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By the League Basic Needs
Electoral Committee
This year’s Democratic National Convention is taking place on the 60th anniversary of one of the most effective protests ever held at a U.S. political convention. In August 1964, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) attempted to seat itself in place of the fascist, all-white Mississippi delegation at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. The speech (a video and transcript of her speech are in the right-side column of our homepage) was delivered to the Credentials Committee by the MFDP spokesperson Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977) and ended up being recorded and replayed over and over again on national TV. It became instrumental in turning Americans against the Jim Crow fascist regime in Mississippi and across the South and has been a model for fighting fascism ever since.
A video and transcript of her speech are in the right-side column of our homepage
Project 2025 is a 920-page blueprint for the dictatorship that corporations openly plan to impose if they can get a “conservative president” elected or installed this November. It unquestionably represents the most immediate and dangerous tendency in the overall fascist offensive and must be defeated. As the famous anti-fascist Georgi Dimitrov taught us, whoever does not fight the reactionary measures of the bourgeoisie and the growth of fascism in its preparatory stages will not be in a position to prevent its victory later. Hamer’s 1964 speech should be used today to inspire people to fight the threat of Project 2025 and to build a new society where government meets the basic needs of its people.
DEFEAT PROJECT 2025
The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party has several critical lessons to teach the revolutionaries of 2024. First and foremost is exposing the brutality and depravity of the fascist enemy we face. Decades of ruling-class propaganda have caused far too many Americans to become complacent and forget the great truth pronounced by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., that the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today is our own government. People dare not let themselves be deceived by the illusion that Project 2025 is not so bad, or not so different from the status quo. Project 2025 actually corresponds well to the classic definition of fascism – “substitution of one state form of class domination of the bourgeoisie – bourgeois democracy – by another form – open terrorist dictatorship.”
Project 2025 (and its companion policies put forward in Trump campaign speeches and in Supreme Court decisions) is the open replacement of all the norms of U.S. bourgeois democracy with unrestricted, violent corporate dictatorship. It includes:
- The Insurrection Act invoked against peaceful protests.
- Presidential immunity.
- Internments and/or deportations of tens of millions of people.
- Block-by-block military sweeps in neighborhoods of color to round up anyone without government-issued identification.
- A national abortion ban.
- Suppression of independent newspapers and other independent media.
- An increase of mass incarceration.
- Denial of housing and health care subsidies.
- Deportation of Palestinian solidarity protesters.
- Suppression of LGBTQ communities.
- Elimination of environmental regulations.
- Destruction of federal regulatory agencies.
- Fixing and/or overturning of elections.
- Stripping citizenship from children of immigrants.
- Imprisonment of revolutionaries.
ECONOMIC FACTORS
The fascism of Project 2025 is equally as vicious, violent, and racist as the fascism of 1964. What is different is that it is the fact that today it cuts across a much broader swath of the working class and will affect all of U.S. society. It is driven by powerful objective economic factors that did not exist in 1964. Jim Crow-era fascism was used to enforce colonial exploitation of Southern labor, especially sharecroppers and especially African Americans. It was undone, not only by the heroism of Fannie Lou Hamer and her colleagues, but by the fact that Wall Street found it could make more money by industrializing the South than it did from its agriculture. When the cotton-picking machine was introduced, African Americans migrated to the cities where they were able to find jobs and carry on their freedom fight under more favorable conditions.
Today we face a different situation. No sector of the ruling class has an interest in extending or preserving democracy. Artificial intelligence and digital production are increasingly removing the need for any labor force at all. During the industrial era, the economy depended on workers for production and as a result it provided them with wages and benefits, along with limited rights to vote, speak and protest. Now that the system no longer requires their labor, it will no longer tolerate them organizing, demanding and voting for government policies to meet their basic needs.
Real victory today therefore requires defeating dictatorship and guaranteeing social-economic transformation in the interests of the working class, not simply in the interests of corporate private property. The working class has to have democracy to fight for the programs it needs to survive. And democracy cannot prevail without leadership by the working class. The 1960s Civil Rights movement was already beginning to understand this, as Dr. King transitioned to the Poor People’s Campaign in 1967-68, and Hamer was dedicating the rest of her life to building the Freedom Farm Cooperative in Mississippi. In the long run, we can have neither real democracy nor economic security until our social movement organizes the political power to replace the private property economy with one that distributes society’s wealth based on human needs, not private profit.
UNITY AND POLITICAL POWER
Economic and political rights require political power to make them happen and working class power requires unity. King and Hamer understood this even in the 1960s. They supported the Black Power movement’s impulse to unify and elevate African Americans, but resisted its attempts to exclude white workers.
Defeating Project 2025 is necessary for defending and building the revolutionary movement. This means working tirelessly for the unity of the various sectors of our movement, beginning especially where the economy throws workers together in a growing equality of poverty. It means bringing together the people fighting for basic economic needs, for freedom for Palestine, for health care and reproductive freedom, for the planet, for migrant rights, for Black Lives Matter and for a 2028 general strike. Electoral campaigns – local, state and national – can play a powerful role in building political unity. While we cannot defeat Project 2025 by simply working in an electoral campaign, tactical voting should be an important part of it. Non-voting is not an option in the face of fascism. Building unity means patiently educating each other and refraining from vote-shaming of either Democrats or the existing third parties.
In spite of the bloodshed, in spite of the enormous obstacles and even if we fail to defeat Project 2025, we have no choice but to hold on to our vision. Technology that the ruling class uses to throw people out of work can also be used to set people free. By impoverishing millions, the system is creating a class of people that Plato called “in love with revolution.” Our responsibility is to resist, to unite ourselves and build the political power necessary to create the peaceful and sustainable world that in our hearts and minds we know is possible.
Published on July 25, 2024
This article originated in Rally!
P.O. Box 477113 Chicago, IL 60647 rally@lrna.org
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