How socialists pushed back

government effort to curb

workers rights, and why

bosses’ press can’t explain it



(feature article)

The articles reported the Socialist Workers Party’s victory a day earlier in getting the Federal Election Commission to extend through 2016 an exemption from “campaign reform” laws requiring candidates for federal office to make public names of financial contributors. Had the FEC rejected the exemption, which the party first won in 1974, SWP campaign supporters would have been opened to stepped-up spying, harassment and attacks by government agents, local cops and right-wing thugs.

The FEC extension was the “good news” referred to in the Post’s cynical headline.

These capitalist-owned media were keeping an eye out for what the FEC would do and were surprised when it neither overturned nor weakened the socialists’ exemption. Prior to the hearing, in fact, the FEC had publicly issued both a draft opinion granting an extension and one rejecting it. Even the draft approval said that while the SWP met requirements, it did so “barely” — a proviso dropped in the ruling itself.

None of the bourgeois press articles could explain how or why the exemption had nonetheless been won. Their only explanation was some variant of the “bad news” in the Post’s headline — that the SWP, as the reporter put it, is “largely irrelevant to the modern political process.” So the FEC cut the party a break.

But if the SWP is politically “irrelevant,” how was it able to win “a crucial decision” from the FEC, as the Journal recognized in its lead sentence on the ruling? The Post, too, acknowledged the significance of the victory, saying: “Plenty of campaign experts were watching the case to see if it has broader implications for what other groups have to disclose about their donors …”

As mouthpieces for the wealthy ruling families that control both the Democratic and Republican parties and politicians, none of these media outlets was able to recognize what was really at stake in the FEC ruling. That is, that amid the unremitting capitalist assault on workers’ wages, job conditions, unions and political rights, the SWP victory is the first successful push-back by working-class forces against the bosses, their government and political parties.

It’s a victory not just for the SWP but above all for the working class and unions. It’s a victory for our right to organize independent working-class political action free from interference by the class who accumulates its fortunes off exploiting our labor and whose government enforces its rule.

Why has the SWP been able to fight effectively for this exemption and win it for some 40 years? For the same reason the government and cop agencies have targeted this workers party from its origins. Both are explained by the party’s decades-long engagement in social, political and union struggles by the working class, whose strategic line of march poses the ultimate threat to the capitalist rulers — the revolutionary capacity to conquer power from them and establish a workers and farmers government.

Mass workers movement in 1930s

With the rise in the 1930s of a mass working-class social movement that built the industrial unions, leaders of the Communist League of America, a predecessor of the SWP, joined in labor battles nationwide. They helped lead strikes and organizing drives that made the Teamsters in Minneapolis and across the Midwest one of the strongest unions in the U.S.

The party grew in size, experience in class combat and political effectiveness. It won to its ranks militant workers like Farrell Dobbs, who became a central leader of the Teamsters’ successful drive to organize over-the-road truck drivers from the Dakotas to Kentucky, from Michigan to Texas.

In the late 1930s, as World War II spread across Europe and Asia, Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt pressed for Washington to jump into the bloody conflict to maximize U.S. capital’s share of global markets and profits. The Socialist Workers Party and class-struggle leaders of the Midwest Teamsters took the lead in educating, organizing and mobilizing working-class opposition to the interimperialist slaughter.

In response, the White House in September 1939 issued two secret Executive Orders declaring a “national emergency” and directing the FBI to combat “subversive activities.” Roosevelt’s political police went after unionists, communists and others based on what they thought and to curtail their political activities. The FBI wiretapped John L. Lewis — president of the United Mine Workers and a founding CIO leader — and Harry Bridges, president of the West Coast longshore union.

The U.S. rulers entered the war in December 1941. Within a year nearly 24,000 FBI stool pigeons were reporting on union and political activities in almost 4,000 factories, mines and mills.

In June 1941 FBI agents and U.S. marshals raided SWP headquarters in Minneapolis and St. Paul, seizing books and other literature. Washington indicted 28 SWP members and Teamster leaders under the thought-control Smith Act, adopted by Congress the prior year. In early December, 18 defendants were convicted of “conspiracy to advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government” and sentenced to federal prison.

Among the party’s responses to the indictments was to nominate James P. Cannon — SWP national secretary and one of those facing trial — for mayor of New York. “His campaign will mobilize the advanced workers against the brazen attempts of Roosevelt and his War Party to intimidate the anti-war forces in America,” the Militant reported.

To fight the anti-labor indictments and then campaign to free the framed-up workers, the Civil Rights Defense Committee was launched in 1941. The CRDC won support nationwide from working-class militants, union locals, central labor bodies, Black rights leaders and groups, and prominent individuals.

In 1943 the Postmaster General canceled second-class mailing rights for several Black newspapers. He also yanked the Militant’s mailing permit for “stimulation of race issues” among other political reasons. The paper waged a yearlong fight, backed by Black groups and unions, winning back its postal rights.

In face of these assaults, the SWP stepped up its political activity. It distributed the Militant to workers as widely as possible, along with pamphlets and books. Party cadres were active in union fights, joined protests against lynchings and racist discrimination (including in the armed forces and war industries), and stood for office as independent working-class candidates on the SWP ticket.

This short history of how the SWP helped build the unions and resisted assaults on the working class during the 1930s and World War II sheds light on why it has remained a target of government and cop harassment ever since. More important, it shows why the SWP is the kind of party able to chart a revolutionary political course to strengthen working-class independence from the employing class, their government, and their political parties — including waging an effective, decades-long fight against disclosing the names of its supporters to the cops and other enemies of the workers movement.

The next article will bring that fighting record up to today.





Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home



