Firouz
Similarly, because Biden – and indeed the more progressive members of his party – are members of a party that embraces capitalists and is funded largely by wealthy donors, he will preside over a regime that like Trump will seek to keep employment conditions “flexible” for the bosses, while continuing to allow the capitalists the “freedom” to hire as few workers as they want and to retrench workers whenever their bottom line demands it. Although Biden has promised to roll back some of Trump’s measures further excluding the poor from health care, his platform rejects anything approaching universal, free health care. It is true that the most progressive of the Democrats do support Medicare (public health insurance) for all. However, they refuse to stand for the bringing of the health sector itself into public ownership. That means that while their proposed schemes would be a big advance on the current system where millions are denied basic health coverage, their program would mean that an even more enormous portion of the public budget would end up subsidising the infamously exorbitant profits extracted by American pharmaceutical companies and corporate X-ray, pathology, physiotherapy and medical centre operators (this corporate profiteering is so extreme that the U.S. spends a much larger proportion of its national income on health care than other wealthy countries while having inferior health outcomes). As a result, the plans of the progressive Democrats are sure to continue to incite strident opposition from taxpayers from the middle class and better-paid sections of the working class whose taxes would end up subsidising the greedy, capitalist health sector operators while the latter would continue to laugh all the way to the bank. That means that a Democrat administration, even with the maximum possible “pressure” of progressive Democrats, is unlikely to be able to push through anything much better than the half-baked reforms favoured by Biden.
Biden did distinguish himself from Trump by not outright condemning the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and instead claimed to share concerns about racism. However, this was largely cynical politicking. Rejecting calls to defund the police, Biden even called for more funding for police during the presidential debates with Trump. Indeed, Biden has a despicable record of enforcing the racial oppression of black people. As a senator in the mid-1970s, Biden spearheaded opposition to the anti-segregation busing program to bus black kids into better-funded white schools. His racist activities helped ultimately to defeat the anti-segregation program. During a 2019 fundraiser for his presidential bid, Biden even boasted of his close relationship with two white supremacist politicians notorious for their rabid insistence on racial segregation. Inside, Biden has much of the same racist flesh that Trump is full of but masks this in order to get the black vote and to channel in support from the popular anti-racist movement. No one should be under any illusion too that more progressive and black Democrats would pressure Biden into actually doing something meaningful to alleviate the racial subjugation of black people. Following on from the horrific days of slavery, the forcible confinement of black (and increasingly brown) people today as a persecuted, largely very low-paid, last-hired, first-fired layer of the workforce provides a huge source of cheap labour to America’s capitalist bosses. The profits of big sections of the capitalist class
– and indeed the economic stability of their system – relies on this racist status quo being maintained. So all parties that include capitalists, that rely on funding from the corporate bigwigs and which uphold the capitalist order – which means both the Republicans and the Democrats along with all their respective factions – are completely incapable of ending the all-sided racial subjugation of black people. During the presidency of Democrat Barack Obama, America’s only ever black president, U.S. cops killed over 1,000 people every year – disproportionately black, Hispanic and poor.
America’s “Democracy” is a Dictatorship of the Capitalists,
a Democracy for the Rich.
But We Must Mobilise to Oppose Fascist Attacks on It
The violent storming of the Capitol has been described by U.S. ruling class politicians and the American and Australian mainstream media as an “attack on America’s great democracy” and “a violation of the people’s house.” But let’s get real! America far from being a democracy for all is a tyranny of the tycoons. A system where all people have equal real power would not allow a few capitalists to acquire staggering wealth while consigning hundreds of thousands of people to sleeping on the streets as occurs in the “United States”. America’s political system is one that locks up poor, black and otherwise non-white skinned people in such astounding numbers that the country has by far the greatest number of people in prison in the world, despite having less than a quarter of China’s population. The USA’s prison population is so huge that it is about the same as the entire population of Brisbane!
Regardless of who wins elections, the state enforcement organs in the U.S. – the police, the National Guard, the FBI, CIA, the military, prisons, courts and the bureaucracy – are completely tied to and subordinate to the capitalist exploiters of labour. That is why these bodies attack protests for racial equality and the picket lines of striking workers. It is why the FBI and police assassinated Black Panther Party (BPP) leader, Fred Hampton, in 1969 and later dozens of other BPP activists. It is why the National Guard shot dead four Kent State University students in their 4 May 1970 massacre of students protesting against the U.S. military’s expansion of its war in Vietnam. It is why the U.S. military invades Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and many other countries in wars that help American tycoons secure greater resources and markets but which are completely against the interests of the U.S. working class – not to mention the peoples of the invaded countries. Far from being a democracy for all, democracy under capitalism is a dictatorship of the capitalist class over the toiling masses.
Theoretically in capitalist “democracies,” like the U.S., everyone has an equal right to engage in politics and an equal vote in elections. But even if that were actually the case and union, leftist and anti-racist movements were not subjected to repression, surveillance and intimidation, such a reality would still be terribly biased against working class people. For even if everyone has the same political rights, it is the rich capitalists who are able – greatly disproportionate to their numbers – to shape political opinion and swing elections through their ownership of the news media, publishing houses, movie studios and social media companies as well as through their disproportionate ability to fund political parties, pay for political advertising, finance and thus control the arts sector, hire lobbyists and fund “independent” think thanks. As in Australia, elections in the U.S. are all about big money. They are in good part decided by the relative ability of rival candidates to attract money from rich donors. In the recent runoff elections for two senate seats in Georgia alone, largely super wealthy, political donors poured in over $A570 million (i.e. $US443 million) to the Democrat and Republican parties! In practice “democracy” under capitalism is more like a million dollars for a million votes rather than one person, one vote!
So let’s be clear: although we strongly oppose the fascist-led invasion of the Capitol building that is not because we have sympathy for America’s democracy for the rich. Our opposition is entirely because the Capitol was stormed by the wrong people for the wrong reason. If instead, for example, people fighting against racist oppression of black people had stormed the Capitol we would be fully supporting and cheering such an action. Mind you, the anti-racist movement would need much greater forces and the power of the organised workers movement behind it to pull off such an action. For we sure won’t have any collusion from any of the regime forces like the far-right rioters did on January 6. Indeed, if leftist or anti-racist protesters had stormed the Capitol with just the same forces as the white supremacists did on January 6, we would likely have been massacred by the cops and National Guard.
However, we should not be indifferent to the political form through which capitalists exert their power. Parliamentary democracy under capitalism, as fraudulent is the claim that it is “a democracy for all”, does allow working class people comparatively greater freedoms than those that exist when capitalist rule is administered through a military dictatorship or outright fascism. So while the working class and oppressed are still totally disenfranchised in even the most liberal of capitalist parliamentary democracies, this particular form of capitalist rule nevertheless allows the masses relatively greater opportunities to organise to fight to defend their rights – and eventually to topple the capitalist order itself. That means that we must oppose attacks on capitalist parliamentary democracy and its institutions by the Far Right – such as when fascist-led forces on January 6 attempted to use violent intimidation to overturn the results of last November’s presidential elections. Any such trampling on capitalist democracy by extreme right-wing forces would necessarily be accompanied by a curtailing of democratic rights for the masses. It is telling that in the call outs for the January 6 right-wing mobilisation, organisers not only demanded the return of Trump as president for another four years but also demanded that Antifa (the name given to left-wing staunch anti-fascist groups) be declared a terrorist group. In other words, the January 6 rampage was in part an action pushing for a crackdown on the Left. Moreover, if Trump had been restored to presidency through the action of extreme racist forces – some of whom were carrying the Confederate flag of slavery while others sported racist tattoos and t-shirts (including ones hailing the Nazi Holocaust of Jewish people) – he would have necessarily been pushed to implement, still more savagely, the most racist aspects of his agenda. Indeed, after January 6, neo-Nazi groups that took part in the riot jubilantly declared that the action represented the “beginning of the start of the white revolution” – in other words the start of a systematic, more extreme subjugation, expulsion and mass murder of black, yellow and brown-skinned peoples.
We Can Never Rely on the Capitalist State to
Stop Violent Far Right Attacks
Photo credit for photo on right: Adam J. Dewey
With the type of extreme right-wing forces that stormed the Capitol expected to attempt new attacks over the coming days on the institutions, symbols and representatives of capitalist democracy, politically aware workers, black liberation activists and leftists must organise to oppose these attacks. We cannot rely on the capitalist state to resist these attacks. We saw where that leads on January 6! The biggest factions of the capitalist class were stunned by the events of January 6 and are now determined to more forcefully defend their own institutions against their own fascist attack dogs. However, the will and ability of capitalist state institutions to oppose fascist violence is severely undermined by the presence of a large number of far-right rednecks within the police, National Guard and military. Although people join U.S. enforcement institutions for a variety of reasons, a good number enlist because they are racist reactionaries who want a chance to be able to attack leftists and beat – and even kill – black, brown and yellow-skinned people in a “legal” way. More fundamentally, the mainstream capitalist state institutions serve the same capitalist class just like the fascists do. That is the main reason why the state organs are so soft on violent far-right forces. Imagine an owner of two big attack dogs. One is his currently preferred dog who he keeps on a very long leash. This dog is cute looking but terrifyingly cruel when the owner sets it upon his opponents. The other is an ugly, fierce and nasty dog that gives him a bad name with other dog owners. This dog the owner keeps on a short leash for the moment. The owner still wants to have this nasty dog in case he is feeling vulnerable and his favoured dog is unable to attack his enemies savagely enough. The owner is analogous to the mainstream of the capitalist class and their regime, the dog on the very long leash to the institutions of capitalist “democracy” and the nasty dog on the short leash is like the fascists. Now if the nasty dog turns on the owner’s presently favoured dog, the owner will of course want to break up the fight between his dogs. However, although he would be most concerned to ensure that his currently favoured dog is not hurt at all he would still also do everything possible to ensure that his nasty dog in reserve is not injured too badly either. Such is the attitude of the capitalist class and their state to the fascists.
Given that, to the extent that they do not actually collude with the fascists, the American state enforcement organs will be arrayed to restrain fascist attacks on “democratic” institutions over the coming weeks, the worker/black/brown/Asian/leftist defence guards that must be mobilised to oppose the fascist threat should seek to take a military non-aggression posture towards these state organs. We would seek to avoid a physical clash with these enforcement organs while we and they are – somewhat nominally in their case – mobilised to protect the institutions of capitalist democracy from the fascists. At the same time we must ensure that our mass anti-fascist contingents remain completely independent from these state enforcement organs both politically and organisationally.
Especially given that the fascists are often armed with guns, the working class-based, anti-fascist defence squads that must be built should take advantage of the right to bear arms that exists in America – as granted by the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution – to acquire arms. Such multi-racial, workers-organised militias should coordinate with the left-wing and black militias that already exist. Building worker/black/people of colour militias is not only a task for the able-bodied people able to bear arms. Rather it is a political task requiring a mass mobilisation. For starters there needs to be a campaign of mass agitation to motivate the need to build armed militias to defend workers and oppressed peoples from fascist forces. Then people need to organise to reliably supply the guns, ammunition and other provisions needed to equip those carrying the guns in the multi-racial, anti-fascist militias. Others need to be involved in organising and communicating patrol and training rosters. Although, right now, anti-fascists outnumber the fascists in America, the latter are far better organised for physical combat, better trained and better armed. This needs to change fast!
Of course, we should also understand that the situation is highly fraught right now. We should avoid suicidally deploying contingents to areas where we would be outnumbered or outgunned by the fascists. The police, National Guard and military sure can’t be trusted to protect anti-fascists from fascists! Therefore, we should carefully select, from among the many sites where fascist provocations are planned, a few locations where we can concentrate our forces and be confident that we can mobilise sufficient strength to outnumber and outgun the fascist presence at those sites.
Now some social democrat leftists and progressive liberals would respond that our proposal is a bad strategy because it would divert the ruling class from targeting the violent Far Right at a time when the capitalist rulers are incensed with the July 6 far right riot. Such reformist leftists would no doubt argue too that pursuing the course that we are advocating would also allow the capitalist rulers to paint anti-fascists as being “as bad as” the fascists and would thus enable them to target the Left. However, such arguments are deeply flawed. For they assume that the capitalist rulers actually want to crush the fascists which, as we have explained, is definitely not the case. Moreover, if we lie low when the fascists confront the institutions of capitalist “democracy” and hope that this will ensure that the state enforcement organs do not target the Left, the very opposite will actually happen. Let’s take a reality check! All the current mobilisation of state forces in the U.S., the new restrictions on where “extremist” protests can be held, the precedents set in terms of “special” regulations and curfews and even the social media censorship, all of which are today nominally aimed against violent far-right forces will tomorrow be used against the Far Left, the staunch wing of the BLM movement and the workers movement. After all we constitute the main target of the capitalist state! In as much as the U.S. regime is seeking to put its fascist dogs back on their leashes and confine them to their designated spaces for the time being, it is merely a question of the capitalist rulers trying to put their own camp in order. But they are trying to put their camp in order so as to better attack our camp! So rather than doing nothing, if the workers movement, black liberation movement and Left mobilise our own forces to stop the expected fascist assaults on capitalist democratic institutions in the coming period then we can improve our level of organisation, self activity and militancy all the better to resist the coming crackdown on working class and progressive movements. Moreover, such activity will also improve our preparedness to defend black and other non-white minorities, LGBTIQ people, the BLM movement, our unions and the Left when the violent Far Right realise that they do not yet have the forces to displace mainstream state institutions and will return their focus back to their stock in trade of racist terror and violent attacks on the BLM movement and the Left.
The Fascist Threat Will Not End
With the Departure of Trump from the Presidency
The fascists and extreme conservatives did not have the forces to pull off their wished for coup on January 6. But if more sections of the capitalist class were behind them and they had larger, more centralised militias, then the January 6 coup could have been a step towards outright fascist rule. Fascism is a form of capitalist rule involving the complete smashing of all parties and organisations of the Left and working class (like trade unions). Beginning with a coup on January 6 that overturns the November election result and then bans “Antifa” (i.e the Far Left), fascist militias could then have started cracking down on broader and broader sections of the Left and then moved onto breaking up our trade unions (or imposing fascist leaders on these unions and thus converting them into completely pliant bodies unrecognisable from their current state). Let’s recall that Hitler’s Nazis began turning their parliamentary influence into fascist rule by first brutally smashing the Communist Party of Germany and then attacking more moderate left parties, the trade unions and Jewish, Roma and other ethnic minorities.
As events in the days following January 6 have shown, at the moment the majority of the capitalist exploiting class in the U.S. do not want to abandon parliamentary democracy in favour of the fascist form of capitalist rule. Even as trust in government evaporates, the pretensions of “democracy” remain an effective way for the capitalist exploiting class to trick the masses into believing that they actually have influence on the direction of society. Additionally, should the U.S. capitalists embrace the fascist form of rule it would undermine their ability to meddle in countries abroad under the pretext of fighting for “democracy.” Moreover, if the bulk of the capitalist class were to try to impose fascist rule it entails great risks for them. For such an attempt could provoke staunch resistance from the working class masses that could end up with the capitalists being toppled from power!
It is only when they feel especially vulnerable that the capitalists begin to consider abandoning the “democratic” form of their rule over the masses. A crisis of capitalism indeed exists right now, which is why some sections of the capitalist class are supporting far-right forces. These are frequently the capitalists who feel most insecure in their social and economic position. They are often smaller-scale bosses exploiting a lesser number of – and in some cases just a tiny handful of – workers. They feel that to make a decent profit they need wages and workers’ conditions driven down even further which can only be achieved by crushing union and leftist organising. Moreover, they want to super-exploit low-paid, black and immigrant labour even more, which requires black and brown people to be terrorised by more severe racist attacks and more open discrimination in order to make black and migrant workers fearful and compliant enough to accept still crueller working conditions. Meanwhile, even though the national-centred leaders of socialistic China do little to support the class struggle in the U.S. and other capitalist countries, capitalists are all too aware that the mere presence of such a large state where workers rule – in however deformed a way – and where socialistic public ownership plays the dominant role is a threat to both their own rule at home and their ability to exploit the peoples of South and Central America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Some U.S. capitalists have thus concluded that they need to be even more aggressive in their Cold War – or even launch a hot war – against Red China, which they know can only be prosecuted by unleashing fiercer repression of the Left at home in order to ensure that there is complete domestic unanimity for the difficult task of confronting a workers state that happens to be the most populous country in the world.
For all of the above reasons, some in the capitalist class are providing violent far-right groups with money and other forms of material support, while some sections of the capitalist media legitimise them. Some of the capitalists backing extreme right-wing forces have not yet decisively decided to go down the road of fascism but are ensuring that they have the option to go down that road in the future. Trump is an example of and a representative of this section of the capitalist class. From his statement that there were “very fine people” among the white supremacist thugs who murderously rampaged in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017 to his legitimisation of attacks on BLM protests by Proud Boys fascist militia, to his incitement of the January 6 riot to his praise of the fascist-led rioters that “we love you, you’re very special,” Trump has certainly appealed to and sought to ally himself with fascist forces. He has been more than flirting with the idea of ditching the norms of capitalist democracy – including by trying to stay in the presidency after losing last November’s elections. However, as his later condemnation of the January 6 rioters showed, Trump is not yet willing to irrevocably turn his back on using capitalist “democracy”. In a way, Trump’s schizophrenic attitude to capitalist democracy personifies the vicious internal conflicts within the U.S. ruling class. The capitalist rulers are split between, on the one end, those like Biden and the Democrats who still basically advocate parliamentary democracy and, on the other end, a smaller section who want outright fascism. In between these ends, there are numerous intermediate positions respectively held by various members of the capitalist elite, including the one occupied by the hard-right, influential owner of Fox News, Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch.
After the January 6 storming of the Capitol failed to put Trump back in the presidency, Trump and the hard-right section of the ruling class have been on the back foot in the face of a political offensive by liberal and mainstream conservative members of the Congress, of the corporate elite and of the media. These factions of the ruling class as well as many honest liberal and left-leaning people amongst the masses hope that the coming end of Trump’s presidency will see the demise of the hard-right politics pushed by Trump. Unfortunately, this will not happen. As we have explained, the rise of extreme right-wing movements comes from the crisis of capitalism itself. This will not change no matter what happens to Trump personally.
Who Are the Mass Base of the Far Right?
In order to impose fascist rule on a country, those sections of the capitalist class that choose to go down that road cannot do it by themselves. They are too small in number for that. In “normal” times the capitalists have their state organs to enforce their rule. Their cops, courts, National Guard, military, prisons and spy agencies are effective tools to murderously enforce their interests abroad and to suppress the resistance of the masses at home. However, under fascist rule the working class and oppressed and their struggles will not just be repressed: all their organisations will be violently smashed. The existing state organs are not fully up to such a task. After all, while enforcing capitalist exploitation, “democratic” capitalist state organs still have to pretend that they are there “to serve all the people” in an “impartial” manner. To wage a brazen class war against the organisations and activists of the working class and other subjugated sections of society, the exploiting class need an additional, more fanatical force. That mass force is provided by fascist militias consisting primarily of backward, ultra-reactionary members of the middle class.
In summary, fascism as a movement (rather than when the word is used to describe a form of political rule) is a mass movement of those sections of the middle class – or to use the more precise Marxist term, the petit bourgeoisie – who in a time of capitalist crisis are whipped into extreme opposition to the struggles of the working class, oppressed communities and the Left. The petit bourgeois are members of that class of society who are neither exploiters of labour – i.e. they are not capitalists – nor are they people whose labour is directly exploited by capitalists (in other words they are not wage workers). This very diverse class includes not only people who are traditionally thought of as “middle class” – small business owners not using hired labour, accountants, doctors, low-level managers, architects, engineers, self-employed computer programmers, lawyers and farmers – but also other self-employed people who are often colloquially referred to as “working class” but who are actually part of the petit bourgeoisie because of their self-employed/contracting means of earning an income. The latter include those “tradies” (plumbers, electricians, handymen, carpenters, tilers etc) who are self-employed, as well truck drivers owning their own truck and self-employed cleaners, hairdressers and landscape gardeners. Due to their often intermediate position within the class conflict between capitalist bosses and workers, members of the petit bourgeoisie can end up lining up behind either one of these two main classes.
For much of the petit bourgeoisie, especially lower income sections of this class, it is overwhelmingly in their interests to stand behind the working class struggle against capitalism. After all, they are hurt by capitalism in many ways. If they are self employed they are often bullied by the banks or the big landlords from whom they rent their business premises from. Skilled personnel (or, for instance, owner truck drivers) having their own business and relying on contracts from corporations for their income are often ripped off by the latter. Meanwhile, capitalism creates economic instability and crises which causes great hardships for many parts of the petit bourgeoisie. The children of the petit bourgeoisie can often end up being part of the exploited working class. However, in “normal” times the petit bourgeoisie tend to be conservative and follow the capitalist class. Here, in Australia, the petit bourgeoisie overwhelmingly vote for the Liberal-National Party or parties further to the right. In the U.S. they have been largely backing Trump. Because this class does not have much social power – it is hard for them, for example, to unite like workers at a workplace to stand up to a capitalist boss – they tend to follow the main class that is stronger at any given time. Many a petit bourgeois self-employed business owner hopes to gain enough profits to one day hire labour – i.e. become a capitalist – and make still greater profits from exploiting these workers. Meanwhile, the higher income sections of the petit bourgeoisie have enough money to invest in shares and, therefore, see their interests as being aligned with the big capitalist shareholders of corporations.
There are also some sections of the petit bourgeoisie – including highly educated sections working in “intellectual” pursuits – who are currently more small-l liberal in their outlook. Take, for example, the accountant at a manufacturing company who gets on well with the shop-floor process workers and secretly despises the greedy business owner and the arrogant top managers who act as the owner’s henchmen. However, when there is conflict between the unionised workers and the boss, the accountant does not want to openly side with the workers fearing that she will lose her relatively well-paying job. So the accountant stays quiet and wishes, quite hopelessly, that “everyone can get on” and there will be peace between the bosses and the factory workers, so that she is not squashed in the middle. Such is the economic basis for the small-l liberal outlook within some sections of the educated petit bourgeoisie.
Today the petit bourgeoisie is suffering from much insecurity. The deep recession triggered by the pandemic has ruined many a small business in the U.S. – and to some extent Australia too – and brought many more to the brink of ruin. Even before the pandemic hit, the truth is that the capitalist economies never fully recovered from the late noughties Global Recession and many a self-employed person has been terrified by such an economic collapse ever since. Meanwhile, a large number of self-employed “tradies” have stopped receiving enough contracts from corporations to make ends meet. Far-right demagogues have been able to exploit all these insecurities to mobilise the most politically backward section of the petit bourgeoisie into a fanatical hatred of the struggles and advocacy organisations of the working class, oppressed black people and the Left. Since it is far harder for the petit bourgeoisie to kick upwards at the powerful capitalists – whose system is the real cause of their hardships – reactionary sections of the petit bourgeoisie are led to kick downwards savagely at the working class and oppressed below them. Workers’ strikes, climate change direct actions, BLM struggles and other staunch left-wing street protests are blamed for impeding the flow of supplies and products to their businesses, for increasing their insurance costs and for otherwise disrupting their operations. Meanwhile, they are whipped into an irrational frenzy against overseas producers, against supposedly “unfair” competition from China and against racial minorities and refugees – all of whom are scapegoated for the petit bourgeoise’s economic difficulties or blamed for soaking up their tax dollars. Those vulnerable to such demagogy include former wage workers who have been retrenched from their jobs and have now been involuntarily forced into opening self-employed businesses or contracting in order to make ends meet. Vulnerable in their new vocation, some a few years after being retrenched and many episodes of watching Fox-News-documentaries later, forget that it was capitalists who initially put them in their precarious current position; and consequently – especially since their new self-absorption in their own individual business has gradually thinned their ties with their former worker mates and drawn them ever more into an individualistic, self-obsessed outlook – fall for crazy claims blaming oppressed communities, imported goods and that all purpose bogey man, Red China, for their precarious situation.
One crucial reason that the frustrations of the middle class can be channelled against the working class and other oppressed sectors is that the petit bourgeois fears that if those below them demand and win greater rights, they will lose their relatively privileged position in comparison with these layers and even end up being plunged into the same social position that working class people currently endure. Although union struggles for workers rights are, at the moment, at an all too low level in the U.S., struggles for black liberation have a similar effect upon reactionary parts of the white petit bourgeoisie. This is especially the case since black people are not only a community facing racist persecution but are, in their majority, a group forcibly pushed to the lowest income layers of the working class. Insecure petit bourgeois right-wingers irrationally fear that if black people are able win greater rights and are able to free themselves from discrimination, the white middle class will end up not only being displaced from their current social position but will be forced to replace working class blacks at the bottom of society. Hence the obsession of the Far Right with ridiculously asserting that as a result of “reverse discrimination” it is white middle class people who are actually oppressed!
There is a particular feature of the contemporary Far Right that is more pronounced than in earlier fascist movements. And that is that they are a very male movement not just in composition but in prejudices. Petit bourgeois males have their economic insecurities magnified by fears that the privileged position of men over women in capitalist societies is threatened by women’s rights movements and anything that smacks of giving women greater rights: from abortion rights to affirmative action programs to women fighting back against workplace sexual harassment. Thus similar to, albeit less fanatical than, their hostility to black liberation struggles, the right-wing portion of the male petit bourgeoisie is fervently opposed to women’s rights movements which they fear will plunge them down to the oppressed position of women.
In addition to reactionary sections of the petit bourgeoisie, there are two other components of the mass base of fascists. One is those sections of the impoverished, unemployed population who are isolated from the working class movement. This especially includes former self-employed petit bourgeois or even small-scale capitalist exploiters whose businesses have gone bust and are now forced to join the ranks of the unemployed. Then there are skilled professionals and former lower and middle managers who because of their relatively high pay have been among the first to be laid off when companies decide to downsize. Since all these layers would likely never have had a pro-working class outlook, they are prone to somehow blame the working class and oppressed communities for their plight. In contrast, those newly unemployed workers who retain ties to the union movement or to current wage workers are more likely to blame the bosses and the corporations for their situation. However, some longer term unemployed workers who have gradually been isolated over the years from existing wage workers can easily fall prey to demagogues blaming racial minorities for “taking our jobs.”
Like the petit bourgeoisie, isolated unemployed people can often be influenced by right-wing conspiracy theories. Whereas workers, especially those at bigger worksites, have their trusted co-workers to bounce ideas off several times a week and through collective in-person discussion weed out theories that are obviously whacko, isolated unemployed people and self-employed petit bourgeois often do not have the chance to have such frequent in-person discussions with large numbers of trusted people. Their source of ideas and discussion is the internet and social media intercourse rather than real world discussion with people that they actually know well in the real world. Naturally then, crazy conspiracy theories that would not hold up to serious scrutiny in the real world can infect their minds.
A final group that adds to the mass base of the Far Right are current and retired police, prison guards, military soldiers and National Guard troops. Extreme right-wing ideologies give these people solace by “justifying” their repression of workers struggles, the black rights movement and the Left at home and, in the case of military personnel, their participation in the Cold War drive against socialistic China. Moreover, by fanatically opposing those leftists and black rights activists who protest police, prison guard and military atrocities, fascists gain favour with these state enforcement personnel.
Right-wing sections of the petit bourgeoisie, current and former police, soldiers and prison guards, smaller-scale capitalist exploiters and those sections of the unemployed isolated from the workers movement, these were indeed the mass base of Hitler’s Nazis. And today they are the mass base of fascist movements in both the U.S. and Australia. This is confirmed by information trickling out about those arrested in the July 6 far-right riot. They include several small business owners, a CEO of a small company, a self-employed furniture maker married to a doctor, a real estate broker, an insurance company’s lawyer, a West Virginia politician, a lecturer, the son of a retired local supreme court judge, an army captain, a retired Air Force officer, a former Navy SEAL and two currently serving police officers.
Since the embittered petit bourgeoisie mobilised behind extreme right-wing movements have much anger at the current state of society, far-right demagogues must espouse an “anti-establishmentarianism” to win the trust of their base. Trump promised to “drain the swamp” in Washington, a term he used to signal opposition to corrupt high-ranking government bureaucrats. Often outright fascist leaders also appeal to the petit bourgeoisie’s and small-scale capitalists’ fury at being bullied by the banks and big capital by promising to the curb the power of finance capital. Hitler claimed hostility to the banks. However, given that it is only the working class that has the power to successfully fight against the most powerful capitalists – the finance capitalists – and given that fascist movements are all about smashing working class political action, anti-working class mass movements of the petit bourgeoisie, i.e. fascist forces, have no ability to resist the power of finance capital. Moreover, in the absence of the working class leading a struggle to overthrow the capitalists, both the petit bourgeoisie and small-scale capitalist exploiters – the people who make up the mass base of the fascists – despite all their resentment about the banks, are economically dependent on the finance capitalists. As a result, fascist movements promising their base that they would both, on the one hand, crush the workers movement and oppressed peoples and, on the other hand, bring finance capitalists into line, are left only being able to deliver on their first promise and far from being able to deliver on their second one, end up being the most extreme enforcers of the interests of all the capitalists – including the bankers, fund managers and insurance bosses. In the end, the supposed “anti-establishmentarianism” of the Far Right is actually an opposition to the “establishment” making any concession, however small, to the struggles of the working class and oppressed peoples. It is the “rebelliousness” of carrying the Confederate flag which is a “rebellion” against any move to reduce the discrimination and segregation suffered by black people and in literal terms actually a “rebellion” against the ending of slavery! It is an “anti-government” opposition to governments collecting taxes to fund even the most minimal medical insurance for some of the poor. In reality the Far Right’s “anti-establishmentarianism” is really an ultra-establishmentarianism!
Mobilising Against the Fascist Threat Will
Advance the Struggle for Workers Rule
Although those capitalists moving towards opting for the fascist road do currently back violent far-right groups, the two components leading towards fascism – the movement of a section of the capitalist class towards support for ruling through the fascist form and the assembly of a mass fascist base centred on the reactionary portion of the petit bourgeoisie – can develop somewhat independently. Fascist leaders may for a while be able to sell to their petit bourgeois and small-scale capitalist base that they are independent of the big capitalists. However, at a certain point, when decisive sections of the capitalist class decide that they have no option but to take the fascist path, the anti-democracy wing of the capitalist class comes together with the fascist mass movement based on the petit bourgeoisie. Thus an important step in the ascendancy of Hitler’s Nazis to power was when in November 1932, twenty-two leading German finance, industrial and agricultural capitalists signed a petition – the infamous Industrielleneingabe – demanding that then German president Hindenburg make Nazi head, Hitler, the chancellor.
Right now in the U.S., the amount of workers struggle has not reached a level that could either scare the majority of the capitalist class to abandon support for capitalist “democracy” or to drive the mass of the embittered petit bourgeoisie into supporting fascist movements. However, this could change very quickly. Moreover, as we saw on January 6, the crisis of capitalism is at such a level that it has already driven a sizeable minority of the petit bourgeoisie, smaller-scale capitalists and state enforcement personnel into extreme right-wing movements. And Joe Biden becoming president is not going to change this! Although the Democrats now securing control of the Senate will allow the incoming Biden administration to pass a big stimulus bill and the roll out of vaccines will gradually ease the suffering caused by the pandemic, the deeper, longer term crisis of capitalism remains. This crisis will continue to threaten the livelihoods of not only the working class and the very poor but also self-employed people. Meanwhile, with Biden, or even the most progressive Democrats, having no program whatsoever to stop capitalists from retrenching workers at will or from confining their hiring to casual positions, more and more workers unable to gain secure wage-earning jobs will be pushed into establishing unviable new businesses in order to have a hope of gaining a livelihood. All this will ensure that there will be plenty of insecure self-employed business owners and smaller-scale capitalists heading into the ranks of fascist outfits. The fact that Biden, who fully supports capitalism, will not be able to fundamentally close the massive gap in wealth between the rich and poor in America will mean that the capitalists and their media will need to promote racism and protectionism in order to divide and divert the exploited masses and stop them uniting against their common capitalist enemy. Such propaganda will serve to legitimise fascist movements.
Indeed, the fact that Trump will no longer be president will likely accelerate the conversion of right-wing conservatives into outright fascists. With right-wing conservatives now seeing that they have no vehicle for their agenda through the “democratic” process they are more likely to resort to violent means. This trend will be further intensified by the reality that many far-right activists feel betrayed by Trump who, under pressure from leaders of his own Republican Party, eventually condemned the January 6 rioters. This is likely to lead to many extreme conservatives concluding that even their best-case president could not satisfy their “aspirations” and that, therefore, democracy should be completely rejected and the full fascist agenda should be embraced.
However, it does not need to be this way. When the working class show that they are able to not only protest and strike for better rights but are strong enough to actually challenge for political power, the petit bourgeois now streaming towards the fascists will think twice. When they see that it is possible to challenge the big capitalist oppressor they will start to see that their fanatical squabbling with – and bullying of – layers of the oppressed more subjugated than them is pretty pointless. Why fight over crumbs when big slices of the cake are going to be retrieved for the benefit of all from the very few that were hoarding them! The formerly far-right portions of the petit bourgeoisie will then start to become politically neutral. Meanwhile, the more progressive sections of the petit bourgeois masses will rush enthusiastically into open support for the insurgent working class. The worker-friendly accountant who we spoke about earlier will now feel confident enough to openly declare her support for the workers struggle at her workplace and with delight will be able to finally show her capitalist boss what she really thinks of this greedy exploiter.
To finally get rid of the threat of a new Nazi-style regime gaining the ascendancy in the U.S., Australia or any other capitalist country we need to sweep away capitalist rule for good through socialist revolution. When we have a system of workers rule based on socialist public ownership of the means of production we will be able to put an end to unemployment, insecure work, inequality and economic crises. In other words we will be liberated from the economic conditions that spawn racism and fascism.
A socialist revolution cannot be prepared by mere propaganda or organised from scratch. It is prepared through the working class and other oppressed groups being mobilised in many partial struggles and in the course of these strengthening their unity, gaining greater confidence in their own power and, with the assistance of a revolutionary party, learning to distrust all parties and political institutions of the capitalist class and to, instead, see the need for themselves to collectively seize political power. This is why mobilising mass worker/black/leftist action against fascist attacks is especially crucial. For not only does such action resist the fascist threat, it also helps us to develop the organisation, discipline and activity needed to fight the incoming Biden administration and the capitalist class as a whole. Fascists still only make up a minority – albeit a quite significant one – of Trump’s supporters and a smaller minority of the whole population. They are still deeply hated by the majority of the population. So our trade unions, the black liberation movement and the Left have certain political space to develop and use certain means against the fascists – including armed militias and mass direct action to disperse fascist assemblies – that we cannot at this time use against the capitalist state. However, in unleashing such actions against the fascists we are organising and preparing ourselves for future staunch action to defend ourselves against the capitalist regime. It is worth noting that the immediate prelude to the October 1917 Russian socialist revolution was the Bolshevik-led workers mobilising direct action to defeat a far-right military coup led by general Lavr Kornilov. Because the active sections of the working class defeated the coup by their own mass action they gained the confidence in their own power, unity and organisational strength needed to seize state power less than two months later.
Of course, mobilising against the fascist threat is just one crucial component of the resistance that we must wage in the coming period. There also needs to be powerful class struggle action against job slashing by capitalist corporations. We must struggle for secure jobs for all workers by fighting to force all profitable companies to increasing hiring at the expense of their profits. Counterpoised to the Democrats minimal promised medical insurance reforms, we must demand completely free, high-quality public health care for all. Crucially, the workers movement must mobilise its industrial power to back black people’s struggle against racist state terror. We must build on the powerful action by U.S. dock workers on June 19 last year when they shut down all West Coast ports in solidarity with the BLM movement; and with the action of tens of thousands of fast food, ride-share, nursing home and airport workers in more than 25 cities who walked off the job on July 20 in opposition to racist police brutality.
Led by determined and capable black activists, the massive – and at times very militant – BLM protests in the U.S. summer of last year show the potential for staunch resistance against the racist, capitalist order in America. However, like other worker and progressive movements, the BLM movement dwindled as the election approached and waned further after Biden’s election. This shows how much illusions in the Democrats harm the struggle against exploitation and racism. Therefore, even as we need to mobilise to physically resist attacks from fascists who right now have Democrats as one of their main targets, we need to fight for a complete political break of the workers movement, the BLM movement and all progressive movements from the Democrats.
The U.S. Capitalist “Order” Suffers a
Big Blow to its International Prestige? Good!
The shock waves from the dramatic events of January 6 have reverberated around the world. The deep – and indeed violent – divisions within the U.S. ruling class have been exposed for the whole world to see. Although overall the January 6 riot is a terrible event in that it shows how emboldened violent far-right forces are, one important positive to take from the events is that it has been a blow to the prestige of America’s capitalist rulers. Their supposed “democratic” system has been proven to be weak, damaged and crisis ridden. This undermines their ability to meddle in other countries under the guise of “promoting democracy.” The Chinese government has rightly pointed out the hypocrisy of U.S. House speaker Nancy Pelosi who, while denouncing the January 6 rioters, had earlier praised the anti-PRC rioters [from the pro-colonial, rich people’s opposition in Hong Kong] storming and vandalising the Hong Kong parliament building as a “beautiful sight.”
Australia’s capitalist rulers are very worried that all this damage to the U.S. regime’s prestige will harm their own interests. The Australian capitalist class superexploits the peoples of the South Pacific and plunders their natural resources. However, they rely on the power of their U.S. big brother allies to guarantee this tyranny. Over the last few years, the Australian regime has chosen to put itself at the very forefront of the Western capitalist Cold War drive against socialistic China. They did so, however, on the premise that Washington would be right behind them. Now with Red China, by far Australia’s largest source of export income, finally pushing back, Australia’s rulers look at their rear view mirror for backing from their American big brothers… only to find that their big brothers are too busy beating each other up to stand up for their Aussie capitalist mates! Australia’s ABC News reported that when the January 6 riot was taking place, Australian politicians and foreign policy bureaucrats were glued to their televisions watching the events in horror.
Trump’s incitement of the January 6 riot and the thuggish behaviour of his supporters who invaded the Capitol have politically damaged many pro-Trump movements around the world. This includes the hard-right government of India led by Hindu chauvinist and mass murderer of Muslims, Narendra Modi. Another largely pro-Trump force is the pro-colonial, supposedly “pro-democracy,” opposition in Hong Kong. Many in this movement have carried pro-Trump slogans and most wanted Trump to win the November elections. The key figure and financier of the movement is far-right media billionaire, Jimmy Lai, known as Hong Kong’s Rupert Murdoch, whose news outlets have been unashamedly pro-Trump. Especially in the wake of the January 6 riots, the ardent support of the bulk of Hong Kong’s anti-PRC opposition to Trump exposes the fraudulent nature of their “pro-democracy” pretensions. Another fervently pro-Trump movement is the far-right Chinese pseudo-religious organisation, Falun Dafa, and its newspaper outlet, Epoch Times. Epoch Times has become a main force spreading all of Trump’s most ridiculous conspiracy theories from ones about the origins of COVID-19 to the one that helped incite the January 6 riot: that Trump was cheated out of victory in last November’s election. Indeed, the claims of Falun Dafa’s Epoch Times have been so ludicrous that even Youtube recently suspended for two weeks its Hong Kong edition, despite Falun Dafa’s fervently pro-Western agenda. People who recognise the completely fake nature of their conspiracy theories about the U.S. presidential elections should distrust all the other assertions pushed by Falun Dafa and Epoch Times – including the whacko claim that the Chinese government executed Falun Dafa prisoners to harvest organs for sale.
Support the Struggle Against Fascism and Capitalism in the U.S. by
Mobilising Against Australia’s Capitalist Rulers and the
Fascist Shock Troops That They Spawn
As the Australian regime’s main ally, events in the U.S. have a major effect on Australian politics. Current Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, and many of Australia’s most powerful capitalists including Gina Rinehart and Anthony Pratt are close to Trump. It is undoubted that the advent of Trump to the presidency and the rise of the Far Right in America has emboldened fascist groups in Australia. Far-right MPs in Australia’s ruling Liberal-National coalition have been openly cheering Trump. Today these government politicians like George Christensen and Craig Kelly repeat many of the lies peddled by Trump – including claiming that the November election was stolen from him as well as repeating Trump’s earlier anti-scientific opposition to mask wearing as a means to slow the spread of the pandemic. Prime minister Morrison has pointedly refused to condemn these MPs for their statements. Meanwhile, deputy – and currently acting – prime minister, Michael McCormack, sought to downplay the January 6 riots and despicably equated this rampage by white supremacists with the BLM anti-racist protests.
Yet progressive struggles in the U.S. also shape this country. The BLM struggle in the U.S. in the middle of last year inspired the antiracist movement in this country. The weekend of June 6-7 saw the biggest anti-racist protests in Australia in a long time. Tens of thousands of people marched through Australian cities not only in solidarity with the BLM struggle in the U.S. but in opposition to racist state murders of Aboriginal people in custody.
The working class and oppressed of Australia face many similar lessons to our sisters and brothers in the USA. One lesson is the simple truth that capitalism breeds fascism. Although fascist forces here are currently not as organised as they are in the U.S., they are nevertheless already a substantial threat. They help incite the thousands of violent and verbal racist attacks that are perpetrated by garden-variety racists all the time in this country. Moreover, less than two years ago, an Australian white supremacist who was nurtured in the racist climate created by Australia’s capitalist society murdered 51 Muslim people in New Zealand’s Christchurch in the biggest single terrorist attack ever committed by an Australian individual.
Another crucial lesson that we should learn from U.S. events is that one cannot rely on the capitalist state to repulse the fascist threat, as was proven during the January 6 storming of the Capitol. There has been ample evidence of this here too. The Australian white supremacist shooter who perpetrated the Christchurch massacre was never monitored by the Australian Federal Police (AFP) or ASIO despite being very active online spewing racist filth and making threats. Instead the AFP and ASIO have been busy intimidating and raiding the offices of our trade unions – including the AWU and the CFMEU – and arresting whistleblowers who expose the atrocities of the Australian regime, including David McBride the former military lawyer who exposed the horrific war crimes by Australian troops in Afghanistan. They were also engrossed in persecuting socialist political prisoner, Chan Han Choi, who spent three years in prison without trial due to his sympathy for socialistic North Korea and is now under house arrest facing trial on charges of trying to organise trade deals to help the people of North Korea avoid cruel economic sanctions. It was a political choice by the AFP and ASIO to target the union movement, Chan Han Choi, whistleblowers and even journalists, rather than monitor the rabid white supremacist who would end up murdering 51 people.
Based on this recent history and examining the January 6 riot in Washington, we should have zero confidence that the inquiry into “extremist” groups in Australia that was reluctantly announced last month by the right-wing Morrison government will do anything meaningful to curb far-right violence in Australia. That inquiry was enacted by hard-right home affairs minister, Peter Dutton – the very same Peter Dutton who has been greatly responsible for inflaming racist sentiments through his overseeing of Australia’s cruel incarceration of refugees in offshore detention camps, through his statements inciting fear of African youth and by his rant that it was a mistake to let Lebanese Muslim migrants into Australia. Even more tellingly, the person chosen to head this inquiry is far-right Liberal MP, Andrew Hastie. This is the same Andrew Hastie who has criticised Australia’s Muslim community and who was lionised by fascist groups for his strident calls to completely remove laws proscribing racist hate speech. Moreover, this same Andrew Hastie champions the white supremacist cause celebre pushing for special refugee status for white South African farmers; a “cause” based on the racist myth that these farmers – often notorious for their brutal and sometimes murderous exploitation and repression of black farm workers – are facing “white genocide.” “Adolf” Hastie even led rallies demanding fast tracked visas for these rich white farmers. At these events, Hastie rubbed shoulders with some of Australia’s most notorious and violent fascists who, in turn, carried despicable white supremacist placards like, “Let the Right Ones In” [i.e. white South African farmers and not dark-skinned refugees] and “White Lives Matter.” And now this Andrew Hastie is heading an inquiry that is supposed to look at right-wing extremism in Australia! All he needs is a mirror! As in the U.S., we must not rely at all on capitalist politicians, capitalist institutions or the capitalist state to defeat the threat posed by violent far-right forces. We must rely only on mass mobilisations of the working class united will all the intended targets of the fascists.
Just as progressive struggles in the U.S. inspire struggles in Australia, if we mobilise actions here against fascist threats, against racist state terror against black people in this country, for increased hiring of workers at the expense of capitalist profits and against the U.S./Australia Cold War drive against socialistic China then this will encourage similar struggles in America. As black and brown people in the U.S., alongside Chinese people, Muslims, Jews, the workers movement and the Left face a heightened threat of fascist terror to go along with mass unemployment, low wages and the carnage caused by the American regime’s fatally flawed “response” to the pandemic, the best solidarity we can offer to our embattled sisters and brothers in the U.S. is to intensify our struggle here against the capitalist ruling class of Australia and the fascist shock troops that serve their interests.
