David Koch, one half of the toxic Charles/David Koch billionaire brothers, died on August 23. The Koch brothers have been leaders of the domestic small fascist bosses challenging the big fascists who have historically run U.S. imperialism.
These two wings of the ruling class are killers rushing towards a battle that will result in increasing fascism. Trusting either of them to liberate our class is a dead-end. Building confidence in our class by building a revolutionary communist movement to put the working class in power is the only way forward in the face of growing fascism.
Domestic oil vs. Mid-East oil
The Koch empire was built on oil refining, fracking, and petroleum products, mainly based on U.S. and Canadian oil and natural gas (Rolling Stone, 9/24/14). Koch Industries is one of the biggest family businesses in the world. However, even considering all of its extensive businesses beyond fossil fuels, it is still small compared to the big oil companies ExxonMobil, Shell and BP. The big oil companies, founded on the blood-soaked imperialist exploitation of Mid-East oil, are each two to four times the size of the entire Koch empire, and together dwarf Koch industries (Owler.com).
Wars over taxation and regulation
The Kochs and other small fascist bosses have banded together over the last 30 years to fight the big fascist bosses around two major issues: cutting corporate taxes that go towards supporting the big fascist bosses’ worldwide military empire, and stopping government regulations that press the big oil producers’advantages and hurt  the smaller companies.
When the Rockefellers and other big fascist U.S. bosses started the environmental movement (EElegal.org, 12/2016) to keep the domestic oil companies in check, the Koch brothers stood to take a massive hit.
“The effects of [environmental regulations] would be measured over decades for Koch. The company has billions of dollars sunk into the complex and expensive infrastructure of crude-oil processing. If a limit on greenhouse gas emissions were imposed…The total dollar losses would likely be measured in trillions over a period of 30 years or more”(NY Times, 8/23).
“No taxes and no regulations” became the battle cry of the Kochs. In the 1980s and 90s the big fascist liberal bosses were smashing unions, cutting benefits, eliminating job security and pushing racist lies to justify filling the prisons with Black workers.
The Kochs sought supporters for their movement in the army of workers who were being devastated by this drive of the main wing U.S. bosses. In the face of increasing competition from other rising imperialists, the liberal big fascists had to crush wage levels and smash the New Deal social contract that had staved off rebellion of U.S. workers during the 1930s.
Racism became the glue of the Koch movement
The main wing liberal bosses emerged from their victory in the Civil War as the most powerful ruling class in history by mobilizing millions to fight slavery. But it wasn’t long before the liberal bosses betrayed the working class.
The entire history of U.S. capitalism is built on the foundation of racism. From slavery to the racist terror of the KKK; from Jim Crow segregation to mass incarceration; from segregated schools to racist cops gunning down young Black men. Even the New Deal, hailed by liberals, mostly excluded Black workers (see book When Affirmative Action Was White). Within a few years of the defeat of the Southern ruling class and the end of chattel slavery, the big fascist liberal bosses let the KKK ravage Black workers in the South and allowed the defeated southern bosses to institute Jim Crow segregation.
The biggest liberal bosses at the helm of U.S. imperialism have made their billions and built their political power by building racism to exploit, divide and attack the working class. The liberal bosses’ racist ideas pollute our children’s schools, permeate the entertainment our class consumes and fuel the bosses’ organizations used to control us.
The Koch brothers used the racism cultivated through brutality by the liberal big fascists running U.S. capitalism against the liberal bosses themselves. At the heart of the Koch movements is open racism that paints Black and immigrant workers as the enemies of white workers. The Kochs didn’t create racism. They just recycled the same lies that the liberal big fascists used to justify “Stop and Frisk”, and to jail and terrorize millions of Black workers living in the cities controlled by the liberal big fascists.
The Koch brothers poured hundreds of millions of dollars into openly racist movement that gave life to the Tea Party (Rolling Stone, 9/24/14) and successive formations culminating most recently in Trump’s mobilizing of racist voters to win the White House (NY Times, 9/6/2018).
The liberal fascists are again asking for help from our class, and particularly from Black workers, this time to fight the Kochs and their small fascist partners. The liberal bosses’ mouth-piece, the NY Times, is running on all cylinders to build patriotism and unity with the liberal ruling class through articles like their 1619 Project on the role of slavery in building U.S. capitalism. The liberal big fascists are faking concern about racism because they need us to die in their battle for power. Like the scorpions they are, the liberal big fascist bosses will kill us once they have used us up, just as they have always done.
Racist hypocrisy of liberalism provides the fuel
Building openly racist movements has worked for the Koch brothers because of the profound and deep hypocrisy of the liberal big fascist bosses. As unions were smashed by the liberal bosses and rural industrial workers across the U.S. saw their wages slashed and jobs disappear, the Kochs directed workers’ anger at Black and immigrant workers as well as the wealthy liberals who have formed the backbone of the main wing bosses support in the major U.S. cities of New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.
The wealthy “liberal elite” of the United States’s biggest cities, who deride white workers as uneducated racists, while preserving  New York City as the most segregated school system in the U.S. and the most unequal city in the world, were an easy target for first the Tea Party and later the Trump movement to rally against. The hypocrisy of the Democratic Party claiming to be against racism and inequality while working day and night to keep the working class segregated and exploited in the financial and media centers of the U.S. let the Kochs, and the rest of the small bosses’ fascist movement, make the most open and vile racist lies attacking Black and immigrant workers.
Trump brought Koch movement into the White House
The election of Trump, with 62 million people voting for an open racist, signaled a new level of success for the domestic bosses and the Koch agenda. While the Koch brothers had a public spat with Trump, he has delivered on their agenda while trashing the main wing bosses’ institutions. “The Koch network has gotten 85 percent of what it has always wanted out of the Trump presidency so far — especially the huge government-starving, upward tilted tax cuts, the evisceration of the EPA...cuts in social spending, and ultra-right judges who will eviscerate government regulatory capacities and further weaken liberal forces” (NY Times 9/6/2018).
David Koch’s death will not lower the volatility. The threat posed by the Koch industry bosses and their fascist ilk poses a greater threat to the big fascist liberal bosses than ever before. The coming election in 2020 looks to be an extremely volatile event.
Look for the battle between the factions to sharpen as pressure from a rising China puts more strain on the liberal big fascist bosses to use more fascist methods and attempt to mobilize the working class on their behalf to regain control of their bloody racist empire. Going along with them is death for our class. We can never let the bosses lead us. We must make the fight against racism a fight to liberate our class from the system that breeds it: capitalism. We must build the PLP’s working class-led communist movement to fight for communist revolution!