Fascist Terror in Pittsburgh and Louisville
This past week was a violence festival for the fascists. How do we end it?
Two years of the #MAGA movement with Trump at the helm have not stymied the decay of the capitalist order and a parallel decline of civil order. Trump took credit for the meteoric rise of the stock market last year but he did not take credit for the decline last January and he will not step up to the plate and claim credit for this week. For those who have watched their 401K’s take a dive this week his promise to MAGA are getting a little old. The 4% unemployment rate would be a true measure of success if it was factual and based on jobs with decent wages and benefits, but the rise in interest rates and tariffs were not a real answer to the stagnation of capital investment in the productive forces. Trump’s inability to deliver on his promises of good jobs with good wages, benefits and a brighter day has his Neanderthal followers seeking a scapegoat for their misery.
Egged on by the Trump, Fox, Breitbart echo chamber the unhinged lone-wolves of the Alt-right let loose on America for a week straight. Once Trump declared himself a nationalist, the festival of fascism began. Following a spate of politically directed package bombs sent by a flaky “Trumpenkrieger” the blood started to flow. The bodies of the victims of the synagogue massacre aren’t all in the ground yet, but the Democrats heard Trump’s complaints and are laser focused on what he does and says and on the elections he says are a referendum on him. Ineffectual as usual, Democrat Joe Biden this week said “now is not the time” to speak about impeachment, even while Trump claims the violence is the fault of the fake news media and results from criticism of him.
It was Black and Jewish blood his supporters spilled. We noticed and won’t shut up about it, being Marxist revolutionists and not remotely mainstream media. For the Bonaparte wannabe, himself and even his hair are what you should care about. That and the threat of immigrant caravan “invasion.”
The bourgeois press disapproves of Trump’s characterization of the ‘caravanistas’ as criminal illegal invaders with a mixture of middle easterners hiding in the throng; so for the press the caravan is made up of “migrants,” suggesting these are seasonal labor visitors who won’t stay. We say the obvious; they are refugees and deserve every citizenship right, and we demand those for them. Trump has announced he’s sending 15,000 troops to the Mexican border to stop the “very bad people” the murderer Bowers believed were invited by Jews to come to America to kill his people.
“Screw the optics, I’m going in,” reads a post attributed to Bowers moments before he fired the first gunshots inside the synagogue.
Ask yourself why Bowers, the white power murderer would cast aside concern about what his deed would look like. We say his message was for Trump. Bowers wrote Trump must clear ‘the jews’ out of the White House and the State Department must cease supporting immigration of Muslims, Jews and Central Americans and break all ties with the 137-year-old Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), a chapter of which met in the Synagogue Bowers attacked. This is also the message of the 9 white supremacist candidates running for Congress. That the most visible of these, Steve King of Iowa has been cut loose by the Republican National Committee, does not mean that Trump can do without their support, or that the party will shed them. They have had fifty years to shed them and the C.I.A.-supported eastern European “freedom fighter” Hitlerite fringe.
Just days before the massacre a twisted racist, Gregory Alan Bush, emboldened by Trump’s hate filled #MAGA rhetoric picked up on Dylan Roof’s racist murderous rage and shot down two African-American customers at a Kroger’s grocery store because he had failed to get inside the Black church across the street. Bush was confident that he would not be shot by another white man who confronted him in the parking lot.
“Ed Harrell … was waiting on his wife in the parking lot when he heard gunshots and grabbed his revolver. As he crouched down, … he saw the gunman walk “nonchalantly” by with gun by his side. Harrell called out to ask what was going on, and the gunman replied: “Don’t shoot me. I won’t shoot you. Whites don’t shoot whites.”
The murderer Bush imperfectly understands the historical moment. A river of blood separates the U.S. of the post-civil rights era from the Jim Crow past. The element of truth in what he says is the police generally will defend the assemblies of fascists and attack antifascists. What he gets wrong is they will not disobey orders to apprehend or even shoot lone wolf gunmen, at least for the present.
The upsurge in violence comes just a week after the Proud Boys Gavin McGinnes re-enacted the murder of a Japanese Socialist parliamentarian by a Japanese nationalist before the approving and stodgy NYC Republican Club. This is not playing well for Trump and his Party, despite the optics of a fawning Kanye West and the Young Black Leadership Summit echoing the anti-Semitic attack on Soros. These young Uncle Toms meeting with Trump picked up on the anti-globalist rhetoric and chanted he should lock up Soros, causing Trump laughs. When you see Trump laugh, remember what we said in “Class War”. He never jokes. In a bid to deliver for Black rightism he says he will abolish birthright citizenship by Executive Order. This is unconstitutional, as even Kelly Ann Conway’s husband has pointed out. But Trump has his packed Supreme Court now, and we are not at all sure the liberal and conservative laughs you hear now will be the last.
The intellectual/academic class and the average workers are placing the blame for the increased violence on Trump’s rhetoric. On the east coast a civil engineer asks a historian why Trump is still President. He answered ‘because his wife hasn’t poisoned him yet’ and tells her about Warren G. Harding and his demise. On the west coast a doctor’s secretary said someone should shoot Trump. We didn’t ask whether these individuals believe the C.I.A. shot JFK, these being nothing but conversations we overheard. But they show how the masses really want Trump gone and much of the fuel of the expected “blue wave” is the expectation of a quick impeachment. Of course personal violence may be a pattern in U.S. history and even for far less cause, but it is no political remedy and would just result in a Falwell/Robertson/Huckabee style white power/Putinpal Pence administration, JUST LIKE THE SIMPLE IMPEACHMENT THE VOTERS ARE EXPECTING FROM THE DEMOCRATS! An expectation we say is on express rails to disappointment and disillusion.
Trump is the Democrats ideal punching bag and if they can jerk the voter masses they’ll keep him around until January, 2021. They are conceding as much every night when they forecast not winning the Senate and moving blithely to the topic of possible 2020 nominees. Will they even want the Mueller report, or want it made public? Exasperated workers ask ‘well who else are you going to vote for?’ This is exactly the right question. Further down we will tell you about a party we need which does not exist yet. (Hint: It will not be a creation of or a servant of the ruling class.)
Trumpenkriegers (Trump Warriors in fake German)
The reason the rightist sociopaths and their intellectual headcarriers and apologists are not any more united than they are is they don’t all agree on the ranking of their scapegoats. And even among the fascists who have a lot of enemies’ list agreement, they don’t have lots of agreement on strategy and they have no discipline organizations. This is why Steve Bannon dismissed the Charlottesville tiki torch mob as “a bunch of clowns.” Bannon has talked about being a Leninist, and liberals and anarcho-Democrats have too much fun pointing at that, but he is talking about a Brown International with a solid political line and disciplined cadres. The sociopaths whose activism we have seen last week are nothing like what Bannon wants (we can add– what Putin and his kept white power theorist Dugin wants, although Putin is gaming the racism of Bannon, Dugin AND Trump in pursuit of world hegemony for the Russia/China alliance.)
The courts have not been smiling on the various “trumpenkriegers.” They may be imagining they are the reincarnations of the original 1870s Ku Kluxers, but they are not enjoying the impunity the post-Reconstruction terrorists did. Trump’s statements at his rallies don’t pan out. He does not pay their legal fees! He soups them up, they act out, and the FBI swoops on them or fingers them for the local police. It came as a big surprise to the Rise Above Movement that its leadership got arrested recently for violence dating back to Charlottesville. Likewise, in recent weeks members of the Proud Boys thought they could beat up protesters in Manhattan (NY). The principal leader of this gang, Gavin McInnes, was addressing the East 84th street Republican club in celebrating the anniversary of the stabbing of a Socialist leader by a Japanese nationalist, and McInnes’s goons were not satisfied by the theater of him recreating the scene on stage with a samurai sword, but were filmed out front stomping two protesters on the sidewalk. Three Proud Boys are in jail now. The question is, what the police will do when fascism gets the bigger rightist population to join them in “action?” We expect the police to defend them physically, as they have done across the last century.
Fascism in the U.S. is racism-driven, but this is only the surface motive-objective combination. Fascism everywhere is a capitalist movement for the restoration of the rate of profit by violent suppression of the workers movement and its vanguard. Once this is understood the remedy is plain to see. It is the self-organization of the working class and the oppressed for self-defense and liberation from exploitation by Capital and its wages system. In practical terms. What is required now are Labor-Black-Brown Community Defense Guards, organized at Union halls and community centers. Mass mobilizations of the trade unions and the oppressed communities are needed to drive the fascists back underground and not give them one bit of room to organize and recruit for their genocidal terror. The Labor movement needs to address fascist recruiting in the prisons and armed forces. We say “Bring the Union In! Drive the fascists out!”
The Lasting Social Remedy
Workers are asking ‘well who would YOU vote for?’ and we think this is the right question to ask because we think the franchise is too important to ignore like the sectarians and some anarchists do. In fact, in the reorganization of society for species survival we call the socialist revolution, the working class will be voting on all the important questions and not once over 2,4 or 6 years but every day! How do we make a start to accomplish this revolution?
We propose a fighting workers’ Labor Party. The political program of this party will codify an uncompromising struggle against exploitation and oppression of every kind. The workers and oppressed will at last have their own party beholden to no interests but their own and one which will champion all their struggles. Naturally, this party will champion the self-defense of immigrants and all victimized communities. We will likewise see survival as a function of socially necessary labor. This means “Jobs For All” with a reduced work week (30 for 40) and a sliding scale of wages and hours. The U.S.A. that has a future will require massive public works including emergency environmental remediation and restoration, as well as an entirely new energy regime. Even under the present-day regime, party candidates will be workers who fight for such reforms as part of a program that links the struggles and consciousness of today with the historic tasks of the workers’ socialist program.
For workers power! For socialism!
We will not forget these victims of the worst act of fascist violence in the modern era.
Pittsburgh victims of Anti-Semitism.
Joyce Fienberg, 75
Rich Gottfried, 65
Rose Mallinger, 97
Jerry Rabinowitz, 66
Cecil Rosenthal, 59
David Rosenthal, 54
Bernice Simon, 84
Sylvan Simon, 86
Daniel Stein, 71
Melvin Wax, 88
Irving Younger, 69
Louisville, Kentucky victims of anti-black racism:
Maurice Stallard, 69
Vickie Lee Jones, 67
