Vol. 80/No. 9 March 7, 2016
(feature article)
Book on US class struggle has ‘many lessons on battle against political repression’
Havana International Book Fair event presents ‘50 Years of Covert Operations in the US: Washington’s Political Police and the American Working Class’
AND OSBORNE HART
Speaking at the Feb. 13 event were long-time Cuban revolutionary leader Ramón Sánchez-Parodi and Mary-Alice Waters, president of Pathfinder and a member of the National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party in the United States. Sánchez-Parodi headed the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, D.C., for 12 years from its opening in 1977. He writes often in the Cuban press on U.S.-Cuban relations.
50 Years of Covert Operations in the US, by Larry Seigle, Farrell Dobbs and Steve Clark, traces the expansion of the U.S. rulers’ political police and the struggle against it. It focuses especially on the period from the 1930s labor battles and Washington’s preparations to enter World War II through the Watergate crisis, which exploded in 1973, and the Socialist Workers Party’s successful lawsuit against the FBI and other political police agencies.
Sánchez-Parodi said 50 Years of Covert Operations in the US contains “many lessons, many explanations of the political situation in the United States.”
He emphasized the significance of the 1973 SWP lawsuit against FBI spying and harassment. “The Socialist Workers Party wasn’t defending itself against government charges,” which is more often the situation confronted by the workers’ movement. In this case, a communist workers organization “was accusing the government — accusing it of violating the U.S. Constitution.”
“Even more interesting,” Sánchez-Parodi added, is the fact that, “after more than 12 years, the [federal court] judge ruled in favor of the Socialist Workers Party.”
Fight for political space
Sánchez-Parodi said “this is a good lesson of what can be done — of the battle that must be waged to win space and protect yourself against political repression by the dominant sectors in the United States.”In 1987, he noted, the federal court with jurisdiction over the case issued an injunction that “prohibited any use of documents and other information obtained surreptitiously and unconstitutionally by the FBI and other U.S. police agencies. It declared unconstitutional [the use of agents] infiltrating the party, spying on it, and burglarizing its headquarters and the homes of its members.”
Judge Thomas Griesa “also ordered the government to pay financial compensation for damages caused and costs incurred, setting a precedent that has been used in many other cases.”
Sánchez-Parodi said that despite Washington’s claims to be a champion of liberty and equality, the U.S. rulers have always sought to protect their class interests by attacking the rights of working people.
50 Years of Covert Operations in the US describes how, during the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Franklin Roosevelt administration “took steps to suppress the growing influence of the workers’ movement and unions,” he said. “As inter-imperialist contradictions sharpened and [the second world] war was imminent, the Roosevelt administration needed to crack down on any movement of social protest by workers.”
The Cuban leader highlighted the federal government’s first use of the infamous 1940 Smith “Gag” Act to frame up and imprison leaders of the Teamsters union and the Socialist Workers Party. Washington’s goal was to silence the labor vanguard in the workers’ movement that opposed the goals of U.S. imperialism in World War II.
During the postwar witch-hunt, Sánchez-Parodi added, the Smith Act was also used to frame up leaders of the U.S. Communist Party in 1949. As the U.S. government waged an anti-labor offensive at home, it used its military to defend imperialist interests around the world, from backing Fulgencio Batista’s 1952 military coup in Cuba to its wars against the Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese revolutions.
He noted that for several weeks in 1952 Washington did not recognize the Batista regime, until it publicly announced it had broken its ties with the pro-Moscow Popular Socialist Party and with the Soviet government
Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the subsequent U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, he said, Washington has used the Patriot Act and other measures to vastly expand the use of its political police.
US gov’t target: labor movement
Waters noted that 50 Years of Covert Operations in the US was one of three books Pathfinder was presenting at the Havana book fair, each of them about the class struggle in the United States. The other two were the Spanish translation of Teamster Politics by Farrell Dobbs and a new title in both English and Spanish, The Cuban Five Talk About Their Lives Within the US Working Class. (The full text of Waters’ remarks is printed on the facing page.)Discussing 50 Years, Waters said the book explains how in the late 1930s Washington targeted the Minneapolis Teamsters union and the Socialist Workers Party because they were helping lead “the expanding strength and rising political consciousness of a component of the industrial union movement centered in the upper Midwest.” Within a few years the union had organized a quarter million truck drivers and warehouse workers across an 11-state region. The ruling class was alarmed about this development and the success of the working-class vanguard in organizing political opposition within the labor movement to Washington’s imperialist war aims.
Like Sánchez-Parodi, Waters underscored why the questions taken up in this book are important for today.
“The U.S. national security apparatus has undergone a massive expansion over the 15 years since 9/11” and its intrusion into every aspect of our lives “is hated by the working class,” said Waters. “And there’s nothing reactionary about that.”
In fact, she noted, that is “one of the elements driving support for the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump.” He plays on “the anxiety and fear generated by the smoldering depression conditions U.S. workers have known for almost a decade,” the insecurity generated by the unraveling of the imperialist world order, and the policies of the Obama administration that serve the interests of the giant insurance companies and other capitalist financial institutions.
Waters concluded that communist workers in the United States and other countries welcome the opportunity — “in the streets, in the factories, and on the picket lines” — to join in the growing debate and search for answers among working people in face of this capitalist crisis.
Sánchez-Parodi agreed, saying, “The struggle continues. And this book offers many ideas and experiences that need to be studied, discussed and applied in today’s context.”
Related articles:
Government’s expanding ‘security state’ is hated by workers
Cuba says, ‘Return Guantánamo!’ as Obama plays politics on prison
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