A January 22, 2026, article by World-Outlook, Minneapolis: Counter-protests Against Ultra-rightists and Defense of Free Speech, reported on the provocative rally by ultra-rightist Jake Lang in Minneapolis on January 17. Lang was there to promote his racist views and support the invasion of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul and the state of Minnesota by federal agents deployed by the Trump administration as part of its anti-immigrant crackdown. The article also reported on a large countermobilization of anti-ICE protesters against Lang.

“Minnesotans have staked out important political space in the fight against the ICE crackdown, drawing many people into action who had not previously participated in political protests. Defense of that space and the right to free speech and assembly is critical in the fight for immigrant rights and in defense of all democratic rights now under frontal assault by the Trump administration,” World-Outlook (W-O) noted.

“The decision to counter-mobilize against Jake Lang was spot on,” W-O continued. “But the physical attacks on Lang — whether carried out by genuine opponents of ICE terror or by provocateurs, who easily blend into such situations — undermined the political space and moral high ground that tens of thousands have carved out in the Twin Cities recently.”

On January 18, “another incident garnered national press attention as a group of protesters, including leaders of Black Lives Matter Minnesota, entered Cities Church,” the World-Outlook article also reported.

“While Baptist pastor Joshua Parnell tried to deliver a sermon, they began chanting the name of Renee Nicole Good, who was shot and killed January 7 by an ICE agent, and ‘ICE Out!’ Protesters said another pastor at the church, David Easterwood, leads the local ICE field office responsible for overseeing the violent tactics and brutal anti-immigrant raids in recent months,” W-O noted.

“Entering a church and disrupting a congregation was similarly a blow against the gains of the anti-ICE protests,” W-O pointed out. “Not only was it a violation of the rights of the worshippers; it undercut the ability of those leading the protests to continue to win the hearts and minds of a growing number of potential allies among working- and middle-class people and among all those who care for free speech and other democratic rights.”

These issues of strategy and tactics that thousands faced in the mass struggle to resist the ICE dragnet in Minnesota have been posed many times in the past.

In the spirit of using the lessons from working-class history to maximize the chances for thoughtful and disciplined action today, we publish below excerpts from a May 6, 1975, discussion among socialists led by Farrell Dobbs on strategy and tactics in the struggle against fascism.

Dobbs authored Teamster Rebellion, Teamster Power, Teamster Politics, and Teamster Bureaucracy. This four-volume series records Dobbs’ experiences as a leader in the Minneapolis truck drivers’ strikes of 1934, organizer of the campaign to unionize truck drivers throughout the Midwest, and participant in socialist efforts to build a left wing in the Teamsters union. Dobbs served as national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) from 1953 until 1972, and was the party’s candidate for president in 1948, 1952, 1956, and 1960.

The discussion was sparked by an incident at San Francisco State University in March 1975. A professor invited a member of the National Socialist White People’s Party, a fascist group that aped Hitler’s storm troopers, to address a speech class.

Ultraleft groups organized a small confrontational demonstration that forced cancellation of the talk.

Most of the campus community reacted with hostility to the demonstration, which students saw as a violation of freedom of speech.

Taking advantage of this atmosphere, the university administration launched an effort (ultimately unsuccessful) to expel several radical and socialist groups from the campus.

The campus chapter of the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA) issued a leaflet that opposed the victimization while criticizing the ill-chosen tactics of ultraleft groups. In line with a policy the YSA had adopted in 1974, the leaflet also held that fascists had no right to speak at the university.

The incident in San Francisco sparked a reconsideration by the YSA leadership of the advisability of opposing democratic rights for fascists. They discovered that the SWP, together with Bolshevik leaders V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, had long held that slogans that denied anyone’s right to free speech damaged the defense of democratic rights against fascist attacks.

In the course of re-evaluating the YSA’s previous stance on this point, some YSA leaders proposed a discussion with Farrell Dobbs and other party leaders on this issue. The result was the discussion excerpted below. The entire transcript of that exchange, along with other documents, can be found in the Education for Socialists bulletin Countermobilization: A Strategy to Fight Racist and Fascist Attacks.

We publish the excerpts below for the information of our readers. They include the opening remarks in the 1975 discussion by Dobbs, a contribution to the discussion by SWP leader George Novack, and the closing summary by Dobbs. Due to the length of these materials, we are publishing them in three parts, the first of which follows.

— World-Outlook editors

*

A Strategy to Fight Racist and Fascist Attacks (Part 1)

(This is the first of three parts. The others can be found in Part II and Part III.)

Farrell Dobbs: I think we should start by abstracting for the moment from the immediate situation and take a look at the fight against fascism in a broader, more fundamental sense. In the process of discussing that, we will come around to the immediate problem. It would be better to spend a little time looking into broader, more general, more basic aspects of the fight against fascism. I’m talking about the strategic concepts of this fight and some broad lines of tactics that flow from these concepts.

Fundamentally, what are you up against? Good generals are always very careful to try to perceive as accurately as they can what the situation is on the opposing side and what the enemy’s line of approach is. It’s always very important for the leaders of a combat force — that’s what we’re talking about now, a combat force — to know how to get ready for combat and also how not to go into combat foolishly and precipitously.

What is the tactic of the ruling class? How does the ruling class proceed when it’s getting ready to utilize fascism? What they want at that point is to turn from the existing form of bourgeois rule to a ruthless fascist dictatorship. The objective is to crush the organizations and the combat capacity of the working class, the main opponent of the capitalist class.

In a given country at a particular time when the bourgeoisie opens this chapter, there will be one or another degree of democratic rights. Our situation is one where there are on the law books a somewhat extensive body of formal democratic rights won by the masses in the history of the class struggle in the U.S. The approach of the ruling class is to begin to move toward a deterioration of those rights.

Their tactic is to protect the rights of the fascists while at the same time using fascist forces to try to keep others from exercising those rights. One of the forces used to implement this is that most malevolent of all the repressive instruments of capitalist rule, the police forces. The police structure is of a character that makes it a breeding ground for fascists.

You don’t only have an army of capitalist cops that represses opponents of capitalism, you have a ripe recruiting ground for fascism itself. You not only have cops implementing ruling class orders in aiding the fascists. You have a police force that is honeycombed with fascists. In this country at this time, it is not yet honeycombed, but there are plenty of reactionaries and racists there.

The more the lines of confrontation deepen and sharpen, the more the tendency is for fascist formations to attract adherents within the police department. It’s an important thing to keep in mind. Apart from the fact that the cops aren’t neutral in the class struggle, but are neutral on the side of the capitalists, you will be facing a formation that has a lot of fascist-minded elements in it.

The line of the police

The line of the police is to defend the exercise of the formal democratic rights of the fascists, on the one hand, and not to “see” the violations of the democratic rights of the fascists’ victims. Meanwhile, the cops take full advantage of any violation of bourgeois-democratic law that the antifascists may commit. In any kind of confrontation between antifascist and fascist forces, the basic line of the cops is to protect the fascists in any way they can and to join in the victimization of the antifascists.

Anybody that’s purporting to develop a strategy and shape tactics to fight fascism and doesn’t start with an understanding of what method your enemy is going to use, can fall into all kinds of traps. Such missteps disadvantage the antifascists and aid the fascist forces. They also make things easier for the repressive arms of the ruling structure that are abetting the fascists.

Let’s be a little more specific about some of the problems that arise if we fail to understand the nature of the confrontation. Let’s take the demand raised by some that the government ban the fascists from speaking. This implies that the masses can rely on the government to protect them from the fascists. But that’s only the beginning of the negative aspect of this demand.

Anybody with an ounce of perception can see immediately that when you rely upon the government to protect the victims of the fascists, you are sowing illusions about the readiness of the government to defend the exercise of the democratic rights that are incorporated in the bourgeois constitution. But the capitalist regime absolutely can’t be relied on to do that job.

The minute you say that the government should stop the meeting, you have to say the next thing. Unless you’re fatuous enough to believe that the government is going to act, you’re still left with the question, what are you going to do when the government doesn’t act.

The implicit logic is this: No matter what the situation is, no matter what the stage of development, this approach means that your objective is to prevent the fascists from speaking. Now what kind of problems does that posture lead to?

Let’s assume for the moment that it is possible to develop a sufficient action in the concrete situation to limit or suppress the fascists’ speech.

Now it’s conceivably possible that enough pressure could be developed to make the ruling powers do a little something to curb the democratic rights of the fascists. Then you simply arrive at a new stage of the problem. The capitalists are always looking for ways to contravene the formal democratic rights of the antifascists. Anything the government might do to interfere with the exercise of democratic rights by the fascists, they will at the same time apply to the left, to the antifascists.

Roosevelt’s loyalty oath

In the section of Teamster Politics on the WPA^[1] strikes, I discussed the loyalty oath that Roosevelt imposed on the WPA workers as part of whittling down the rolls. As always happens in such cases, the oath proscribed from participation the German American Bund^[2] and all communist organizations. They always strike against the left at the same time as they hit the right.

Then they tend to give less and less enforcement to the proscription against the right. The more intense the struggle becomes, the more they will be inclined to use their seeming neutrality in the class struggle as a cover for paying less and less attention to what the fascists are doing. The government will let them do what they damn please, while more and more using its authority to curb the rights of the left.

Thus, even if the government does something in passing to curb the rights of the fascists, all that happens in the last analysis is that the rulers get a new pretext for attacking the anticapitalist forces. They will piously claim to be moving in a perfectly fair-minded way against the “extremists” on both sides of the controversy.

Thus, by demanding that the government suppress the formal rights of the fascists, you create a whole new set of tactical problems for yourself. The government does nothing that would really cripple the attack of the fascists, so you still have the essential problem of fighting the fascists. However, you now have the additional problem of fighting to defend some of your own rights against new restrictions adopted by the bourgeois-democratic state supposedly against the fascists. As Napoleon said to one of his generals, one more victory like that and we’ll be back in Paris.

Why demanding that fascists be prevented from speaking is wrong

This tactic of demanding that the fascists be prevented from speaking puts you at a disadvantage in other ways. Two categories of the population at large can become a problem here.

There are people in capitalist society who are professional civil libertarians. They not only believe in the Bill of Rights but believe in it as a kind of mystical object of worship that stands above the realities of the class struggle. It looms in their eyes like a first cause uncaused, as remote from and unsullied by all the confusions and conflicts of class society as God is from the realities of life on this planet.

If you demand that the government suppress the freedom of speech of the fascists or declare your intention of suppressing it, you automatically put the civil libertarians on the other side. That will be so even though your real aims in the fight are to defend your democratic rights against the fascists. You make a new tactical problem for yourself.

To take another example, is it not true that if you fight on a campus around the demand that fascists should not be allowed to speak, you can get in the way of elevating the consciousness of the very students you are trying to reach? Part of the process of radicalization is that they don’t want anybody to tell them who to listen to or what to think.

If you are insisting that fascists can’t speak, you risk antagonizing students. You risk making them, not in the last analysis but in a formal sense at the given moment, into allies of the fascists. They are radicalizing and often are recruitable to the revolutionary movement, but instead they get jockeyed into a position that confuses them greatly. You wind up making another tactical problem for yourself.

The implication of confidence in the ability of the government to oppose the fascists and protect democratic rights is only the most obvious error in the demand to prevent fascists from speaking. You create problems that get in the way of mobilizing an ever-broader mass opposition.

Union defense guard in Minneapolis in 1938

What, then, should be our line of approach? Let me refer here to our approach to the organization of the union defense guard in Minneapolis in 1938. We didn’t say a word about anybody depriving the fascists of their right of free speech. We didn’t say a word to the state or federal authorities about doing anything to prevent the fascists from speaking.

Our remarks were concentrated on explaining to the workers why they couldn’t rely on any arm of the state apparatus to protect them against the fascists and why they should rely only on themselves to do so. It was along those lines that we set out to educate the members of Local 544 and the rest of the union movement.

How did the union defense guard go about this? Did we say we’re not going to let the fascists speak and if they meet, we’re going to break up their meeting? No. It wasn’t us who said that. It was the Silver Shirts organizer. He said that in a statement that was quoted in the St. Paul press on the morning after they sneaked over to St. Paul and held a meeting, protected by the cops. They were afraid to have a meeting in Minneapolis. He said, the leaders of 544 say we can’t have a meeting in Minneapolis.

That’s what he said. What we said is that we’re organizing a union defense guard and the guard is going to so conduct itself that it will show the fascists that they can’t operate in Minneapolis without a fight. We just cut through this whole free speech business because that was not the crucial issue.

The issue is not for or against free speech for fascists. These people are not trying to promulgate an idea and convince somebody of a new line of thought in an academic way. They’re organizing to commit acts of violence against others in order to destroy the fundamental rights of working people. They want to make the working people victims in a new and even worse form of this decaying capitalist system. There is nothing academic about that.

(This was the first of three parts. The remainder of Dobbs’ opening remarks can be found in Part II. The last installment, Part III, includes a contribution to the discussion by George Novack and Dobbs’ closing comments.)

NOTES

[1] The Works Progress Administration (WPA) was an employment and infrastructure program created by U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt in 1935, in the middle of the Great Depression. Over its eight years of existence, the WPA employed roughly 8.5 million people to work building schools, hospitals, roads, and other public works. The WPA also employed tens of thousands of actors, musicians, writers, and other artists in cultural projects.

[2] The pro-fascist German American Bund, founded in 1936, was organized to promote a favorable view of Nazi Germany. Its membership was restricted to U.S. citizens of German descent. It was disbanded with the U.S. entry into World War II in 1941.

For further reading:

The Teamster series (4 volumes)

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