Communist Workers Group (CWG-USA)

Anti-Fascist Protesters Confront Nazis in Kansas City:

We Need Mass Labor, Black and Brown Mobilizations to Stop the Nazis/KKK!

Rally against the Nazis in Kansas City on November 9th

November 9th saw worldwide protests against fascists, with rallies in Sweden, Poland, Germany, Russia, Italy and Spain. In the United States, several hundred anti-fascist protestors rallied in downtown Kansas City, Missouri, across from the Jackson County Courthouse on November 9th, against the National Socialist Movement (NSM) Nazis on the anniversary of Kristallnacht. The anti-racist counter protest represented the good people of Kansas City and the surrounding area and embodied the Black, Brown, immigrant and Jewish communities; workers and youth; anarchists, Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World) and socialists; plus individual trade unionists. The few dozen Nazis (the KKK did not show) were protected by the cops and police barricades and they were allowed to spew their race-hatred, particularly targeting immigrants, through a sound system, while the anti-racist demonstrators had only their voices to drown them out, as bullhorns were banned in the counter-demonstration area. The counter-demo at the courthouse against the NSM was supported by SHARP (Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice), the Latino Coalition of Kansas City, the Ida B. Wells Coalition Against Racism and Police Brutality, and Occupy Kansas City. Unfortunately, adequate forces were not there to stop the Nazis from rallying.

A larger, diversionary, Gandhi-style pacifist rally was held two miles away from the courthouse at the Liberty Memorial, endorsed by the City Council, faith groups, politicians such as City Councilman John Sharp and Mayor Sly James, as well as the NAACP. This is a completely bankrupt strategy and only serves to diffuse the mobilization of the masses against fascist thugs. The Kansas City Council passed a resolution urging “all residents to express their moral outrage and morally confront the NSM’s hateful rhetoric through their words and actions on November 9.” Moral outrage or embarrassing the Nazis/KKK is not enough! Fascism needs to be crushed before it grows!

The historical experience of Germany in the years before the Nazi seizure of, and more recently, the experience of Golden Dawn political violence in Greece shows us the danger of tolerating these forces in our midst. These racist terrorists are a mortal danger to Blacks, Latinos, immigrants, Jews, LGBTQ persons, Roma,…all decent persons, and to the racially integrated working class and the unions. The KKK used to lynch union organizers along with Blacks and they terrorized the Jewish community, while the Nazis in Germany crushed the powerful German labor movement. It is suicidal foolishness to see this as an issue of taking the ‘morally high ground’. And it certainly isn’t an issue of the right to free speech. The “free speech” the Nazis/KKK engage in is the lynch rope, firebombing and genocide. It is a question of the self-defense of the oppressed and the workers movement. That this racist trash would be allowed to get away with rallying (in SS uniforms and giving Nazi salutes) in the heart of a major urban,

heavily Black, Latino and immigrant (second largest Sudanese population in the US) city like Kansas City is a very ominous sign. This would not happen if there is not some level of bourgeois support for fascism.

The counter-protesters at the Courthouse were separated from the NSM rally by police barricades and cops who searched them. Even mounted police were present and no doubt there were even larger numbers of state forces waiting in the shadows. The police defend the fascists, while they attack Occupy activists. The police are kindred spirits with the fascists as they themselves are racist terrorists, with a Black person shot down by them every 28 hours in America. The capitalist state is not an ally or even neutral in struggles of the oppressed, as there is a domestic Democratic/Republican Party attack on labor, the Black/Brown communities, immigrants, the social gains of the past, and civil liberties; while US imperialism wages war on the workers and oppressed abroad in the interest of profits for American capitalism. The class bias of the state is why the CWG-USA does not call for the state to ban the Nazis/KKK. As was shown by the police restrictions on the anti-racist protestors in Kansas City, any such measures will primarily be directed at the masses, leftists and the unions. We rely only on the independent mobilizations of the masses to stop the fascists.

Leon Trotsky analyzed the social basis of fascism and put forward a program to fight it in the 1930’s, particularly in his pamphlet “FASCISM-What It Is and How To Fight It (1932).” Trotsky saw the basis of fascism as the ruined petty bourgeoisie (small businessmen, professionals, students, unemployed, peasants) of the towns, cities and country, driven to irrational counter-revolutionary despair by capitalism in crisis. “All the countless human beings whom finance capital itself has brought to desperation and frenzy…,” even at a certain point drawing in the most backward sections of the working class due to the lack of a revolutionary leadership and party guiding with a clear political program to resolve the crisis. Given an insurgent workers movement, the capitalist ruling class will unleash the fascists to crush the organizations of the working class:

“From fascism the bourgeoisie demands a thorough job; once it has resorted to methods of civil war, it insists on having peace for a period of years. And the fascist agency, by utilizing the petty bourgeoisie as a battering ram, by overwhelming all obstacles in its path, does a thorough job. After fascism is victorious, finance capital directly and immediately gathers into its hands, as in a vise of steel, all the organs and institutions of sovereignty, the executive administrative, and educational powers of the state: the entire state apparatus together with the army, the municipalities, the universities, the schools, the press, the trade unions, and the co-operatives. When a state turns fascist, it does not mean only that the forms and methods of government are changed in accordance with the patterns set by Mussolini — the changes in this sphere ultimately play a minor role — but it means first of all for the most part that the workers’ organizations are annihilated; that the proletariat is reduced to an amorphous state; and that a system of administration is created which penetrates deeply into the masses and which serves to frustrate the independent crystallization of the proletariat. Therein precisely is the gist of fascism…”

– Leon Trotsky, “FASCISM What It Is and How To Fight It (1932)”

The ongoing crisis of world capitalism today has witnessed the rise of fascist groups. The Golden Dawn in Greece has grown dramatically in the absence of a workers movement with a revolutionary leadership and Leninist Party willing to lead the workers to power. Europe has seen right-wing attacks on the Roma as well as immigrants. The CWG-USA wrote in September, 2012:

“Capitalism breeds racism, fascism, poverty and war

The organized attack by the French capitalist state goes hand-in-hand with the racist attacks on Roma and immigrants. As capitalism reels from the current crisis, right-wing and fascist organizations are on the rise. The big bourgeoisie looks at social democracy and sees that it is increasingly unable to demobilize and contain or check the rage of the worker masses. So it finds sluices of funds for fascist groups with plans to use them tomorrow to smash labor militancy. The corporatists of the American Legislative Exchange Council (A.L.E.C.) correspond socially to the European big money backers of fascism.

The brazen Golden Dawn misogynist/fascists in Greece and the anti-Muslim sociopath
Breivik in Norway are fun-house foreshadows of what is in store, and not just for those who can be classed as different or other. The ruling coalition and new parliament are barely functional, the breakdown of civil society that accompanies their attempt to impose the “troika’s” austerity is leading to chaos. The working class, lacking
a revolutionary party, has not created the structures for workers democracy and working class control of the society to answer the power vacuum.”

Class War, Vol. 1, No. 2, “Hands off the Roma and all immigrants! No deportations!”

The US has seen the Obama administration deporting immigrants in record numbers, feeding into the anti-immigrant racism that the fascists use for recruiting. And the AFL-CIO/Change to Win labor tops answer is to support a reactionary so-called immigration reform bill that seeks to further militarize the border, impose a new guest worker program and just perhaps, maybe grant citizenship after a decade or more waiting period (see Class War Vol. 1, No. 5, “AFL-CIO/Change to Win Labor Leaders Selling Sham Democrats/Republican Immigration ‘Reform’”.) The racist cops are waging a virtual war on Black and brown communities. Meanwhile, Holocaust denier and Hitler apologist David Irving is conducting a speaking tour of Eastern US cities. All leftists, trade unionists and the Black, Brown, immigrant and Jewish communities need to prepare to take steps to stop this.

To oppose the fascist NSM in Kansas City, activists travelled from surrounding states, including a group of leftists/trade unionists from Iowa. The CWG-USA presented a perspective of mobilizing the power of the racially integrated labor movement to launch labor actions to stop the fascists. A draft trade union resolution signed by several trade unionists was emailed a few days before the 9th to Iowa union members, officials and locals, the AFL- CIO State Federations of Iowa, Missouri and Kansas, the Iowa AFL-CIO Central Labor Councils, the Center for Workers Justice of Eastern Iowa, and the Greater Kansas City Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The KC IWW put the resolution in the informational booklet they distributed. The “DRAFT resolution for a national labor anti-fascist movement” called for:

Kansas City has a proud labor tradition. This is what was missing from the Kansas City protest: the mass mobilization of the multi-racial organized labor movement in alliance with Black, Brown and immigrant communities. Labor should have organized mass, disciplined contingents of union locals, not just a few union officials and individual trade unionists; thousands should have been brought out to shut down the NSM in an intelligent manner.

Militant trade unionists attended rally in Kansas City

The workers movement has a history of mobilizing against fascism! The then-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) members that led the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strikes, one of three crucial strikes that year that were the catalyst for the great industrial organizing drives and the birth of the modern Teamsters union, organized workers and the community against the Silver Shirts in the 1930’s. The Silver Shirts were fascists who were trying to organize in the Twin Cities and elsewhere. The trade unionists organized a workers defense guard who stopped the fascists from organizing and drove them out of the Twin Cities through intelligent, disciplined, militant, bold actions.

“It became known immediately that Zachary’s (ed. Silver Shirt organizer) main theme had been to call for a vigilante attack on the headquarters of Local 544….
This situation called for prompt countermeasures. So Local 544, acting with its customary decisiveness, answered the threat by organizing a union defense guard during August, 1938….

The local served public notice that it would take care of its own defense, putting no misplaced reliance on the police for protection.
The union leaders were fully aware that capitalist politicians in seats of power not only tend to wink at fascist hooliganism; they often encourage and abet such extralegal attacks on workers. Not only that. Their minions, the police, condone and protect fascist activities, become members of such movements and, when open violence is used against the trade unions, usually look the other way….

Conceptually, the guard was not envisaged as the narrow formation of a single union. It was viewed rather as the nucleus around which to build the broadest possible united defense movement…. It was expected that time and events could also make it possible to extend the united front to include the unemployed, minority peoples, youth – all potential victims of the fascists, vigilantes, or other reactionaries….

The only requirements for inclusion in its ranks were readiness to defend the unions from attack, willingness to take the necessary training for that purpose, and acceptance of the democratic discipline required in a combat unit….”

– Teamster Politics, by Farrell Dobbs

The SWP in 1939 also initiated a mass rally against the Nazis and Silver Shirts of 50,000 workers at Madison Square Garden. Even with 50,000 workers mobilized, the 1,780 cops defended the fascists and attacked the anti- fascist workers who attempted to close the rally down. As Teamster organizer and SWP leader Farrell Dobbs explained:

“It was evident, especially at this point, that even a large gathering of workers cannot easily attain its objective unless these workers have been organized thoroughly in advance and trained to act in sharp coordination. It was evident, in other words, that for the complete success of such a demonstration a militant, organized Workers Defense Guard is indispensable.”

– “The Fight Against Fascism in the USA”, Socialist Workers Party [US] Education for Socialist Bulletins

The workers movement and the oppressed need organization and leadership and a political program for direction based on methods of struggle. This is not going to come from the servile, Democratic Party AFL-CIO/Change to Win labor federation leaderships. These labor-fakers outright collaborate with the bosses and their politicians to suppress labor struggle (see Class Warrior #5 BART STRIKES: Once again on the method and relevance of Trotsky’s Transitional Program). And anarchism or the anarcho-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) are no answer. Both sneer at the Trotskyist political program and the transitional method, and favor “direct action” divorced from a working class program of struggle that challenges the foundations of capitalism. Are they calling for the mass mobilization of organized labor linked to the oppressed communities to fight fascism today? To unleash the power of the working class? For organized workers self-defense? Just as in the 1930’s, today we need “men (ed. and especially women) from nowhere” to rise from the ranks within the labor movement to refresh the sellout union leaderships that exists today, a misleadership that is incapable of defending our unions against the assault of the bosses, not to even begin to speak of mobilizing against the Nazis/KKK.

The CWG-USA advocates militant workers forming organized class struggle fractions/caucuses within the unions to fight for a class struggle program and fill the void left by an abstentionist union leadership that will not lead the fight. We also advocate linking organized labor to the oppressed Black, Brown and immigrant communities to form self-defense and struggle committees within those communities. American workers desperately need a fighting, multi-racial workers/labor party with a base in the unions and the oppressed communities, uniting with our international working class sisters and brother, to organize struggle to abolish this capitalist system of exploitation that breeds oppression, fascism, racism and war.

Anti-Fascist Workers Defense Guard in Minneapolis initiated by Trotskyist militants from Teamsters Union Local 544

For mass labor led mobilizations to stop Nazis/KKK and other fascist groups.
No reliance on the cops, authors of racist police brutality; no reliance on Democratic/Republican politicians they are no friends of labor or the oppressed!

For a fighting workers labor party.

Defend the black and brown communities and identity victimized populations by organizing the Workers/oppressed self-defense formations in our union halls.

Fight for full citizenship rights for all immigrants! Abolish ICE/La Migra
Tear down the fence! Smash the racist border vigilantes.

We call for a workers united front self defense of our entire working class no exclusions or exceptions.

Footnotes:

http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/themilitant/socialist-appeal-1939/v3n09-feb-21-1939.pdf

http://www.tonyskansascity.com/2013/11/the-tkc-breaking-news-and-saturday.html

http://www.irehr.org/about-irehr/irehr-impact/item/521-kc-says-no-to-nsm

http://www.tonyskansascity.com/2013/10/unanimous-kansas-city-mayor-and-council.html

http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/swp-us/education/antifascism/silver.htm

http://libcom.org/blog/how-teamsters-quelled-fascist-thugs-07052012

http://revolution-news.com/anti-fascists-embarrass-neo-nazi-groups-world-nov-9th/

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1944/1944-fas.htm

Anti-Fascist Resolution: Signatories prepare for anti-fascist action