Vol. 77/No. 19      May 20, 2013

For decades the FBI, other cop agencies and “intelligence” squads, employers and rightist thugs have spied on the SWP and organized firings and harassment of its supporters. Exposed through a lawsuit filed by the party against the FBI in 1973 and won in 1986, this evidence was central to winning the exemption. That record was buttressed by some 70 declarations by SWP campaign supporters, Militant readers and others detailing new attacks since 2009.

While today the employers and their government rationalize attacks on political rights in the name of combating “terrorism,” their real target remains the working class and its vanguard organizations. That’s clear from papers pried from the FBI in recent years, cited in letters to the FEC filed on the SWP’s behalf in 2012-13 by attorneys Michael Krinsky and Lindsey Frank.

A 2012 Freedom of Information Act fight, for example, brought to light federal spying on labor actions in solidarity with longshore workers in Longview, Wash., fighting a union-busting lockout. The SWP was actively involved in those actions. A 2010 report by the Justice Department’s Inspector General, issued in response to revelations of spying on anti-war and environmental groups, cited as one of the FBI’s reasons for surveillance of the Catholic Worker its alleged “communistic” views.

The Socialist Workers Party and its forerunners have been targeted from their origins because the capitalist rulers hate the example set by the party’s involvement in battles of workers, farmers and the oppressed. Using the Militant and books and pamphlets, socialist workers get out lessons of working-class battles the world over. Through SWP election campaigns, the party champions labor struggles and points a road toward the revolutionary fight for working-class political power.

The SWP’s origins go back to working-class militants who founded the Communist Party in the U.S. They organized to follow the example of workers and farmers in Russia who conquered power from capitalists and landlords in October 1917, under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party led by V.I. Lenin.

In 1918-19 labor battles mounted in the U.S., as bosses fattened their profits during the interimperialist slaughter of World War I. Not only was the country rocked by a strike wave in meatpacking, textile, copper mining and steel — but the Bolshevik Revolution was looked to by many workers across the U.S.

In February 1919 the country’s first general strike took place in Seattle. Later that year longshoremen there refused to load 50 freight cars of rifles onto government-chartered ships bound for counterrevolutionary armies fighting to overthrow the workers and farmers government in Russia.

Militants of the young communist movement were involved in labor battles, reaching out to the mass of unorganized industrial workers, and in efforts to combat racism and violence against African-Americans and the deportation of immigrant workers.

The bosses used both private goons and the government to put down the upsurge. A key part of this repression was targeting communists. The Department of Justice’s recently created Bureau of Investigation launched what became known as the Palmer Raids, named after Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer.

Using new laws against “sedition” and “criminal syndicalism,” Justice Department agents and local cops unleashed spies and provocateurs, smashed offices of unions and communist organizations, and joined with anti-labor outfits to break up gatherings of working-class parties. A special target was revolutionary-minded immigrant workers, who had fewer legal protections. More than 3,000 such militants were arrested and 750 deported in 1919 and 1920.

Washington went after publications championing Black rights, especially the Messenger, which solidarized with the Russian Revolution and urged African-Americans to join unions, and the NAACP’s Crisis.

As revolutionary groups attracted to the Bolsheviks’ example organized to form a single Communist Party and find ways to carry out public propaganda and mass work amid these attacks, they launched a campaign in 1921 for mayor of New York on the Workers League ticket. The candidate, Benjamin Gitlow, was in prison at the time on frame-up “subversive” charges.

In 1922 federal agents and local cops raided the Communist Party convention in Bridgman, Mich., aided by reports from a government informer. Seventeen delegates were arrested and charged under the state criminal syndicalism law. CP leader Charles Ruthenberg was convicted and sentenced to three to 10 years in prison. The party helped form the Labor Defense Council to support those arrested, winning backing from union officials, Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs, religious figures and Roger Baldwin, director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

The ferocity of government attacks ebbed later in the 1920s, as Communist Party militants expanded public activities in the unions, on the street and through election campaigns. But the Bureau of Investigation and local “Red Squads” had begun what would become the norm in the U.S., targeting revolutionary-minded workers. In the 1930s they launched new assaults on the labor movement and Socialist Workers Party, as we’ll recount in the next issue.  
 
 
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