WASHINGTON, D.C., August 28 — PLP boldly confronted tens of thousands of lily-white Tea Partiers streaming into a rally led by Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin. We challenged the racists, haranguing them on a loud bullhorn for two hours and individually in their faces as they walked by. Speakers exposed the Tea Party as tools of big business, especially Koch Enterprises, a multi-billion dollar energy company that organized and funds the Tea Party with millions of dollars. (Jane Mayer, “Covert Operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama,” New Yorker, 8/30).
PL’ers called for multi-racial unity to fight against racism and for jobs, affordable housing, and against the wars for oil. Some speakers called for the unity of all workers to fight for communism, a society run by the working class without profiting from anyone’s work, and condemned the racially-divisive message of the Tea Party.
We distributed over 400 CHALLENGES and 700 leaflets (including 300 the night before at an anti-racist gathering) explaining the fascist nature of the Tea Party. Our numbers grew when other anti-racists looking for a protest showed up. Our friends were furious at Glenn Beck’s attempt at hijacking the symbols of anti-racism by holding his rally at the Lincoln Memorial.
This location is associated with the end of slavery and was the site of Marian Anderson’s famous concert in response to the racist banning of her performance in Constitution Hall in the 1930s. The rally was called on the anniversary of the anti-racist March on Washington in 1963. Beck even got Martin Luther King’s niece (a right-winger who is estranged from her family) to speak favorably at the rally.
The Tea Party crowd was overwhelmingly white, middle class, and older. Most vigorously denied they were racist, while some were openly racist. Most wanted to “take back the country” and “return it to its roots,” a thinly-veiled call to return to segregation and even slavery. Almost all of them viewed undocumented workers as a major cause of the problems in society.
Other Tea Partiers were vague as to what the rally was about. Several said that they had voted for Obama, but were furious that he had sold out to the Wall Street banks during the crisis, and so had switched to the Tea Party. Capitalism in crisis drives people to take sharper positions, either to the left or the right. We have to be there to win increasingly angry workers to revolutionary politics, not fascism! We cannot abandon any workers to the demagoguery of fascism.
We struggled successfully with our coworkers, friends and neighbors and comrades from out of town to join us and not be intimidated by this emerging fascist movement. Our greatest victory was that the workers we brought with us got to see the danger of the beginning of a mass fascist movement up close and personal, which gave a sense of urgency for building PLP and the revolutionary movement.
Greater Dangers
The Tea Party and its allied Freedom Works support policies to enrich big business, especially aggressive southwest capitalists challenging the eastern Wall Street capitalists within the ruling class. The Tea Party and Freedom Works want to privatize social security, eliminate welfare, charge for currently free Internet services, eliminate environmental protections to control global warming, and restrict unionization. The longer-view liberal capitalists generally oppose these policies as unnecessarily disruptive, but they are moving in the same direction.
The Tea Party may have mobilized fascist foot soldiers, but the main danger remains with the liberal bosses currently led by Obama. They are the leaders of imperialist wars, massive cutbacks in services, and ongoing fascist repressive measures that in some ways have exceeded those of the Bush administration (for example creating a list of “terrorist” enemies and giving the green light to assassinate them anywhere in the world, not just on the battlefield).
These forces have mobilized labor unions and the NAACP for a mass march on October 2 to shore up the political power of their faction of the ruling class. We must be there to expose their efforts to mislead angry workers into the bosses’ election charade. What is called for is sharper class struggle in the streets and in the workplaces.
The Tea Party is similar to the movements that grew in Germany and Italy in the 1930s. We have started a fight-back movement, but we have to grow larger quickly to derail the fascist Tea Party through more vigorous struggle, similar to our campaigns against the Klan and Nazis.
With the economy going deeper into recession, more workers are looking for answers, and the Tea Party offers other workers as scapegoats. PLP can show workers that capitalism is the cause and that revolution for communism is the solution. Let’s bring that same message to the bosses’ demonstration on October 2.