The defense of constitutional freedoms key in class struggle

By Brian Williams
December 30, 2024

Defending freedom of speech, assembly, religion, the right to bear arms and other constitutional rights from attack by the rulers and the FBI remains at the center of working-class politics today. These freedoms provide working people with protection from government interference in union and political activity.

They were won in class battles over two and a half centuries, including in two popular revolutions. The first succeeded in gaining independence from British colonial rule and the second in overturning slavery.

These freedoms were put to use in the class struggles that forged industrial unions in the 1930s; by the movement that uprooted Jim Crow segregation in the 1950s and ’60s; in fights against Washington’s wars from Korea to Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan and others; and in efforts since 1919 to build a communist party in the U.S.

Spying, harassment and frame-up operations by the FBI, the rulers’ political police, are key to their offensive against working people. Under both Democrats and Republicans, the government continually seeks ways to refurbish the reputation and expand the use of its foremost political police agency.

A historic victory against government spying was won by the Socialist Workers Party’s lawsuit and political campaign against the FBI, begun in 1973. A court ruling in 1986 found the FBI’s use of informers, its burglaries and wiretappings of SWP headquarters, and its covert disruption of party activity and the lives of SWP members were unconstitutional.

Over the past nine years the FBI has been used by liberal forces, supported by the middle-class left, to target President-elect Donald Trump in a failed campaign to drive him and his “deplorable” working-class supporters out of politics.

A review by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General Dec. 12 admitted that the FBI had at least 26 informants at the Jan. 6, 2021, melee at the Capitol in Washington, D.C. Four entered the Capitol and 13 went into a restricted area. Three of the snitches were tasked with reporting on people attending the event and an undisclosed number provided FBI bosses with on-the-scene updates.

Last July FBI Director Christopher Wray refused to tell Congress whether FBI agents had been involved.

The Justice Department’s review was launched days after the fracas, but the report claims it was necessary to withhold the findings until now. Acknowledging the presence of informers might “interfere” with the prosecution of the many hundreds of people who have been locked up, government officials said.

Liberals unleash FBI on opponents

After Trump said he is nominating Kash Patel to be FBI director, Wray announced Dec. 11 he will resign. In another recent Justice Department report, the FBI admitted it spied on Patel starting in late 2017 when he played a prominent part in a House Intelligence Committee investigation into the FBI’s role in slandering and framing Trump for “Russian collusion.” This charge was concocted by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Patel says the FBI couldn’t openly snoop on his work exposing the sham charges, but instead pried into his Google account and then got a court order gagging Google from informing him.

Democrats are seeking to remake the image of the FBI, to turn it into a progressive, woke agency to target forces like Trump that they smear as “fascist.”

In a sweeping attack on the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, some 30 heavily armed FBI agents raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in August 2022, claiming they were looking for evidence that Trump had illegally stashed classified documents there.

Political police target the working class

While targeting Trump, these attacks are more broadly aimed at the working class. The FBI has targeted a number of people who they view as “foreign agents” — including leaders of the African People’s Socialist Party and Scott Ritter, a former United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq, both of whom Joseph Biden’s Justice Department claims have untoward relations with Russia.

Under Wray’s watch, the FBI has also targeted Catholics. A memo last year from its Richmond, Virginia, office described Catholic groups that worship with the traditional Latin Mass as potential “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists.”

And many parents have been outraged over Attorney General Merrick Garland ordering the FBI to snoop on parents speaking out at school board meetings about not being informed about gender-related instruction in schools that affect their children.

The use of government spies has gone hand in hand with increasingly open attacks on free speech. Upper-middle-class layers consider views that differ from theirs as “unacceptable,” whether it’s opponents of abortion clinics, foes of so-called critical race theory, advocates for the freedom to worship or others.