First Published: Frontline, Vol. 1, No. 18, March 19, 1984.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
Copyright: This work is in the Public Domain under the Creative Commons Common Deed. You can freely copy, distribute and display this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line as your source, include the url to this work, and note any of the transcribers, editors & proofreaders above.
In your article on the Klan/Nazi trials in Greensboro you show an incredible amount of restraint toward the CWP (Communist Workers Party). While I agree that the trial raises very significant issues, there are many activists in the left and progressive movements (and I assume among your readership) who are not familiar with the background to the murders, and thus the dangers of CWP’s mix of infantile leftism with incredible amateurishness.
From the moment that the CWP (known as Worker’s Viewpoint Organization before Nov. 3, 1979) voiced its “Death to the Klan” slogan in North Carolina’s Klan country, they were in over their heads. As a group that hardly distinguishes between the cops and the Klan, they should have known (and common sense would have told them) that if their challenge was taken seriously, they would for certain be out maneuvered and out gunned by a militarily superior adversary. Not only that, but they would endanger the few individuals out of the masses who might momentarily be attracted to their hopelessly thin display of bravado.
However, not to be deterred from fomenting the confrontation implied by their slogan, the CWP, in the weeks before Nov. 3 poked, prodded and provoked the Klan and Nazis on radio and in print The icing on the cake was their “glorious victory” over the Klan in China Grove, N.C. just days before the Nov. 3 massacre’ when this self-proclaimed “vanguard” busted up a sparsely attended Klan-sponsored showing of “Birth of a Nation” with baseball bats and similar primitive weapons.
The provocateurs within the Klan and Nazis (Butkovich, Dawson, and probably others) were having a field day whipping up the fascist troops for some heavy action. I wouldn’t be surprised if they got even more than they bargained for five activists, identified as leading cadre of the CWP, killed; a four-fold increase in Klan activity in North Carolina after the first set of Klan/Nazi defendants was let go scot-free in 1980.
I could go on and talk about the Nov. 17 funeral march where the CWP honored their dead by parading through the streets of Greensboro with unloaded rifles, or their sectarian approach to building the protest against the murders and acquittals, but I think my point is clear “Death to the Klan” is not only an infantile slogan that promotes simplistic illusions about the complex political process of defeating the Klan and fascism, in certain situations it can be deadly. The organization that promoted the slogan (and to this day has never renounced it) should not be let off the hook for its political immaturity. In this case the amateurish CWP was a serious danger to itself and its miniscule following.
–Ted Grounds, New York, N.Y.
First Published: Frontline, Vol. 1, No. 23, May 28, 1984.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
Copyright: This work is in the Public Domain under the Creative Commons Common Deed. You can freely copy, distribute and display this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line as your source, include the url to this work, and note any of the transcribers, editors & proofreaders above.
The John Brown Anti-Klan Committee wishes to criticize Frontline for printing the letter by Ted Grounds (March 19, 1984) which promotes the view that revolutionaries bring the state’s repression down on themselves and others by being revolutionary. Grounds attacks the Communist Workers Party (CWP) for raising the slogan “Death to the Klan!” and blames them for the murder of five of their members by the Ku Klux Klan. Grounds’ letter echoes the line of the KKK and the Nazis–that they were responding to the provocations of the “commies.”
The truth is that these murders were organized by the U.S. government as an act of terrorism and a bloody message to all who would dare support the Black liberation struggle, oppose the growing armed white supremacist right, or call themselves communists.
In raising the slogan “Death to the Klan!” the CWP and other anti-Klan forces join the entire Black Nation which has raised and fought for this slogan for years. It is not empty bravado. It is a political demand that says the Klan has no right to exist, this is not a “free speech” issue or a question of bourgeois democracy. “Death to the Klan!” is a mass demand that has been raised and should be raised by all people who hate racism and violence.
Prior to the consolidation of fascism and seizure of state power by the Nazis, ordinary people and the German labor movement broke up any Nazi meeting they could find using baseball bats and other weapons. It was not those who opposed Hitler who brought him to power, but the people who did nothing (except bad-mouth the resistance) that later became known as ’good Germans.’
–Lisa Roth, John Brown Anti-Klan Committee
The John Brown Committee’s position is a classic example of the infantile leftism that still pervades a portion of the U.S. left. Certainly the U.S. government, not communists or anti-racist activists, is the source of repression and murder in this country. But the point is, what political conclusion are we to draw from this?
Apparently the John Brown Committee believes that this objective fact of the class struggle relieves revolutionaries of the responsibility to formulate and carry out effective tactics, based on an accurate assessment of the political balance of forces, the level of consciousness of the masses and the relative development of the tendency toward fascism. To this group, moral outrage and militant actions are sufficient to conduct revolutionary struggle.
But politics are not so simple. Defeating racism, repression–and fascism–involves developing slogans, campaigns and actions that step-by-step forge a broad and durable progressive front. Preparation for direct, even violent, confrontation is part of that process, but its centerpiece must be a strategy to isolate the enemy politically and ideologically and to constantly raise the consciousness of the people’s forces.
Judged by this standard, the CWP’s approach to anti-Klan work was precisely empty bravado. Slogans such as “Outlaw the Klan” or “Stop the Klan” have the potential to mobilize a broad front to deny this fascist group any rights whatsoever, and to produce tactics that are both militant and place the Klan on the defensive. But “Death to the Klan” as one’s fundamental organizing principle directs work only towards those immediately prepared for a military confrontation and leads to tactics in which the anti-racist forces, under present conditions, are certain to be at a disadvantage. One can take note of the individual courage of some who pursue this course, but it is irresponsible not to simultaneously point out the fundamental political bankruptcy of such a strategy.
Even the pragmatic CWP seems to have learned the lesson that the U.S. working class is not ready to “rise up like the CWP 5” and rally behind their super-revolutionary call for revolution in the eighties. They have modified their tactics and appear to be attempting, in their own sectarian way, to carve out a niche for themselves in the broader people’s movement. But the John Brown Committee seems to have found a fountain of perpetual youth and adamantly refuses to drop its analysis that only direct confrontation with fascist groups is a worthwhile part of the anti-fascist struggle. When someone points this out, it is not echoing the line of the bourgeoisie, it is combatting the kind of infantile posturing that hinders the left’s ability to become a powerful political force.