The Low Point of Labor Resistance Is Behind Us: The Socialist Workers Party Looks Forward by Jack Barnes, Mary-Alice Waters and Steve Clark is one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for September. The excerpt is from the opening section of the SWP’s December 2022 Political Resolution, “Opposing US rulers’ assaults on freedoms protected by the Constitution and their use of the political police.” It outlines the course of action the party projects to build a mass revolutionary party in the U.S. and an international communist movement able to lead the working class to end capitalist rule. Copyright © 2023 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
BOOKS OF
THE MONTH
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. …
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. …
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. …
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.”
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 counter-espionage operations. …
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.
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. …
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.