Library:The Klan & Government: Foes or Allies?

The Klan & Government: Foes or Allies?
Author	Sam Marcy
Written in	1983
Source	MIA

Foreword: The Klan yesterday and today

In the middle of November 1982, the Ku Klux Klan undertook what appeared to be a bold adventure in their long and bloody history.

They attempted to schedule a demonstration in the heart of Washington, D.C., fully aware that the District has been for quite a number of years virtually a Black city. Washington was thus a particularly attractive target for the Klan.

It was not boldness or bravery which impelled them to target Washington but rather their calculation that the police in the District, mostly Black, would be forced by both the federal authorities and the chief of the metropolitan police to protect and defend their presence in the city.

Earlier the Klan had partially succeeded in invading several large cities, including Boston and Baltimore, as well as some of the smaller cities. After weeks of maneuvering behind the scenes with the federal and District police authorities, the Klan obtained a permit to demonstrate in the District on November 27.

This certainly came as a profound shock to the oppressed people in the District and to many in the progressive movement. The move by the Klan unfortunately caught the working class and oppressed communities in and around the District, and throughout the country as a whole, by surprise.

The capitalist press and media knew about the projected Klan demonstration long in advance. As a matter of fact, the All-Peoples Congress, a national community, labor, and civil rights organization, which learned of the Klan demonstration early, sent out releases to the national and local electronic media and press and announced that it was calling for a counter-demonstration.

As will be seen by the articles in this book, the Klan was soundly trounced in its effort and was driven off by a very militant counter-demonstration. The counter-demonstration was largely a spontaneous response by thousands of militant, mostly Black, young people. It did not come about without a struggle with the police, which took a considerable toll in injuries and arrests of the young militants.

Since then the Klan has reared its ugly head in several other cities. It has attempted to stage a demonstration in Austin, the capital of Texas, and has sought a foothold in the western part of New York near Rochester.

The Klan would not be a problem worthy of serious discussion if one were to judge it merely by its numbers, which are conceded by all sides to be rather insignificant.

The Klan-state connection

The far more important problem is the reciprocal relations between the capitalist government and the Klan. More often than not, the former is made to appear rather hostile to the Klan. The public impression conveyed is that the government is forced under the law (the First or "Free Speech" Amendment to the Constitution) to defend and secure the Klan's rights.

In reality, however, the capitalist government has covertly encouraged and promoted the Klan over many decades. It is often completely overlooked in current discussions and in the press and media reports that the durability of the Klan rests on solid long-term bonds to the state, and that the two share a common political ideology, for the most part.

When the ruling class had the opportunity to wipe out the Klan more than a century ago, it failed to do so. The Northern industrialists and bankers were more interested in reaching a compromise with the ex-slaveowners than with the newly freed slaves.

The U.S. government capitulated to the Southern planters and ex-slaveowners after the period of Reconstruction when it withdrew federal troops from the South without establishing an independent citizens' militia composed of the Black people and poor whites.

It also left them politically defenseless and deprived the Black population of economic power by failing to grant the newly emancipated people the land which they had tilled for centuries.

The violence against the Black people which had begun on a minimal scale during Reconstruction began to take a tremendous toll after the U.S. government finally withdrew its troops. It was in this period that lynchings, the most barbarous form of counter-revolutionary terror, became the hallmark of the reactionary attempt to keep the Black people in semi-bondage. As many as 5,000 lynchings, took place between the 1880s and 1951 (J.E. Cutler, Lynch Law, 1969 edition).

Nothing so much emphasizes the need for an independent citizens' militia as what happened immediately after the withdrawal of the federal troops. It is to be noted that only in the nineteen fifties and sixties, when the question of self-defense was raised in a serious way, did Black communities become freer from the unrestrained terror of the earlier period.

Self-defense actually began during the so-called Tulsa riots of 1921. This attack on the Black community in Oklahoma for the first time in many years found an unexpected response in the form of what we would now call self-defense.

The withdrawal of the federal troops from the South was a signal to the Southern planters and ex-slaveowners to move swiftly in setting up the Ku Klux Klan in one place after another. Over many decades, not only have Southern state governments encouraged and promoted the Klan, but many governors, legislators, and even some national figures were either secretly or openly associated with the Klan.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Hugo Black to the Supreme Court in the 1930s, it was brought out in the Senate hearings to confirm his appointment that he had been a member of the Klan. While Black stoutly denied that he was in any way sympathetic with the objectives of the Klan or that he was a member of it at the time of his confirmation, he didn't deny that he had been a member "a long time ago."

Ironically, when Justice Black took his seat in the Supreme Court, Justice Harlan Fiske Stone was also a member. President Calvin Coolidge had first appointed Stone as Attorney General before making him a Justice of the Supreme Court. It was Stone who, under cover of instituting procedures to fight subversion of all kinds, had the FBI "infiltrate" the Klan, supposedly to uncover its terrorist activities.

In reality his work amounted to using government agents to establish something like 41 chapters of the Klan. The subsequent history of the Klan makes it clear that rather than undermining the Klan, the secret operations of the government helped to maintain and strengthen it.

Of course the government has always maintained a formal posture of hostility to the Klan.

But even where that has occasionally been true, the government shares with the Klan allegiance to the ruling class, which really is their fundamental concern.

The FBI has been notoriously racist and ultra-reactionary and shares much of the same ideology as the Klan. It would be very difficult to separate the reactionary, racist actions of the FBI from those of the Klan, if one were to look at its historical role rather than the pro forma position it takes in public.

Reaganism and the Klan

The coming to power of the Reagan administration has not only stimulated and encouraged the Klan, it has raised the general level of violence in the country against all oppressed people—Black, Latin, Native, Asian, women, gays and lesbians. It is part and parcel of the general anti-working class offensive of the Reagan administration.

It is not for nothing that some of the right-wing ideologists have heralded the Reagan administration as the beginning of a counterrevolution in social, political, racial, and labor policies. More than any other in recent years, the Reagan administration has gone out of its way to emphasize its racist character and to level its blows precisely at the poorest, most under-privileged oppressed people.

It is in the area, however, of the use of legal violence that the Reagan administration has made its deepest impact. One has only to examine the massacres in the cities of Memphis and New Orleans to confirm that it was precisely the election of the Reagan administration which generated and stimulated the increase in violence.

In fact, what the Klan has not been able to do is precisely what the capitalist state, through its city and state police, does with a very thin veneer of dubious legal sanction.

The wholesale repression by the police in New Orleans and Memphis almost seems like a reenactment of history, of the period immediately after the Civil War when Andrew Johnson ascended to the presidency. The assassination of Lincoln and the assumption of the presidency by Johnson, who was in league with the South in the first place, was the signal for the ex-slaveowners and planters to reopen the struggle they had lost on the battlefield.

There was bloody rioting in Memphis and New Orleans at that time, and it seemed like the beginning of a classical counter-revolution to reverse the results of the Civil War.

In the Memphis attack, which took place in May 1866 (a little more than a year after Lee surrendered at Appomattox) 46 Black people were murdered, quite a number of them Union veterans. As many as 70 were wounded. Twelve churches and four schools were burned to the ground; Black women were raped.

This was Memphis in May 1866. Things were not much different in New Orleans, which also took its cue from Andrew Johnson's accession and started an anti-Black riot which took the lives of 48 and wounded 68. There were also burnings and ransacking.

The death toll in both cities was probably much higher but these are the conservative estimates. It was enough to alarm the radical wing of the Republican Party into embarking upon the road of Reconstruction. For a brief period very significant progress was made with the aid of the U.S. Army, which controlled the Southern states. Too soon, however, the troops were withdrawn leaving the people once more defenseless.

How much different are today's massacres in New Orleans and Memphis from those of more than a century ago?

Memphis and New Orleans today

The progress of capitalist development forced the abolition of chattel slavery and instituted wage slavery, share cropping, and land tenancy, a form of robbery of the tillers of the soil. The form of oppression and exploitation has changed fundamentally, but exploitation and oppression remain.

The fundamental reforms necessary for full freedom have never been fulfilled. And the nature of the capitalist state holds down the oppressed peoples, utilizing both legal and illegal means to perpetuate, if not intensify, their oppression.

What happened in Memphis on January 13, 1983? How different was it from what happened in May 1866?

The police organized what can only be described as a massacre of a religious group in the heart of a working class district in the Black community. Just as the accession of Andrew Johnson was a signal for anti-Black repression in 1866, so under different historical circumstances but continuing the line of repression by the state apparatus, the coming of the Reagan administration encouraged the repressive capitalist state apparatus of Tennessee to wantonly visit its repression on Black people.

According to the original police version, this religious group in Memphis enticed three white policemen to their house and then held one hostage. It's not clear what the religious group supposedly wanted or what they asked the police to do. Even if we take the police story as they themselves gave it, clearly it was a most flagrant violation of the rights of the Black community.

Memphis is the town where Martin Luther King was assassinated. It is well known that the town has been under great tension and that the capitalist administration has consistently been polarizing the city on a racial basis, encouraged by the coming to power of the Reagan administration.

The police and the city administration understood this only too well. They knew that the religious group was situated right in the heart of a working-class district of the Black community. The police should have also known that the Black community, like any other neighborhood or community, has the right to local self-autonomy.

If it is true that this religious group was bent on enticing white police and holding them hostage, it would have been no more than an exercise in elementary local autonomy to have let Black police deal with the situation.

The U.S. has loudly proclaimed the right of self-determination everywhere in the world except for oppressed people here at home, even on the most elementary community level.

What was involved in Memphis from the viewpoint of self-determination was the right of the people to choose their own police as an expression of local self-autonomy—an elementary exercise of the right to self-determination. Local or community control over schools has been an issue for which Black people have fought for a considerable period. It has been won to some degree in the larger cities such as New York.

But the Memphis authorities and city government made the hostage situation inevitable by violating the Black community's right to their own police. Had Black police taken charge of the situation, it is entirely conceivable that no violence whatever would have occurred.

As it happened, however, the Memphis city administration mobilized more than 300 police with weapons of mass destruction. They besieged the community for two days. Then after a barrage of concussion bombs and tear gas, they stormed the house. Seven occupants were killed by the police: Lindberg Sanders, 49; Larnell Sanders, 26; Michael Coleman, 18; Cassell Harris, 21; Andrew Houston, 19; David Jordan, 29; and Earl Thomas, 20. All seven were shot in the head.

This is an unmistakable sign of the most wanton brutality and demonstrates that there were both premeditation and planning by the police.

What distinguishes this outburst of massive violence from what the Klan would do lies precisely in the fact that the police and the city and state governments of Tennessee cover themselves with a thin veneer of dubious legal sanction, which would not be accepted as legally valid anywhere in the world, except by the most racist institutions.

What happened in New Orleans in November 1980, just after the Reagan election, was equally ghastly, even if one or two less were murdered. As was clearly demonstrated by a CBS 60 Minutes telecast, a series of police attacks resulting in the deaths of five Black people was organized and carried out in a manner which differed little from what the Klan would do except that the murderers are the legally constituted authorities of the capitalist state.

Bourgeois liberals most concerned with Klan's 'rights'

The police massacres in Memphis and New Orleans aroused less concern among the liberal bourgeoisie than did the Klan demonstration in Washington, D.C. Strange as it may seem, some of the liberals, pressured by the way the media handled the counter-demonstration against the Klan, turned their fire on the counter-demonstration rather than on the Klan itself.

For instance, a long letter in the Guardian of January 19, 1983, spent hundreds and hundreds of words attacking the counter-demonstration. It was written by a "socialist," no less, David McReynolds, a leader of the Socialist Party, USA.

His conclusion, like that of many others in the camp of the liberal bourgeoisie, was: The counter-rally would only result in "the level of violence within society increasing. ... Are we going to undermine our own right to speak fully and freely by calling for the selective enforcement of the Bill of Rights? Is there anything the Klan can say that is one-half as dangerous as our saying it should not be allowed to speak?"

This is the standard bourgeois liberal position and has been the prevailing current of bourgeois political thought on this question ever since the Klan came into existence.

As long as the argument is confined to the plane of bourgeois liberal ideology, our position necessarily becomes defensive and faulty and represents nothing more than a defense of the status quo—of things as they are. Arguing on the plane of First Amendment rights disregards completely the nature of society as it exists today—hopelessly divided as it is into antagonistic classes.

Matters are altogether different when we begin, not with some abstract legal norm, but with an examination of the living struggle in the contemporary United States.

All social relations are shaped by the struggle of the social classes, a struggle of the working class and oppressed people against merciless, ruthless neo-barbarism in the form of unrestrained racist monopoly capitalism. To this must be added the super-exploitation of oppressed peoples by the ruling class.

The bourgeois liberal approach is that the class struggle does not really exist, nor the super-exploitation of oppressed peoples. Furthermore, they assume that the Ku Klux Klan is merely an extremist grouping in capitalist society, just as there are extremist groupings on the left.

The duty of the main current (the bourgeois liberals imagine that's them, of course) is to keep these two extremes at bay. Granting them both the right to organize and demonstrate safeguards bourgeois society.

As long as the democratic procedures are observed, goes this argument, society will remain peaceful. The extremists will be kept in their place if only the First Amendment is abided by faithfully.

But to accept this you really have to close your eyes to what is going on in the capitalist USA. The First Amendment preachers almost always assume that the Klan and other fascist groupings are completely separate and independent organizations, that they have no intimate connections with the capitalist government and are not aided and abetted by it.

As we have shown this is an utterly false position. It is invalidated by 100 years of struggle. Memphis and New Orleans are merely some of the more gruesome developments, while smaller ones continue to multiply.

For instance shortly after the Klan demonstration in Washington, the Miami police killed a youth in a Black neighborhood. An angry rebellion followed, another Black man was killed and many Blacks were arrested. The police took over the Black community and turned it into a strategic hamlet of the type the U.S. created in South Viet Nam.

Where are the First Amendment preachers when it comes to dealing with such a phenomenon? Even when they say a word or two here and there, it is by way of exonerating the police or lightly chastising them in the usual way for applying "excessive force."

After the Black community in Miami was subdued, the Klan made its appearance in that city with one of its symbolic demonstrations. But it was sufficient to capture the attention of the capitalist press and many made sure to mention that the Klan were there in support of the police who had brutally murdered the two Black youths.

While interest in the resurgence of the Klan in liberal circles seems to be on the wane, the controversy which the counter-demonstration aroused continues to have more than topical interest. This is because in the eyes of the liberal bourgeoisie a militant struggle against the Klan, that is, to drive it out wherever possible, violates the sacred norms of imperialist democracy.

The axis of the controversy takes the usual form: "The Klan and other fascist organizations should be permitted to exist and exercise the rights of free speech and organization the same as other political organizations."

Unless one sees the Klan other fascist organizations in the general context of the developing struggle of the workers and oppressed, one runs the danger of completely abdicating, if not surrendering, the struggle and using the free speech amendment as a cover for it all.

Our First Amendment proponents should first ask themselves: Is it conceivable that the Klan will in any way abandon its terrorist role, will slowly recede and disintegrate or will it continue to thrive and expand as the needs of the ruling class become more imperious?

For the First Amendment proponents to consider this question critically, it would first be necessary for them to examine the real situation: the objective evolution and direction of capitalist development in the U.S. It is on this question that the role of the Klan really depends Approaching this from the liberal position, from the viewpoint of First Amendment rights, is dealing with it in the stratosphere of abstract ideas and not on the granite realities of the grim situation which is unfolding.

A Marxist would pose the question as follows: Are class antagonisms between the working class and the bourgeoisie softening in the U.S., or becoming more aggravated? Is the super-exploitation of the oppressed peoples lessening or becoming more intensified?

If class antagonisms and pressures on the oppressed people were softening, this would moderate the collisions between the classes and would have the effect of reducing extra-legal political struggles. These would become dissolved in everyday, peaceful political controversy and debate.

In order for the class struggle to soften, in order for class conflicts to moderate, there must first be an upward, vigorous, and sustained revival of the capitalist economy which moreover has to be on a worldwide scale. But this is the epoch of capitalist decline, and while there may be an ephemeral upward spurt here and there, the basic disease of capitalist decay is irreversible.

This narrows the possibilities for easy, peaceful solutions. On the contrary, precisely because of the general world economic crisis, particularly in the U.S., class antagonisms are bound to sharpen, class conflicts are bound to widen and deepen. These in turn cannot but bring in their wake an enormous growth in the use of repression and violence which is endemic to the capitalist government in the first place.

Violence and the state

It has to be remembered that the use of violence and mass repression is a congenital tendency of the capitalist state. Even in the so-called best of times the capitalist government not only tolerates terrorist organizations like the Klan, but once the class struggle of the workers and oppressed people takes on the character of a genuine mass upsurge, the capitalist government is more likely than ever to encourage and promote the likes of the Klan and other mediums of repression.

If the U.S. is resorting more and more to naked armed force on a world scale to the point of threatening nuclear first strikes, if it is hastily building super aircraft carriers for the Navy to prowl the seven seas, threatening mass destruction of Third World people, is it likely under these circumstances that so-called "domestic tranquility" will prevail, that is, class peace, the peace of the oppressor imposed on the oppressed?

Indeed, one should put the shoe on the other foot. It is the ever-expanding growth of the police and military forces at home which makes repression and violent outbursts an inevitable outgrowth of the deepening class antagonisms. The preachments of the liberal bourgeoisie to rely on First Amendment rights are a mere cover-up for a grim reality which is expanding and not in any way receding.

Besides, First Amendment moralists frequently abandon their own position in moments of great crisis. They either surrender or fall to pieces altogether under the stress of right-wing political pressures.

In 1939 when there was a brief but very hysterical witchhunt which rose out of the short-lived Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact, the liberal bourgeoisie completely defected on the question of civil rights and joined the camp of the right-wing witchhunters.

That splendid defender of civil liberties, the ACLU, capitulated to the witchhunters during that 1939-1940 nightmare. Its national board expelled from board membership Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who was then an outstanding leader of the Communist Party.

None other than Norman Thomas, leader of the Socialist Party and the ideological godfather of David McReynolds who so sanctimoniously cites the First Amendment against the anti-Klan counter-demonstration, called for a purge of communists in the ACLU. He did so in an article in the Socialist Call of December 16, 1939.

So what did freedom of speech amount to in a time when the bourgeoisie was putting on the pressure?

The vote for expulsion was a shameless exhibition of liberals voting unison and goose-stepping to the tune set by the FBI and capitalist government. J. Edgar Hoover had his own personal attorney, Morris Ernst, sitting on the ACLU board and acting as its co-counsel. How in the world can one be a counsel for the ACLU board and at the same time be the attorney for J. Edgar Hoover. This is how consistent liberalism can be in a crisis—they go over to the other side. (See Corliss Lamont's excellent account in his The Trial of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.) During the 1950s, they crumbled altogether and then became victims themselves of the witchhunt.

As the capitalist crisis deepens, as unemployment grows as the U.S settles its international disputes not merely on the basis of gunboat diplomacy as of old but of nuclear might, what is the only realistic expectation? Some utopian era, when class antagonisms will soften and diminish and collisions between the classes slowly disappear, leaving extremist right-wing organizations like the KKK with no material basis for existence and therefore tending to disintegrate and disappear?

On the contrary, this is the most unlikely and the least possible variant in the next stage of capitalist development.

That being the case, it is most important to discard the liberal straitjacket that only leads to defeat and frustration and arm the mass movement of the working class and oppressed with a revolutionary perspective. It is necessary to politically prepare for the impending struggle not less, but better than, the bourgeoisie pre- pared to win their struggle when they were a subject and oppressed class centuries ago in Europe under feudalism.

It is better to learn the progressive lessons that the bourgeoisie assimilated in their struggle than to become an object of mass confusion through the medium of petty bourgeois preachers and moralists who righteously wave the flag of freedom but abandon it as soon as the class struggle sharpens.

Neo-fascism in the 1980s

Where It Comes From

The U.S. working class should not fall prey to the deadly illusion that the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan and the growth of fascist violence in widely separated areas of the country is a fleeting, momentary phenomenon, soon destined to sink into oblivion as conditions rapidly change.

This very attractive if not alluring prognosis can only disarm the broad mass of the people and subject them to the kind of passivity in the face of danger which can only lead to catastrophe.

This conception of the menace of KKK and neo-Nazi terror is buttressed by sophisticated liberal apologetics which tell us that extremist groups like the KKK and neo-Nazis mushroom only during periods of so-called "national frustration," and that they disappear as soon as economic conditions improve and international tensions begin to ease. As these conditions begin to take hold, even the Reagan administration will tend to move away from the Right and move to occupy the center, these liberals say.

All this we are told signifies that class contradictions will tend to soften rather than sharpen. In the course of this development the liberal establishment will again begin to assert itself and the extremists on both sides of the political spectrum will be cast into the dustbin of history.

Moreover we are too often reminded that almost every capitalist politician who has achieved some prominence nationally has had to denounce and condemn fascist violence and the neo-Nazis.

Even Ronald Reagan and James Griffin, the reactionary, racist mayor of Buffalo, N.Y., have had to denounce the Nazis and the KKK as did the former mayor of Philadelphia, Frank Rizzo, and his like.

Finally, it is said (and this is all too true) that the overwhelming majority of the working class, the oppressed, and their allies are dead set against the Nazis and the KKK.

Of course, Tom Metzger, the Imperial Wizard of the California KKK, got almost 33,000 votes, or 15% of his Republican opponent's more than a quarter-million votes when he ran for Congress in 1980. And fascist Gerald Carlson won 32% of the primary vote in Detroit in a Republican contest for Congress. But the numerical or electoral strength of the combined Nazi-KKK forces appears infinitesimally small if arrayed against the tens of millions in the electorate.

However, posing the question on an arithmetical as against a political basis is the most fraudulent of all methods of assessing the subsequent evolution of basic trends in contemporary capitalist society. Unquestionably the Nazis and KKK are infinitely small groups when one compares them to the mass of the U.S. population. It is not however their numerical strength which has significance (although it is not to be discounted).

Symptom of capitalist disease

It is the symptomatic importance of the rise of the KKK and neo-Nazis which is of greatest moment in apprehending the direction that events are surely taking. The Nazi-KKK menace in the U.S. is a symptom of a profoundly significant disease which has become congenital to the entire social system of capitalist exploitation and oppression.

If the growth of the KKK and the Nazis were an isolated phenomenon divorced from the degenerative effects of monopoly capitalism, if these groups had no ties to and were not supported, encouraged, and promoted by formidable sections of the ruling class, they would be merely a sterile and stagnant combination of racist thugs, even though they are oriented to prey upon growing unemployment, economic dislocation, skyrocketing prices and the cost-of-living. But that is not at all the case.

The growth of fascism everywhere has been securely tied to big business; that is its lifeline.

A case might be made for the liberal apologists' view under the following conditions. If there were a prolonged softening of the class struggle, rather than its growing acuteness on a world scale; if a swift and protracted economic recovery on a truly high level of production were in the wind, if an easing instead of an aggravation of international tensions were to come, if a sharp drop rather than a tremendous hike in swollen defense expenditures were really to take place in the immediate period ahead.

Such conditional "ifs," however, are wholly unwarranted by the very grim realities of the present situation as it continues to develop.

Liberals don't speak for monopolist bourgeoisie

If the bourgeois liberal view as a class force represented the viewpoint or the orientation of the capitalist establishment as a whole, as it did on occasion in the past, its forecast would have to be taken into account, at least as one element, in appraising the evolution of political trends in the period ahead.

But the liberal bourgeoisie, for the most part, is a cast-out element. It has been in the process of decline for a very considerable period. Far from speaking for the capitalist establishment, it is trying desperately to retain some toehold by propitiating the rightists in the imperialist firmament.

The ruling class as a whole have rejected and disqualified the orientation of bourgeois liberalism. They are not full of optimism about a speedy recovery from the deep-going economic malaise which afflicts all of society, and whose burden falls so heavily on the shoulders of the workers and the oppressed.

Rather than seeking peaceful solutions to international problems, the new Reaganite administrators of the capitalist state are hell-bent on war. They may decide to talk softly and cover themselves with pacifist phraseology for a period of time, but mainly for the purpose of gaining time to gear up the war machine and militarize the country as a whole.

The two most formidable and preponderant elements in the capitalist establishment—Big Oil, that untrammeled octopus which pervades every nook and corner of social existence in the country, and the unbridled military—are the most prone to promote lawlessness and extra-legal, extra-parliamentary and paramilitary force to gain their ends. They, together with the military-industrial complex are the very infrastructure of contemporary capitalist society.

It is they who finance the growth of a thousand-and-one single-issue reactionary organizations and who cannot but look benignly upon and covertly finance KKK and neo-Nazi thugs. To them it is just one more covert operation which for public purposes is out-of-bounds of the legal framework of the capitalist government.

The array of giant multi-national corporations that compose the monopolist bourgeoisie are all connected in one way or another with the military and Big Oil either being subjected by them or allied with them in friendly, cooperative, "shared" areas of collaboration. None of the monopolist bourgeoisie any longer lean in or even give the semblance of leaning in a liberal direction.

End of free trade

The end of the free trade policy by Chrysler and Ford, and tomorrow by others, spells out political adventurism abroad and vicious reactionary assaults on the living standards of the masses at home. The launching of a new export drive by the U.S. to pump up the capitalist economy only succeeds in fueling the militarist inclination to protect and defend whatever growing war expenditures the giant monopolies and multinational conglomerates muster.

All this cannot but inevitably provoke a resurgence of the working class and oppressed masses to meet the menace of political reaction unloosed by the ruling class.

Big Oil and military

Of all the fallacies concerning U.S. politics, the worst is that which seeks to divorce and separate the most vicious and outrageous symptoms of capitalist reaction from the development of the degenerative aspects of monopoly capitalism.

It is Big Oil and the military which have unloosed the general political reaction and brought in the Reaganites to administer the state.

The old hands were good and praiseworthy in some areas of their stewardship (so goes the right-wing palaver), but the new hands will be firmer, more brutal. Indeed, they openly boast that they have an "SOB factor," which is popularly conceived to be mere nastiness when, in reality what is meant is the promotion and execution of dirty tricks and covert paramilitary operations, not only abroad, but also at home.

The financing and the spread of neo-fascist and downright KKK and Nazi groupings is a logical supplement to the legal repressive and terrorist apparatus of the capitalist state in times of need. For that reason, a short-lived perspective in fighting the fascist menace is erroneous.

The struggle against fascism, which is only in its embryonic form at the moment, must entail the perspective of involving the broadest social forces of present-day society in the struggle against capitalism. Capitalism is the fountainhead of political reaction in general and of KKK and neo-Nazi terror in particular.

It is impossible to conduct a consistent antifascist policy unless one takes into account the key and decisive factor in overwhelming and destroying the fascist menace; it is the working class, the oppressed people and their allies.

There can be no substitute, however one tries, for involving the broadest masses of workers and oppressed to overwhelm the fascist threat.

The fascist menace cannot be legislated out of existence. The employment of legal, judicial and other methods in the struggle against fascism is necessary and often indispensable as a prerequisite to winning the broadest sections of the masses. But reliance upon the capitalist state to effectuate political measures directed against the threat of fascism is a hopeless, deadly illusion.

Nowhere, and at no time, has a capitalist government ever effectuated legislation clearly directed against fascism and proscribed existing fascist organizations without at the same time also limiting and proscribing the existence of revolutionary, working-class organizations.

The general tendency of capitalist legislation against fascist organizations generally comes down to banning "subversive organizations in general," which is an umbrella formula to prohibit progressive working-class and revolutionary organizations while at the same time protecting and defending the right-wing and fascist organizations.

Lessons of Buffalo, N.Y.

The Buffalo experience has shown in microcosm what the bourgeoisie is capable of doing when faced with a fascist threat. When the mayor of Buffalo was finally forced to take cognizance of the Nazi-KKK demonstration, he and the capitalist establishment, with the complete cooperation of (if not in conspiracy with) the capitalist media, moved to ban the anti-fascist demonstration under cover of banning both the right and the left.

This is a classic example of how a terrified capitalist city administration reacts when challenged by a neo-Nazi-KKK threat. First, they try to do nothing. Then they get their liberal friends and luminaries to ridicule the neo-Nazi menace and say that it doesn't exist. And then when the menace shows determination to demonstrate in the heart of the city, they advise the workers and the oppressed to boycott it, ignore it in the face of racist murders which have yet to be solved.

When all this fails and when a counter-demonstration against the KKK and Nazis shows promise of encompassing a broad coalition of civil rights, progressive, and working-class organizations to effectively confront the KKK and Nazi thugs, then (and only then) does the capitalist city administration assume its posture of "fighting" against the Nazis. But how? By presumably banning both demonstrations, but in reality aiming to ban only the anti-fascist demonstration.

What was truly important about the Buffalo experience was that a militant and progressive coalition demonstrated a determination to go through with its demonstration in the face of an illegal and unconstitutional ban. And finally the mayor and the capitalist establishment were forced to abandon the ban in the face of this militant and inflexible determination to hold the demonstration and not surrender the right to freedom of assembly in the face of the combined threats by the capitalist government, the press and the police.

In a further effort to try to displace, discredit, and frighten the mass of the people away from the militant anti-fascist coalition, the mayor and the city administration were obliged to sponsor their own government-supported and establishment-controlled rally to honor Martin Luther King, Jr.

Intransigence, which is so indispensable in any working-class struggle, did not alone account for the victory of the anti-fascist progressive coalition in Buffalo. It was also careful assessment of the political relationship of forces in the area and in the country. It was good, efficient organization, free from any dogmatic approach to the phenomenon of fascist violence, free from sectarianism. It was reliance on the mass of the workers and progressives, and attempts to achieve the broadest possible alliance with all elements willing, ready and able to put up a vigorous struggle.

Buffalo was a microcosm of what the ruling class can and will do in the face of a fascist menace. It is also a microcosm of what can be done by the working class movement to achieve victory in the face of what appear to be overwhelming odds.

The Struggle Against the Klan

A Historical Perspective

Attitudes to the Klan, even by those who oppose it most vigorously, differ widely. It is too frequently regarded as merely an extreme expression of racism and bigotry.

This is wholly inadequate. It omits the two singularly most significant characteristics of the Klan and also disconnects the Klan from its historical evolution, which spans more than a century.

The Klan is one of the very few organizations in this country which has avowedly been a secret terrorist organization. Murders, kidnappings, burnings, lynchings, whippings, and downright mass terror have characterized its existence since its inception more than 100 years ago.

The Encyclopedia Britannica, the most authoritative but highly conservative encyclopedia in the U.S. and abroad, bluntly characterizes the Ku Klux Klan as a "secret terrorist organization." That puts the Klan on a fundamentally different plane than merely an organization which promotes racism, no matter how viciously.

The Reagan administration, as well as those of Carter, Ford, and earlier presidents as well, have studiously resisted this characterization of the Klan. The current Attorney General, as well as the previous ones have compiled lists of terrorist organizations, some of dubious validity and mostly for witchhunting purposes, but have stubbornly resisted attaching this characterization to the Klan.

The matter is of considerable importance. By failing to recognize the true character of the Klan, they accord the Klan a legal status, entitling it to so-called First Amendment protection, which no terrorist organization ever obtains anywhere else in the world.

The characterization of the Klan is often the cause of confusion in progressive organizations. Civil libertarians in general seek freedom of speech and protection of the First Amendment for all political organizations. They seek to put all political organizations under one single protective umbrella—freedom of speech under the Constitution.

In a society which is divided into antagonistic classes as well as between oppressing and oppressed peoples, this umbrella covers up the most glaring contradictions and conceals the most fundamental interests of the working class and the oppressed people in favor of the oppressors and exploiters.

It puts legitimate organizations of the workers and oppressed alongside a secret terrorist organization, on the basis of "free speech for all." Moreover, it deliberately disconnects the entire historical evolution of the Klan, which for over a century has openly proclaimed that it stood for the abolition of civil rights for Black and other oppressed people, but also stands for the abolition of the bourgeois democratic structure of the U.S. government in totality.

Its leaders have asserted, even to this day, that the U.S. Constitution merely guarantees a republican form of government, not a democratic one. This is a fascist formula fashioned according to the lines of Hitler and Mussolini.

The Klan has at various times also made Catholics, Jews, Native Americans, and other minorities principal objects of attack. It has also of course been most viciously opposed to any form of working class organization, particularly unions.

But is the Klan so important when one considers that it is numerically negligible when compared to the general mass of the population?

The capitalist state and the KKK

This is a poor criterion for judging the possibilities of the Klan. One must consider its other features besides numerical strength and the fact that it is universally hated by the mass of the people.

The Klan is an extra-legal, extra-governmental organ, promoted and maintained by the capitalist state as an instrument of special and exceptional repression under circumstances when the state itself cannot or will not intervene in the struggle against the masses.

The Klan's origins are of utmost significance in evaluating its current role and perspective. The civil libertarians and the capitalist government both separate the origins and historical evolution of the Klan from its current role. And in this, they differ fundamentally from the mass of the oppressed people as well as the more enlightened elements among the working-class organizations.

It is impossible to evaluate the contemporary role of the Klan without a critical examination of its historical antecedents, its special role in U.S. history.

The Klan originated in the South in the era of Reconstruction which followed the Civil War. Reconstruction constituted a most revolutionary phase in American history.

Judged by what a thoroughgoing bourgeois democratic revolution should have accomplished in the struggle against the slavocracy a century ago, that revolution succeeded only halfway.

The main task of the bourgeois democratic revolution as experienced by most of the European revolutions of the 19th century and earlier, was to free the serfs from feudalism and give land to the peasants. To the extent that such revolutions succeeded they were wholly progressive.

The Civil War in the U.S. was a class struggle, a struggle of the Northern capitalist class against the Southern slave oligarchy.

"The present struggle between the South and the North," wrote Karl Marx in 1861, "is ... nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labor. Because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side by side on the North American continent, the struggle has broken out." (Quoted in Heritage of the Civil War, by Will Herberg.)

Marx and Engels both closely followed the developments in the Civil War and the period of Reconstruction and had high regard for the revolutionary struggle that was put up against the slavocracy by the left wing of the radical Republicans in the U.S. in that period.

Lenin too of course recognized the revolutionary significance of the American Civil War. "Where can you find an American so pedantic, so absolutely idiotic, as to deny the revolutionary and progressive significance of the American Civil War of 1860-65?" (Ibid.)

Civil War a limited bourgeois revolution

In the Civil War in the U.S., the bourgeois democratic revolution was aborted. It did result in ending involuntary servitude. It freed the Black people from their legal ties to the slavocracy. But it failed to carry out the rest of the basic and revolutionary measures which were necessary for formal equality with the white population.

Nevertheless, as a result of the revolutionary prosecution of the war against the Southern slavocracy, the Southern slave state governments were immensely weakened and in part replaced through federal intervention and military occupation by the central government.

These measures were made necessary in order to defend the rights of the Black people and to insure that the Southern slave-state governments did not violate the new federal legislation which the U.S. government had promulgated.

The Southern state governments were thus under the jurisdiction of the U.S. military and had to obey its orders. Unable to do anything legally to subvert the new status and rights of the Black people, the Southern planters resorted to building a conspiratorial terrorist organization to supplement the Southern states' legalized governments.

We see therefore that the KKK arose as an illegal, extra-governmental secret apparatus, nourished, promoted, and organized by the then legalized governments of the South. No matter what transformations the Klan has experienced throughout its more than a century of existence, it has retained its fundamental characteristics to this

By failing to take account of these two exceptional characteristics of the Klan, recognized even by the conservative Encyclopedia Britannica the civil libertarians and the capitalist government define the Klan by purely superficial and external characteristics. They ignore that which is inherently fundamental to the Klan—secrecy of organization and preparation ideologically and politically for mass terror.

By putting the KKK on a plane with other organizations, they ignore the very core of the matter.

Even so the rise of the KKK and its subsequent evolution during the Reconstruction period might not have been significant had it not been for some very important historical developments.

Need for people's militia

The duty of the federal government in the South under Presidents Lincoln, Johnson, Grant, and Hayes was not merely to juridically proclaim and defend the rights of the freed men and women. Its duty was also to train, educate, and organize them, above all on a military basis so they would be able to properly defend themselves against the violence instigated and perpetrated by the revival of the slavocracy's political power.

It was not enough to have subdued the slavocracy militarily. There had to be a counter-force or a parallel force as against the armed forces and repressive organs still wielded by the Southern states, notwithstanding the breakup of the old Confederacy.

It's true that the Confederacy seemed crushed and powerless, insofar as exercising its political sway against the Northern bourgeoisie. But the old planter aristocracy was permitted to rebuild and revive on the basis of retaining all its private property and land as well as whatever financial and commercial assets it still had.

Under these circumstances, the economic and state power of the planter aristocracy remained an overwhelming force as against the Black people, notwithstanding the gains made—including those in the state legislatures of the South. What the Black population needed to resist the growth of the KKK was an organized militia, trained, armed, and financed by the federal government to protect and defend their newly won rights and also to contest the planters' right to the land—which the former slaves were entitled to no less than the serfs in Europe during the bourgeois revolutions there.

The great model of the European democratic revolutions was of course the French Revolution of a century earlier, which was the deepest and profoundest of all the bourgeois revolutions. It is interesting to note that during the revolutionary Jacobin period, the Jacobins exercised a military dictatorship over the reactionary rural departments of France and insured the distribution of the land to the peasants and the confiscation of the estates of the nobility.

This is a very striking parallel to the Reconstruction period in the U.S., with this difference, that the military dictatorship of the Jacobins carried out its tasks, at least insofar as dividing the land and organizing a militia to defend against a return of the royalists. This unfortunately did not happen eighty years later during the period of Reconstruction.

Treachery of Northern bourgeoisie

The federal government retreated under pressure from many of the capitalists in the North Who felt that they had got what they wanted: (1) a centralized government which had crushed the political power of the South as against the Northern bourgeoisie, and (2) the replacement of chattel slavery by the capitalist wage slave system which accelerated capitalist production and increased the political authority of the federal government of the newly enriched bourgeoisie.

As a result the treacherous bourgeoisie withdrew the federal troops from the South and left the Black people defenseless against the KKK. The Southern aristocracy thereafter began a large-scale campaign to secretly recruit, organize, and promote the Klan as a mass terror weapon with an extra-legal and extra-state character, in order to destroy the ability of the Black people to utilize their newly won legal rights as proclaimed by the Constitution. The right of self-defense was virtually nullified by the withdrawal of federal troops from the South.

It is interesting to note that years earlier the Lincoln administration had been well aware that the right of self-defense by Black people was indispensable for their full freedom. The Emancipation Proclamation issued in 1863 contained a specific provision affirming the right of Black people to self-defense.

To ignore this highly significant chapter in the freedom struggle of the Black people in this country, to try and divorce the democratic and highly progressive aspects of the Reconstruction period from the development of the Klan, not only mutilates and distorts history, but makes it impossible to understand the contemporary role of the Klan and the continuing racist character of capitalist society in the U.S. in general. This is not at all an academic struggle over a definition or characterization of the Klan, but in reality a difference in class approach.

It is not for nothing that most of the bourgeois history books on the Reconstruction period, as well as the novels, movies, and television shows, are glorified fairy tales about the "beauties of the old South." They vilify and scandalize the period of Reconstruction; they submerge its modest achievements and its heroic figures, both Black and white, North and South.

Bourgeois scholars of Reconstruction, especially the more reactionary ones, underestimate the tremendous role played by the Black people in achieving the victory over the Southern oligarchy. They do everything to belittle the role of Black people and only rarely is there any mention of what W.E.B. Du Bois in his great book Black Reconstruction calls the general strike of Black people, that is, the abandonment of service on the plantations and the support it rendered to the Northern army which was indispensable for the victory over the plantation aristocracy.

In modern times, the vicious attacks against the Civil Rights movement, the pillorying of Black leaders and white progressives, especially those in the working-class movement, are merely a continuation of the same old struggle that the bourgeoisie, especially its most reactionary elements, carried on against those struggling for the implementation and extension of the achievements during the period of Reconstruction.

Reconstruction and the imperialist epoch

In discussing the withdrawal of federal troops from the South during Reconstruction, which constituted a crime of enormous historical proportions and left the Black people defenseless, it should be related to contemporary developments arising out of the predatory nature of imperialist politics.

Angola may be thousands of miles away from the Black South of the U.S. and separated by more than a century from the days of Reconstruction. But there are certain lessons to be learned there, too.

The Angolan people won a tremendous revolutionary victory in 1975. Had they been left alone to reconstruct society as they saw fit without interference, Angola would be a strong and prosperous country on the road to constructing a socialist society. But the U.S., in conspiracy with the South African government, used the UNITA mercenary organization headed by Jonas Savimbi against Angola.

As a result of South African support for the mercenary expeditions of Savimbi and UNITA, which were (and are) supplemented by direct South African air raids and invasions, the Angolan military forces were hard pressed to sustain the revolutionary struggle. The Cuban government offered internationalist support in the form of a military contingent and supplies in order to offset the counter-revolutionary forces supplied by the South African racist regime and its mercenaries.

An untimely withdrawal of the Cuban support forces would leave the Angolan people at the mercy of U.S.-supported South African intervention in Angola, similar to the withdrawal of Northern troops from the South a century earlier.

One need hardly mention the tragic forced withdrawal of the Palestine Liberation Organization from the Beirut area, with the consequent ghastly massacre which followed. The Phalangist murderers are nothing but a Lebanese version of the KKK.

Amin Gemayel is comparable to the Grand Wizard of the Invisible Imperial Empire. His visit to the White House at the invitation of Reagan is as though the ghost of Jefferson Davis, the head of the Confederacy, were to be called to a White House ceremony celebrating the victory of the old Confederacy in newer racist garments.

The same applies to an untimely Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, were that to take place under imperialist pressure.

KKK part and parcel of capitalist state

We have seen that the KKK is not merely an organization that grew up autonomously and spontaneously to promote racism. It is an offspring of the capitalist state of which the Southern states once again became an integral part.

The Klan has always been part and parcel, sometimes secretly, sometimes openly, of the capitalist state, especially in the police and military forces of the U.S.

The KKK is the prototype of an international phenomenon. In old Russia, they were known as the Black Hundreds (called this because of the black garments worn by their horsemen).

They go under different names in various countries. But everywhere they are counterrevolutionary organizations which grow up in response to the needs of the capitalist state for supplementary, illegal, extra-state, and extra-governmental repression and terror.

Their targets vary from time to time, but their general objective is the same—the destruction of the democratic rights of the workers and oppressed. They are the closest approximation to a fascist apparatus.

Always they grow out of a period of acute class struggle. It was so in Germany, in Italy, and in old Russia.

There are embryo fascist organizations all over Europe. The U.S. finances fascist gangs in the less developed countries as a means of threatening, intimidating, and overthrowing, where possible, governments which are striving to be independent of U.S. imperialist interests.

The lessons of armed self-defense are especially necessary and indispensable in the light of the congenital propensity of monopoly capitalism to rely more and more on illegal force at home and abroad. The fact that the Klan has been numerically small in different periods of U.S. history has not prevented it from suddenly surging forth as a mass organization, as it did in an earlier period of the U.S. when the ruling class needed it more frequently.

Now, with the capitalist crisis ever deepening and widening, it is inconceivable that the ruling class, which through the CIA promotes covert operations on a world scale, will suddenly drop its interest in supporting and maintaining clandestine, extra-legal support groups to promote its domestic objectives.

The capitalist crisis is bound to produce a tremendous resurgence of the working class. It is equally certain that the ruling class will attempt to inhibit, derail, and utilize all sorts of support organizations in the struggle against an aroused and united working class and oppressed peoples' united front. It is in light of this perspective that one needs to view each and every step in the development of not only KKK activity but other forms as well, and to properly organize against it with all the diligence, energy, and devotion which are necessary in the struggle.

Klan to March in Washington

The Broad Political Issues

A potentially serious setback to the civil rights movement, to the working class, and to all oppressed people is likely to develop unless an aroused movement quickly takes notice of what is about to go on in Washington on November 27.

For the first time in half a century the Ku Klux Klan has scheduled a demonstration in the heart of Washington, D.C. Not since the middle 1920s have they dared set foot in the capital.

Some may shrug it off as nothing of significance while others may view it with some concern but permit themselves to be passive to this situation.

For many weeks now the Klan has been gathering momentum, raising its ugly head in one city after another, leaving a trail of violence, burning crosses in some smaller rural cities, and in general exhibiting a renewed confidence which goes back to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.

It should be mentioned that its provocative appearance in the heart of Boston in October 1982 produced one of the largest anti-Klan demonstrations yet, perhaps as many as 10,000 on one day's notice.

There is absolutely no question that the Reaganite victory stimulated and encouraged the Klan and it is now trying to move more swiftly and boldly.

Role of capitalist media

A counter-demonstration for November 27 has been called by the All-Peoples Congress (APC), which also-called for the Boston demonstration. The capitalist media, which have seen fit to give the Klan leaders free time to promote racism on the national networks, have conveniently overlooked this scheduled counter-demonstration.

The national networks have thus far failed to reply to the many requests for interviews from leaders of the All-Peoples Congress.

There have been many press releases sent out, but only a few of the local papers and the Black press and radio station have given it attention. However, the foreign press has shown interest. But to this day the great dailies of the imperialist press monopoly—The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and The New York Times—have given it virtually no notice. The Washington Post has seen fit to give it only minor notice in its metropolitan section, as though this were a matter merely of local concern.

The capitalist government, however, has shown no such indifference.

For weeks the Klan was trying to set a convenient date for its projected provocation in the capital. The Klan tried to keep both the date and the site secret so as to take the oppressed people, the progressive movement, and workers generally by surprise.

But organizations like the All-Peoples Congress and others, which are determined to see that no Klan demonstration goes by unnoticed without protest and mobilization, have been working energetically to pursue the matter and to rally the masses.

The broad public ought to know that when interested organizations concerned with mounting a counter-demonstration tried to pursue the matter with the federal government in order to find out when and where the Klan would meet, they were politely advised that the information should be sought through the Freedom of Information Act.

Such is the situation!

However, in the interest of mobilizing its own thugs and would-be murderers, the Klan was then forced to make its demonstration public by filing an application for a permit. They were expeditiously granted it.

They chose a date around the holidays, when the broad masses of people are concerned with other matters.

When word was received about the granting of the permit to the Klan, leaders of the APC approached the federal authorities to protest the granting of the permit as inherently provocative. The APC also vigorously protested the denial of a permit for a counter-demonstration at Lafayette Park, where presumably the Klan, too, was planning to demonstrate.

Government officials maneuver against anti-Klan forces

After much delay and maneuvering by the federal authorities, a meeting was held between the APC representatives and the federal and metropolitan agencies on November 18. This was a most extraordinary session.

The government was represented by about 30 people: the National Park Service, Metropolitan Task Force, various other agencies, and a representative of the Justice Department.

The interest of the Reagan administration is shown by this virtual army of representatives.

What came out of it was a denial of the APC's application for a demonstration at Lafayette Park, but an approval of one for McPherson Square. However, the meeting was significant for what it indicates about the orientation and direction of the Reagan administration, which orchestrated the positions of the various agencies represented.

A representative of the government not only upheld the right of the Klan to march in the heart of this virtually Black city but said that they would not permit any other marches in the city during the time of the Klan march. There was no opposition raised by the Justice Department representative.

This is the clearest possible example of a gross and flagrant violation of the right of the people to demonstrate against the Klan wherever it goes.

The Justice Department stuck to its guns during the entire course of the meeting. This was all planned out in advance by the Reaganite administrators.

They have not only permitted an open provocation against all the oppressed people, and especially Black people, but they have enlarged the rights of the Klan while depriving the people of the same.

'Administrative prerogatives' vs. freedom of speech

To justify this mutilation of the law, the Justice Department came out with a patently absurd formula: We have a right to use administrative prerogatives in this situation.

Prerogatives! What prerogatives? A prerogative by an administrative agency—to do what? To invalidate the fundamental right of freedom of speech—the First Amendment. Thus for administrative convenience—for the convenience of the capitalist bureaucracy—they will accommodate a march by the Klan.

Administrative prerogatives! Where have we heard that formula before? It comes from the arsenal of fascist dictatorships and repressive regimes all over the world who employ this threadbare formula to cover up their violation and destruction of the civil rights and liberties of the people, all for the purpose of suppression.

Thus the Reagan administration is taking a leaf from the most repressive and outrageously reactionary police dictatorships.

As though this were not enough, the Justice Department also said it would be ready to invoke a newly passed local ordinance regarding the wearing of masks, cross-burnings, and so on, which the City Council had aimed at the Klan. But this law would be used to arrest counter-demonstrators (!) whose dress, according to the interpretation of the Justice Department, falls into this category.

This was aimed against people who wear Middle Eastern headdress who may be in the progressive counter-demonstration. It is an evident attempt to twist a local law meant for other purposes in order to intimidate, harass, and persecute demonstrators whose national custom is to wear certain forms of dress which do not suit the sensibilities of the Reaganite Justice Department.

The APC has protested all this in a letter to Attorney General William French Smith and will pursue it further.

By whose authority?

There is also a broad layer of bourgeois liberal officialdom whose position does little to help in the struggle against racism in general or the Klan in particular.

This position has been expressed by almost all the mayors in the various cities where Klan demonstrations have taken place. They have said ad nauseam that they have no authority to stop the Klan, no legal right to ban it.

Yet whenever the masses are about to move, whenever a truly gigantic outpouring of the people is about to take place, almost all of these mayors find ample authority to declare a state of emergency, to prohibit their demonstration under pretext of imminent danger.

Even that most liberal mayor of New York, John Lindsay, falsely invoked emergency laws in order to stop important demonstrations of the people. So did the mayors of Wilmington, Delaware, and, as recently as three years ago, of Miami, Florida.

The question of authority has never stopped the bourgeoisie from doing what they have to do in the interest of their class.

Cromwell answers mayors

There's a great historical example that is germane to the struggle of the oppressed and the working class in general regarding the right to exercise authority against the Klan. It comes from English history.

During the civil war in the middle of the 17th century in England, Oliver Cromwell, the leader of the revolution against the nobility (bourgeois revolution), set an excellent example that ended the long and abstract controversy over authority between the monarchy and the Parliament.

As a result of the revolution, Cromwell was able to confront the King and hand him an arrest warrant. Reading the arrest warrant, the King asked Cromwell, "By what authority can you arrest me?"

"It is," replied Cromwell, "upon this question of authority that the civil war has turned and been won."

A civil war, when it represents a revolution, is the highest possible authority. A revolution is not merely a bare transfer from a reactionary to a more progressive class; it carries out the will and determination of large masses of people who intervene to change history.

A revolution is the locomotive of history, that is, of progress. It accelerates progress.

Whoever opposes the verdict of the revolution opposes progress. Whoever opposes the revolution commits treason against the people, of which the revolution is the highest social and political product.

No law is superior to the verdict of the revolution. All laws after the revolution must be in conformity with the verdict of the revolution for purposes of implementing it.

Right to abolish Klan won in Civil War

This should be borne in mind today when the question is: Who has the authority to stop the Klan? It was the Civil War in the United States, the revolution that abolished slavery and affirmed in the Emancipation Proclamation the right of self-defense, that gave the people the authority to abolish the Klan. For the Klan is a relic and tool of the slavocracy, perpetuated even by the Reagan administration to continue oppression of the people.

Millions died in the Civil War in order to establish the authority by which slavery was abolished. And millions of Black people made that victory possible by carrying out what has been called (by the great scholar W.E.B. DuBois) a "general strike" ; by renouncing involuntary servitude, refusing to aid the war effort of the slavocracy, abandoning the plantations, fraternizing with white workers and farmers.

No exceptions were made for any remnants of oppression, persecution, or inequality. No room was left open by the Emancipation Proclamation and by the acts of Reconstruction to permit a terrorist organization, such as the KKK, dedicated to genocide, which everywhere is regarded with horror and abomination.

The Ku Klux Klan came later. It was a venomous, treacherous product of the attempted counter-revolution of the slavocracy and has been perpetuated by the capitalist government since then to one degree or another.

It is the Ku Klux Klan therefore that is subversive of the revolution, of the will of the people, because it challenges the verdict of history—the revolution; it challenges the people; it challenges all laws implementing the verdict of the revolution. It is, therefore, destructive of all the progressive values emanating from the Civil War.

The Ku Klux Klan, therefore, should have no real legal standing. Its defense and encouragement by the capitalist government is both illegal and an attempt to undo the historic verdict of the Civil War.

Facilitating the program of the Klan and accommodating them to march in the heart of the city, escorted by the military and police forces of the government, is to trample upon the authority which was won in blood over a century ago and continued in the glorious struggles of the 1960s, all of which the Reagan administration is bent on invalidating.

A march of the Klan is the march of a genocide squad, a march of the Nazis of pre-war Germany, of the Phalangists who massacred the people in Lebanon.

Every effort must be made to give the Reaganites a proper rebuff. While the time for this is necessarily short, it is most important to pursue it energetically and arouse the broadest and widest sections of the masses. They must be alerted to the danger that lurks behind the ugly scene of a genocide squad parading under the protection of the police and the government.

Lessons of the Anti-Klan Demonstration

All who are concerned with the course of the struggle of the working class and the oppressed, all who seriously consider the path to the socialist revolution in the U.S., must study in detail the very rich lessons of the powerful anti-Klan demonstration in Washington, DC on November 27.

It is an event of considerable significance from which one can consider variants of development on the road to the socialist revolution.

Cynics of the bourgeoisie and its ideological captives in the ranks of the petty bourgeoisie will hasten to characterize what was a virtual rebellion of the masses as really a small thing; a sort of tempest in a teapot; here today, gone tomorrow, and fading fast into oblivion.

Hysterical headlines in the bourgeois press and the extreme hostility shown by the ruling class in the editorial comments betray a deep concern that more than an isolated demonstration emerged from the anti-Klan experience.

On the surface, virtually all sections of society in the country are opposed to the Klan. It would seem that if there is any issue on which the ruling class holds a position nearly identical with that of the workers and oppressed, it is opposition to the Klan. That, however, is the surface.

Just beneath the surface is a chasm as deep and as wide as any of the oceans. Opposition to the Klan means nothing. It is opposition to the existence of the Klan which is the real issue.

Historic role of terrorist Klan

The Klan is not just a right-wing political organization. From its very inception the Klan has been and is today an avowedly terrorist, racist organization whose fundamental objective is genocide.

It is a relic of the uncompleted Civil War, maintained in modern times by the capitalist state as a supplementary weapon in the struggle against the oppressed people and the working class.

The Klan is a genocide squad—like the death squads of the Nazis, of Mussolini's Black Shirts, and lately of the Christian Lebanese Phalangist murderers.

The existence of the Klan challenges the existence of the oppressed people and the working class. The Klan does not challenge the bourgeoisie. It proclaims itself as their most loyal servants and protectors.

It particularly has cultivated and continues to promote a friendly relationship with the repressive forces of the state.

Succeeding administrations of the U.S. government ever since the great betrayal after the revolutionary period of Reconstruction, have protected, defended, held undercover and even openly collaborated with and utilized the Klan in a variety of ways to suppress the Black people, to persecute other nationalities, to maintain a vicious anti-labor attitude, to promote each and every reactionary scheme of the ruling class.

Most of all it stands out as the proclaimed enemy of the Black people.

Bourgeoisie seeks legal status for Klan

The bourgeoisie defends the Klan by elevating it to the status of a legal organization on a par with other political organizations. In its early days the liberal bourgeoisie opposed this, citing the victory of the Civil War Reconstruction and the illegal terrorist character of the Klan.

Gradually the liberal bourgeoisie succumbed to accepting and even promoting a superficial and fraudulent First Amendment right for the Klan, to treat it on a formally equal footing with other organizations.

This ideological stratagem of surrender by the liberal bourgeoisie was carefully cultivated and imposed upon progressive and workers' organizations. The indifference and weakness of even the progressive elements within the working class movement in not vigorously opposing this ideological stratagem has led to the acceptance of this reactionary and extremely harmful position.

The right of the Klan to so-called free speech has therefore become a sort of inviolable principle of the bourgeoisie. When the bourgeoisie speaks of inviolable principles, you can be sure it reflects their most inviolable and fundamental principle of all principles—the principle of maintaining bourgeois private property, the framework of contemporary monopoly capitalism.

Class relations and the anti-Klan demonstration

To understand the political significance of the powerful anti-Klan demonstration, a near uprising of the masses that was wholly unanticipated, one must first of all take into account the class relations in which this political experience took place.

Without taking into account the position of each of the classes in the city, no fruitful analysis can possibly be made.

In a rebellion, large or small, the masses often, as in this case, take their lives into their own hands. When that occurs, it signifies a political crisis in the city.

No political crisis of any magnitude ever really occurs without there also being a concomitant economic crisis at the very base of society. Washington, D.C., is, in most fundamentals, representative of the great metropolitan centers of the U.S.

Washington's social structure is like a huge pyramid. At the very apex is an infinitesimally small stratum of the population which has the aura of invincibility and omnipotence.

To most people, Washington means the president and his cabinet, the House of Representatives, the Senate, the Supreme Court and the vast array of agencies which support this structure.

In reality, this is not where the omnipotence and apparent invincibility rests. This, the governmental structure, is right beneath the apex and is in reality the fundmental support to the apex.

The apex of power in Washington

The apex is composed of an infinitesimally small group of the population who generally maintain a low profile: The various official and unofficial representatives of the large banks, the most powerful multinational corporations, and the ever-increasing number of military-industrial complexes.

They are buttressed by the chiefs of the military forces, the army of highly paid and privileged think tankers (particularly those on the advisory boards who need no pay), the multitude of known and unknown lobbyists, the huge number of so-called eminent law firms with their main offices on Wall Street, the arms merchant fraternity concerned with exports to all parts of the world, the equally powerful agribusiness companies so intimately linked with the sale of arms—these in essence all have the most efficient and reliable representatives in the heart of the city and constitute the next layer of the pyramid.

Below the governmental bureaucracy, there is a broader layer of officialdom whose tenure and social status is insecure but well-paid and whose job is to serve the administrative machinery of the capitalist state as it is represented in Washington's succeeding administrations.

Further down is still another layer of civil servants who in the last three decades in particular have grown to encompass a large section of Black workers, more women workers, and also other oppressed people.

The service proletariat

Finally, at the very base of this unique edifice, is the service proletariat, the granite stone on which this huge structure sits. Bourgeois literature is full of descriptions of the service employees and how they are rapidly displacing manual workers.

It avoids, however, describing them as the service proletariat, with good reason. This city cannot run for a minute without the service proletariat—those who really do the work, both manually and clerically.

From sanitation to electricity, to the maintenance of all forms of transportation, to feeding the public, bringing to and fro all that makes the city livable—it only takes one look at the city to know that there is a vast service proletariat that digs the ditches, shuffles the papers, cooks the food, washes the dishes, prunes the trees, maintains the shiny monuments, and, yes, also rides to and from the suburbs to perform domestic and other services for the suburban rich.

All these are the service proletariat who, along with the industrial proletariat, stand in objective irreconcilable opposition to finance capital at the top of the pyramid and the substructures that service it.

Like every other city, Washington is wracked by capitalist crisis. The city fathers take pride that Washington, D.C., has the second or third highest per capita income in the country. But that merely indicates the vast gulf that separates the few rich from the many poor. It also exaggerates the income of the middle layers, whose growing insecurity could drive them into the ranks of the revolutionaries but whose petty bourgeois mentality could also make them candidates for the extreme right.

What differentiates the District, as it is called, from other cities in the U.S. is that it is an administrative center. It administers the functions of the capitalist state.

Unlike other administrative centers in the imperialist world, it doesn't have a red belt of working class suburbs (like Paris for instance). But it does have a green belt where the wealthy from the District relax in fashionable country-style homes.

There are also a not inconsiderable number of so-called Black enclaves outside the city where there are many white workers as well.

Washington as a Black city

The other characteristic which is far more significant is that Washington is a Black city, especially at its base. And the officialdom of the city—the mayor, the city council, and so on—are mostly Black.

The city has only in the last two decades really emerged from semi-colonial tutelage to the federal government. Originally it was a sort of fief to the federal capitalist administration. Ever fearful of a growing Black population, the federal government has kept a tight hold on it.

While loosening the reins a bit to allow gradual autonomy, the capitalist state hangs over the city administration like a heavy weight and controls the vital arteries on behalf of the banks and insurance companies.

The DIC, officialdom must always bear in mind that the purse strings are really held by the federal establishment. It is the federal establishment which has supervised the District. It has done so through its Senators and Representatives as well as the executive office. It is hardly necessary to state that most of the people whom the District leadership had to deal with in the federal administration have been of a most racist character, sometimes deliberately picked from the South.

The other matter that the District leadership has to constantly keep in mind is the weight of the so-called private sector—the banks, insurance companies, and the multitude of businesses which have grown up. Between the heavy weight of the governmental structure and the so-called private sector, the city administration has to delicately maneuver to maintain the little room which, for lack of a better word, we call autonomy.

The people of the District take pride that their leaders can govern as well if not better than in other cities administered by a so-called white power structure.

But the Black population too has its class divisions and stratification notwithstanding the universal national (racist) oppression which affects all Black people and all other oppressed nationalities.

In this year of the profoundest capitalist crisis since the Great Crash there are more unemployed than there have been in decades in the District. For the first time bag women and unemployed men young and old are sleeping on the lawns near the Washington and Lincoln Monuments and even near the White House. They are homeless, destitute, desperate, and downright hungry in the literal meaning of the word.

At this particular time, holiday time, the Klan decided to make its bold move and demonstrate in the heart of this Black city where it hadn't set foot in more than half a century.

Klan march poses acute problem

Naturally this posed an acute problem for the city administration first of all, for many of the federal government officials, for the various federal agencies under the Reagan administration, and for the mass of the people as a whole. Deep anger and anxiety seemed to be the prevailing mood in some currents of the population, fear among others.

As we said earlier, opposition to the Klan seemed unanimous on the surface. But the real question was whether the Klan should have the right to set foot in the city, whether the genocide squad could parade on Pennsylvania Avenue and thereby gain legitimacy as an organization with legal status.

In the face of the impending Klan march, would the city retain that superficial unanimity of opposition to the Klan? Or would the city become divided both on the basis of oppressor and oppressed nationalities and class antagonisms? Would the antagonisms always inherent in the class structure now break through? And would the deep feeling of national oppression of all Black people reveal itself in a mammoth united front to oppose the humiliation of the city (which in this context does not include the upper capitalist layers of the pyramid)?

At first the ruling class press tried to avoid mentioning the Klan at all, until the Black press and Black media picked it up and began to publicize it. That stalwart champion of liberalism, the Washington Post, initially relegated it to a single paragraph and waited almost three weeks before mentioning it again.

All this time the All-Peoples Congress kept up a steady barrage of leaflets, notices, press releases, and requests for interviews, while also carrying out a massive campaign of organization and propaganda. It hoped to go beyond its own and allied supporters and arouse the city to the danger in order to build a truly tremendous mass opposition, an opposition that would take the form in this concrete situation of a mass demonstration the likes of which would make it impossible for the Klan to ever reach the outskirts of the city.

Other organizations also planned activities. Unfortunately they were in the nature of actions where the groups substitute themselves for the mass, thereby merely projecting the strength of their individual organizations rather than facilitating the emergence of the vast mass of the working class, which alone can play the key role in a decisive struggle.

Bitter hatred of the Klan is general in the Black community. This generally prevails in all layers of the Black officialdom as well.

The white liberal establishment in Washington—which also takes in the petty bourgeoisie, the merchants, the small manufacturers, the horde of lawyers and accountants, the commuters who come in to manage the small industry enclaves as well as lawyers and doctors in the administrative apparatus of the state—all seemed to be deaf to the ferment in the Black community regarding the Klan.

White liberal establishment remained silent

But what about the varied groupings of bourgeois liberals who pride themselves on their anti-racism (while at the same time denouncing affirmative action and quotas!)? No word came from them, although they are generally a very articulate class grouping.

Some of the Black officialdom thought it might not be such a bad idea if, in the spirit of Martin Luther King, they went arm-in-arm—the mayor, the president of the city council, all the council members, and DC's congressional representative—as the advance guard in a truly huge mammoth march to the very edge of the city to confront the Klan, the same way it happened on the bridge during the Selma march. Is the issue here any less significant?

Had the right to ban the Klan

Only here there is a vast difference. This time it was possible to say to the enemy, "No entrance, the city is closed to you. It is closed to the squads of genocide. It is closed to an illegal, terrorist organization aimed at our destruction. There is no Constitutional protection for you."

As the administrators of the city, they have the right to instruct the police, including the police chief, and tell them that the Klan has no Constitutional right whatsoever, that their very presence creates the danger of violence precisely because they are the symbol of violence and their presence ignites and generates it.

The vision of such a tremendous array of the mass of the population—Black, Latin, and white, young and old—was not impossible. But the officialdom were nowhere around on the day the Klan set foot in Washington.

Many were on their way to Los Angeles to a great gathering of mayors, where they would hear Reagan telling them what they have been hearing for the last two years—more layoffs, more cutbacks, more belt tightening for the masses. Conferences of mayors and legislators should not be underestimated as important forums, but they should not supersede a political crisis, especially one growing out of a flagrant attempt to humiliate the city as a whole and gain legitimacy for racism as a legal institution.

Of course the Black establishment did not want the Klan to come to Washington. They would rather that the Klan died on the way.

But there is a vast difference between having a sentiment or an opinion or even a deep-seated conviction and giving it overt political expression in practical activity. This was conspicuous by its absence.

There was considerable effort by several independent Black organizations, but unfortunately with very modest influence. The influence of the establishment and the sway they hold over the mass of the people was exercised in a negative way when the police chief, voicing the official policy of the administration, told a press conference that he advised the people to stay away from the demonstration.

Without authoritative leaders from the Black community openly and clearly taking an affirmative position to stop the Klan from coming on the basis of both legal and political grounds (which are super-abundant), the Black community was left virtually leaderless at a moment of crisis.

The deep hatred and profound antagonism which welled up in the heart of the Black community seemed to be destined to remain underground, muffled, silenced, or mistaken for indifference altogether.

But right before the demonstration, after it became known that the APC was holding a demonstration at McPherson Square as a staging area and a base for all participants, the capitalist press announced that a number of organizations were calling for demonstrations and posters and leaflets were being disseminated in large numbers.

Confrontation was inevitable

When the Klan finally arrived, buttressed by the police, it was virtually a foregone conclusion that a confrontation was inevitable, not merely because several political organizations had vowed to demonstrate against the Klan, but because so many from the community were not going to allow the Klan to set foot without being challenged—eyeball to eyeball so to speak—and quite a number expressed it that way.

What happened then was of historic significance. A truly strong and powerful surge of many thousands from the heart of the Black community, with many white supporters as well, began to emerge as though from out of the earth. In their readiness and determination to drive the Klan out, their outrage and anger spilled over on the police.

But the police, true to their role as the repressive force of the capitalist state, as the guardian of the interests of the ruling bourgeoisie, did not look the other way or fraternize with the demonstrators as has occasionally been done in great historic situations where the masses came out in the defense of freedom, liberty, and the preservation of their very lives.

Instead of fraternization there was a merciless assault upon them. Inevitably the retaliation by the masses was swift and direct—a glimpse of the future of the liberation struggle of the oppressed and the working class.

The bourgeois press began to scream. The media howled. The abuse cast upon the demonstrators was as odious and shameless as it was reactionary. In addition they had to lie and exaggerate about "looting," and trashing a few windows here and there, all in defense of the "peace-loving" genocide squad.

What does it really indicate?

Here was the officialdom of a great city, which in a way represents the multimillion oppressed people of the country, showing kinship to the same strategy and tactics employed by the officialdom, liberals, social democrats and people far to the left of them in pre-Hitler Germany.

Instead of striking back with all the force available to them (and they had both legal and political force), they bowed before the gods of bourgeois legality, which merely served as a screen for the gestation and development of the Nazi movement that went on to destroy the working class, bourgeois liberalism, and democracy to boot.

Two paths to socialism

We saw in the District a microcosm of things to come. We saw that in the two variants to the road to the socialist reconstruction of society, the bourgeoisie will utilize legality against the working class and the oppressed, not for them, a lesson that must be impressed indelibly on all who seek to cut a path toward a socialist society.

We saw that the bourgeois liberals and conservatives are not serious in the struggle against fascism, are tolerant of racism, cultivate and generate it to suit their interests. They are however great specialists in sanctimonious hypocritical incantations and prayers against racism. But in the face of danger, they crumble.

Who came out on behalf of the District to really fight back? It was the unemployed, the youth, the most disadvantaged. They were the vanguard of the working class of the District, with all its friends inside and outside the city.

From this the conclusion is inescapable that the bourgeois establishment whether it be liberal or conservative, whether it be Black or white, in a decisive showdown, even on a miniature scale, demonstrates that it is utterly incapable of carrying out its most fundamental and elementary duty in the struggle against the most dangerous and contemptible enemy of the workers and oppressed.

The bourgeois establishment of the District, like bourgeois establishments everywhere, in the face of the crisis tended to vacillate and become immobilized and thereby also immobilized the most viable section of society, the working class which supports them.

Vanguard carried out a historic duty

Hence it was that only the vanguard of the community, only the most oppressed but also the most determined and most politically advanced and conscious took it upon their shoulders to carry out a historic duty.

It is to them that the working class and oppressed people of the whole country owe a genuine debt of deep and profound gratitude for driving the Klan out of the city. This was no mere skirmish nor was it a revolutionary struggle for power but it was intensely political in character and conscious of the significance of the mass action that was undertaken.

As such it was a magnificent feat. All the more so because it was carried out spontaneously by the masses. It is true that a number of organizations participated in this and helped to stimulate the movement. And it is true, of course, that the All-Peoples Congress initiated, organized, and agitated energetically and tirelessly over a prolonged period without letup for precisely such an eventuality.

But by and large it was, as Marx once put it very aptly, an instinctive and elemental surge forward which was like a spontaneous outpouring in the manner of a minor earthquake and would have come independently even if no organization had participated or initiated a campaign at all.

Necessity of organization

This, too, is an important lesson. It doesn't negate the necessity for organization. On the contrary it really underscores it.

Preparation facilitates organization and converts the spontaneous struggle from sporadic activities into a coordinated offensive.

But powerful though the demonstration was, its duration was not long enough or sustained enough to arouse the reserve elements of the working class to join the struggle.

It did not draw up the vast reserves from the hundreds of thousands whose deep sympathy was with those in the vanguard of the struggle. This requires more than spontaneity. It requires preparation and leadership. Of course, no one really expected such a tremendous outpouring on a spontaneous basis.

In times of routine, parliamentary struggle, it is the middle, more conservative layers who seem in the forefront. But more crucial struggles are almost always begun by the most oppressed, going back to the sans culottes (the unemployed and poor workers of the time) of the French Revolution.

If the struggle is sustained, it ultimately draws in broader layers of the working class. Here the struggle was aborted for the moment by the preponderance of police force and violence against the unarmed demonstrators.

The fact that the reserves were not yet ready attests to the fact that the situation had not yet fully matured and that the obstructions from the capitalist establishment and its repressive forces were overwhelming.

Yet the demonstration served another purpose. It symbolized the end of the period of despondency—the period of givebacks to the ruling class, of takeaways by the bosses, of cutbacks of social services and of brazen, unbridled reaction riding high under the protection of the capitalist police.

The demonstrators who were the vanguard played a truly historic role in this situation, and the experiences from it will enhance the struggle and bring it to victory.