The Militant (logo)  
   Vol. 69/No. 41           October 24, 2005  
 
 
25, 50 and 75 years ago
 
October 24, 1980
BUFFALO, N.Y.—A broadly sponsored rally condemning the racist murders of six Black men and the attempt on the life of a seventh was slated here October 19 in front of city hall.

Four Black males were shot to death during a two-day period in September by the so-called “.22-caliber killer.”

Two weeks later, in a 48-hour period, two Black cab drivers were murdered. In a particularly ghoulish manner, their bodies were mutilated, with their hearts extracted.

A day later, a white man tried to strangle a Black patient at the Erie County Medical Center with a cord.

There has not been a single arrest in these seven cases. The Black community is in a state of shock and outrage.

The call for the Buffalo Unity Day rally is a response to the deep-going concern within the Black community, which comprises a third of the city’s 355,000 population.  
 
October 24, 1955
October 19—The eyes of the most conscious representatives of capital and labor are focused on New Castle, Hagerstown, and Richmond, Indiana, where the strikebound Perfect Circle Corporation has resumed operations with scabs under National Guard protection after police and company thugs had shot down peaceful CIO United Automobile Workers pickets.

“The strike’s significance spreads far beyond the boundaries of these three small Indiana towns,” writes the Wall Street Journal, Oct. 18. And this spokesman for the Wall Street money sharks adds, some businessmen regard Perfect Circle “as the leader of a crusade, fighting for the worker’s right to hold a job without belonging to a union.”

Prominent among those who have enlisted in Perfect Circle’s “right to work” crusade, according to general manager Prosser, are the scabs.  
 
October 1, 1930
What does the essence of “social fascism” consist of? And wherein lies its difference from avowed Fascism? Up to now the Marxists were of the opinion that it is democracy which is the “outward” disguise of the class dictatorship—one of its possible disguises. The political function of the present social democracy is the creation of precisely such democratic disguises. In nothing else lies its difference from Fascism which, with other methods, other ideology, in part also with another social basis, organizes, insures and protects the same dictatorship of imperialist capital.

Fascism as well as social democracy are bourgeois parties, and not bourgeois in the general sense, but such as protect sinking capitalism, which sustains itself less and less, not only with democratic forms, but also with the least firm legality. That is precisely why the social democracy is condemned to sink down to nothing, giving way to Fascism at one pole and to Communism at the other.  
 
 
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