Beat The Right With a Labor Party
by FSP
Socialist Feminist statement on the anti-lesbian/gay ballot initiatives likely facing voters in Washington State this fall.
BEAT THE NAZIS WITH A LABOR PARTY!
Just 50 years after Hitler and the Holocaust, Nazis are working on a big
comeback. From Europe to Russia, fascists are winning elections, accompanied by a brutal surge of violence against lesbians/gays, bisexuals, transgendered people, immigrants, Jews, people of color, radicals, and Romani people (Gypsies). Just this week, MussoliniÕs political heirs took the reins of government in Italy.
U.S. Nazis are pouring money into the European parties of racism, nationalism and anti-Semitism overseas. As goes Europe, so goes the U.S.Ñthey hope. Here they bankroll the ultra-right agenda by investing in initiatives campaigns: racist anti-crime measures, abortion restrictions, and homophobic attacks on civil rights. The also propose to privatize public schools and to foist workfare on the poor.
Stopping the right is a survival issue for millions.
Civil rights under fire. Initiatives such as I-608 and I-610 are the front line
of the right wing's ballot box strategy. Their foot-in-the door tactic uses
homophobia and AIDS hysteria as the means to create a fascist movement in this
country. Today, they strive to wipe out homosexuality; tomorrow, the Bill of
Rights.
Twenty-five years ago, scum like Lon Mabon would not have dared to raise
their heads. The Black civil rights movement had ignited the oppressed. Women
of all colors, lesbians/gays, Native Americans, Asian Americans and Chicanos
joined Blacks in the cry ÒFreedom Now!Ó
Instead of freedom, capitalism gave workers a steady decline in the living
standard. Hope became disillusionment as the rich got richer and workers and the unemployed suffered.
Today the ultra-right protects the fat cats by pointing the finger of blame
for this economic decay at the victims of discrimination, unemployment, inflation, and poverty.
How can the labor and civil rights movements get back on the offensive
again?
THERE IS POWER IN A PARTY. Big Business has two partiesÑthe Democrats
and Republicans.
These parties run society in the interests of keeping profits high. If profits
start to fall precipitously, business then turns to the ultra-right to hold labor in line. That's why unionists, socialists and communists were among the first to be sent to Hitler's concentration camps. And it is why big business backed the fascist Forza Italia in the April 1994 elections.
But, this doesn't have to happen here.
Workingclass people have the clout to stop fascism cold. What we need is a
political voice, a democratically-run, anti-capitalist Labor Party that unites workers and their allies against the politics of scarcity, scapegoating, white supremacy and unionbusting.
Such a party could fight the bigots in Congress, at the polls and on the
streets. It could bring workers to defend and expand civil liberties and win
strikes. It could pose an alternative to the Perot-like demagogues and the sell-out, NAFTA/GATT-loving Democrats.
A labor Party can pack a punch for civil rights.
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