BY JACK BARNES
The following selection on the "culture war" is from a talk
presented in April 1993 to participants in a regional socialist
educational conference in Greensboro, North Carolina. The talk,
entitled "Capitalism's Deadly World Disorder," and discussion
on it are included in Capitalism's World Disorder: Working-
Class Politics at the Millennium. The book is copyright (c)
1999 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission.
The polarization in the "culture war" declared by [Patrick] Buchanan and other ultrarightists takes many forms: chauvinist anti-foreigner agitation, racist assaults on affirmative action, vulgar attacks on women's social equality, half-hidden but virulent outbursts of Jew-hatred, fearful prejudice against homosexuals. These incipient fascist forces are vocal advocates of the cops, like those currently on trial in Los Angeles for brutally beating Rodney King; fascist movements always draw many of their cadres from the cops.(1) There will be no limit to the pornographic overtones of their demagogy, as they claim to offer a road to bring a "decadent" society out of its crisis.
These reactionary positions have no logical evolution or rational content. They are a collection and recombination of refuse from the past, floating out from the backwaters of class history. It can be ancient religious ideas, pagan symbols, age- old prejudices, regional attitudes, beliefs about women born of economic and social conditions from millennia past. It does not make any difference; it is accidental. But these come together in various mixtures. They are patched together into partial truths from the myriad forms of exploitation and oppression and pressures under capital. They are invested with emotional energy and declared to be the banner of a movement.
These are not religious movements; it is not "the religious right," "the Christian right," "the fundamentalist right." These are not movements about art or culture; they are not movements about schools or education. Those just provide some of the words that emotional energy is invested in. It is a reactionary, demagogic, petty-bourgeois social and political movement, one that over time becomes increasingly brutal and murderous in its methods.
As the capitalist social crisis deepens, and the working class and labor movement begin to engage in battles to defend our living standards and our unions, growing numbers within the ruling class, often reluctantly, will begin to provide financial and political support to the fascists. They will unleash the energy of the ultraright in the streets, against striking workers, labor gatherings, social protests, and organizations of the oppressed. They will use whatever force and violence is necessary to deny enough democratic rights to the majority of working people, eventually, to preserve the privileges of the upper middle class and maintain capitalist rule.
Last year, some of you will remember, we underlined something in particular about Buchanan's speech at the Republican nominating convention in August. Everything else at the convention we had heard before - until Buchanan shoved Reagan aside for an hour during prime time and, not to put it more politely than it was, gave the finger to the entire respectable Republican bourgeoisie.
Think very carefully about one phrase in Buchanan's speech. As he had done throughout his campaign, he invoked religious expressions, railed against gay rights and "radical feminism," and called for "a religious war," a "culture war," a war "for the soul of America." Then he came to the windup of the talk. "We must take . . . back our culture and take back our country," Buchanan said, "block by block" - just as the called- up National Guardsmen had done in Los Angeles a few months earlier. (Buchanan's description of the L.A. events was a gross exaggeration, but that is not the point.)
Block by block - that was the banner Buchanan raised to bring to their feet his partisans watching him live on TV around the country. That was Buchanan's summation. That fight was his promise. And that day will come.
You'll sometimes see Buchanan referred to in the bourgeois press as an "isolationist," or "antiwar." He opposed U.S. government policy during the Gulf War and speaks out against committing U.S. troops to the United Nations military operation in Bosnia. But class-conscious workers could make no more deadly mistake than failing to recognize - and to act on - the political fact that Buchananism is part of the imperialist war drive today.
Buchanan will mobilize the rightist movement he is building to demand that Washington use all its military might to back "our boys." But he's determined to first win the war at home against the working class, to hamstring us, and he urges his followers to act in the image of his heroes, Franco, MacArthur, and McCarthy. That's a precondition to really do the job, Buchanan holds, but then America has to do it!
NOTES
1. Los Angeles policemen Theodore Briseno, Stacey Koon,
Laurence Powell, and Timothy Wind were on trial in federal
court for violating the civil rights of Rodney King, a Black
worker whom they had been videotaped brutally beating in March
1991. Following an earlier acquittal of the cops by an all-
white jury in state criminal court in April 1992, anticop riots
broke out across much of Los Angeles for more than four days.
On orders from the Bush administration, some 1,100 U.S. marines, 600 army infantry troops, and 1,000 Border Patrol and other federal cops joined 6,500 California National Guardsmen and thousands of Los Angeles police in occupying large areas of the city's Black and Latino communities.
Fifty-eight people were killed over the four days, more than 80 percent of them Black or Latino; some 17,000 people were arrested; and immigration cops used the dragnet as an excuse to deport several hundred detainees.