Workers World, Vol. 23, No. 6
February 3, 1981: For the first time in many years there has been a truly alarming growth of the Klan, Nazis, and a varied assortment of fascist organizations. Along with this menacing development has come the spread of fascist violence in different parts of the country.
Fascist violence is not at all new in the United States. The phenomenon has existed in earlier decades. Fascist groups grew in large numbers in the 1930s, and suffered a steep decline from the very late ‘30s (1938-39) all the way up to the end of the Second World War.
In the early 1950s, there was another rise of a number of neo-fascist organizations. They were, however, all overshadowed by the menace of McCarthyism and the witch-hunt, which the capitalist government carried out during those days. Most of the fascist organizations again began to decline in the middle ‘50s all the way until the last few years following the defeat of the U.S. in the Vietnam War.
To many, the rise of fascist organizations, particularly the Klan, is thus regarded as a transitory phenomenon, not to be taken too seriously. The strength of the KKK and other fascist groups is not considered of such numerical proportions as to pose a serious danger in light of the huge and overwhelming majority of the population who regard them with scorn if not utter hatred. This, of course, is very true.
What is completely left out of consideration, however, is that the spread of fascist organizations takes place in a vastly different, if not wholly new, social, political, and economic situation. The entire social environment in which the spread of this evil disease takes place imparts to it a significance which far surpasses the numerical strength of these organizations.
It is this which adds a really new dimension to the perilous growth of this virulent disease. Fascist violence has been endemic to the maintenance of the domination of the ruling class in the U.S. for a number of decades. It is, however, exceptionally important to distinguish between the violence which emanates directly and openly from the capitalist state, and the extra-legal, extra-governmental violence of fascist organizations.
The capitalist state is itself, of course, the main generator of force and violence. In its role as an instrument of capitalist domination over the working class and the oppressed, it operates as an organ of suppression in order to maintain and secure its rule over the masses.
Violence practiced upon the working class and the oppressed is therefore a concomitant element of the rule of the oppressing and exploiting bourgeoisie. Notwithstanding the viciousness, ferociousness, or magnitude of the violence which the ruling class visits upon the oppressed, it must nevertheless be considered as violence within the framework of the bourgeois legal (“democratic”) system.
Such violence must be differentiated from, and not be confused with, the extra-legal, extra-governmental violence which is the essential characteristic of fascist organizations of the type under discussion. It is, of course, absolutely true that both legal and extra-legal violence have coexisted along with the bourgeois state since the very inception of the state itself.
In the U.S., legal and extra-legal violence have existed side-by-side for longer than a century. Ku Klux Klan violence is a principal example of how extra-legal violence visited upon the oppressed masses coexists with the legal forms of the capitalist state, and how one promotes the other.
Anti-labor violence employed on a huge scale for many decades by individual employers and industries has been of an extra-legal character. Most particularly noteworthy are strike-breaking organizations and the employment of underworld mobsters. “Right-to-work,” open-shop states are frequently the very same states which have either clandestinely or openly supported the Klan.
The pogroms visited upon oppressed nationalities in Czarst Russia are another example of how extra-legal forms of violence are carried out alongside with and encouraged and promoted by the legally constituted government. Pogrom violence in old Russia didn’t differ much from the massacres carried out by the Night Riders in the U.S.
Every capitalist state tolerates and occasionally promotes this sort of extra-legal violence. The difference, however, between fascist violence and other forms of illegal violence practiced by the government should be made clear.
For example, police brutality is frequently as vicious and as violent as that carried out by the fascists, and on occasion goes beyond legal limits (usually characterized by the bourgeois press as “excessive”). The two should not be confused even though the police may, and often do, collaborate with the Klan, neo-Nazis, and other fascist and neo-fascist organizations.
Fascist organizations in their embryonic form, particularly when they are armed and supported materially by right-wing, disaffected, but powerful elements of the ruling capitalist establishment, constitute a threatening parallel form to the legal (bourgeois-democratic) capitalist state.
While receiving encouragement and sustenance from the capitalist state, embryonic fascist forms at the same time rival and stand in antagonism to the bourgeois democratic state. If historical conditions favor them, they have the propensity and organic tendency to overpower the bourgeois democratic form of the capitalist state.
Such a situation can only exist in periods of extraordinarily acute social crisis when the capitalist state is so torn by accumulating inner contradictions and weakened by its inability to overcome its social crisis that it inevitably gives way to extra-parliamentary, extra-legal forms of rule.
The growth of violence outside the boundaries of capitalist legality during periods of acute social crisis always portends a danger to the existing bourgeois democratic form of capitalist state.
Of course, it is not at all conceivable under present circumstances for the current social crisis which is wracking capitalist society to give way to a fascist form of rule. However, to the degree to which a solution to the grave economic and political crisis of the U.S. ruling class cannot be found, it promotes and strengthens out-of-establishment, extra-legal, extra-parliamentary forms of violence.
The situation in the U.S. ruling class today is such that elements of it merely promote clandestinely the growth of fascist organizations as an extra lever to be used in times of grave crisis and as a means of clubbing into line recalcitrant elements of the bourgeoisie. Much more important is the use of these embryonic forms of fascism as paramilitary forces of violence, as storm troopers against the inevitable resurgence of the working class and the oppressed.
From all this it does not follow that a change in the form of state, that is from a bourgeois democratic state to a fascist state, is at all imminent or possible in the immediate, foreseeable future. The danger is there, of course, and must be understood, but put in its proper perspective and proportions.
A variant of development in the evolution of the inner struggle of the ruling class in the U.S. is the possibility of a so-called restructuring of the capitalist state apparatus in a more reactionary, anti-democratic, and near fascist direction. Such a possibility is inherent on the basis of the experience of U.S. capitalist administrations since the 1950s.
The rise of McCarthyism and its subsequent defeat is one link in the chain of evolution inherent in the instability of capitalism as a social system in the U.S. and its reflection of sharpening antagonisms within the bourgeois state.
A second phase was the Kennedy assassination followed by the Nixon conspiracy, which was an attempt at a restructuring of the capitalist state in a near fascist direction, and Nixon’s subsequent ouster. (Also to be considered was the revelation by Lady Byrd Johnson in her interview with Heritage magazine that President Lyndon Johnson was pressured to decline a second nomination for the presidency because he feared the military, which was pressing him to use nuclear weapons in Vietnam.)
Of paramount importance in gauging the political situation in the U.S. is the necessity for a careful, objective appraisal of the Reagan administration as it begins to unfold its program.
The Reagan administration, in its overall political character, is a far-right administration. It is not another variant of a Coolidge or an Eisenhower administration.
It is noteworthy that its more extreme supporters, both in and out of the administration, regard not merely the Rockefeller-Kissinger-Ford faction as “moderate” and “unacceptable,” but also Nixon. This is true not because of Watergate, but because of his foreign policy orientation with respect both to China and the USSR (the signing of the Shanghai communique and the first SALT agreement, which are associated in their minds with détente).
Constantly to be borne in mind is the fact that the military has not merely subordinated the State Department to the Pentagon but virtually captured it. The appointment of an unbridled militarist as secretary of state gives the military the two most important executive departments in the capitalist state – the Pentagon and the State Department.
In the minds of the contenders in the factional struggle within the Reagan administration, the speculation regarding Reagan’s age is closely associated with what would happen if Reagan were to die.
Constitutionally, George Bush would assume the presidency. That clearly would pose a challenge to the entire Reaganite faction. The latter regards Bush, even more than the Rockefeller-Kissinger-Ford faction, as being a “Trilateralist,” almost exclusively Eastern Establishment oriented, and in reality opposed to the more adventurous militarism and rabid domestic reaction.
In circumstances of military adventurism abroad, this could open the road to another attempt at restructuring the capitalist state, which could bring Haig to the presidency since he is constitutionally third in line to succeed Bush if the latter were to die, decline the presidency, or resign shortly thereafter.
The greater danger thus lies with the capitalist state itself. It is the legal state apparatus itself, and not the auxiliary forces such as the fascist organizations, that the primary attack of the working class and the oppressed must be directed against.
The auxiliary forces must be seen for what they are: offshoots of the ruling establishment. The principal attack, however, has to be directed against the source – the bourgeoisie and the state which is its instrument.
If all the forces of the working class are diverted in a struggle against the auxiliary forces of the capitalist state, it would detract attention of a most necessary and indispensable character in the struggle against the ruling class as a whole and its capitalist establishment.
While major attention must be focused on the growth of the fascist organizations and the possibility that they may eventually, under certain conditions, turn against the capitalist state itself, this is still in the future. For the present, and as far as one can foresee, the struggle against the growing menace of fascist organizations should not detract from the principle struggle against all the forms and varieties of political reaction and repression which emanate directly from the state.
Above all, the danger of war must maintain its central position insofar as the tasks of the working class go, along with the task of building and strengthening the unfolding working-class offensive against capitalist exploitation and oppression, especially national oppression and all forms of bigotry.
There ought not be a hard and fast division between anti-fascist, anti-repression activities in the working class movement and the general economic and political struggle that the workers and the oppressed must carry on against the ruling class and in particular the capitalist state.
Last updated: 11 May 2026