Vol. 79/No. 42      November 23, 2015

 
(feature article)

Join defense of SWP exemption
from disclosing campaign donors

 
 
In December 2016 the Socialist Workers Party will apply for an extension of its 41-year exemption from having to report to the Federal Election Commission the names and personal information about contributors to the party’s election campaigns. The exemption was last renewed by the FEC in a 4-1 vote in April 2013.

“The party is asking for help from Militant readers, supporters of Socialist Workers Party candidates and other defenders of political rights to win further exemption next year,” Steve Clark, chair of the Socialist Workers National Campaign Committee, told the Militant Nov. 8. “Send us reports on any harassment, threats or attacks against SWP candidates, SWP campaign supporters or against yourself.”

For the 2013 FEC hearing attorneys Michael Krinsky and Lindsey Frank, from the firm of Rabinowitz, Boudin, Standard, Krinsky & Lieberman, filed over 70 affidavits documenting firings, police spying and harassment, and right-wing threats and attacks from across the country over the previous six years.

“Reports like these are key to documenting that while there’s great receptivity to and interest in the SWP and its election campaigns, the party and those who join with it in political activity continue to face ongoing attacks by government officials, cops, bosses and rightist goons,” Clark said.

The party has fought against filing contributors’ names since the anti-working-class “disclosure” laws were adopted in the 1970s. In 1974 the party won exemption after a hard-fought legal battle, and has won extension in five FEC hearings since.

These victories are the fruit of decades of the party’s participation in the struggles of working people and its battle-tested ability to respond to attacks by the rulers and their political police.

“It is a victory not only for the SWP,” Clark told the press after the 2013 decision, “but for the right of workers and our organizations to engage in political action free from government, employer and right-wing interference.”

“Independent working-class political action — independent of the Democratic, Republican and other capitalist parties — is a pressing necessity in face of escalating attacks by the bosses and their government and political parties,” he said. “They are trying to solve the crisis of their exploitative system by attacking our wages, our job conditions, our political rights and our very dignity as human beings. SWP election campaigns set an example for workers and our unions of what needs to be done.”

Since 1919 the SWP and its forerunners have been part of the struggles of working people, farmers and the oppressed. It strives to build a communist political party capable of following the examples of Lenin’s Bolshevik Party in Russia in 1917 and the July 26 Movement in Cuba in 1959, leading workers and farmers to take political power out of the hands of the capitalist rulers and form their own government.

That’s why the SWP has been and remains a target for the propertied rulers and other opponents of the working class.

The reports of ongoing harassment the SWP is asking workers to write up and send in build on the extensive evidence accumulated during the party’s 16-year political and legal campaign against Washington’s spying and disruption. In 1973, following revelations of government spying and harassment against participants in the fight to overturn Jim Crow segregation and to end U.S. imperialism’s war against the people of Vietnam, the SWP sued the FBI and other government spy agencies for decades of attacks against the party.

Represented by renowned political rights attorney Leonard Boudin, the party forced the FBI to turn over more than 8 million documents recording the spies’ activities, as well as on the FBI Cointelpro Program, which targeted the SWP and others for disruption. Records of wiretaps and at least 204 black-bag burglaries of party offices was forced out, as well as redacted copies of files from hundreds of government informers.

This massive record of government spying and attacks on the party not only helped win the ruling against the FBI, they also laid the basis for the party to win its exemption from FEC disclosure requirements.

Affidavits in 2013 documented how bosses fired Lisa Potash from two jobs when they found out she was the SWP’s candidate for mayor in Atlanta in 2009. Frank Forrestal wrote up how he was accosted while petitioning for party candidates in Omaha, Nebraska, by a thug who started calling friends to beat him up. The New York SWP headquarters received phone threats that party leaders would be “shot on sight,” and Philadelphia cops told Osborne Hart, who was running for mayor, that they would get him put on the government’s “no-fly” list, other declarations reported.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, the party’s lawyers noted, the FBI and other federal, state and local cop agencies have stepped up spying and harassment in the name of the “fight against terrorism.”

FEC officials push back

“Maybe some people don’t like seeing a newspaper like the Militant in demonstrations outside their office,” said Commissioner Steven Walther at the FEC’s 2009 hearing on the SWP, but today socialism is more “mainstream.”

But, as the affidavits in 2013 showed, that doesn’t mean harassment and attacks on the party have stopped.

In both 2009 and 2013 some FEC officials made efforts to limit or eliminate the SWP’s exemption, but failed because, in the context of the deepening capitalist economic crisis, the fight waged by the party drew broad interest and support.

This marked the first successful pushback against growing attacks by the bosses and their political representatives. Since then the movement for $15 and a union and against cop brutality and killings — struggles that have successfully forced concessions — have followed suit.

“Help the party prepare for the fight we expect next year,” Clark said.

“El PST es un partido político los 365 días del año”.
 
 
Related articles:
SWP campaign in Philadelphia: ‘We won because we built the party’
Do 2015 election results show workers moving to the right?
 
 
 
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