The Tea Party Movement and the Crisis of Capitalist Rule

The close of the first Tea Party Convention last Sunday marks a turning point in developing political crisis facing the exploiting and oppressing classes.

What began a little over a year ago as a disparate collection of rightwing populists and disaffected neoconservatives has been steadily galvanized into a mass movement of shock troopers to defend capitalist rule.

More to the point, in the course of the last year, the Tea Party movement have been politically transformed from a relatively “loyal” conservative populist opposition into a movement of semi-populist Nativist fascism.

While the left flank of the capitalist order — from liberal Democrats to “middle class” leftists — amble between making belittling jokes about the Nativists and declaring them to be “irrelevant” politically, we communists see the danger posed by this growing movement and sound the alarm.

We take them and their political program seriously, because we see the threat they pose to the rights, livelihoods and even existence of working people in this country. If they are not stopped, and they are allowed to take political power, the result for working people will be a barbarous hell, where we are reduced to little more than slaves.

Thus, the choice we as workers face is sharply posed: Do we do nothing and let the Tea Party Nativists grow unchallenged, or do we begin to organize and mobilize against the Nativists and their movement now, while it can still be defeated and neutralized?

We advocate the latter, and appeal to our brothers and sisters to join with us to begin organizing to put an end to the Nativists.

Calling the Tea Party movement fascist is certainly controversial. To some, it might even seem hyperbolic or an overreaction. We disagree.

What is fascism? To define it in one sentence, fascism, as a movement, is a specific means of mobilizing and organizing the “middle class,” itself permeated with a specific hatred of working people, around a program of anti-worker social reaction and demagogy in the interests of maintaining the stable rule of (corporatist) finance capitalism.

Yes, such a movement also draws in sections of the working class that see in fascism an opportunity to improve their situation and enter into, at the very least, the labor aristocracy, if not the “middle class” itself (as a manager or official). It seeks to restore “pride” and “traditional values” that have been lost or thrown out by those they see as “undermining” society (liberals, labor unions, socialists, communists, non-Christians, non-whites, etc.). It is violently xenophobic, seeing all those who they do not consider a part of their “nation” as the enemy.

Most of all, it kneels before the altar of private property, seeing anything that challenges its omnipresent supremacy and unfettered development as needing to be destroyed.

Historically, these movements develop in the wake of a failure by working people and their organizations to successfully defeat capitalism through a revolution. Sometimes, this wake can be only a span of months; other times, it can be a span of years or decades.

In the case of our situation, it is the latter. The failure of the revolutionary situation of 1968-73 began a process of transformation that culminated in the break with capitalist democratic forms in 2000, and opened the door to the rise of fascism in America.

Today, American corporatist capitalism resembles a kind of police-state dictatorship, with the state using its power to act as the overall arbiter of society.

This system, also called Bonapartism (after Napoleon Bonaparte), is at once a reflection of the crisis and instability felt by the ruling classes, and also an attempt reimpose “law and order” through the gun and club.

In such an environment, the rise of a fascist movement is to be anticipated. As more elements of the “middle class” become nervous about their eroding position in the exploiting and oppressing coalition, the more they begin to look for miracles and salvation in the rule of an extralegal authority.

In America today, they find salvation in the Nativist movement, and its program of endless war, racism, and breaking of the back of the organizations of working people.

But the exploiting and oppressing classes are not yet won to the ideas embodied by the Tea Party Nativists.

They are not yet convinced that the “law and order” proposed by that movement is their only option to stabilize their rule.

Nevertheless, they hold out the possibility that they may be needed in the near future, so the Nativists are given the “breathing room” and “media hype” needed to grow.

This gives working people an opportunity to intercede and stop the development and growth of the Tea Party movement.

We have a narrow window of opportunity to begin educating, organizing and mobilizing our class to oppose, confront and, ultimately, neutralize the Nativist gangs.

As the economy continues to limp through the current depression, as more people are forced out of work and into underfunded private or public social programs, the more the Nativists will intensify their activity ... and the more that the traditional institutions of capitalist rule will look to them — first through appeasement, then through integration — for their own salvation.

Time is short, and the task is great. There is a chance we might fail to stop them, but the alternative of doing nothing is a guarantee the Nativists will succeed.

Statement of the Central Committee of the Workers Party in America
Perspectives on the Current Political Situation