Workers World, Vol. 5 No. 25
Two recent events, seemingly unimportant and unrelated, are in reality organically tied to each other, and of enormous significance in assessing the meaning of the double assassination in Dallas.
The first is the emergence of a massive, well financed, and highly organized defense for Ruby. The announcement that a sixth attorney has been added to a group of five prominent lawyers already retained to defend him, is an unmistakable indication that large forces are operating on his behalf behind the scenes.
Such a formidable array of legal talent in a case like his, which is singularly free of legal complications, is itself enough to create a suspicion that more than the life of Ruby is involved. Having committed the murder of Oswald in the view of millions, the only legal question actually involved in his case is the degree of Ruby’s guilt.
Since his chief defense attorney announced that a plea of temporary insanity was planned, the case has become even simpler. It should therefore require expert psychiatric opinion. And, as his lawyer said he was arranging for a nationally known psychiatrist – in his own words, “the very best available” – it is very strange indeed that the high powered battery of five additional lawyers are necessary.
The conclusion is inescapable that Ruby’s defense is so very important because he is still the key figure, who by his testimony, could unravel many threads which would bring the assassination of Kennedy to the doorstep of the forces of neo-fascism.
Ruby’s high-powered defense is an alarming signal that the ultra-right, after a brief period of submersion, has raised its ugly head again, an is back in the political arena.
The second event, which is intimately connected with the first, is the publication of a full page advertisement by The John Birch Society. This is far more ominous.
Entitled “The Time Has Come,” the venomous Birchite manifesto is a virtual declaration that the time has come for the installation of a fascist regime with all its odious accompaniments. Under the guise of a call to “red-blooded Americans,” the Birchite tract seeks to rouse all the gutter elements of U.S. reaction to unite. It is a call to the storm troopers, the Ku Klux Klan, the strike-breakers and scab-herders – to the savages who bombed the churches in Birmingham, and – to the murderers of Medgar Evers, Emmett Till, and the countless other victims of racist madness and political retrogression.
It is a document worthy of Goebbels, and evinces a depraved mentality of the type which Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini so sedulously cultivate. It seeks to pin the Kennedy assassination on a mythical Communist conspiracy. Oswald, you understand, “was a Communist” – working “on orders.”
In the tried and true style of swastika politics, it attempts to shift the onus of the assassination from the neo-fascist conspirators to the shoulders of the Left, militant, progressive community of the U.S. It falls back again and again on the moth eaten lie of a “red conspiracy,” using well known admonitions from its friends J. Edgar Hoover and Marin Dies.
The worst thing is to underestimate the danger inherent in the appearance of this foul tract. The fact that it appeared as full page advertisements from one end of the country to the other, and included such newspapers as The New York Times, The New York Daily News, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, the St. Louis Globe Democrat as well as the western edition of The New York Times and others, signifies that fantastic sums of money are now made available to the Birchites. The page in the Sunday New York Times along cost more than $7,200. In addition to the widespread advertisement in the daily papers, the Birchites have scheduled the same ad for a number of key weekly publications as well, with a very wide circulation.
The Birchite tract gives every indication of merely being the first stage of an organized campaign to galvanize all the vile forces of reaction and racism for a new offensive by the reactionary ultra-right.
It is proof positive that the menace of fascism is real and has been germinating for a considerable period before it reached a climax with the assassination of Kennedy.
The grave problem that we face is that there are all too many in the progressive, democratic, and labor community who tend to discount the danger of fascism as a negligible factor in American politics. They view the development of neo-fascist and ultra-rightist organizations strictly from a statistical viewpoint, or to be more precise, from an electoral one.
They find it comforting that few of the outspoken neo-fascist elements have ever gotten elected. Still others compare the fascist movement led by Mosley with the neo-fascist formations in the U.S. Mosley’s movement, they say, has existed in Britain for several decades, yet he has failed to make an impact on British politics.
The comparison is worthy of note. For it is precisely the differences between neo-fascists in the U.S. and the Mosley movement in Britain which are of critical importance.
The Mosley movement grew and developed in the 30s on the basis of the frustration and disappointments of a considerable number of petty-bourgeois elements who were deeply hurt by the catastrophic economic decline of that decade. Mosley himself, originally a Labor MP, hoped to enlist large and substantial sections of the bourgeoisie. He never did. With some exceptions here and there, it has remained largely an echo of the part rather than a portent of the future.
The ultra-rightist elements in this country, on the other hand, are an out and out bourgeois movement. It originated, developed and has its primary roots in large and powerful sections of the bourgeoisie – with some of the wealthiest people in this country supporting it. That is a difference of considerable import.
The U.S. variety of fascism is a movement of ruling class cliques and factions which only incidentally aims at obtaining independent mass support. It inclines basically towards conspiratorial methods for a change in the regime, a “cold takeover” or a coup d’etat, utilizing a real or fake national catastrophe, as in the case of the assassination of President Kennedy.
It is in anticipation of just such a catastrophe that the fascist elements construct their hopes.
“All that these people need,” said an observer quoted by the New York Times in its issue of October 10, 1962, one year before the assassination, is a “national disaster” and a “man on horseback.”
The causes for this phenomenon are not to be found in national traditions, psychology, or individual idiosyncrasies of the various factions within the ruling class. They are found deep in the character of the capitalist mode of production, and moreover in the latest phase of U.S. monopoly capital.
The fantastic development of the productive forces in the U.S. has engendered a truly gargantuan centralization of capital, which requires a rational, planned, centralized economy based on socialist ownership of the means of production. Failing that, then totalitarian methods to ensure the domination and sway of outmoded monopoly capital will sooner or later prevail.
The U.S. in many respects resembles Germany. Like German capitalism, it develops at a tempestuous rate. It goes through long protracted periods of rapid, dynamic growth (the gradual quantitative maturing of social contradictions). During these periods, there is a development of so-called democracy, social reforms, and most importantly, the development of workers’ organizations, trade unions, and political parties.
Such, briefly, was the period characterized in Germany from 1870 to 1914. Then this period of gradual development exploded into a catastrophe – the First World War. The Second World War, as far as German monopoly capitalism is concerned, was merely a repeat performance.
In like fashion, the period in the U.S. which ended in October 1929, was a period of tempestuous economic growth, based on the gradual, quantitative growth (the maturing of the social contradictions of monopoly capital) which finally burst asunder in the cataclysmic economic collapse of October 1929.
The specific feature which characterizes U.S. monopoly capitalism (but not only U.S.) is the very acute disproportion between the stupendous growth of the productive forces, and the simultaneous contraction of the domestic and world markets. This is especially so since the Second World War, and more recently since Sputnik I was launched.
This is the differentia specifica of U.S. monopoly capital, and the subsoil from whence it continually and irresistibly sprouts forth the species of political debris known as fascism, which monopoly capital hopes to use as a means to resolve its contradictions. This is the real well-spring which fomented the Kennedy assassination.
In his recent speech before and labor and management group, President Johnson went much out of his way to assure the world that the U.S. “system was strong,” by emphasizing the tremendous amount of wealth which will be produced by the end of this year.
The gross national product of the United States soon will be 600 billion dollars. The capacity of the U.S. to produce has never been in doubt, nor for that matter has there been any doubt about the ability of any of the capitalist countries to produce in abundance the material things of life.
On the contrary, the capitalist system is distinguished from all other social systems based upon class domination and exploitation of man by man, in that not only is superior in its productive capacities, but that it produces a super-abundance of goods.
But this is also what constitutes the chief element for its own undoing. Indeed, scarcity is not the problem of the capitalist system. Its chief and fundamental problem is how, within the framework of the profit system, it can dispose of the tremendous produce of labor.
As many times as the problem has been stated and restated by Marxian economists, its real depth is rarely grasped by the bourgeois scholar. The problem, of course, is how to dispose of these goods and services at a profit in a world where markets are shrinking.
The ability of the U.S. capitalist system to produce such a gigantic product of labor (as the 600 billion GNP) and the inability to dispose of it profitably, is the root of the fundamental antagonisms that rend the capitalist system asunder and nourishes the growth of fascism, of which the Kennedy assassination is the violent offspring.
The imperious necessity to dispose of the goods and services in order to realize a profit has rarely been pointed up in such an illuminating fashion as in the following true-to-life incident.
In the very early days of the Eisenhower Administration, when Sherman Adams was the assistant to the President, he arranged an appointment for his old friend Goldfine, then a big textile manufacturer and salesman, with President Eisenhower. Goldfine, however, did not appear on time to meet the President.
Adams was furious, and could not imagine what would make Goldfine late for an appointment with the President of the United States. Finally, twenty minutes after the appointed time, Goldfine arrived, cheerful and jocular as ever.
Astonished, Adams asked, “what happened? You’re twenty minutes late to see the President.”
“I had something important on,” replied Goldfine.
“What could be more important than an appointment with the President of the United States?” cried Adams in exasperation.
“Customers! Customers!” answered Goldfine.
The ability of the parliamentary form of the bourgeois state in this country to contain the inner antagonisms among the various financial oligarchies, and retain a stable equilibrium between the exploiters and the exploited, has been for them the chief merit of bourgeois democracy and the sole raison d'être for its existence.
But the assassination of Kennedy is evidence that it is this very inability to contain any longer the vastly aggravated inner antagonisms among the monopolistic cliques and factions in the ruling class – the ever growing instability in the relationship between exploiter and exploited – especially as manifested on the world arena – that has called the system of bourgeois democracy into question as the best form of domination for the bourgeoisie.
As a result of the growth of the development of fascism, two directly opposite conclusions can be drawn. The opportunists draw the conclusion that if fascism is on the rise, then all the more is it necessary to snuggle up to the Johnson Administration, support its basic policies, embellish it in the eyes of world public opinion, and even more so, to support its left, liberal wing, the Rauh-ADA contingent.
Marxist-Leninists, on the other hand, draw an entirely different conclusion. That the Johnson Administration, like the preceding Kennedy Administration, by its aggressive warlike policies abroad, and its reactionary domestic policies, paves the way for fascism, has in fact made giant strides in the direction of fascism by supporting and cultivating the witch-hunt, by collaboration and capitulation to the racists, and by relentlessly pursuing a war of extermination in South Vietnam, Venezuela, Cuba and by aggressive war policies toward all socialist countries.
This, however, does not exclude the possibility of united action on concrete, specific issues in the struggle against fascism. The struggle against fascism is a worldwide struggle. Its outcome will be decided not by national factors alone, but by the international situation, by the state of the world proletariat of all countries, the national liberation movement, and all the socialist countries.
To participate and fight in this struggle is both a duty to mankind, and a great contribution to world socialism.
December 16, 1963
Last updated: 11 May 2026