Re-instate Claremont McKenna College Suspended Students
By Mark Friedman, Trade Union Activist
Claiming to be fighting fascism, anarchist groups in the United States have carried out numerous actions in recent months that pose a deadly danger to the working class — from sucker-punching rightist Richard Spencer as he was speaking to a reporter to assaulting workers who express support for Donald Trump to disrupting and shutting down campus speeches by individuals with whom they disagree.
Students organized a 250-person counterprotest to the right-winger invitee Heather MacDonald. As a result, four of the seniors had their college degree revoked. Others face the loss of financial aid. Instead of harsh treatment of the students, administrators should use the incident as a teaching moment.
These thuggish actions of violating free speech, whether in Claremont or Berkeley, flow from the erroneous view that a minority of adventurers can substitute themselves for mass actions and change society. But their actions close down political spaces, handing the government and its police agencies golden opportunities to clamp down on political freedoms. The rightists become the “victims.”
That’s the opposite of what politically conscious unionists, activists and individuals stand and fight for: mobilizing the working class to organize politically independent of this country’s ruling wealthy and their parties, joining today’s labor and political struggles. These seek to build social protest movements capable of fighting police brutality, union-busting, attacks on abortion rights and Planned Parenthood funding, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant racism and this society’s dog-eat-dog social relations. One of the most striking aspects about the anarchists’ actions — such as the riot they organized in Berkeley — is that they reduce workers to bystanders, erasing any possibility of mass protest.
Writing in The Nation Jan. 22, Natasha Lennard gives a graphic description glorying in the black bloc she joined in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 20, during Trump’s inauguration.
“Disrupt J20 aimed to directly impede, delay and confront the inaugural proceedings,” she wrote. “This message was delivered with human blockades, smashed corporate windows, trash-can fires, a burning limousine, ‘Make America Great Again’ caps reduced to ashes and a blow for Richard Spencer.”
Spencer is a white supremacist and president of the National Policy Institute. He was speaking to a reporter on the street when a black-clad assailant sucker punched him in the face and ran away. A video of the blow went viral on the Internet, accompanied by tweets such as: “We all have to stay strong and survive so that we too can have the chance to punch Richard Spencer in the face.”
Anarchist black blocs have targeted speaking engagements of Milo Yiannopoulos, an editor for Breitbart News, at many campuses. At the University of Washington in Seattle, they forced their way to the front of a Jan. 20 protest, throwing bricks and paint to try to stop people from attending his talk. Similar groups tried to stop an event organized by the College Republicans at New York University Feb. 2 for comedian Gavin McInnes, who calls himself a “Western chauvinist.” McInnes was pepper sprayed on the way in. In Southern California, alleged pro-Palestinian supporters prevented supporters of Israel from speaking on campuses. Instead of shouting them down, students could have organized a countermobilization to demonstrate the broad support for Palestinian rights and against continued Israeli expansionism. Which one would have educated and mobilized more?
In many incidents, targets have included individuals wearing pro-Trump hats or signs. The anarchists join the liberals in slandering workers who voted for Trump, fed up with the grinding depression conditions that the world economic crisis of capitalism is producing, those Hillary Clinton called “deplorables.”
Neither Trump nor the workers who voted for him are part of a fascist movement. But as workers’ struggles deepen and the danger of fascism is posed, the stakes for working people in rejecting anarchism and its methods will only grow. The historic function of fascism is to smash the working class, destroy its organizations and stifle political liberties when the capitalists find themselves unable to govern and dominate with the help of democratic machinery.
Attempting through violent attacks to silence those you disagree with from expressing their views is a method that can and will be used against the workers’ movement, women fighting to defend their right to choose, immigrants and their right to emigrate where jobs are, against deportations, etc. Groups that carry out such attacks are fertile ground for provocateurs and breed actual fascists. And, their provocations allow rightists such as Spencer and Yiannopoulos to appear to stand on the moral high ground as defenders of freedom of speech.
The great labor leader Farrell Dobbs, who organized the Teamsters in Minneapolis in the 1930s to build a fighting and democratic union, to mobilize workers to defeat real fascist gangs (Brown Shirts), and to oppose U.S. entry into World War II said: “If you start by attempting to hastily gather together a vanguard force and crush fascism in the egg, you are playing into the hands of the fascists, you are losing ground in the mobilization of the real class that can do away with fascism.” (Teamster Rebellion, Pathfinder Press.)
The anarchist perspective is marked by opposition to political action by the working class. They favor the action of small groups to the mobilization, education and organization — of the working class, small farmers, farm workers, youth, women, oppressed nationalities, documented and undocumented — to take power out of the hands of the wealthy rulers and begin to reorganize society in the interests of the toiling majority — as the 1959 Cuban Revolution showed was possible.