As more and more workers reject their previous outlook and adopt more radical ideas and more militant forms of struggle, the employers increasingly rely on...repression. There is more frequent use of cops to intimidate striking workers, more use of injunctions to break strikes, more cop murders of Black and Latino youth, and stepped-up use of the secret police against the unions, Black organizations, and socialist groups. This in turn serves to encourage racist and fascist scum like the Ku Klux Klan to carry out terrorist attacks.
"Workers' Rights vs. the Secret Police" discusses the SWP and YSA lawsuit and the campaign in support of it in this framework. It is based on a talk presented on behalf of the Political Committee of the SWP at a socialist educational conference in August 1980.
In explaining the new stage in this campaign, which is a result of the deepening economic crisis and the more radical moods in the working class, it was pointed out that "we are experiencing a general step-up in incidents of FBI-type harassment. These are things we haven't seen for a while, including spying and harassment on the job, not just by the FBI and the cops but also by private detective agencies." It did not take long for such incidents to come to light.
Four months after this speech was given, five unionists at the Brooklyn Navy Yard were fired at the instigation of the navy. The sole reason for their dismissal was that they were accused of membership in the Socialist Workers Party.
The five pipefitters returned the following morning and handed out 500 copies of their termination notice to co- workers, with a protest on the back. "How can the U.S. Navy itself claim that the ships we work on are being readied to protect democratic rights abroad when the Navy itself suppresses democratic rights of workers on Navy ships?" the leaflet asked. News of the political firings swept through the yard, and many workers expressed their anger at this violation of fundamental rights. The union began to make inquiries about the justification for the firings.
A political fight is not what the company, the Coastal Dry Dock and Repair Corporation, had bargained for. It got cold feet. By that evening the fired workers had been rehired. The news was greeted by workers in the Navy Yard as a solid victory that was doubly sweet because it was won against the U.S. Navy as well as the Coastal Dry Dock bosses.
Within weeks after the Navy Yard victory, however, another case of union members being fired for purely political reasons broke. The giant Lockheed corporation, one of the nation's largest war contractors, began firing members of the International Association of Machinists at its Marietta, Georgia, aircraft plant. The unionists were fired because they showed up in Lockheed "security" files as suspected members of the SWP or YSA.
In December and January, fifteen workers were dismissed. All fifteen have been active members of IAM Lodge 709 and were involved in its struggles against speedup and unsafe working conditions in the plant. Most also belong to the SWP....
The files show that Lockheed has finks report on all union meetings as well as on discussions and activities engaged in by union members on and off the job. The workers who were targeted for firing, as well as some of their co-workers, were followed around the plant, to their homes, to restaurants, on shopping trips, and even to the laundry. Dossiers were compiled on people the socialists talked to, with special attention to Black workers. Information on the workers was collected from police agencies and from the FBI's political dossiers. But [the] FBI's thick files turned up absolutely nothing illegal, violent, or secretive. Today, the fired unionists are waging a nationwide effort to win their jobs back....
The capitalists and their government have targeted the SWP and YSA for persecution because our ideas speak to the needs of working people. Workers' rights are not "given" by the capitalist government - they have been won and defended through the mobilization of our class and its allies. The suit of the SWP and YSA against the secret police is part of that struggle.
February 1981
Our fight against the political police today continues the fight waged by Marx and Engels, beginning in 1848, against the series of frame-ups of leaders of the Communist League, including successful defenses of Marx himself. These led up to the notorious Cologne trial in 1852, which took place in the wake of the defeats of the 1848-49 revolutions. All the police methods we see today came to light there: the accusation of illegal conspiracy based solely on political ideas and activities, the false testimony of informers, even "mail covers" and police forgeries. The original "black bag job" - to use a current FBI term - took place in preparation for that frame up.
Our fight today has many parallels with the fight by the German Social Democratic Party against the Anti-Socialist Laws in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The party fought for the right to function openly, as a legal party. And it refused to begin acting as a conspiratorial society even when forced into illegality.
Our war with the FBI today is in a direct line of descent from the fight that the Bolshevik Party and the entire Russian workers' movement waged against the Okhrana, the tsars' FBI, which fielded an army of informers against the working-class movement....
Our fight against the political police also has, of course a long tradition in this country. It includes the national campaign against the execution of the Haymarket frame-up victims, the battles against the Pinkertons and other labor-spy outfits, and struggles to stop police and KKK racist terror against Blacks, Mexicanos, and Asians. Another early chapter was the crusade by the Wobblies, the Industrial Workers of the World, to establish their right to free speech on the street corners. It was a pre-World War I equivalent of our fights today to establish the right to petition in shopping malls and to defend our right to sell our newspapers on street corners and at plant gates.
Our heritage also includes the fight against the arrest, trial, and imprisonment of Eugene Debs and other antidraft and antiwar fighters in World War 1. It includes the fight against the anticommunist and anti-immigrant witch-hunt and deportations after that war, known as the Palmer raids (named after A. Mitchell Palmer, the attorney general at the time). It includes the fight against the monstrous frame-up and murder of Sacco and Vanzetti, and countless other cases of political persecution aimed at the working-class movement. It is a continuation of the fight waged on behalf of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were martyrs of the witch-hunt in the 1950s.