What is fascism?

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SOCIALIST ACTION SEPTEMBER 2017 11 Trump.” “I just think his ability to get anything done—particularly the bigger things, like the Wall, the bigger, broader things that we fought for—it’s just going to be that much harder,” Bannon said of Trump, in an interview with the Weekly Standard.

And what will be the effect of the remaining White House advisers on Trump? “I think they’re going to try to moderate him,” Bannon said. “I think he’ll sign a clean debt ceiling; I think you’ll see all this stuff. His natural tendency—and I think you saw it this week on Charlottesville—his actual default position is the position of his base, the position that got him elected. I think you’re going to see a lot of constraints on that. I think it’ll be much more conventional.”

But whether Trump can be reined in or not will hardly matter in the long term. As the crisis of world capitalism deepens, the ruling class will seek a change in tactics. At that time, reactionary policies such as the ones that Trump espouses will not go far enough to suit the needs of the capitalists. They will then perceive the “horror” of fascism as their only hope, and they will feel obliged to unleash fascist thugs in order to decisively crush the labor movement and its allies. Now is the time to act! A mobilization of organized labor, as well as all people of social conscience, is necessary to give notice that “Fascism Has No Home Here.” n Fascism is a symptom of capitalism in its terminal decay. The tactics of fascists were described by Malik Miah in the August 1975 International Socialist Review: “Fascists try to turn the anger of all those threatened with ruin by the capitalist crisis against the oppressed racial minorities and organized labor. In this country, the approach of fascist organizations in the l930s and l940s was to claim to be the representatives of the ‘little man’ against both the big capitalists and the ‘communists,’ directing their fire especially at Blacks, Jews and ‘big labor.’ “In his book ‘Fascism and Big Business,’ Daniel Guerin points out that ‘fascism’s game is to call itself anti-capitalist without seriously attacking capitalism.’” The major social base of fascism is the discontented petty bourgeoisie (“middle class”). In the struggle for power, fascism uses anti-capitalist slogans, but their paymasters are the ruling class. They use the petty bourgeoisie as what Trotsky called a “battering ram” against the working class. The regime of fascism is, in the final analysis, the government of finance capital. Having masked their intent under anti-capitalist rhetoric, the Nazis quickly subordinated all of German society to the needs of the capitalist class.

We seek to mobilize the largest possible counter-mobilizations of workers and the oppressed against these thugs. We take to heart the IWW slogan, “an injury to one is an injury to all.” n

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SOCIALIST ACTION