The following is the third of three parts with excerpts from a May 6, 1975, discussion among socialists led by Farrell Dobbs on problems of strategy and tactics in the struggle against fascism. Dobbs’ opening remarks in that discussion were published in Part I and Part II.

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 excerpts below, published for the information of our readers, include a contribution to the discussion by socialist leader George Novack, and the closing summary by Dobbs.

— World-Outlook editors

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A Strategy to Fight Racist and Fascist Attacks (Part 3)

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

George Novack: The basic position of the party on this question was formulated in a resolution on the capitalist witch-hunt adopted at the February 1950 Plenum of the SWP National Committee…. [See Education for Socialists publication, The Fight Against Fascism in the USA.]

On the question that was posed about how to answer when we are asked whether or not racists or fascists have the right to speak on campus, my opinion is that this question has to be turned around. Our concern as socialists and anti-racists in this instance is not whether this individual or that individual has the right to speak.

Our concern is the abuse of this right by the fascists and racists to rationalize and encourage taking away the rights of the masses of Black people, the abuse of this right to incite violence against Black people in Boston or elsewhere. Put the question in the proper framework and on the right axis. This problem has to be seen in the light of our long-range tasks.

There are three major sites of social struggle in this country — the factories, the communities of the oppressed nationalities and national minorities, and the campuses. The Young Socialist Alliance as a student organization has its attention focused on the campuses. There are ten million college students and hundreds of thousands of faculty members in a country that is probably the oldest democratic republic in the world.

People in this country are very sensitive about their democratic rights, and rising expectations have made them even more sensitive. That is why they can respond to attacks on our rights. We can’t get ourselves into the position where we advocate the abrogation of anyone’s democratic rights as such.

This country is divided into classes, and the classes contend with each other. In this contest, we counter the meeting of fascists or racists on a campus with the demand for a counter mobilization. Here you have the counter position of democratic rights by two sides. The contending forces appeal to the same democratic rights, codified in the same bourgeois-democratic constitution.

That is the ground on which the conflict initially and formally stands. That is where the concrete realities of the class struggle come to the fore, sometimes leading to physical combat. If that happens, it is all part of the struggle. We don’t go in for adventures and we don’t encourage adventures. It’s just that when opposing forces come to grips, fighting sometimes results. That is part of the process of determination of the relationship of forces on a campus, in a city, and in the nation.

We certainly want to be in a position where the relationship of forces is changed in favor of our class and its allies. We want the fascists, racists, and sexists to feel intimidated and afraid of doing their dirty work. But we don’t want this to take the form of restrictions on democratic rights, because that can lead to restrictions on our advocacy or that of any progressive force. We do what we have to do without indulging in orations against anyone’s democratic rights….

Discussion summary by Farrell Dobbs

Farrell Dobbs: One point, specifically on the right of free speech. We don’t fight for free speech for Nazis. We defend the right of free speech against the fascists and against the government, and we don’t want to hand them any weapons for suppressing our free speech.

We don’t advocate free speech for Nazis the way the professional civil libertarians do. We don’t view it as a concept that rises above the laws of the class struggle.

Our aim is to crush the fascists. That aim is dictated by their nature and the methods they use against our class. The civil libertarians may dream that this conflict will be resolved by polite exchanges of views. The struggle with fascism won’t be settled that way. Either the workers are going to crush the fascists, or the fascists will crush the workers.

We stand in opposition to the government trying to put restrictions on the Nazis, because they turn any such restrictions against our class and its allies. We stood in opposition to the government of New York City in 1961 when it tried to prevent the American Nazi leader Rockwell from speaking in Union Square. [See The Fight Against Fascism in the USA].

If we had kept silent or supported the government’s action in that instance, we would have been helping the government set a precedent for use against the next four or five civil rights or peace actions. We don’t make speeches against free speech for anybody because of the same kind of considerations. But we are under no illusions that the fight with the fascist groups will be settled by speech.

It’s a coldblooded tactical proposition. A lot of people are already in our party, and I hope an infinite number are yet to come. As people mostly born and bred in the USA, they will come around us with all the thinking habits of American pragmatism and formal logic. They may think that since the SWP doesn’t call for the suppression of free speech in the case of fascists, therefore the SWP is interested in the fascists’ right to speak.

We start with the rights of our class and its allies

No. Our concern is with the rights of our class and its allies. It’s in the nature of things that our rights and the rights of the labor movement and the Black movement will collide with the supposed rights of the fascists — because the fascists view their rights as a license to kill, a license to crush the workers’ movement.

Secondly, when you talk about the fight against fascism, you are talking about combat. The object of the ruling class in trying to build a fascist movement is to prepare, alongside the institutions of parliamentary rule, extra-parliamentary forces to crush the working class and its allies and lay the basis for capitalism to impose a very brutal form of dictatorship. Between now and the time that showdown comes — and it’s going to come, that’s a law of history — the ruling class will resort to every possible means including the most bloody violence to perpetuate its power and its privileges.

The ruling class always comes to the point where it seeks to pass from bourgeois democracy through interim stages like Bonapartism^[1] or military dictatorship to fascism.

The whole period between now and then is one of mobilizations and counter mobilizations leading to the final showdown. Viewed in that perspective, mobilizing forces for self-defense against the extra-parliamentary attacks of the fascists can be seen as a step in a process that leads to the formation at a certain stage of a working-class army like the army that the Bolsheviks forged in Russia after they came to power.

The line-up in the preliminary stage is one of the ruling class attempting to mobilize initial fascist forces. The conscious revolutionary vanguard has the task of mobilizing the forces that are going to prevent the fascists from imposing their dictatorship in the crunch. That crunch occurs later when we’re at a higher, more intensive stage of struggle, when the capitalist crisis has become far deeper than today.

If you start by attempting to hastily gather together a vanguard force and crush fascism in the egg, you are playing into the hands of the fascists. You are losing ground in the mobilization of the real class that can do away with fascism, and the fascists are gaining ground as a result. Now that’s the problem the ultralefts fell into in San Francisco.

With a new wave of the current radicalization, we will witness the beginning of a process that was characterized by the appearance of a diversity of phenomena in the thirties. On the one side there was the German American Bund or the Silver Shirts, counterparts at that time of the Klan and the Nazis.

On the other hand, we had Coughlin. He was a somewhat different animal. Frank Hague, the mayor of Jersey City, was yet a different animal. Study that period in this respect, with all its nuances.^[2]

Until Roosevelt, the Stalinists, the Social Democrats, and the old-line union hacks like Tobin^[3] succeeded in blocking the political radicalization of the class, the ruling class was terrified that they might see a revolutionary explosion. It was no accident that the first signs of an incipient fascist development began in the early 1930s. Pelley started the Silver Shirts in 1932.

Right-wing polarization in late 1930s

It was also no accident that the right-wing polarization began to take a more serious form when it appeared in the late 1930s that the labor radicalization had been stalled. Confusion was created by the failure of the working class to respond independently to the new depression of 1937-1938. This was no little economic dip but a very severe slump.

In those circumstances, Coughlin and Hague, the serious fascists, were able to enter a confused political scene that resulted from the crisis of working-class leadership. The fascist danger was not washed out by anything the labor leadership did, but only when the path followed by the ruling class led into World War II. Then all the ground rules changed.

What has happened since then? A long period of cold war and witch-hunt transpired, with economic stability and quiescence in the class struggle. Things began to change with the turn in the Black struggle in the 1950s, the student radicalization, women’s struggles, and the antiwar movement. With the new economic depression and the beginning of new thinking in the working class, you are seeing new signs of incipient fascism interrelated with the repressive actions of the government.

You are going to see the rise of counterparts of Hague and Coughlin — in a different form, in different garb, but a comparable type. Remember, you’ve now got a more desperate ruling class that had to haul its ass out of Saigon in a hurry. The imperialists scrambled out with their tails between their legs the way the special deputies left the market in the 1934 Minneapolis strike….

As I was saying, we have to see the next period as a period of mobilization of fascist forces and counter mobilization of working-class forces. That is the context in which we develop our tactics. Someone who begins with the concept that you can defeat the enemy without a major battle is making a big error.

There is going to be a battle, a direct confrontation with whatever forces the capitalist class can muster to perpetuate its rule. Don’t go out with a corporal’s guard thinking that if you can smash a few scouts on the other side, the real enemy army will cut and run and never take to the field of battle. You’ve got to meet them power to power.

Tactically, your actions must be calculated to aid the mobilization of the workers and their allies and obstruct the mobilization of the fascists. The fascists are trying to do the same thing. They are trying to develop a system of tactics that will facilitate the mobilization of fascist forces and block the mobilization of our forces. Look at the line they are taking at San Francisco State. They are able to gull a lot of people who are raw material for the antifascist forces because of this mistake by the ultralefts.

This is no game for fools. This game is for all the marbles. The question is: is there going to be a victorious proletarian revolution or is there going to be fascism in power? The conscious forces on both sides know the game is for keeps.

Ultraleft groups do not know what time it is

It is important to keep these things in mind in our discussions, to inculcate these lessons into our cadres and through our cadres into the mass movement. There’s nothing wrong with the instincts of most of these young ultralefts. The instinct is in line with the task, that is, the destruction of the fascist forces. The problem is that they just do not know what time it is.

They remind me of grade school kids. An immeasurable number of black eyes and lost teeth are caused by the fact that youngsters don’t know how to fight intelligently. They run in swinging their arms like a windmill. That’s what these people are doing. But much more is at stake in this fight than there is in a schoolyard brawl.

We’ll try to educate as many of them as we can but that’s not the main thing. The main thing is to educate a growing army of antifascists. The issue at stake for every fighter is: Are you going to be ready for the real thing when it comes? And it will come.

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

NOTES

[1] For a historical explanation of Bonapartism and its recent manifestation in U.S. politics see Radicalism, Bonapartism, and the Aftermath of the 2020 U.S. Elections, World-Outlook’s inaugural article.

[2] For more information on Father Coughlin, Mayor Frank Hague, and U.S. senator Joseph McCarthy, see What Is American Fascism? Writings on Father Coughlin, Mayor Frank Hague, and Senator Joseph McCarthy by James P. Cannon and Joseph Hansen. This bulletin dissects Coughlin’s Social Justice movement, Frank Hague’s dictatorial antilabor regime in Jersey City, New Jersey, and Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s anticommunist crusade as early manifestations of incipient fascism in the United States.

[3] Daniel J. Tobin (1875–1955) was an Irish American labor leader who served as the Teamsters union president for 45 years, from 1907 to 1952.

For further reading:

The Teamster series (4 volumes)

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