The Democrats yearslong efforts to use the FBI and frame-up court cases to bring down Donald Trump pose serious challenges to the working class. In the course of their attacks, and counterattacks by the Republicans, blows are being dealt to constitutional freedoms we need.
The U.S. Constitution provides protection from interference by the government and its political police: freedom of speech, worship, assembly and more. It includes “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms,” ensuring working people have the means to defend ourselves as we exercise all other rights. It provides the right to trial by jury and to legal counsel, bars unreasonable searches and seizures, or cruel and unusual punishment, and guarantees the right to vote.
These political conquests were won by working people in the course of the First American Revolution and extended during the Second American Revolution that uprooted slavery. The Black-led movement that tore down Jim Crow segregation helped ensure these freedoms could be exercised.
These protections are used in all struggles by workers and the oppressed. The latest courtroom attacks on Trump highlight the importance of safeguarding them. The Socialist Workers Party has set an example for working people everywhere on these questions.
“All suppression of political rights” under capitalism, wrote Leon Trotsky a leader of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, “no matter who they are directed against in the beginning, in the end inevitably bear down on the working class and its most advanced elements.”
All the institutions of the U.S. rulers’ state exist to advance the interests of the capitalist rulers against the working class, here and around the world. And the U.S. Constitution codifies capitalist rule. But it also bears the stamp of revolutionary upheavals by working people and the conquests that came out of these battles.
The very need for constitutional protections shows the state is not neutral — as Democrats and Republicans, the capitalist media and our school teachers always claim. It is an instrument of the ruling class against the toiling majority.
This fundamental class character of the U.S. government was missing from the article in the last issue of the Militant, “Democrats attack Constitution, weaken checks on gov’t power.”
The Constitution’s separation of the powers between Congress, the presidency and the Supreme Court offers a check on what different sections of the rulers can do against each other, and against us. It’s an important protection that’s under attack today.
But when the article described the Supreme Court as “the apex of an independent judiciary,” it made it appear as something outside class reality. Like the other two government branches, it’s not “independent” of the ruling class. It exists to serve them.
Clarity on all questions about the state is central to workers understanding of what we are up against and what we must organize to overturn, if we’re to take political power into our own hands and create a government based on our needs. In the course of revolutionary struggles to replace capitalist rule, workers will make use of every constitutional protection and we’ll fight to extend them. That’s why defending these freedoms today is indispensable.
And when working people have established our own class rule, we’ll combine gains from past struggles with new institutions that facilitate the toiling majority — now the ruling class — in taking control over all aspects of social, economic and political life.
In the course of doing so, we’ll have a lot we can learn from the experiences of the Bolshevik Revolution led by V.I. Lenin and Cuba’s socialist revolution led by Fidel Castro.