Here is solid evidence that the Working Class is under attack. In
short, this is a War.
Carl Jarvis
On 11/1/20, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
SWP campaign wages fight for political rights in Washington
https://themilitant.com/2020/10/30/swp-campaign-wages-fight-for-political-rights-in-washington/
BY JOHN STUDER
AND STEVE CLARK
Vol. 84/No. 44
November 9, 2020
Alyson Kennedy, left, SWP presidential candidate, talking with striker
Angie Lara on Allan Brothers fruit packers picket line in Naches, Wash.,
May 19. Lara is member of Trabajadores Unidos por la Justicia.
MILITANT/REBECCA WILLIAMSON
Alyson Kennedy, left, SWP presidential candidate, talking with striker
Angie Lara on Allan Brothers fruit packers picket line in Naches, Wash.,
May 19. Lara is member of Trabajadores Unidos por la Justicia.
Once again, the Socialist Workers Party and its presidential ticket —
this year, Alyson Kennedy for president and Malcolm Jarrett for vice
president — are setting an example for all working people in defense of
political rights and free expression.
On Oct. 19 the secretary of state’s office in Washington state informed
Socialist Workers Party campaign leaders of a request by a person to
release names and addresses of 2020 SWP electors.
“We do not believe that there is a public records exemption that clearly
allows us to withhold this information,” wrote Public Disclosure Officer
Brenda Galarza. The state, she said, would release the names and
addresses on election day, Nov. 3, short of a court order not to do so.
The facts show the opposite. There is a long and well-documented public
record of harassment and threats against SWP supporters, both in
Washington and nationwide. They’ve been revealed, among other ways, in
hard-fought battles against the disclosure of names and personal
information. Victories have been won before the Seattle Ethics and
Election Commission, Washington Public Disclosure Commission, Federal
Election Commission and federal benches up to the Supreme Court.
These rulings document hundreds of threats, physical assaults,
firebombings and other attacks on SWP candidates, supporters and
campaign offices, as well as government spying and disruption.
In the last few months alone, party campaigners in Washington have
received several serious death threats.
To make public the electors’ personal information opens them to being
targeted by government political police, employers and right-wing goons.
It exposes them to middle-class radicals who resort to “cancel culture”
to shut down those they disagree with by public lynching on social
media, thuggery and harassment outside their homes and apartment buildings.
The SWP campaign has retained the well-known labor and political rights
law firm of Barnard Iglitzin & Lavitt to help meet this challenge. In
response to initial steps by the party’s lawyers, the state government
has agreed not to release information until at least Nov. 9 to
facilitate court proceedings and negotiations.
The Socialist Workers National Campaign Committee has launched an
immediate campaign to raise $20,000 to help cover the legal and
associated costs.
“For decades — since our party was formed out of the 1917 Bolshevik
Revolution in Russia — we’ve been active in working-class struggles,
fights to build and strengthen unions and to defend the rights of all
those who challenge the dog-eat-dog capitalist system,” Mary Martin, an
SWP leader in Seattle, told the Militant. “For that reason, we’ve all
too often been targeted by those who fear the working class and seek to
block moves toward independent labor political action.
“This fight is part of defending that working-class tradition against
all who seek to attack it,” she said.
Death threats
The SWP has gotten a good response from working people in Washington to
its political activity — campaigning and putting the SWP ticket on the
ballot there; participating in battles to win unions by fruit packers
and farmworkers in the Skagit and Yakima valleys; and other efforts to
advance struggles by workers and farmers.
But the party has also faced threats.
In July, for example, Dean Peoples was talking with workers coming out
of a Walmart in Renton, including getting signatures to put the SWP
ticket on the ballot. One person, however, “looked at me coldly and
said, ‘Somebody should shoot three or four of them,’” Peoples reports.
“F–k antifa socialists!” a caller said in a message left on the SWP
phone Aug. 28. “And you motherf–kers better watch your back, because I’m
coming to burn your f–king place down and kill all of you!” A similar
phone threat had been left a month earlier. SWP members acted on these
threats, informing other tenants in the building and increasing security
measures there and at forums and other meetings.
So when they learned of the secretary of state’s threat to turn over
names and addresses of party electors to anyone who wants them,
socialist workers were determined to take it on.
Front lines defending rights
The party has fought to defend workers’ rights from its origins in 1919.
Its founders, as leaders of the young Communist Party in the 1920s,
helped lead the International Labor Defense, organizing working-class
campaigns in defense of victims of frame-ups and other capitalist
injustice.
As leaders of the Teamsters union in Minneapolis and the Upper Midwest
in the 1930s, SWP members were deeply involved in labor battles,
including building working-class opposition to Washington’s imperialist
aims in the Second World War. The SWP headquarters there was raided by
the FBI. Party and Teamster leaders were framed up, tried and imprisoned
for “conspiracy to advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government” under
the thought-control Smith Act.
The SWP has taken the lead in exposing decades of FBI infiltration and
disruption of the labor movement. In the 1970s and ’80s the party
organized a successful decade-and-a-half political campaign and federal
lawsuit against FBI spying, harassment and disruption. The SWP’s suit
was upheld in federal court, and millions learned more about the true
face of the capitalist rulers’ criminal “justice” system.
It was a victory that advanced the space for political activity for all
working people.
When liberal political forces, largely in the Democratic Party, began
winning adoption of “campaign reform” legislation in the 1970s — on the
false claim this would clean up capitalist politics — these laws were
put to use to target the Socialist Workers Party and other working-class
groups.
In response, the SWP filed for exemption from turning over to the
government the names, workplaces and home addresses of campaign
contributors. The fight built on victories won by the NAACP in the 1950s
and ’60s against moves by Alabama state authorities to force the civil
rights group to turn over its membership lists.
The party succeeded in winning the right not to disclose this
information through political fights on federal, state, and local levels
— victories used by others to defend their rights, as well. In 2016, for
the first time in decades, the Federal Election Commission refused such
an exemption.
But the fight goes on, including in Washington right now.
Fighting lawyers
The Barnard Iglitzin & Lavitt law firm representing the SWP in this
fight has an earned reputation in the fight for workers’ rights. They
trace their history back to George Vanderveer, the attorney for
militants in the Industrial Workers of the World victimized in Everett,
Washington, in 1916, and then in Centralia a few years later.
Kathy Barnard has fought legal battles to defend the Familias Unidas por
la Justicia union and its right to organize and defend farmworkers from
boss surveillance and attack in Skagit Valley. She won a case defending
the right of participants in a union-organized action to rally in a
Walmart parking lot.
She has also successfully fought for protection of victims of sexual
harassment and domestic violence from having their addresses made public
by government agencies.
An important case in which Dmitri Iglitzin was the attorney ended with a
ruling that all employees in Washington state have a legally enforceable
right to a paid 10-minute rest period after every three hours of work.
Join the fight!
There is a growing threat to free speech and workers’ rights in the U.S.
today. It comes not only from government spies, cop informers, rightists
and stepped-up efforts by the bosses to make workers pay for the crisis
of capitalism. There are also mounting assaults on political rights from
those seeking to impose their version of “politically correct” speech.
As part of imposing their views, they support government efforts to
force the disclosure of names and personal information of those engaged
in political activity.
The SWP’s current fight in Washington against such undemocratic
government measures — a frontal assault on the Bill of Rights and other
constitutional protections won by toilers over centuries — is in the
interests of all working people and the labor movement. Your help is
needed!
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_____
Robert G. Ingersoll
“Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead
calm of ignorance and faith! Banish me from Eden when you will; but first
let me eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge!”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, The Works Of Robert G. Ingersoll, Vol. Iii
