Right wing bares its teeth

by Olga Domanski

The dangerous rise of the Right is evident today in the proliferation of new attacks on all the freedom forces as new forms of the retrogression we have suffered for two decades keep appearing not only from within fundamentalist organizations but more potently from within the institutions of government. Even as Newt Gingrich's dominance of the reactionary right in power seems to have diminished, two quite different recent events demonstrate the determination of the Republican Right to wield its formidable will. One was the refusal of the Republican-controlled Judiciary Committee to allow the Senate to vote on the nomination of Bill Lann Lee to become Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. The other was the federal election monitor's barring of Teamster Union President Ron Carey from running for re-election next year.

Nothing is more blatant than the attack on Bill Lann Lee, the first Asian American ever to be nominated for such a post, whose qualifications for the job were so high that no one even tried to contest them. Nor could anyone deny that the legislative branch of government has historically allowed a president to choose his own cabinet. The sole reason Utah Republican Senator Orrin Hatch offered for refusing to permit a vote on Lee was that Lee is a "defender" of affirmative action. It is not the first nomination stalled over what are called "social issues." Clinton's choice of David Satcher for Surgeon General has been held up over his position on abortion. And even his choice of business executive James Hormel to be Ambassador to Luxembourg has been stalled by the Republicans because he is openly gay. Yet the attack on Lee has been so extreme that it is a warning that the Republican Right is out to demonstrate its power in every way it can.

Even more critical is the warning embodied in the barring of Carey--that Big Business and its government have no intention of allowing the new openings promised by the victory of the Teamsters UPS strike this summer to become a turning point in labor's never-ending struggle with capital. While Carey is the prime target now, the real target of the reactionary Republican Congress is all of American labor--in particular the AFL-CIO that at long last, after John Sweeney's election in 1995, had made some first small steps toward organizing the unorganized.

The WALL STREET JOURNAL gave the real target away a full month before the hearings led by Republican Congressman Peter Hoekstra into charges that Carey misused union funds to assist in his l996 election which ended with Carey being barred from a new election next year. On October l7, under the title "What's become of labor?", the WSJ launched a virulent red-baiting attack on what they depicted as a U.S. labor movement and its leadership "simply drifting leftward and away from the mainstream of the country's life." They wound up linking Carey to a whole array of "left-wing political groups" from Teamsters for a Democratic Union to New Party, Democratic Socialists of America and ACORN.

The the "specter" of a new McCarthyism, emanating from the worry Big Business interests have exhibited ever since the UPS strike, is no illusion. It is born out by the extent to which the employers' Pacific Maritime Association has lashed out at the international solidarity that recently prevented ships carrying cargo loaded by scabs in Britain from being unloaded in Oakland, Calif. this Fall. The attack the employers launched on the Oakland demonstrators in reminiscent of the witch-hunts of the 1950s McCarthy era (See story, page 3).

ALL FORCES OF REVOLT UNDER ATTACK

Most chilling of all in the rise of the Right we are experiencing at this moment is its multi-faceted character as it seeks to silence all potential forces of revolt. While student activism is a far cry from the turbulent days of the l960s, new student groups have begun to arise, a number of them focused specifically on issues of labor abuses by capitalism. Protests of Nike's exploitation of tens of thousands of Southeast Asian workers have sprung up from the University of North Carolina to Michigan, Notre Dame, Illinois and other campuses. Other protests that have received little media attention but are a measure of the kinds of activities student youth are organizing around today include everything from the protests at the University of Mississippi against white supremacist attempts to bring the Confederate flag back to wave at athletic events, to the public burning of copies of the arch-conservative student paper at Cornell University which carried a vicious cartoon likening a planned parenthood "abortion clinic" with the KKK and the Nazis by asking "which one of these kills more Blacks?"

At the same time, the Center for Campus Organizing (CCO), a five-year-old organization dedicated to supporting social justice activism and alternative journalism on hundreds of college campuses across the country, has just released a l32-page book, UNCOVERING THE RIGHT ON CAMPUS. The result of four years of research, it is aimed at exposing that, far from the claim that right-wing student movements have grown "naturally" on campuses, they have been backed by millions of dollars in corporate funds in an attempt to control the debate on affirmative action, financial aid, feminism, and gay rights. (The CCO web site for those who want to read excerpts is: http://www.envirolink.orgs/right)

The attack on the struggle for freedom has most notably taken the form of an attack on what has been contemptuously dubbed "political correctness." It has been accompanied by an attempt to eliminate ethnic and women's studies from the curriculum and minority student associations from the campus. At the same time that bigotry has been disguised as "science" (as in the publication of THE BELL CURVE), the very concepts of "civil rights" and "feminism" have been twisted and perverted to mean their very opposite. Nowhere has this been more effectively used by the Right, especially in its governmental form, than in the affirmative action struggles that have become a measure of how deep is the racism and misogyny of the land, most notably the way in which no less than 26 other states have in the works bans similar to California's Proposition 209, which passed last year to ban the use of race or gender in hiring, contracting and college admissions.

More, however, than the enflaming nature of the wording was involved in the recent vote in Houston--where, instead of calling it "preferential treatment" as was done in California, the proposition asked simply whether city-sponsored affirmative action should be banned. Signaling that the battle is not over, voters in Houston rejected the ban, 54% to 46%. At the same time, many who approved the passage of Proposition 209 in California are reported to be having "second thoughts" as they have learned it has already resulted in the exclusion of almost all Blacks and Mexican Americans from the state university's graduate schools. Adding its voice, the Association of American Medical Colleges, in reporting on the four states where affirmative action can no longer be used in higher education admissions (California, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas) has warned that the drop in minority applications "is an ominous sign for the medical community."

So lethal is the issue, and so surely would the Supreme Court open the floodgates had they ruled against the school board in the recent New Jersey case--in which the board, faced with a decision over which of two teachers with the same seniority to keep, kept the Black teacher to maintain "diversity"--that civil rights groups raised over $300,000 to pay off the white teacher and keep the Court from being able to establish a precedent with this case. It became a matter of buying time in a situation in which the supposed "balance" between the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government has become non-existent as all three have been dominated more and more heavily by the Right.

RELIGIOUS RIGHT'S DANGEROUS AGENDA

Along with the new attacks on labor, the Black dimension and youth, has come a heightened backlash against the historic Women's Liberation Movement and the drive to wipe out all its gains--which has been going on with increasing force ever since the Reagan retrogression took center stage in the l980s. Nowhere has it been expressed more ominously today than in the recent rise of the Promise Keepers (PK). Founded in l990, the PK have by this year succeeded in recruiting enough new members to count an estimated 2 million followers, with an annual budget of $117 million.

Preaching that wives should "submit" to their husbands, that gays must become heterosexual, and that Christianity is the only true religion, the PK is by now a lucrative big business operation, selling books, CDs, T-shirts and pins. Most significant of all, the PK has a definitive political agenda. It is being called the "third wave" in the religious Right's political development, with Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority considered the "first wave" and Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition the "second wave." What distinguishes PK from the prior fundamentalist movements, as the Center for Democratic Studies puts it, "is its organizational prowess, theological extremism, and the extent to which it wants to comprehensively restructure America's social order." In this aim, the religious Right stands as one. They kept a lower profile in the Republican Party during the elections last year because they were looking ahead to take over the Republican Party via the "grassroots" in the next election. Meanwhile, they have been gaining ominous "grassroots" influence in school boards, especially in the South. It is worth noting that the PK has already announced that it is gearing up to hold rallies simultaneously in every state capital in the year 2000.

It is also worth noting that so far only women's and gay groups have been drawing attention to the dangers of this rabid organization.

The rise of the Right today within governmental institutions and in the proliferation of fundamentalist organizations has created an atmosphere in which we are witnessing skinhead violence in Denver, and what could only be called police "storm troopers" massed in a courtroom to intimidate a victim who had lodged a police brutality complaint in Chicago (See story, page 11). It is seen in the rise of open Web hate sites and in an increase in the kind of daily radio broadcasts Oliver North is sending out to 2.5 million listeners, having racked up more than 100 affiliates in a little more than two years.

THE 'SPECTER' OF MARX

It is a rise that makes it urgent to find our way out of this degenerate society because its many forms are making themselves known at the very time capitalism is in a profound economic crisis--which is historically when capitalism has moved toward fascism in its effort to perpetuate its rule. At the same time, the depth of the crisis has moved a number of non-Marxist intellectuals and writers to take a new, long, hard look at Marx again. Even THE NEW YORKER, in its special issue looking at the next millenium, sees none other than Karl Marx as the only thinker who, though "he was wrong about Communism," was "right about capitalism" (See "The Return of Karl Marx" by John Cassidy, THE NEW YORKER, Oct. 20 & 27).

From the multi-billionaire, George Soros, who warned of "The Capitalist Threat" in The ATLANTIC MONTHLY, to journalists for the CHICAGO TRIBUNE, who saw, on the l50th anniversary of the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO, a todayness in Marx's prediction of "a rising of the have-nots against the rule of the rich and famous," the picture they paint reveals the "specter of Marx." What must be confronted, however, is its accompaniment by a potential "specter of fascism."

It is what makes important a return to look again at the crackdown on Carey--not only because it is one of so many signs of a resurgent Right today, but because of the importance capital puts on any new developments for labor such as the UPS strike seemed to promise. What needs to be asked is whether the red-baiting of a labor leader like Carey, who, though no saint was a genuine reformer as against the reactionary corporate lawyer Hoffa, will stifle the movement forward just as it was beginning to discover itself.

To answer that question what needs to be confronted is whether "reform" is all that is needed, when the attacks on every single force of revolt show the need for finding the absolute opposite of the exploitative, racist, sexist, heterosexist, class-ridden society we suffer under capitalism. What must also be confronted is that it is not the Left but the bourgeoisie that is discussing Marx. For while the bourgeoisie feels Marx is still alive because they know that "economics" matters, the Left has not only bought the illusion that Marxism is dead, but has no grasp that Marx's Marxism is still on the agenda because for Marx every economic category was a philosophic one that could not be separated from the struggles for freedom, of workers, women and the Black dimension, in all of which he participated in his lifetime.

As we expressed it in our Marxist-Humanist Perspectives this year: "The problem isn't that new struggles aren't emerging. The problem is that because of the lack of a projection of a goal of a new society, the struggles become hemmed in by non-revolutionary tendencies before they even have a chance to breathe.... The crucial point is that to reach their potential a direct encounter with the philosophy of Marxist-Humanism is essential."

That is what NEWS & LETTERS seeks to project as we participate in all the freedom struggles, never separating the mass activities from the activity of thinking.

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