From "Globalization, the South and the Motion Toward Fascism"
LRNA, January 2003.

Over the last forty years, the ruling class has been reconstituting the South as a political base for its class program to restructure economic and political world relations under the control of the US, to realign the lives of all the American people to these priorities, to extend and strengthen the apparatus of repression of all the American people, and when it becomes necessary and possible, to replace bourgeois democracy in America with fascism. The realignment of the two-party system has been an essential element of this process. The Southern Black Belt elite and their hold over Southern politics has been vital to the steady, yet accelerating implementation of this program. The form of political control has changed, but the continuity of purpose remains. 

Yet the ruling class cannot entirely control the outcome of this struggle or dictate the shape of the process as it unfolds. They must contend with human aspiration and history as well as the power of a deepening social revolution which is tearing Southern workers from their moorings no less than workers in the rest of the country.  

The inevitable resistance and upheaval in response to these conditions is and will be qualitatively different than in past periods of the South's realignment to the needs of capital. It cannot help but to contain elements of the racial politics of the past. However, its leading and arising element is the common economic plight that crosses color and national barriers and is shaping an entirely new social force out of the polarization and destruction of the old relations.  

Today, the struggle for unity is not only emerging under qualitatively new conditions. The quality of that struggle for unity is itself new. In the South this does not only mean the possibility of unifying along class lines -- a necessary step toward revolution -- but the unshackling of the chains that have bound this country almost since its inception -- the use of the South to control the political life and destiny of this country. 

Historic possibilities present themselves, but nothing is automatic. Will the emerging revolutionary forces in the South be marshalled to fight for the interests and fascistic program of global capital? Or will they be mobilized in the fight for a cooperative and equal society? This is the question that faces revolutionaries today. The future of the revolution turns upon their answer.

This entire report is now available online.
"Globalization, the South and the Motion Toward Fascism"

 

February.2006.Vol16.Ed2
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