Photo: Sandy Perry
From the editors: At rallies, marches and meetings, millions have raised the warning that fascists are holding a knife at the throat of democracy. The government’s attack on immigrants has been their cutting edge, but the ultimate target is the working class as a whole. The growing body count reveals that:
- In all of 2025, 32 people died in ICE custody, and as of January 2026 the toll was 8.
- Since Trump became president ICE officers have shot 13 people, killing five of them. Most were immigrants of color. The last three were U.S. citizens, one Black and two white.
Our January article Today’s “Today’s Fascism Arises From An Economic Revolution” explained that an economic revolution began with robots replacing factory workers, then soon disrupted the whole society. Fascism is the political expression of that upheaval, a way for the ruling class to maintain control over the masses they no longer need to employ. https://rally-theleague.org/fascism-economic-revolution/
The following is excerpted from an analysis by the National Council of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America. It looks at fascism’s deep roots in American history, and helps point the way towards a future that can nurture humanity and nature:
The American Roots of Fascism During Economic Upheaval
The George Floyd demonstrations of 2020 and the growth of a 21st century abolition movement was a social expression of the economic upheavals under way. The threat posed by millions of working-class people of all nationalities and genders protesting police violence was not lost on the authors of Project 2025, a comprehensive policy blueprint for accelerating fascist consolidation. It was written by the Heritage Foundation and allied conservative organizations to reshape the federal government under a potential future Republican administration.
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does carry a living legacy. That living legacy is that American fascism was born out of the defeat of the Reconstruction program set up in the South after the Civil War. It was a response to the threat created by the general strike of slaves who left the plantations to take up arms or contribute labor to the Union cause, securing its victory.
W.E.B. Du Bois characterizes the period immediately following the Civil War as “anarchy in the South and the triumph of brute physical force over large areas.” There was no civil authority in most southern states. Starvation and violence permeated the region. The federal government was in turmoil. What would the content of democracy be as political power shifted from the planter class to Northern-based industrial and finance capital? Who held the power: Congress, the president and/or state legislatures?
Southern states answered with the Black Codes, which was slavery by another name. The codes included vagrancy laws, denial of freedom of movement and property ownership, and the continuance of the Dred Scott ruling of 1857 that Blacks were not citizens and had no rights that a white man was bound to honor. This was the seedbed of American fascism, enforced by violence both “legal” and sanctioned “extra-legal.”
Congress answered in 1865 by passing the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolishing slavery and again in 1867 with the first Reconstruction Act, establishing the short-lived Freedmen’s Bureau and its work to assist the formerly enslaved and poor whites with food, clothing and shelter. Ratification of the 14th and 15th amendments followed in 1868 and 1870 respectively.
RECONSTRUCTION PERIOD
During Reconstruction from 1865 to 1876, those born into slavery could vote and own land. Approximately 2,000 African American men served in public office. All over the South sprouted new schools and public relief projects aimed at improving the lives of the freed people and poor whites. Despite facing constant violence, new hospitals and public health departments were created.
Reconstruction was also marked by white supremacist terror to prevent formerly enslaved from political participation and keep them tied to land, in the mines and in the kitchens in slave-like conditions. Over 2,000 lynchings were documented during Reconstruction and unknown thousands more were beaten, whipped, raped and tortured.
Reconstruction was halted after the Hayes-Tilden compromise of 1877, in which Southern Democrats agreed to accept Republican Rutherford B. Hayes as president in exchange for the withdrawal of the last federal troops from the South. White supremacist violence, the under-funding of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the federal government’s failure to sufficiently enforce the rights of African Americans and white Republicans working with them and an economic depression all contributed to this defeat.
It was in the interest of Northern industry, railroads and finance to enact this “compromise” that imposed colonial conditions on the Black Belt South and protected capitalist private property through segregation. As C. Vann Woodward’s book Origins of the New South stated, “To the editor [of the National Republican] it appeared but natural and proper that the ‘governing classes’ in the South should combine with like elements in the North against Northern Democratic ‘riff raff’ and assume leadership over ‘the native menial classes’ of the South.”
Multiple court cases and unmitigated racial mob violence in the 1870s and 1880s mortally wounded any legal equality or protection delineated in the Reconstruction amendments. The final withdrawal of federal troops from South Carolina, Louisiana and Florida guaranteed the super exploitation and violent control of Black labor in the South. White supremacist violence was used to destroy the multiracial coalition that was attempting to build a more democratic society during Reconstruction.
Fascism is not only ‘mob’ violence, but legally sponsored and sanctioned state violence. Now that political power had been regained, legalized racial subordination could and would be restored. From 1885 to 1908, all eleven former Confederate states rewrote their constitutions to include provisions restricting voting rights with poll taxes, literacy tests and felon disenfranchisement. In the words of John B. Knox, president of Alabama’s 1901 state constitutional convention: “If we would have white supremacy, we must establish it by law – not by force or fraud.” (Quoted from the Equal Justice Initiative)
The following decades used the State Rights’ doctrine enshrined in the defeat of Reconstruction to crush working-class unity with both terror and laws like Taft-Hartley’s “right-to-work.” Attempts by Black people to exercise the right to vote or to challenge the total control that landowners exerted over sharecroppers were met with brutal and often deadly violence. Efforts to escape the confines of the plantation system or to assert basic freedoms provoked retaliation, serving as a warning to others. The fascist system built to control Blacks was also a threat to the poorest whites – from 1882 to 1968, 13 Southern states witnessed the lynching of 3,199 Blacks and 575 whites. (https://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/shipp/lynchingsstate.html)
FIGHTING YESTERDAY’S FASCISM
But even Southern fascist violence could not completely crush the fight for freedom and equality. In 1919 Arkansas, an armed white mob attacked Black sharecropper activists, who returned fire in self-defense, then organized a campaign that won the freedom of the 12 who had been sentenced to death. In 1962 Robert F. Williams upheld self-defense against the KKK in his book Negroes with Guns, and by 1975 an Alabama court had to drop false criminal charges filed against him. In 2025 the history Motown and the Making of Working-Class Revolutionaries noted that during the 1960s Black auto workers in Detroit were studying Williams’ book.
Many other forms of struggle against Southern fascism also developed, culminating in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s that forced the U.S. government to prohibit laws openly enforcing segregation in jobs, housing, etc. But many aspects of segregation and fascism have continued up to now. The old slave patrols, followed afterward by white militias and the Ku Klux Klan, were the origin of today’s racist American policing. The murders of Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Georgia and Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida are directly linked to the history of violent extra-legal terrorist white supremacy. The convict leasing system that began immediately after the Civil War is imprinted on today’s prison industrial complex. Vagrancy laws that filled the prisons are not unlike today’s criminalization of the homeless, mass incarcerations, and immigrant ICE detentions.
The drive toward consolidating fascism nationally today follows the same agenda as the institution of Jim Crow 148 years ago, with white supremacy as the form and fascism as the content. At this moment, that white supremacist form is being focused against immigrants of color, along with the patriarchal attacks on women’s equality which have always accompanied fascism. The Voting Rights Act won by the Civil Rights Movement is also under renewed attack. As just one example of many, Georgia has purged over 500,000 people from the state’s voter rolls and instituted multiple obstacles to voting including reducing drop boxes, requiring multiple pieces of identification to request an absentee ballot, closing well over 1,200 polling places and gerrymandering legislative districts to guarantee that the most conservative candidate wins.
FIGHTING TODAY’S FASCISM
The super exploitation and oppression of the Black, Indigenous and immigrant worker has never stopped. However, the possibility for working class unity is far greater today, as millions of whites join them in unemployment, poverty and homelessness. Over 60 years of lessons and struggles for “reforms” have shaped their expectations and a powerful movement for social and economic justice today confronts the capitalist roots of both fascism and climate change.
But this movement has an incomplete analysis of today’s fascism. Though the term fascism was coined in 1919 by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, the first actual fascist political system was built much earlier in the U.S. South to stop Reconstruction’s efforts which threatened to unite Black and whites. The Jim Crow South expressed the open terrorist dictatorship of capital. Understanding this history instructs us on the keystone for developing class conscious unity today.
In 1877, the center of the economy was shifting from agriculture to industry, which shifted the dominant section of the ruling class from plantation owners to the industrialists and financiers who ruled post-Civil War America. Some sections of the working class were granted access to rising living standards, while white supremacy was used to divide and maintain the poverty of the rest.
Another historic shift in the economy’s productive forces is underway now, from industrial to electronic and digital. It is producing both a new section of the ruling class based in technology and speculation, and a new section of the working class which is being dispossessed of jobs, housing and other basic needs. That ruling class is increasingly united on the need for new fascist means of controlling the dangerous impoverished mass, though they differ sharply among themselves about how openly to do it.
The working class is not facing unavoidable competition over the scarcity of goods of the Civil War economy. Now digital production could be used to heal the wounds suffered by humanity and the Earth. Only a united class war against fascism can end this rotten, degenerate system and equitably distribute the resources needed.
Published on February 11, 2026.
This article originated in Rally!
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