http://themilitant.com/2016/8009/800950.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 80/No. 9 March 7, 2016
(feature article)
Book on US class struggle has ‘many lessons on battle against political
repression’
Havana International Book Fair event presents ‘50 Years of Covert
Operations in the US: Washington’s Political Police and the American
Working Class’
BY JONATHAN SILBERMAN
AND OSBORNE HART
HAVANA — Amid heightened interest here in politics in the United States,
one of the presentations at this year’s Havana International Book Fair
featured the new Pathfinder Press book, published simultaneously in
English and Spanish, 50 Years of Covert Operations in the US:
Washington’s Political Police and the American Working Class.
Speaking at the Feb. 13 event were long-time Cuban revolutionary leader
Ramón Sánchez-Parodi and Mary-Alice Waters, president of Pathfinder and
a member of the National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party in the
United States. Sánchez-Parodi headed the Cuban Interests Section in
Washington, D.C., for 12 years from its opening in 1977. He writes often
in the Cuban press on U.S.-Cuban relations.
50 Years of Covert Operations in the US, by Larry Seigle, Farrell Dobbs
and Steve Clark, traces the expansion of the U.S. rulers’ political
police and the struggle against it. It focuses especially on the period
from the 1930s labor battles and Washington’s preparations to enter
World War II through the Watergate crisis, which exploded in 1973, and
the Socialist Workers Party’s successful lawsuit against the FBI and
other political police agencies.
Sánchez-Parodi said 50 Years of Covert Operations in the US contains
“many lessons, many explanations of the political situation in the
United States.”
He emphasized the significance of the 1973 SWP lawsuit against FBI
spying and harassment. “The Socialist Workers Party wasn’t defending
itself against government charges,” which is more often the situation
confronted by the workers’ movement. In this case, a communist workers
organization “was accusing the government — accusing it of violating the
U.S. Constitution.”
“Even more interesting,” Sánchez-Parodi added, is the fact that, “after
more than 12 years, the [federal court] judge ruled in favor of the
Socialist Workers Party.”
Fight for political space
Sánchez-Parodi said “this is a good lesson of what can be done — of the
battle that must be waged to win space and protect yourself against
political repression by the dominant sectors in the United States.”
In 1987, he noted, the federal court with jurisdiction over the case
issued an injunction that “prohibited any use of documents and other
information obtained surreptitiously and unconstitutionally by the FBI
and other U.S. police agencies. It declared unconstitutional [the use of
agents] infiltrating the party, spying on it, and burglarizing its
headquarters and the homes of its members.”
Judge Thomas Griesa “also ordered the government to pay financial
compensation for damages caused and costs incurred, setting a precedent
that has been used in many other cases.”
Sánchez-Parodi said that despite Washington’s claims to be a champion of
liberty and equality, the U.S. rulers have always sought to protect
their class interests by attacking the rights of working people.
50 Years of Covert Operations in the US describes how, during the Great
Depression of the 1930s, the Franklin Roosevelt administration “took
steps to suppress the growing influence of the workers’ movement and
unions,” he said. “As inter-imperialist contradictions sharpened and
[the second world] war was imminent, the Roosevelt administration needed
to crack down on any movement of social protest by workers.”
The Cuban leader highlighted the federal government’s first use of the
infamous 1940 Smith “Gag” Act to frame up and imprison leaders of the
Teamsters union and the Socialist Workers Party. Washington’s goal was
to silence the labor vanguard in the workers’ movement that opposed the
goals of U.S. imperialism in World War II.
During the postwar witch-hunt, Sánchez-Parodi added, the Smith Act was
also used to frame up leaders of the U.S. Communist Party in 1949. As
the U.S. government waged an anti-labor offensive at home, it used its
military to defend imperialist interests around the world, from backing
Fulgencio Batista’s 1952 military coup in Cuba to its wars against the
Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese revolutions.
He noted that for several weeks in 1952 Washington did not recognize the
Batista regime, until it publicly announced it had broken its ties with
the pro-Moscow Popular Socialist Party and with the Soviet government
Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the subsequent U.S. wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq, he said, Washington has used the Patriot Act and
other measures to vastly expand the use of its political police.
US gov’t target: labor movement
Waters noted that 50 Years of Covert Operations in the US was one of
three books Pathfinder was presenting at the Havana book fair, each of
them about the class struggle in the United States. The other two were
the Spanish translation of Teamster Politics by Farrell Dobbs and a new
title in both English and Spanish, The Cuban Five Talk About Their Lives
Within the US Working Class. (The full text of Waters’ remarks is
printed on the facing page.)
Discussing 50 Years, Waters said the book explains how in the late 1930s
Washington targeted the Minneapolis Teamsters union and the Socialist
Workers Party because they were helping lead “the expanding strength and
rising political consciousness of a component of the industrial union
movement centered in the upper Midwest.” Within a few years the union
had organized a quarter million truck drivers and warehouse workers
across an 11-state region. The ruling class was alarmed about this
development and the success of the working-class vanguard in organizing
political opposition within the labor movement to Washington’s
imperialist war aims.
Like Sánchez-Parodi, Waters underscored why the questions taken up in
this book are important for today.
“The U.S. national security apparatus has undergone a massive expansion
over the 15 years since 9/11” and its intrusion into every aspect of our
lives “is hated by the working class,” said Waters. “And there’s nothing
reactionary about that.”
In fact, she noted, that is “one of the elements driving support for the
presidential candidacy of Donald Trump.” He plays on “the anxiety and
fear generated by the smoldering depression conditions U.S. workers have
known for almost a decade,” the insecurity generated by the unraveling
of the imperialist world order, and the policies of the Obama
administration that serve the interests of the giant insurance companies
and other capitalist financial institutions.
Waters concluded that communist workers in the United States and other
countries welcome the opportunity — “in the streets, in the factories,
and on the picket lines” — to join in the growing debate and search for
answers among working people in face of this capitalist crisis.
Sánchez-Parodi agreed, saying, “The struggle continues. And this book
offers many ideas and experiences that need to be studied, discussed and
applied in today’s context.”
Related articles:
Government’s expanding ‘security state’ is hated by workers
Cuba says, ‘Return Guantánamo!’ as Obama plays politics on prison
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home