“Opposing US rulers’ assaults on freedoms protected by the Constitution and their use of the political police” is the title of the opening section of the political resolution adopted by the December 2022 Socialist Workers Party national convention. It is reprinted below from the book, The Low Point of Labor Resistance Is Behind Us: The Socialist Workers Party Looks Forward, by party leaders Jack Barnes, Mary-Alice Waters and Steve Clark, published by Pathfinder Press.
This issue of the Militant was printed just days after the office of liberal New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg succeeded in leading a jury of New Yorkers, with less than 24 hours of deliberations, to convict former President Donald Trump on 34 felony counts. That New York state prosecution has had the unspoken backing of the Joseph Biden White House since the politically driven charges were filed last year.
EXCERPT FROM
THE LOW POINT OF LABOR RESISTANCE IS BEHIND US
This reinforces the stakes for working people in rejecting the Democrats’ frenzied drive to destroy their chief political rivals in the 2024 presidential election. Crucial constitutional protections of all are being shredded along the way.
As revolutionary workers leader Leon Trotsky pointed out in 1939, “Under conditions of the bourgeois regime, all suppression of political rights and freedom, no matter whom they are directed against in the beginning, in the end inevitably bear down upon the working class, particularly its most advanced elements. That is a law of history.”
Reading and studying this material is essential for charting a winning course for workers and the unions today. Copyright © 2023 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
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1) Defending and extending the freedoms protected by the US Constitution is at the center of the class struggle today. Workers and farmers must organize and act to prevent the federal government’s assault on these freedoms, which we have won in class battles over some two and a half centuries. We must oppose the US rulers’ relentless drive to refurbish the reputation and expand the use of the government’s political police, first and foremost the FBI.
The political course of the current Democratic administration includes an open assault on these very freedoms. Employing violent and provocative demagogy, President Biden, in his September 1, 2022, “Battle for the Soul of the Nation” speech in Philadelphia, condemned as “a threat to this country” tens of millions of US citizens who voted for former President Donald Trump in 2020 or who would have done so if they had the chance (74 million people cast ballots for him). The “MAGA Republicans,” Biden said, are carrying out an “ongoing attack on democracy.” They represent “a clear and present danger,” he warned, “an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”
A week earlier, Biden had branded “MAGA Republicans” as “semi-fascists.” There is no rise of fascism in the US today, but Biden’s Philadelphia performance did call up images of Nuremberg rallies. It was staged against the backdrop of garish red lighting, with two active duty Marines in uniform flanking an American flag. In defiance of government and US Armed Forces policy against uniformed soldiers being used at political events, the Democratic administration mobilized Marine sentries and had the Marine Band play “Hail to the Chief” as Biden walked to the podium. The talk was so flagrantly a political event, not a presidential address to the nation, that all television networks but two (MSNBC and CNN) refused White House requests to broadcast it live. Even more, Biden’s speech posed a brazen threat to the people’s constitutional rights.
Class-conscious workers, the trade unions, and organizations of the oppressed and exploited must unconditionally oppose anti-constitutional assaults by the government on freedom of worship and speech; freedom of the press, association, and assembly; prohibition of “unreasonable search and seizure”; and other liberties needed and used by the toilers.
That’s true whether the target is a former US president; a football coach who takes a knee to pray; a family persecuted for publicly affirming their religious beliefs and practices; leaders of a small Black nationalist organization; a Cuba solidarity committee; fighters for Puerto Rican independence; a striking United Mine Workers local or embattled union rail workers; farmers indicted for grazing livestock on public lands; a speaker, author, or teacher “canceled” by the “woke”; prisoners denied the Militant newsweekly and other reading material; or Socialist Workers Party candidates.
Whoever the target today, it is working people who will be targeted tomorrow.
“We stand for freedom of speech and assembly in principle — not just for us, but for everybody,” insisted Farrell Dobbs in the Political Report adopted by the June 1961 SWP convention, reaffirming longtime party policy.
In August 2022 the Biden administration’s “Justice Department” staged a nine-hour raid on former president Trump’s Florida home, carried out by more than thirty FBI and Secret Service agents, many of them heavily armed. Long experience has taught class-conscious workers that when the government, in a violent or threatening manner, takes aim at a rival capitalist politician or party, the same methods and worse have been and will again be used by the rulers to harass and disrupt union battles, struggles by working farmers, opponents of Washington’s wars, fighters for Black liberation, and communists.
As Leon Trotsky forcefully reminded us in 1939, “Under conditions of the bourgeois regime, all suppression of political rights and freedom, no matter whom they are directed against in the beginning, in the end inevitably bear down upon the working class, particularly its most advanced elements. That is a law of history.”
2) In September 1939 the Democratic Party administration of Franklin Roosevelt issued a “Presidential Directive” to ensure “the internal safety of our country.” That executive order initiated a transformation of the FBI, which up to then had been a federal police force pursuing interstate law-breaking, financial fraud, and organized crime, a force most of whose field agents were lawyers or accountants. It was reborn as a federal political police acting at the behest of the president, whichever party occupied the White House. Its agents carried arms as a matter of course. The FBI was now aimed above all at stabilizing and preserving the capitalist state, as preparations accelerated for the US rulers to take the country into the expanding imperialist slaughter.
Long-established “red squads,” “bomb squads,” and “radical units” of state and local police departments, as well as company goons and other private security forces, were no longer sufficient to the global needs of US finance capital. Even under conditions of bourgeois democracy, the imperialist ruling class, whose executive committee sits in Washington, must have a national political police able to operate secretly and largely with impunity. During World War II the FBI was in charge of counterintelligence, and after 1945 it competed with the newly established Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency in counterespionage operations.
Roosevelt’s 1939 executive order instructed the FBI “to take charge of” investigations related to “espionage,” “counterespionage,” “neutrality laws,” and, most importantly for the working class, what his administration called “subversive activities.” The latter was an undefined and elastic term calculated to include militant trade unionism, independent working-class political action, and, above all, any determined opposition to the US rulers’ entry into the second imperialist world war.
The same month Roosevelt signed the executive order, the New Deal White House unleashed the freshly minted political police against the rising class-struggle leadership of the working class. FBI agents in Nebraska and Iowa raided the homes of union militants in Omaha, Des Moines, and Sioux City who were leaders of the Teamsters Midwest over-the-road organizing drive. Framed up on charges of transporting a stolen truck across state lines and burning it, seven Teamsters leaders were railroaded to federal prison. It was an unmistakable warning to the most advanced layers of the US working class.
By 1942, soon after Washington’s formal entry into the war, the FBI was getting regular reports about union and political activity from some twenty-four thousand informers in four thousand factories, mines, and mills across the US. The Minneapolis-based Teamsters organizing drive and their leaders were central targets of this massive undercover operation.
FBI agents organized snitches and provocateurs in Teamsters Local 544 to slander and frame up central leaders of the unionization drive. Many of those trade unionists were leading cadres of the Socialist Workers Party. In June 1941 the FBI raided the SWP’s public headquarters, libraries, and bookstores in Minneapolis and in St. Paul, accompanied by reporters and photographers from the cities’ main dailies and national wire services. The federal cops seized cartons of books, pamphlets, issues of the Militant, and other publications. This “search and seizure,” carried out in violation of the Constitution, was sensationalized across front pages the next day.
In July 1941 Roosevelt’s Justice Department handed down indictments against twenty-nine SWP and Local 544 leaders. The government’s aim was to cripple the unionization drive and behead the developing class-struggle union leadership. Above all it aimed to silence the forces in the labor movement campaigning to a growing working-class audience against the US rulers’ rationalizations for dragging them into the unfolding imperialist war being fought from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
The indictment had two counts: (1) “conspiracy to overthrow the government by force and violence,” in violation of the 1861 Seditious Conspiracy Act, originally aimed at leaders of the secessionists who soon formed the Confederate States of America; and (2) “conspiracy to advocate [emphasis added] the overthrow of the government by force and violence.” The thought-control Smith Act, under which the second count was lodged, had been signed into law by Roosevelt only months earlier in 1940. It was used by the government for the first time in this frame-up. All those indicted were acquitted on the seditious conspiracy charge. Eighteen were convicted under the “conspiracy to advocate” clause of the Smith Act and sent to prison on sentences of up to sixteen months.
The Socialist Workers Party, through the Militant and other avenues, took the political lead in getting the truth out to working people, the labor movement, and beyond about the anti-working-class purpose and anti-constitutional activities of the newly consolidated political police. This included the party’s initiative in launching the Civil Rights Defense Committee to wage an international defense campaign to combat the frame-up and win freedom for those imprisoned. Organized in the midst of World War II, the campaign won broad support in the unions and from Black rights and other organizations, despite vicious opposition from the Communist Party and the labor, Black, and civil rights groups it influenced.
3) In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the SWP again broke new ground in combating government assaults on constitutional rights through our political campaign and federal lawsuit against the FBI, US Attorney General, and other political police agencies.
With the rise of the “Cold War” after World War II, Washington escalated its use of informers, harassment tactics, break-ins, phone taps, and other unconstitutional methods. Among those the government targeted were the rising proletarian-based movement to smash Jim Crow segregation, as well as Malcolm X and numerous Black liberation organizations; those demanding fair play for Cuba and organizing solidarity with Cuba’s socialist revolution; participants in and leaders of the fight to end US imperialism’s war against the Vietnamese people, including citizen-soldiers exercising their constitutional rights; militant trade unionists and labor struggles; and the emerging fight for women’s emancipation.
The SWP was actively involved in all these struggles. Moreover, as we had done from our communist origins in 1919, we distinguished ourselves as principled and uncompromising defenders of all targets of government frame-ups.
In 1949 eleven Communist Party leaders were tried and convicted in federal court under the Smith Act. This was the very same repressive legislation that only a few years earlier had been used by the Roosevelt administration — cheered on by the CP leadership — to railroad to prison leaders of the Midwest Teamsters and the SWP. Farrell Dobbs, who became national secretary of the SWP in 1953, covered on the scene the nine-month frame-up trial week in and week out for the Militant, and we campaigned for the release of the CP leaders after their imprisonment for the maximum sentence of five years.
In the mid-1960s the SWP championed a successful four-year-long effort to defend three members of the Young Socialist Alliance in Bloomington, Indiana, indicted under the state Anti-Communism Act in May 1963 for “assembling” during the October 1962 “Cuban missile crisis” to advocate the overthrow of the State of Indiana by force and violence.
The FBI launched undercover disruption operations — so-called Cointelpro programs — against the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialist Alliance, the Communist Party, Black rights organizations, Chicano and Mexicano groups, American Indian militants, and many others. Opponents of government policies were fired from jobs and evicted from apartments. FBI agents instigated and fomented factional divisions, “agent baiting,” and race-baiting within and among groups susceptible to such dirty tricks, leading to expulsions, splits, and sometimes beatings or murders.
In flagrant defiance of the Fourth Amendment’s guarantees against “unreasonable search and seizure,” the FBI conducted pervasive wiretapping and opened mail of targeted organizations and individuals. The FBI acknowledged in court more than two hundred burglaries of Socialist Workers Party offices (“black bag jobs,” in thuggish FBI lingo), and admitted that the agency had collected ten million pages of files on the SWP and on its members.
Federal District Judge Thomas Griesa’s 1986 decision in the lawsuit filed by the SWP and YSA against Washington’s political police concluded that the government had produced “no evidence that any FBI informant ever reported an instance of planned or actual espionage, violence, [or] terrorism” by the party or any of its members. The judge ruled that the FBI’s use of undercover informers, its Cointelpro operations, and its “black bag jobs” were “violations of the constitutional rights of the SWP and lacked legislative or regulatory authority.”
The party’s campaign and the victory won for the SWP and YSA helped keep political space open for all working people to speak, organize, and act — not only with respect to the electoral and judicial arenas, but also the party’s own working-class terrain: in factories, fields, and mines; at picket lines and on the streets; at bull sessions in soldiers’ barracks; and at political events and social protests of all kinds. In short, wherever the exploited and oppressed classes are thinking politically, discussing, and fighting back.
The SWP’s victory helped keep political space open for all to speak, organize, and act on its working-class terrain — the factories, fields, and mines; in picket lines, the streets, and soldiers’ barracks . . .
exposure of FBI trampling on constitutional guarantees of our freedoms had been made twelve years earlier, in a 1974 federal Department of Justice memorandum written by Antonin Scalia, an assistant attorney general who later served on the US Supreme Court. Scalia was the most influential, and useful, Supreme Court justice of the latter twentieth century and opening fifteen years of the twenty-first. The FBI had rejected a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by SWP member Morris Starsky to receive secret Cointelpro documents relevant to the fight against his politically motivated firing as a professor at Arizona State University.
Scalia recommended to the Justice Department that the FBI’s objections be overruled. He pointed out that one requested document was an anonymous letter from a “concerned alumnus” fingering Starsky as an SWP member, aimed at “discrediting him in his academic community.” Citing “national defense” prerogatives, the FBI had also rejected other requests by Starsky’s attorney. But the agency did so, Scalia wrote, “without any indication or suspicion that [Starsky] obtained any defense secrets or had any connection whatever with foreign powers.”
“In the last analysis,” Scalia concluded, “the only policy reason for withholding most of the requested documents is to prevent a citizen from discovering the existence of possible misconduct and abuse of government power directed against him. In my view, this is not only no reason for asserting the exemption; it is a positive reason for declining to use it. . . . The obtaining of information of this sort is perhaps the most important reason for which the Freedom of Information Act exists.”
4) Democrats, liberals, the “left,” and “woke,” so-called social justice warriors — not rightist or other reactionary forces — have led the assault against constitutional protections and freedoms in recent decades.
The Clinton White House established the first federal “counterintelligence czar.” In the wake of 9/11, this paved the way for what is now called the Director of National Intelligence, centralizing federal political police operations spanning the FBI, CIA, military intelligence, and other agencies. To cite just a few among many measures undermining constitutional freedoms, the Clinton administration’s 1994 Crime Bill eroded Fourth Amendment “search and seizure” safeguards, and in 1996 imposed its Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act — “Effective Death Penalty”! — which introduced “preventive detention” and use of “secret evidence.”
Clinton’s Justice Department led the cover-up of the murderous 1992 assault by FBI and ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms) sharpshooters on a family at Ruby Ridge in Idaho. During a standoff late in the George H. W. Bush administration, the unarmed mother (holding a baby in her arms) and her teenage son were shot and killed. As for the father, who was wounded by FBI snipers, all charges were later dropped except for failure to appear for a court date (the pretext for the massive armed assault). The Clinton White House followed up the next year with its own FBI siege and assault on the compound of the Branch Davidian religious group, resulting in the slaughter of more than eighty people near Waco, Texas.
Sharpening conflicts over race-baiting, Jew-hatred, ‘gender ideology,’ freedom of speech and worship ultimately reflect class divisions . . .
In 1998 the Clinton administration ordered predawn FBI raids on the south Florida homes of the Cuban Five — Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González, and René González — framing them up and sending them to federal prison on charges including conspiracy to commit espionage and, in one case, conspiracy to commit murder. Two years later, the administration unconstitutionally deployed 131 Immigration and Naturalization Service agents and twenty US marshals, many armed with assault weapons, for a middle-of-the-night raid on a private home in Miami. These federal commandos forcibly seized six-year-old Elián González, whom Washington had previously been refusing to return to his father’s custody in Cuba.
That military-style operation “dealt a stunning blow to the right of every US resident to be ‘secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,’ as provided by the US Constitution’s Fourth Amendment,” declared a front-page Militant editorial that week. “Every step taken by the US ruling class to close political space for working people within the United States . . . is a blow against the Cuban Revolution as well.”
Following the initiatives of the Clinton White House, the Obama administration expanded internet and phone wiretapping, resurrecting the 1917 Espionage Act to spy on the Associated Press, a Fox News reporter, and other journalists and government “whistle-blowers.”
In 2016 the Democratic administration, in collusion with like-minded FBI officials and Hillary Clinton campaign operatives, fabricated and paid for salacious slanders that Trump was a pawn of Moscow, lies they continued to spread during Trump’s term in the White House and since.
And in 2010 and 2011, also during the Obama administration, the FBI raided the private homes of individuals in Chicago, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles in connection with “investigations” of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization and other groups; prosecutors’ threats of indictments and Grand Jury inquisitions were baseless and soon collapsed.
Under the Biden administration there have been FBI raids and seizures of documents and electronic devices from individuals associated with Donald Trump and his presidential campaigns. There have also been FBI raids connected to investigations of the so-called January 6 insurrection.
And just days before the Mar-a-Lago operation, there were FBI raids against the Uhuru movement and the African People’s Socialist Party on charges of being agents of Russia. Those assaults were followed a few weeks later by attempted FBI interrogations of some sixty people in Puerto Rico who had taken part in a solidarity brigade to Cuba.
5) The sharpening political and social conflicts in the US over race-baiting, Jew-hatred, “gender ideology,” freedom of religious expression, Second Amendment rights, vaccinations, school curricula, “cancel culture,” immigration, and other matters are not only an expression of divisions in bourgeois politics between Democrats and Republicans, “conservative Red states” and “liberal Blue states,” or “left” and “right.” Whatever the camouflage, they ultimately reflect class divisions.
This class polarization is accelerating under the impact of US and world capitalism’s profit-driven crises of production and trade. As the obscene wealth of the Gateses, Zuckerbergs, Waltons, and Musks grows, to say nothing of the Rockefellers, Mellons, DuPonts, and other longtime ruling-class families, the deterioration of living and job conditions of working people and our families undercuts all pretense that “a rising tide lifts all boats.”
In the wake of billions of dollars of pandemic handouts, as well as sharp reductions in capitalist investment, production, and trade, the prices of food, fuel, housing, health care, and other necessities are rising (boats no, prices yes!). An extended period of stagflation, combining inflation with stagnating capitalist production and hiring, is increasingly likely both in the US and worldwide.
Even the share of workers in the US who are part of the workforce — that is, those who hold down a job or are looking for work — has declined since the late 1990s. For men between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-four, this so-called labor-force participation rate has fallen sharply, from 97 percent in 1960 to 88 percent today. Real wages, adjusted for inflation, have stagnated since the 1970s. The birth rate is falling. Life expectancy in the US has declined to seventy-six years, its lowest level in more than a quarter century.
Exploited farmers face skyrocketing prices for fuel, seed, fertilizer, equipment, and other supplies. At the same time, reaping vast profits from land speculation, capitalists — from the likes of superrich “philanthropist” Bill Gates, to wealthy farmers and agricultural corporations — buy up more and more farm acreage, driving up land prices and preventing small farmers from obtaining enough to be economically viable. Much of this accumulation has occurred under the guise of promoting “environmental protection.”
Working farmers face skyrocketing prices for fuel, seed, and fertilizer, as well as restrictions on access to water. Many are pushed deeper into debt, and forced off the land . . .
State and federal regulatory bureaus, such as water boards, groundwater agencies, the US Environmental Protection Agency, and various environmental bodies on state and local levels, increasingly tighten restrictions on access to water to the benefit of large-scale capitalist agriculture. Working farmers are pushed deeper into debt and often off the land entirely. Ranchers have no choice but to sell off all or part of their herds. Available water in rural communities, especially in drought-stricken areas, is vastly depleted, leaving many with wells gone dry. Every opportunity to drive a wedge between exploited producers on the land and working people in cities and small towns is promoted.
Working people the world over confront either comparably declining conditions, or much worse in the oppressed countries of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and the Caribbean.
Neither we nor anyone else can predict the direction of economic trends immediately ahead, or exactly how the class struggle will unfold. Amid inevitable cycles of capitalist business and trade, however, economic upturns will affect the working class, bolstering confidence and readiness to struggle. We’ve seen examples of this fact in the post-pandemic strikes and union struggles in the US, as we did during slumps and recoveries in the Great Depression of the 1930s.
What we do know is that whatever happens in capitalist economic and social life and the class struggle, our political course and program remain unchanged. Through building the unions and our conduct as unionists together with all other union members, we will respond to and advance the interests of our class and all the exploited.
6) Political and military alignments — “spheres of influence” that had shaped the global imperialist order since Washington emerged as the dominant power coming out of World War II — are being shaken and new alliances between competing states put together. Working people the world over are hit by the effects of growing global conflicts over trade, currency, raw materials, and immigration.
The first full-scale war between two state powers on the European continent in more than seventy-five years is now raging. Ignited by the assault of the secret-police-based capitalist regime of Vladimir Putin against Ukraine’s national sovereignty and independence, that still-unfolding war has consequences that are only beginning to be registered worldwide.
Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, and the economic, political, and military shifts and uncertainties it creates, are temporarily overshadowing other “great power” conflicts, such as the long-smoldering confrontation between China and the US-led imperialist governments in the Pacific.
Tehran’s expansionist drive to extend the bourgeois clerical regime’s military and economic domination across the Middle East continues to pose the threat of an expanded conflagration. These perils are multiplied by the Iranian capitalist rulers’ declared aim of eliminating the State of Israel, home to nearly half the world’s Jews. Tehran’s accelerated course toward developing and deploying a strategic nuclear arsenal endangers all those throughout the region and beyond.
The most important curb to this danger is Iran’s working people — of Persian, Kurdish, Azerbaijani, Arab, and other national origins — who have protested in massive numbers in cities, villages, and rural areas in 2018, 2019, and again in 2022, in defiance of the regime and all its wings.
Workers, farmers, women, and youth are demanding affordable prices for food and fuel. An end to oppressive dress codes for women, enforced by the “morality” police. Language rights and other freedoms for oppressed nationalities. Restitution of unpaid wages, and protection of water rights. The freedom to speak their minds, organize, and act in their own class interests. They want no more of Tehran’s counterrevolutionary military adventures across Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, and beyond. No more body bags, funerals, and sacrifice at working people’s expense and the enrichment of Iran’s capitalist rulers.
7) Increasing class polarization and instability across the imperialist world order drive home the accuracy of the assessment in the party’s 1990 convention resolution, “US Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War,” that the collapse of the counterrevolutionary Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union would not bring about “a lessening danger of the use of nuclear weapons.”
To the contrary, the resolution pointed out, the more governments that possess nuclear arsenals, “and the more class, national, and state conflicts intensify the world over, the greater the dangers that one of these capitalist regimes will resort to the use of nuclear weapons in the face of extreme pressure.”
The possibility of the use of weapons of mass destruction in today’s world can be seen not only in Tehran’s drive to develop nuclear arms and delivery systems. Such a prospect is also underscored by Putin’s nuclear saber rattling, in face of growing setbacks to his regime’s efforts to crush Ukraine’s national independence and sovereignty.
The Moscow regime confronts mounting battlefield defeats; demoralization and disaffection among its troops; opposition from wide layers of working people and the middle classes at home; and antagonism, overt and covert, among bourgeois rivals atop Russia’s largest enterprises (who are cut off from profitable trade and financial markets) and within the state apparatus itself.
The governments of China, India, Turkey, and even Belarus are publicly taking greater distance from Putin, as are the governments of the Central Asian and South Caucasian republics, which gained independence from the disintegrating Soviet Union in 1991. None of the former Soviet republics in Asia and the Caucasus have recognized Putin’s “annexations” in Ukraine.
In Asia and the Pacific, there will be growing consequences to Biden’s repeated avowals (not “flubs”) that Washington will respond militarily to any aggression by Beijing seeking to impose its direct dominance over Taiwan. As this confrontation escalates, the regime in China has cracked down harshly on political opposition in Hong Kong, and on the predominantly Muslim Uighur minority in China’s Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. It has fortified armed outposts on Pacific island chains claimed by other Asian regimes, from imperial Japan to Vietnam, the Philippines, and others.
And Washington maintains its deployment of some 28,000 troops and massive armaments in South Korea and is stepping up joint military maneuvers with Seoul, targeting the nuclear-armed government of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
In the decades since Washington unleashed atomic bombs on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the party’s 1990 convention resolution notes, the US rulers considered using nuclear weapons several times but decided not to. Washington publicly weighed such an option during the Korean War (newly liberated China would also have been a target); during the murderous, decade-long assault on the Vietnamese freedom struggle; as well as against the Cuban Revolution in its opening years.
“Only socialist revolutions in the imperialist countries can bring the danger of a world nuclear conflagration to an end once and for all,” the 1990 SWP resolution states. That requires building “a revolutionary working-class movement powerful enough to overthrow the US capitalist rulers and disarm them,” which in turn “requires a course toward building a proletarian communist party as part of a world communist movement.”
No nonproliferation zones, arms limitation treaties, or diplomatic pacts between imperialist powers and other nuclear-armed regimes can or will advance the fight to stop the global spread and eventual use of such weapons. Nor will the call for unilateral nuclear disarmament of Washington and other governments. No propertied ruling class is going to disarm and risk its own wealth and power, while its competitors and enemies remain nuclear-armed to the teeth.
“‘Disarmament’?” asks our 1938 founding resolution, the Transitional Program, drafted by Leon Trotsky. “But the entire question revolves around who will disarm whom. The only disarmament which can avert or end war is the disarmament of the bourgeoisie by the workers.” That became more true, not less, with the advent of nuclear weapons.
As communists and other class-conscious workers organize to advance a revolutionary struggle for workers power in the United States, our guide on these political and programmatic questions, as with many others, is the Transitional Program, including its section, “The struggle against imperialism and war.”
“Not one man and not one penny” for the imperialist government, its budget, and its war machine, states our program, summing up one central aspect of our proletarian internationalist continuity from the Bolsheviks under Lenin to this day.
As Lenin wrote in the article “The ‘Disarmament’ Slogan” in 1916: “Only after the proletariat has disarmed the bourgeoisie will it be able, without betraying its world-historic mission, to consign all armaments to the scrap-heap.” All, for us, includes conventional and nuclear weapons.
8) Amid the social and political crises driven by the laws of capital, the importance of the US working class safeguarding and using the freedoms and protections recognized and enumerated in the US Constitution is posed ever more clearly.
Bourgeois and upper-middle-class political forces, organized especially in the imperialist Democratic Party today, are seeking to disenfranchise those the liberals and the “left” scorn as benighted working people, whom they increasingly fear, as well. Dubbed “irredeemables” and “deplorables” by Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election, these workers, farmers, and others are often today called “the MAGA Republican voters” — thus vastly and magically increasing their numbers into the tens of millions.
Proposals by the “enlightened” meritocracy and their hangers-on to eviscerate or even abolish the US Senate and Electoral College are being openly voiced within the Democratic Party and its “progressive,” “democratic socialist,” and assorted radical and “woke” wings. Such schemes remain unlikely to succeed, since they require amending the Constitution. What appears more in reach to many liberals, however, is seeking to entrench four more “safe seat” Democratic US Senators, as well as several additional congresspeople, by imposing statehood on Puerto Rico and Washington, DC.
The proletarian party’s unconditional defense of the constitutional freedom of worship is indivisible from our defense of freedom of speech and assembly . . .
So does manipulating or packing the courts to hand over more and more law-making to unelected judges, proposals that also have support among many Democratic Party “progressives.” The aim is to nullify the political voice and influence of working people in what many liberals and the left disdain as “flyover country.” To sideline those “bitter” people in “small towns,” who, in the words of Barack Obama, “cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.”
It’s with similar goals in mind that liberal middle-class layers have also gained yardage in increasing the unconstitutional policy-making and enforcement authority of government regulatory agencies and administrative bureaucracies, with their staffs of “experts,” technocrats, and often their own specialized police forces. These span from the Internal Revenue Service to the National Labor Relations Board, from the Environmental Protection Agency to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and countless more.
The 2022 US Supreme Court decision rejecting the constitutionality of Biden administration actions — having failed to gain a majority in Congress to legislate its “climate change” proposals — to instead impose these policies through the EPA, was a setback to rule through fiat by bureaucracies. It was a setback, however temporary, to the tendency toward Bonapartism in the imperialist epoch.
The Supreme Court in recent years has handed down decisions limiting government encroachments on other constitutional freedoms, as well. Several rulings have upheld the First Amendment right to “free exercise” of religion. These include court opinions permitting a high school coach to pray on the field at the end of a game; barring a state government from excluding religiously affiliated schools from access to public funding available to similar private schools with no religious connection; and reversing discriminatory government restrictions on holding religious services because of COVID quarantines.
The proletarian party’s unconditional defense of the constitutional freedom of worship is indivisible from its defense of freedom of speech and assembly.
In recent years, Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan has helped popularize among the self-designated enlightened the term “weaponizing the First Amendment.” By this catchphrase, increasingly invoked by “progressives” and the “left,” Kagan and others mean the alleged abuse of the Constitution’s protection of freedom of speech and the press to air what the meritocracy considers “unacceptable” views, whether by opponents of abortion clinics, foes of so-called Critical Race Theory, advocates for the freedom to worship, or others.
At the same time, anti-working-class race-baiting, wokery, and “cancel culture” on the bourgeois and petty bourgeois left are fueling a rise of de facto book banning, the cancelation or disruption of speaking events and political debates, firings, and more. Both on the bourgeois left and right, school authorities and library boards are stripping books from shelves and classrooms — from Art Spiegelman’s Maus to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, from Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl to Toni Morrison’s Beloved. State and federal prison officials have been following suit.
9) The US Constitution is a bourgeois document, the supreme law of the land enshrining in writing the class dictatorship and property relations of what is today the world’s final empire. When first drafted in the 1780s, as a product of the victory of the First American Revolution, the Constitution balanced the factional interests of Northern merchant capital and the plantation-based capital of the Southern slavocracy. By the mid-1800s that shaky ruling-class coalition erupted into the “inevitable conflict,” the battle over secession. The resulting bloody civil war was the final manifestation of the mounting threat posed by the expansion of chattel slavery to the continent-wide consolidation of US commercial, banking, and industrial capital.
Protections of the US Constitution limiting the reach of the bourgeois state are deeply in the interests of workers and our allies among other exploited producers . . .
Also from the day the Constitution was ratified on June 21, 1788, there were struggles by small farmers, craftsmen, mechanics, and other plebeian layers, former slaves and bonded laborers, and later the rapidly expanding hereditary proletariat and other exploited producers to protect their class interests within this new governmental structure. Through hard-fought battles, they won amendments — changes — to the Constitution that provide protections from the state and exploiting class on whose behalf it rules.
These rights, in addition to others widely established well before the first American Revolution, introduce a degree of rule by law and written boundaries on the rulers’ license to run roughshod over popular and regional interests, rural as well as urban, and other expressions of social, cultural, religious, race, and national diversity among the toiling majority of a vast continent.
There is not a “Constitution,” plus a separate Bill of Rights and other amendments. The twenty-seven current amendments are part of the US Constitution. These include the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, often called “the Reconstruction Amendments,” which are conquests of the Second American Revolution.
Due to these historical origins and class battles, the US Constitution includes universal rights limiting the reach of the bourgeois state, protections that are deeply in the interests of workers and our allies among working farmers, owner-operator truckers, fishermen, small proprietors, and other exploited producers.
Standing guard against assaults on freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution is indispensable to engaging in the revolutionary class struggle necessary to prepare a vanguard of the working class capable, as conditions demand, of initiating and leading workers defense guards in the unions. Defense guards that can take on and defeat rightist and fascist forces that will organize at the service of the employing class with the aim of crushing the labor movement and its allies in face of a proletarian challenge to the rule of capital.
This course is central to the communist program, continuity, and practice of the Socialist Workers Party, along the line of march toward a revolutionary struggle for workers power.