RE: [Marxism] Michael Moore, Wesley Clark and Jose Perez (even yet again still)

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I want to raise a few more points.  One is the claim that the
Democrats "always" campaign against the Republicans as fascists,
regardless of circumstances (and the corollary that leftists, young
and old, always buy it when they make "lesser evil" choices).  I think
this is untrue.

I remember no such leftist campaign against Ford in 1976, against Bush
in 1988 and 1992, or against Dole in 1996.  I do remember  such a
campaign in 1964 against Goldwater, and I also remember that Farrell
Dobbs, in a speech that helped recruit me to the SWP, acknowledged
that there were elements of a fascist threat implied in Goldwater's
program and base, even though  as a political realist, he insisted
that the issue of a fascist regime was not posed in the election.  I
was very impressed by this reasoned argument, and I joined the SWP's
Young Socialist Alliance within days thereafter.  I had actually been
inclined toward a more sectarian view that Johnson and Goldwater were
the same up to then.  To this day, I am convinced that Dobbs was
right, and I am convinced that he listened more closely than many of
us are inclined to to what others have to say.  (He, like Cannon, was
a real working-class politician in my opinion, even though operating
in a sectarian environment that had been imposed substantially on both
of them and on the SWP by conditions that they could not overcome.)

The current campaign reminds me more of the 1964 campaign than any
subsequent one, and I think the popularity  of the view that elements
of fascism have been strengthened under Bush has some basis, although
I reject the idea that either the Bush administration or increased
repression pure and simple, however intense, equals fascism.

However, I also think it is important to include the rise of the death
penalty in the rise of repression, which was actually dealt a blow in
1953 by the executions of the Rosenbergs and the publications of
photos of the execution in a spirit of patriotic celebration in the
popular press.  The negative response to this helped push the
witch-hunt, especially in its potentially fascist McCarthyite form,
into retreat. Now capital punishment is almost part of the state
religion (although resistance has grown).  It is possible to miss this
because the one leftist activist I know of facing the death penalty,
Mumia Abu-Jamal, has been able to beat the reaper for more than twenty
years.  One reason is that the rulers recognize that killing him,
given the relationship of forces, would deal a blow to the death
penalty comparable to the miscalculation involved in executing the
Rosenbergs, where the rulers though there would be popular enthusiasm.
Meanwhile people continue to be executed, although I think the high
point reached in the Clinton presidency and Bush governorships may
have passed.

Another  element is the spread of all kinds of repressive legislation
in the name of fighting crime, child abuse, and so on. The left needs
to look at the issue of repression in a less purely self-referential
way.

I have to admit a personal bit of revisionism on the fascism question.
In 1971, 1975, and (in the form of a referendum on a constitutional
amendment to allow him to run for a third term) Frank Rizzo staged
campaigns for mayor of Philadelphia.  The CP and liberals yelled that
he was a fascist.  Of course Philadelphia under Rizzo was not a
fascist regime and Rizzo was not building or leading a fascist
movment.  But I had known Rizzo as a political figure from the late
1950s, when he raided gay bars fronting as "beat" coffee houses as the
"Cisco Kid," as the police captain was known, and "Rizzo's raiders" as
his unit was known.

I was always convinced that he represented an almost organically
fascist type in politics, a fanatical racist and homophobe, a thug, a
demagogue, a populist, reactionary and totalitarian to his heart's
core.  I always thought part of our (the SWP's) argument against
lesser-evilism should be explaining this type and how it was a natural
and inevitable product of capitalism.
We, as was natural, took the easy way out and argued that those who
smelled fascism in Rizzo were just imagining things or lying to help
the liberals.(Rizzo was a Democrat in all his campaigns although he
began supporting Republicans in national elections.) Of course, the
fascistic Rizzo was a man out of his time, he gradually settled down
and made lots of money as mayor and off his mob connections.  But I
had felt something in this guy that I felt was 100 percent real,
something that as a good lesser-evilist I was not supposed to feel.
(Fortunately, I had left Philadelphia by the time of Rizzo's first
election in 1971, so I could justify keeping quiet about this. If I
had still been in my hometown, I could have gotten into trouble even
in those much more democratic days in the party.)

This predisposed me to support Trotsky's judgement that, in very more
crisis-ridden historical circumstances, Democratic Frank Hague in
Jersey City, and later the Cannon-Hansen view that Republican Joseph
R. McCarthy represented incipient fascist tendencies.  This is in
contrast to most ex-SWP individuals today.

And it also predisposes me to think that fascist trends in the United
States will arise out of the capitalist state machine, as McCarthy and
Hague did, and not simply as populist outsiders.


I am convinced that we have to explain why the Bush regime is not
fascism, and not going to become fascism, but also how the trends
toward fascism are embedded in it, as they also were in Clinton.
Fred Feldman


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