Re: [Marxism] Re: The Minutemen as early-stage fascists

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Mark Lause wrote:
> 
> [clip]
> So be my guest and call them fascists, early-stage, proto-, crypto-, or
> whateverian fascists.  Happy?
> 
> Won a nice little political victory in the struggle for proletarian clarity
> amidst the factional frenzy?
> 
> Good for you.
> 
> And when we actually face armed, uniform jack-booted thugs openly shooting
> us and carting you off, I'm sure your post-modernist allies can invent
> another name.

There are several problems that this tossing around of the label
fascism.

The first is, of course, that when u.s. bourgeois  democracy, such as it
is, is actually replaced with some sort of dictatorship, it will not be
a fascist dictatorship but a new kind of tyranny, just as fascism was a
new kind of tyranny in the 20s & 30s. Thus those who label u.s. reaction
"fascist" are seriously hampering the defense of bourgeois democracy in
the u.s. They are as silly as someone in Germany in the 30s would have
been to caterwaul about the threat of divine-right monarchy.

The second one is that shouting fascist is essentially a defense of the
DP. Because if Bush (or some other Republican politician) is a fascist,
then it would be right for us to join with the Liebermans & the Clintons
to resist that fascist menace. As a political slogan fascism is a form
of right opportunism -- that is, it grossly underestimates the power of
bourgeois democracy to crush opposition. We do need to defend bourgeois
democratic rights, but we also need to recognize that the main threats
to those rights ordinarily can exist _within_ bourgeois democracy.

And the worst problem of all is that all these shouts of fascism cover
up just how repressive good old bourgeois democracy can be. Those who
understand repressive bourgeois democracy is, has been, and always will
be would recognize that the Minutemen are fit in perfectly well with
democracy under capitalism, just as the Ku Klux Klan and the American
Legion vigilantes and (yes) the Minutemen of the 1960s.

The repressisve crimes of the Bush Administration are precisely what one
would expect from the administration of a capitalist democracy when such
crimes seem useful.

Carrol

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