“Defending and extending the freedoms protected by the US Constitution is at the center of the class struggle,” the Socialist Workers Party said in its political resolution adopted in 2022. “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.”

Today the U.S. rulers are deepening their drive against workers’ wages and conditions, sharpening conflicts with rivals abroad and accelerating their brutal blockade, seeking to overturn Cuba’s socialist revolution. In the imperialist epoch, capitalist rulers everywhere are preparing for more and bloodier wars. And Washington is driven to assault constitutional freedoms, to try to weaken workers’ ability to defend ourselves and to act together with fellow workers around the world.

The Justice Department recently said anyone involved in “public demonstrations” that it claims further the “goals of the foreign power” — like Cuba — must register as a foreign agent. This is a barefaced attempt to silence opposition to the U.S. rulers’ foreign maneuvers.

Sen. Bill Cassidy, chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, is targeting the International Association of Machinists for having the gall to extend solidarity to the Cuban people and for making its union hall in Los Angeles available for a meeting opposing the U.S. blockade. Cassidy demanded the union turn over details of all its alleged ties to the Cuban government and its collaboration with Cuba solidarity groups in the U.S.

These spokespeople for U.S. imperialism say the unions have no right to use their own funds to speak out on foreign policy. But the labor movement has a big stake in world developments and in opposing these moves. It needs to defend all organizations whose constitutional protections are under attack, regardless of who these attacks are directed against.

Similar assaults on free speech and association were launched by the Franklin Roosevelt administration as it prepared to enter the second imperialist world war, fought over turf and plunder. It claimed it was combating un-American “subversives.” Utilizing the FBI, the government framed up and imprisoned leaders of the Socialist Workers Party and the Teamsters under the Smith “Gag” Act. Their real “crime” was organizing opposition in the labor movement to Washington’s drive to use working people as cannon fodder in the war.

The SWP led an international defense campaign to combat the frame-up, winning wide support.

The party again took the lead in fighting government witch hunts in the 1950s. It led a broad-based effort to defeat the attempt by officials in Michigan to declare party members “subversive” and subject to imprisonment and to bar the party from the state ballot under the Trucks Act. It fought and reversed the firing of World War II veteran James Kutcher from a federal government job because of his party membership. It defeated attempts to deport party leader and Teamster fighter Carl Skoglund.

In 1973 the SWP initiated a political fight and lawsuit against decades of FBI spying, harassment and disruption. Its victory in that case broke new ground in pushing back government assaults on constitutional protections.

The SWP was the only party that could do this because there is nothing it does that contradicts what it says. It has no secrets or special goals of its own. Everything the SWP does is to advance the class battles of working people, and to build a party capable of leading the toilers to take political power into our own hands to run society in the interests of the vast majority.

In the course of advancing these struggles today, the unconditional defense of constitutional freedoms remains indispensable.