The following is the second of three parts with excerpts from a May 6, 1975, discussion among socialists led by Farrell Dobbs on strategy and tactics in the struggle against fascism.

Dobbs was 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. He 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 full introduction to this three-part series can be found in Part I.

The excerpt below, published for the information of our readers, contains the remainder of the opening remarks by Dobbs in the 1975 discussion, the first portion of which can be found in Part I.

— World-Outlook editors

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A Strategy to Fight Racist and Fascist Attacks (Part 2)

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

Farrell Dobbs: That’s something we can seize on in explaining our antifascist struggle. In fact, you’ve got an even better case today than we had in 1938.

The Silver Shirts^[1] only said they were going to make an armed raid on Local 544’s hall. The fascist terrorists bombed the SWP twice in Los Angeles. It’s a very peculiar form of friendly persuasion, isn’t it? There’s nothing academic about their objective in Los Angeles.

I’m talking now about how you combat the fatuous notions of professional civil libertarians and begin to intensify the education of students. If you put the struggle on the basis of whether the fascists have or don’t have the right to speak, you create a real problem in trying to wake such forces up and mobilize them. We put our fight on the basis of what these fascists had said they were going to do — raid the union headquarters.

The essence of it then was to counterpose to the fascist actions the democratic right of a countermobilization. We bypassed the whole free speech question. Instead, we related intimately to that concrete situation by posing a second democratic right — the right of self-defense. Keep in mind that the SWP was not a big organization at that time. However, it was not a question of the party stepping out to act against the fascists when there wasn’t much to back it up. This was a union that had thousands of members.

Yet what did we do? You’ll notice if you read Teamster Politics how careful we were to avoid giving any impression that this was a fight between 544 and the fascists, even though this union had a membership of thousands.

The situation was such that there could be no defense guard unless Local 544 took the initiative. We could not build a guard in a hurry that would be strong enough to repulse a Silver Shirt raid on the headquarters unless it was principally made up of 544 members. But we were not so foolish as to organize a 544 defense guard and confront the fascists on that basis. We wanted it to be the fight of the whole labor movement.

We thought it out tactically and used the device of setting up a provisional formation alongside the union. It wasn’t an official part of the union. It was associated with the union only in the sense that its formation was discussed at a Local 544 membership meeting that voted to authorize the leadership to take the initiative in the name of 544 to set up a trade-union-wide defense guard.

At the same time that we were concentrating on organizing a guard big enough to be effective, concentrating principally on building it in 544, we were careful to set the stage for a wider body. Just as quickly as we could, we brought at least a few members of other unions into the guard.

Nobody minded that this formation was called the 544 guard because the name 544 was kind of a mark of honor among the organized workers of Minneapolis, sort of like being part of the Grand Army of the Republic in the North after the Civil War. All it meant was that 544 had taken the initiative in organizing an antifascist defense within the Minneapolis trade union movement as a whole.

Local 544 not only took the initiative in building this trade-union defense formation but held that the labor movement should organize all of labor’s allies — the unemployed, the youth, and others. Right from the beginning, we projected the concept of acting in a united way and trying to develop an ever-broader united front of victims and potential victims of fascism, drawing them into the self-defense forces.

How did we organize the counterdemonstration? The Silver Shirts scheduled a meeting in Minneapolis. We knew what was on tap, so we planned to send the guard to picket the hall where Pelley, the chieftain of the Silver Shirts, was scheduled to speak.

How working class develops its own intelligence

In Teamster Politics I described how on the appointed day a cab driver called Ray Rainbolt, a leader of the guard. The cabbie said he had just driven Pelley to a house in the silk-stocking district. That’s the kind of intelligence system we had.

That is an important thing to realize about the working class. There isn’t a nook or cranny of the capitalist machine where you won’t find workers. Depending on the mood of the class, an individual worker who at one moment is a servitor of the ruling class, can at another moment become the eyes and ears of the workers in the camp of the enemy. When the struggle heats up, the working class develops the kind of spontaneous intelligence system that capitalist money can’t buy.

Ray Rainbolt called Pelley and told him there might be trouble at the meeting. I didn’t tell him to do that, he thought of it himself. Anything to keep the enemy worried, to give your forces an edge. Some people don’t think these tactical niceties are so nice, but they’re effective and perfectly principled. Rainbolt’s idea was to scare the piss out of Pelley. Rainbolt was a good guy for this. He was a mean son of a gun. His ancestors were veterans of the clobbering of Custer, and he hadn’t lost the knack.

Here I’m getting at a concrete example of how the dynamics of a confrontation in the class struggle lead from one stage to another. We scared Pelley out of even going to the meeting. He decided against it.

The minute the guard showed up the Silver Shirts began to take off like chickens in a barnyard, scampering this way and that. A few of them weren’t fast enough and there were altercations that weren’t entirely pleasant for the fascists.

We were not there formally or actually to prevent the fascists from speaking. We were there to show them that we were just as determined that they weren’t going to carry out an attack on the trade unions as they were determined to carry one out — maybe more so.

The question was not whether or not Pelley had the right to speak or whether these people had the right to come and hear him. We cut through that to the heart of the issue. Pelley was trying to organize forces to attack our headquarters and we were against that.

The democratic right to counter demonstrate

I have suggested that, instead of raising an attack on the formal democratic right of the fascists to speak and peddle their program and recruit goons, we counterpose the democratic right to counter-demonstrate. According to the tempo and development of the situation, we infuse into it the concept of the democratic right of self-defense.

Let’s assume that a fascist is going to have a meeting. What kind of counter demonstration are you going to have? What do you propose as the slogans or strategy of the demonstration? Are you going to rally on the site of the meeting? At UCLA [the University of California at Los Angeles], if they tried to send a Nazi goon on campus to exercise the right of free speech and to try to recruit, wouldn’t an indicated theme of a counter demonstration be the bombings of our headquarters?

If you have a counter demonstration, this gives the government and its repressive arm no basis for moving toward real suppression of the democratic rights of the left in the name of evenhandedly suppressing both sides. On the contrary.

The police like to say that they’re simply doing their duty under the constitution by protecting the fascists. Well, they are also duly sworn to protect the democratic rights of other Americans. One of the rights won in the class struggle is the right to picket, to hold counteractions. So, you jockey the repressive forces so that, if they try to do something to help the fascists, it constitutes an overt and clear attack on the established democratic rights of the antifascists.

If you do that, the professional civil libertarians have no grounds for getting themselves worked up about how you are jeopardizing the Constitution by demanding the suppression of somebody’s freedom of speech. Instead, you are in a good position to demand that the civil libertarians denounce the repressive forces that are using the phony excuse of protecting the fascists’ rights to justify violating the democratic right to counter demonstrate.

If you do the opposite — make a big noise about how you’re going to prevent the meeting, suppress the speaker — won’t many students get confused and take the wrong stand? They don’t want anybody to dictate to them who they can listen to, do they?

With the right approach, the students instead see a counter demonstration outside the meeting. They see that the thrust is not on the right of the fascists to speak but on what they are actually doing in Los Angeles, for instance, to suppress our rights. Isn’t that a favorable way to present it?

Starting from our initial premise — the aim of the capitalists with regard to fascism — I’m trying to look at each tactic from the point of view of its effect.

What happens if you start out with the premise that you’re going to organize a battle to prevent the fascists from saying one word in public?

What happens, on the other hand, if you operate on the basis of asserting and exercising the right to counter demonstrate, to confront the fascists in this form without getting bogged down in the question of the fascists’ right of free speech?

The first approach is to the advantage of the ruling class. The second approach puts you in a more favorable position and the ruling class in a more difficult position for carrying out its basic aim of crippling the rights of the antifascists.

To use a slight reformulation of that phrase of Malcolm X, the essence of the ruling class tactic toward oppositional movements like the struggle against fascism is to make the criminal appear to be the victim and the victim appear to be the criminal. They try that in every struggle, without exception. You always have to keep that in mind when you deal with the tactical nuances in the struggle.

Remember that tactics have to serve a strategic course, and the strategic course has to be closely attuned to the programmatic aims. It’s not advantageous to grab hold of a tactic because it seems appealing at the moment without always seeing the tactic in relation to the whole fundamental problem.

What is strategy and tactics?

Strategy is a system of tactics and something more as well. It contains the fundamental aim that you are moving toward. It is attuned to the conjunctural realities of the relationship of class forces and is readjusted as the relationship of class forces changes.

Strategy is subject to variations in scope and tempo concerning the possible extent of its implementation.

Simultaneously strategy is also the means by which you develop a system of tactics to serve your aims, and the regulator concerning the fundamental course that you follow in seeking to build the anticapitalist movement. It’s always very important to see the struggle against fascism not only in its tactical aspect, but in its relationship to strategy and program.

Do you stop with a counter demonstration against the fascists? No, but conceptually we start with it. What are the stages of struggle if we organize a protest confrontation against a fascist meeting?

The first thing you can do, depending on the situation, is to alert those who go into the meeting that there’s more going on than meets the eye in what the fascists have to say. You alert those going in the meeting or who observe the demonstration that the fascists are so dangerous that a lot of people are concerned about it. These people have gathered in front of the meeting hall to warn people that they’re getting sucked into a trap, something that’s against their own interests.

You don’t start on the basis of the party confronting the Nazis. You try to muster the broadest forces possible. No matter what you do in any area, you draw on everybody you can.

Building the broadest possible united front

There are two sides to that. The building of the broadest possible united front becomes an effective mechanism for educating the masses about the fascist danger. It creates the potential for drawing in ever-greater masses to confront the fascists. The more actively and consistently you apply this, the more difficult it is for the police forces to attack the antifascists and violate their democratic right to demonstrate against the fascists. You start on that basis, and the action develops according to the interplay of forces.

Does that mean that it’s always going to be that way? That the fascists will always be speaking inside and a counter demonstration will always be outside and that’s that? No, at a certain point the situation changes. There are several reasons why this is the case.

First of all, the fascists have a basic task to perform. They are trying to mobilize confused and demoralized victims of the capitalist system. One of the things they’ve got to show potential recruits is audacity. That causes them to lean in the direction of provocation.

Moreover, they know the cops are on their side and this makes them still more provocative. It’s not as if one day, instead of a counter demonstration, you take your forces and give the fascists a taste of their own medicine. It’s not a question of on what date this can be done; the fascists also set the stage so that other things happen.

Don’t forget Lenin and Trotsky made a revolution under defensive slogans. If you are obliged to clobber some fascist in order to protect your rights, it’s always good if this is done in the name of defending yourself. It helps you to involve more allies. The fascists tend to be provocative and thus bring the situation past the stage of a counter demonstration.

You start out on a realistic basis that gives the fascists no chance to fool people into thinking that you are violating democratic rights. This helps you to mobilize young people and win over civil libertarians. You build up the forces that will be able to deal with the fascists when the reality of the conflict between fascists and anti-fascists manifests itself in a more physical form.

One final point. Don’t get the notion that you’re facing the future fascist enemy when you face kooks like the Nazis or even the Klan. Don’t get that notion for a minute. That’s not the kind of animal we’re talking about. In fighting against these screwballs today, keep in mind that you are shaping a strategic line and a set of tactics to face something that will be much different, much more sophisticated and even appealing to some, and not so easy to cope with.

The fascist elephant

There are two errors you can fall into if you don’t keep this in mind. If you develop tactics based on the expectation that you’re going to be facing this lunatic fringe, you’ll find that you have the wrong strategic and tactical weapons in hand when you face the real thing. You can also obstruct the education of the masses about the threat of fascism because you alert the masses to the wrong creature. You get them on the lookout for monkeys when an elephant is going to charge them.

When the real thing comes along, it’s not going to extend you the courtesy of being obvious like the Nazis in Los Angeles. They’re not going to start by throwing bombs at you so that you can mobilize against them before they have a following. They are going to be more subtle.

They will claim that they are going to lead the masses out of the crisis created by capitalism. They will act in the name of promises that the masses believe will improve their desperate situation. They are going to pin the blame for the crisis on scapegoats.

In this country, the Blacks are the most obvious target. By demagogically promising to do things for the people that they have no intention of doing, and by singling out scapegoats, the fascists aim to lead a demoralized and disoriented middle class, segments of the working class, and the lumpenproletariat to crush the organizations of the working class. Their fundamental aim will be to use some of the victims of capitalism to mobilize a force to crush the struggle capacity of the working class and perpetuate capitalist rule.

When you run up against the real thing, they’re not going to start by putting on Nazi uniforms and swastika emblems, and they’re not going to wear sheets, either. They’ll look more like the man in the gray flannel suit than the ultraright we see today.

The capitalists are very happy to use the far-out types we run into today. They cause some confusion, stir things up a little, and plow a little ground for a more serious development of fascism. But they are not the real animal we will be fighting when the combat gets really tough.

(This was the second of three parts. The others can be found in Part I and Part III.)

NOTES

[1] The Silver Shirts (officially the Silver Legion of America) were a fascist, antisemitic, and pro-Nazi organization founded by William Dudley Pelley in 1933 in Asheville, North Carolina. In the late 1930s, particularly around 1936 and 1938, the group found a receptive audience in Minnesota — specifically Minneapolis — amid high economic anxiety, claiming up to 6,000 members in the state. 

For further reading:

The Teamster series (4 volumes)

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