The following statement was released Aug. 9 by Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, on behalf of the party’s National Committee.
The Socialist Workers Party calls on working people, the labor movement, and all supporters of constitutional liberties to mount a defense of The People’s Forum, BreakThrough News and Tricontinental: Institute of Social Research.
These three organizations have been hit with federal government subpoenas ordering them to turn over financial records and disclose the identity of contributors. This is a dangerous attack on constitutional protections guaranteed to all — an assault on our freedom of speech, freedom of political association and freedom from unwarranted search and seizure.
The U.S. House Ways and Means Committee, which issued the summons July 21, pretends its investigation serves a legislative purpose. The actual goal is to pave the way for further crackdowns on constitutionally protected political and union activity by working people, the labor movement and organizations of the oppressed.
Jason Smith, chairman of the House committee, accuses People’s Forum of “using tax exempt status to spread foreign propaganda while acting as a foreign agent.” So-called agent-of-a-foreign-power laws have long been central to the capitalist state’s “national security” arsenal. Their aim is to silence individuals and organizations who speak out against Washington’s foreign policy and who organize opposition to wars and military interventions trampling on the national sovereignty of other peoples and lands.
The immediate target today is all those who are opposed to the U.S. government’s bipartisan drive to defame and destroy the example of Cuba’s working people and their socialist revolution.
Government witch-hunters this year have publicly dubbed these organizations and individuals “Cuba’s procommunist ecosystem.” Anyone demanding “Hands off Cuba!” is on the watch list.
Using the pretext that Cuba — by its mere geographical location, as well as its independence from U.S. imperialist control — is an “unusual threat” to U.S. national security, Washington this year has tightened even more brutally its decades-long denial to the Cuban people of elementary food, medical, energy and other basic needs. These latest U.S. government moves are combined with renewed threats of military aggression.
In the wake of World War I and the victorious Bolshevik-led revolution in Russia, the imperialist government in Washington organized sweeping attacks on working-class organizations and the foreign born. Repressive “foreign agents” legislation and prosecutions were qualitatively stepped up by the Democratic Party administration of Franklin Roosevelt in the mid-1930s. The U.S. rulers were determined to gag and victimize opponents of their entry into World War II, a global conflagration they saw as an opportunity to emerge as top dog in the capitalist world.
Government spying, harassment and frame-up prosecutions have been a staple ever since, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, enforced by the rulers’ political police, the FBI first and foremost. The first targets in the years leading up to that second imperialist world slaughter were leaders of the Socialist Workers Party and powerful Teamsters union over-the-road organizing drives, who were mobilizing the fight in the labor movement to expose and oppose U.S. capital’s war aims.
The House Committee’s subpoena this summer demanding that the three groups hand over financial books and name donors is an assault on freedom of association. These same methods have been and will be used to harass and disrupt union battles, struggles for Black liberation, defense of immigrant workers, fights for women’s equality and organizations of working farmers.
Long experience has taught class-conscious workers that no matter who the target is today, it is the working class and organizations of workers and the oppressed who will be in the bull’s-eye tomorrow.
The House committee chairman openly acknowledges the goal of using this “investigation” to tighten federal restrictions against educational, informational and cultural organizations with tax-exempt status, which he and other government voices allege are spreading “anti-American” propaganda. And to deny such organizations their tax-exempt status altogether.
If the assault on the constitutional protections of the three organizations now in the sights of the federal government is not turned back, everyone’s rights are in growing danger.
The SWP urges unions, other political organizations in the workers movement and all defenders of constitutional liberties to demand an end to this political police operation.
Quash the subpoenas!