Big Fascists Discipline Ye

Multi-billion dollar sneaker company, Adidas, ended its nine-year relationship with Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) after the rap mogul made repeated anti-Jewish remarks. Ye praised Adolf Hitler and the Nazis while spewing toxic anti-Jewish racism during radio interviews and on his social media accounts. Twitter and Instagram booted him from their platforms, too.

The statements about breaking ties with Ye is hypocritical at best. It also demonstrates the tactics of the Big liberal Fascists: pretend to care about racism to distract from their systemic racism and exploitation, all while sewing division in the entire working class.

Black and Latin students and workers are spot on about Ye being reprimanded by a class of wealthy capitalists. However, that class is not limited to Jewish, white, or male; all shades and spectrums of the ruling class must be attacked.

The main wing of the ruling class prioritizes amassing finance capital internationally while trying to buy workers into the illusion of fairer exploitation. Ye’s racist volatility is too dangerous for this section of the ruling class’s plans for global domination. Instead, Big Fascist bosses prefer to work with artists-turned-billionaires like Jay-Z (Shawn Corey Carter).

Adidas, a Nazi-loving company
Adidas cut ties with Ye not because they are any less racist but because spewing anti-Jewish racism is bad press and bad business. While the company declared “Adidas does not tolerate antisemitism and any other hate speech” (NYT, 10/22), the founding brothers Adi and Rudolph Dassler were members of the Nazi Party. They had joined around the same time as Hitler’s ascension to power.

In 2020, at the height of George Floyd protests, Adidas workers filed a 32-page report outlining the racist culture at Adidas. "My existence at this brand is praised as diversity and inclusion, but when I look around, I see no one above or around that looks like me," said one employee (Insider, 2020).

No one makes a billion looking out for others
The Washington Post, a publication owned by Amazon’s own exploiter-in-chief Jeff Bezos, announced that he was interested in bidding on the NFL Washington Commanders with Jay-Z (Washington Post, 11/3).

In 2019, Jay-Z’s company Roc Nation struck a deal with the NFL, to launch “Inspire Change '' to allegedly combat social injustice and address the issues that Black and Latin workers faced.

In reality, it was a disgusting public-relations stunt to derail protests led by Colin Kapernick and other football players protesting the murders of Black workers and children during the national anthem. Jay-Z responded to the backlash: “we’ve moved past kneeling. It’s time to go into actionable items” (Washington Post, 11/3).

Many Black and young workers took to Twitter to express their defense of Jay-Z’s decision to cross the picket line of Chateau Marmont workers in their struggle against the racist capitalists there, alluding to some super bargaining power Jay-Z has that will surely result in some win for Black workers. Faith in a billionaire or a liberal misleader like Jay-Z is death for our class. Jay-Z is the same billionaire celebrity that sold out workers in Brooklyn to build the Barclays Center, an arena that’s displaced hundreds of workers.

This is the same billionaire sponsoring classes to teach workers in Marcy housing projects in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood how to invest in another failing faction of capitalism, cryptocurrency. A local resident said, ``If you want to do something, fix this place up,’” (The Guardian, 6/22).

Celebrity culture, new opiate
Karl Marx said, “religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opiate of the masses.” For many workers today, celebrity culture has become that new drug.

Celebrities are pawns used by the ruling class to perpetuate capitalist ideology. In the case of Hip Hop, rappers are given deified status because their lyrical content and ‘come-up’ stories appeal to young Black and Latin audiences struggling to survive under capitalism.

Like the religious opiate, hip-hop celebrities like Ye and Jay-Z promise youth that if we just make the right moves, we too can have all the riches and pleasures. But there is a split between the Small Fascists and the Big Fascists of the ruling class, which is embodied by the difference between figures like Ye and Jay-Z.

Ye and Jay-Z embody two sides of fascism
Ye offers young people disillusioned with mainstream liberal politics a way out and into the arms of reactionary ideologies like nazism.

But the bigger threat lies with yet-to-be-cancelled celebrities like Jay-Z, and their Big Fascist bosses, who gaslight and diffuse the rightful frustrations of the working class by pretending they are fighting racism “the right way.”     

Ye's reactionary politics expose the insincerity of the Big Fascists and their celebrity stooges. Over the last 50+ years, Ye and other rappers have been a public voice for that disillusionment.

When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and much of the southern states in the U.S. in the early 2000s, Ye took advantage of LIVE television to stand in solidarity with workers against the racist neglect of former U.S. President, George W. Bush, saying to the shock of his co-host, comedian Mike Meyers, “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.” This kind of sharp political analysis and tendency toward going off-script did not endear Ye to the Big Fascists, who require disciplined, liberal celebrities to placate the masses, not incite them.

Many have dismissed Ye’s behavior as unchecked mental illness. That may be true, but that kind of analysis misses the political conditions that determine the form mental illness can take. Whatever personal issues plaguing the rapper, the course forward from the Katrina moment is clear: alienation drove Ye to the right, when it should have driven him left.

This is the bribe Small Fascists like Trump in America, Georgia Meloni in Italy, and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil continue to offer the masses.

Those following Ye lack the political guidance of communism, which combats the alienating effects of capitalist terror and neglect with collective action, and proves that a free world is not nationalist, racist, sexist, but an egalitarian one run by and for and by the international working class.

It’s not just Kanye, Jay-Z, or Jeff Bezos...it’s CAPITALISM!
Ye’s ideas belong to the ruling class. He is worth close to a billion dollars, and nobody in possession of that much is a friend of the working class.

Neither the gutter racist, domestically-oriented Small Fascists nor the liberal, imperialism-oriented Big Fascists are acting in the interest of workers. However, PLP fights to win workers to the idea that it is the Jay-Z’s of the world that’s the bigger danger.

The ruling class has demonstrated that they dispose of celebrities like Ye when it suits them because they are trying to win us to fight for them in their brutal imperialist wars. Once upon a time, Ye was right: most Black workers know Republicans like George Bush don’t care about them; they know enslaved workers escaping to the North were not freed from extreme racism nor super exploitation, and that corporations like Adidas are racist hypocrites.

But he is also unequivocally wrong: the enemy of Black workers are not Jewish workers or any other historical scapegoat of the ruling class.

Black workers won’t go to war for a gutter racist like Trump or Bush or work until our feet bleed on a Nazi-run Adidas factory floor. Still, Black and antiracist workers are vulnerable to the rhetoric of the Bidens and Jay-Z’s of this world.

Progressive Labor Party rejects both ruthless factions of the ruling class. We have confidence that with communist ideas in hand, the working class will see through these lies and build a red army to smash capitalism and its ideological tools once and for all. Join us today!