Photo/Bob Simpson
Across the country, churchgoers, community groups and everyday people are voicing heartfelt grief, shock and outrage over the massacre of nine African Americans in Charleston, South Carolina.
As revolutionaries, we must examine the significance of the racist terror rising up in America and its goal.
Today, automation has created permanent unemployment and massive poverty. This will inevitably lead to a mass uprising by the people. The capitalist class is allowing and instigating racism in order to maintain control. It is their route to impose a fascist dictatorship in order to maintain their wealth, power and property.
Fascism, like all processes, develops in stages. The economic stage is the merger of corporate economic power with the government. The political stage is the rising police state and new laws that target the poorest workers. Now we are at the beginning of the social stage—a fascist movement. White supremacists like Dylann Roof facilitate this process. What remains is for a crisis to erupt that allows for a full-blown fascist offensive. The legal power of the government to declare a dictatorship already exists.
Given American history, the rulers’ attack on democracy starts with an attack on the Black workers. We must see, however, that today’s racist terror has a different economic and political goal than the racism of yesteryear. The purpose of the brutal terror after slavery was to keep the Blacks on the plantation working for nothing. Today its aim is to stop the movement for a democratic society.
In this sense, the show of sympathy from whites in Charleston, a city where slavery was once central to its economy, is important. It shows real unity is possible today.
The role of revolutionaries is to show the American people that the rulers are using racism to hide the fact that they are imposing fascism on the whole of society.
