By MICHAEL SCHREIBER
Since we are still weeks away from Donald Trump’s second ascension to the White House, it is difficult to gauge the degree to which Trump will succeed in fulfilling the pledges he made to the MAGA faithful to inaugurate a new deregulated, high-tariff, corporation-friendly, and immigrant-bashing “golden age” in America. It is evident, however, that an attack on human rights will be high on his administration’s agenda.
As political protest activities accelerate—such as a resurgence of the Palestine solidarity movement or climate activists taking to the streets to resist putting Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” directive into action—we can expect that the government will try to come down heavily on civil liberties, especially the rights of free speech and assembly.
Trump has promised that the new administration’s first major crackdown will be against immigrants and asylum seekers. Trump has said that he would start, on day one, to deport immigrants who have been convicted of crimes. After that, his administration would move methodically toward deporting the remainder of the 12 million undocumented immigrants who are living in the United States—plus many immigrants who currently have legal standing to live and work here. Plans are already in the works to expand holding facilities (concentration camps) to house the huge mass of people who are waiting to be deported.
Trump has said that he would use the National Guard or even the Army to help in the immigrant round-ups. The GOP 2024 election platform envisioned “moving thousands of troops currently stationed overseas” to the U.S.-Mexican border to stem the entry of migrants.
But other sectors of the population are also in danger. Quite a few of the sycophants and lawyers whom Trump has presented as candidates for cabinet posts and other positions have revealed in their statements the plans of the incoming administration to seek retribution against its perceived “enemies.” For example, Kash Patel, Trump’s pick for FBI director, listed in his conspiracy-mongering book, “Government Gangsters,” a number of people whom he considered integral to the so-called “deep state,” and thus subject to prosecution. And Trump himself has named many high-level politicians (mostly Democrats) and government employees as targets to be “locked up.”
It’s probable that much of this venom was merely election-season tinder meant to fire up the MAGA crowd. Yet, thousands of federal workers and scientists are liable to be purged as the Trump appointees “clean house.” Some 50,000 unionized federal employees face losing their jobs.
The threat against left activists
The threat by the Trump administration against working-class and leftist political organizations and activity should be taken even more seriously. There is no doubt that Trump and company would like to cripple the ability of such groups to mobilize people in the streets. In that effort, they would be continuing the repressive policies that were encouraged under Biden and the Democrats, especially against Palestinian solidarity protesters. In the past year, the false charges of “antisemitism” were lodged against anti-Zionist protests, encampments, and statements, which led to a wave of McCarthyite-type witch hunts at many universities.
For example, according to a report in Jewish Currents magazine (Dec. 20, 2024), thousands of files recently released under the Freedom of Information Act revealed that the FBI aided the Yale [University] Police Department last spring in spying on pro-Palestine students and disrupting their protest activities on campus. The YPD monitored students’ social media and email posts, and traced their whereabouts with surveillance cameras and drones. These tactics were repeated at other universities, often again with the aid of the FBI.
The Trump White House will no doubt try to extend and enlarge this wave of repression—if it can get away with it. Trump’s determination to clamp down on political protests could be seen in July, for example, when he railed against Palestine solidarity demonstrations, and declared on Fox News that those who burn or tromp on the American flag should get a one-year jail sentence.
During Trump’s first administration, when millions were in the streets to protest police brutality after George Floyd’s murder, the president told his military aides that he wanted to employ the Insurrection Action of 1807 to mobilize Army or National Guard troops against protesters. He asked Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Mark A. Miley about dealing with demonstrators in the streets of Minneapolis: “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?” When his advisors pushed back, Trump reportedly became enraged and called the military leaders “losers.”
Yet Trump rolled out the same scenario more recently, on Oct. 13, when Fox News asked him whether he thought there could be violence on election day. He answered the question by blasting what he called the “enemy from within” and went on to say: “We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they’re the big—and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”
“Marching Toward Violence”
Trump’s return to political power has energized groups on the far right. The president-elect has expressed a willingness to pardon the leaders of two rightist militia groups, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, who had been convicted of criminal activity during the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. Moreover, some right-wing groups, because of their influence on the government and the media, have the power to threaten our democratic rights, including the ability of political dissidents to build their movements without interference by the state.
A particularly pernicious example of right-wing propaganda is the 151-page tract titled “Marching Toward Violence,” published online in early November by a so-called think tank called the Capital Research Center (CRC). The sensationalized document purports to be an exposé of over 150 organizations that may have a relationship to the Palestine solidarity movement in the United States.
The Capital Research Center is a reactionary group that has acted as an adversary toward a number of environmental campaigns and struggles for workers’ rights; it has also railed against issues such as alleged “political correctness” on college campuses. The CRC was founded in 1984 by Willa Johnson, former senior vice president of the Heritage Foundation. The latter group authored the Project 2025 plan, which provided a drastic right-wing-oriented scenario for actions to be taken by the new Trump administration.
As author of its “Marching Toward Violence” folio, the CRC chose Ryan Mauro, a frequent commentator on Fox News and a professor at the “Christ-centered” Regent University, who claims a background in Islamic and “counter-extremist” investigations. As it turned out, Mauro produced a very sloppily researched paper for the CRC. Nevertheless, despite his inability to provide convincing evidence, Mauro boldly insisted in his document that the Palestine movement contains at its heart “militant elements that are pushing it toward … property destruction and violence properly described as domestic terrorism.”
The document declares that many of the groups on its list, even if they are not engaged in terrorist acts themselves, are nevertheless “pro-terrorism.” Mauro justifies the usage of that term because the groups supposedly function in the long run as “recruiters” to terrorism, or are somehow “associated with terrorist groups.” In the outer circles of its “pro-terrorist” category, the document places such well-known organizations as the National Lawyers Guild, the Democratic Socialists of America, the Northern California Islamic Council, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Center for Constitutional Rights, and the Muslim Alliance of North America.
There is little doubt that Mauro and the CRC, by smearing the Palestine solidarity movement and a broad constellation of antiwar, civil liberties, and socialist organizations with charges of “terrorism” and “violence,” hope to affect the ability of those groups to build their events and to grow. The document recommends remedies such as charging “offenders” under racketeering laws (a method that is already being used against Cop City protesters in Atlanta) and stripping nonprofit status from some groups.
There is a danger that the distribution of “Marching Toward Violence” and similar conspiracy-mongering screeds could help foster a climate of fear in the U.S. population. Similarly to what took place during the McCarthy period of the early 1950s, we could again see the growth of an atmosphere in which potential supporters of progressive causes choose to stay away from movement activities to avoid being targeted by police and other government agencies. Such tracts also present the danger of inviting retaliatory violence by far-right and fascist vigilantes against the groups that were named.
Part II: Looking to history
A brief review of history can be instructive in determining how to defend ourselves from government and right-wing attacks. Throughout the 20th century, left, labor, Black, Native American, and antiwar organizations were attacked by police forces and the FBI or by fascist organizations that often operated with the collusion of state authorities. Police orchestrated or helped to cover up the assassinations of prominent Black leaders—like Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, and Mark Clark—while many more activists were arrested and sent to prison on trumped-up charges.
The socialist movement was one of the prime targets of government disruption efforts. But on a great many occasions, the movement was able to respond in accord with a long and tested policy of defense work. We will outline some of their methods below.
Basic principles of defense in the working-class movement were honed in the campaigns of organizations such as the International Labor Defense (which was established by the Communist Party in its earliest years). James P. Cannon was the national secretary of the ILD, and a core of the people who participated in the defense organization, such as Rose Karsner, later formed the first cadre of the Trotskyist group in the U.S., the Communist League of America.
In his book, “The First Ten Years of American Communism,” James P. Cannon wrote that he had worked out the plans to establish the ILD when he was a delegate to the Comintern in Moscow in 1925 and was in conversation with Big Bill Haywood, a leader of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Cannon wrote that he and Haywood conceived of the ILD “as a non-partisan body which would defend any member of the working-class movement, regardless of his opinion or affiliation, if he came under persecution by capitalist law.” In other words, they worked in accord with the old IWW slogan, “An injury to one is an injury to all.”
Another principle adopted by the ILD was the idea that to be most effective, defense efforts required the construction of a broad united front of all workers’ organizations and other groups interested in defending civil liberties.
Cannon pointed out in the “First Ten Years” book that at the beginning of the ILD’s work there were 106 class-war prisoners in the United States—scores of members of the IWW, a group of AFL coal miners in West Virginia, and so on. Cannon said that their only crime was being strike leaders or organizers—and not one of them was a member of the Communist Party. “But we defended them all!”
The most famous case taken on by the ILD was the defense of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian immigrants and anarchists who, despite weak evidence, had been convicted in 1921 of murdering two bank employees during a robbery in Massachusetts. As court appeals dragged on, the newly formed ILD became involved in raising money and other support activities on behalf of the defendants’ defense committee. By 1927, the year that Sacco and Vanzetti were executed, large demonstrations in their behalf had taken place in cities throughout the United States and on every continent of the world. According to Cannon, the ILD “was the organizing center” of this worldwide activity.
Defense campaigns by U.S. Trotskyists
By 1927, tragically, Communist Parties around the world had come under the sway of the conservative bureaucracy in the Soviet Union that was headed by Joseph Stalin. In the United States, Cannon and other members were summarily expelled from the Communist Party because of their support to the ideas of Leon Trotsky—who was fighting the bureaucracy and advocated a return to the revolutionary principles of Lenin and the Bolsheviks.
As the “Left Opposition” (Trotskyists) began to organize themselves into an independent grouping in the United States—soon named the Communist League of America—they had to confront Stalinist hoodlums, whom the CP had sent out to break up their meetings and to assault sellers of The Militant newspaper in the streets. The CLA was able once again to employ the technique of building a broad and united defense. A range of trade unionists, radicals, and people who wished to support the rights of the Trotskyists to speak were recruited into Workers Defense Guards to protect the meetings. In time, the Stalinists became convinced that their violent attacks were counterproductive and stopped them.
In the ensuing years, Trotskyists in the United States became heavily engaged in the defense of Leon Trotsky himself—who had been reviled by Stalin and his followers. The Stalinists invented the lie that Trotsky was a counter-revolutionary, a pro-fascist, working hand in hand with Hitler to disrupt the international working-class movement. They insisted that Trotsky and his cothinkers deserved to be hunted down and eliminated—even murdered.
In 1937, the Trotskyists in this country—then gathered inside the Socialist Party—were instrumental in helping to convene a Commission of Inquiry, headed by the liberal philosopher John Dewey and including other well-known exponents of civil liberties. The commission set about to analyze the “evidence” against Trotsky and his son Leon Sedov that the Stalinists had compiled in the infamous Moscow Trials. After sifting through the facts of the case—including undertaking an extensive examination of Trotsky in Mexico—the commission decided that the Moscow Trials were frame-up proceedings, and that Trotsky and Sedov were not guilty of the charges lodged against them.
As World War II got underway, the Trotskyist movement in the United States—now constituted as the Socialist Workers Party—became embroiled in its own defense, when 17 of the party’s top leaders—together with leaders of the militant Teamsters local in Minneapolis—were indicted under the Smith Act for opposing Roosevelt’s imperialist war policies and for allegedly “conspiring to overthrow the government by force and violence.” Once again, the party sought to build a broad united defense against the false charges; novelist James T. Farrell agreed to head up the defense committee. In the end, the SWP leaders and their Teamster codefendants received relatively light sentences—16 months in a federal prison.
The Stalinists, to their detriment, had refused to defend them and cheered on the prosecution. Seven years later, when the CP was itself caught by the Smith Act and other tools of the witch hunt led by Senator Joe McCarthy, the SWP offered to help build a united front in its defense. However, the CP foolishly refused the offer.
During the war, the bureaucratic leadership of the unions had cemented ties with Roosevelt’s and Truman’s Democratic Party. As repression mounted in the years that followed, the labor leaders’ refusal to encourage working-class independence from the capitalist parties weakened the trade-union movement in defending itself against the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 and other reactionary laws.
Many SWP comrades lost their jobs during the red-baiting scare of the period—just for expressing their ideas. Cannon mentioned in his book, “The First Ten Years of American Communism,” the case of a disabled veteran of the Second World War, James Kutcher, who had been dismissed from his job as a clerk at the Veterans Administration in 1948 because he was a member of the Socialist Workers Party. Cannon commented that, unfortunately, “because of the attitude of the Stalinists as well as for other considerations, it would be utopian to hope for an all-inclusive united front” in defense of Kutcher. But nevertheless, he urged the trade unions and anti-Stalinist political organizations to join together to protest the prosecution. Cannon pointed out that this would be primarily “for the sake of free speech, for those democratic rights which the labor movement has dearly won and badly needs for its informed and conscious struggle to reach higher ground.” After an eight-year fight, largely as a result of the vigorous efforts of the Kutcher Civil Rights Defense Committee, Kutcher won his case, returned to his job, and was awarded back pay.
Kutcher wrote in the book about his ordeal, “The Case of the Legless Veteran,” “Our victory, partial though it was, also heartened and gave ammunition to those who had not been directly victimized themselves but wanted to stop the repression. It tended to undermine the morale and self-confidence of at least some of the witch-hunters and their followers or dupes. And it had a healthy impact on the great mass of the people who stood in the middle and had not actively committed themselves to either side, whose support both sides were trying to win.”
In 1962—the time of the “Cuban Missile Crisis”—three students at the University of Indiana in Bloomington, who had helped to organize a chapter of the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA) on campus, were indicted for “subversion” under the Indiana Anti-Communism Act. Their only “crimes” were their beliefs and the fact that they and other YSA members had dared to undertake political activities in accordance with those beliefs. The YSA, together with members of the Fair Play for Cuba local chapter, had helped to build an “Ad Hoc Committee to Oppose U.S. Aggression,” which initiated a small march on campus in defense of revolutionary Cuba. The marchers were accosted by a right-wing mob numbering in the hundreds, while the police stood idly by.
The indicted YSA members—Ralph Levitt, James Bingham, and Tom Morgan, known as the Bloomington Three—faced a possible prison term of one to three years in prison. However, due in large part to the actions of the Committee to Aid the Bloomington Students (CABS), their case received national support. CABS was guided by the Socialist Workers Party, with which the YSA was in political solidarity. The Bloomington Three went on speaking tours to over 100 campuses. By 1965, over 1300 faculty members at 95 colleges had become sponsors of the defense committee. Even The New York Times covered the case and labeled the prosecution a threat to free speech.
Within a few years, the Bloomington case began to unravel. In 1964, a county judge declared the Indiana anti-subversion law unconstitutional. A year later, the state Supreme Court reinstated the indictments, but the prosecutor soon withdrew the charges and resigned his office.
Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, on a number of occasions, bookstores and offices of the Socialist Workers Party were bombed, raided, and shot up by fascist groups—often abetted or protected by the police. These attacks happened in Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and elsewhere. In some cases, members who were the victims of violence were arrested or persecuted, while the far-right thugs who attacked them went free. At the same time, the cops and FBI burglarized and planted microphones in SWP headquarters, stole the party’s files, and wiretapped its phones.
But the SWP continued to fight back. After a 13-year fight, in 1986, it even won a major court case against infiltration and disruption by the government’s COINTELPRO spy activities.
Part III: Characteristics of an effective defense policy
Of course, defense committees such as the International Labor Defense and its descendants come into play only in the special circumstances of an attack by the state on individuals or organizations of the working class. Yet activists need to be conscious of our defense policies in all of our activities. We need to prepare in advance for increased incidents of spying, arrests, or even violent attacks.
Socialist defense policy acknowledges as its foundation the Marxist understanding of class struggle: The capitalist class exploits the working class, and therefore, the interests of the two classes are antagonistic and in the long run, cannot be reconciled. And it also includes the Marxist view of the state as primarily a vehicle of force (and often violence) within the class struggle. Keeping the working class in check is one of the basic roles of the capitalist state.
This in turn should lead to the understanding that it can be counter-productive and even suicidal to depend on the capitalist state to act against its own class interests in order to defend the working class and its organizations. Judges are not going to rule in our favor just because it coincides with the correct legal or constitutional procedure, and state prosecutors are not going to withdraw their charges because it can be clearly demonstrated that we are innocent. Of course, from time to time, political defendants have indeed won their cases in court. However, it is generally essential to have a defense committee working independently of the legal team to gather mass support for the accused.
How can we build a defense campaign that can reach the masses? As mentioned above, our defense policy recognizes, as in the time of Cannon’s International Labor Defense, the need for non-sectarian solidarity, the idea of strengthening our forces by building a broad united front of all who agree on the basic need for defense and to protect civil rights. A large and well-organized defense coalition—which strives to include leaders and constituencies beyond its own ranks, such as in the trade-union movement or church and community organizations, or even well-known academics, musicians, and writers—can have the ability to reach out to large sectors of working people and their allies and help to set them into motion.
Of course, liberals and non-Marxist civil rights supporters might not understand the reluctance of socialists to rely on methods such as appealing to supposedly sympathetic politicians for favors, or trusting the police to reform themselves and thus become a benefit to society. But these forces can be included within a larger defense coalition. Regardless of differences in political doctrine or other matters, anyone who is willing to aid the defense effort should be welcomed.
Defense activity also involves the need to work to expand and protect our civil liberties within capitalist society; defense work gets a lot easier if one can refer to a range of civil rights that are contained in the law books and still protected to some degree. The right to assembly, free speech, to join trade unions, etc. are important acquisitions of the working class, which were achieved by past struggles, But without continued struggle to maintain these rights, the ruling class will try to whittle away at them. Moreover, the importance of civil liberties are readily accepted by most working people and other sectors of the population of this country, and defense cases can appeal to broad layers by referring to these rights.
Success in attracting wide support centers to a large degree on the defense committee striving to show clearly that the people being defended are victims, not perpetrators, and that it is the state, cops, prosecution, etc. who are acting in an unjust and indefensible manner.
In this respect, successful defense work includes a process that is analogous—at least in many respects—to the methods used by socialists to approach the masses in political work and help guide them into action. How are these methods put into practice? For one thing, in our literature and slogans, we can attempt to make the demands and goals of our movement appear readily understandable, logical, and even necessary to many working people. There is additional value in framing the demands in a way that aids people in seeing how the particular struggle fits into a much larger picture of society, of which they too are a part.
This practice also includes the use of what are often called “defensive formulations” within our slogans and demands. These formulations should try to demonstrate that:
1) Our forces are acting in a perfectly reasonable manner to achieve these necessary demands, whereas our opponents (the state, the boss, etc.) are the ones that are unfair, unjust, or even violent.
2) We stand for the defense of democracy and civil liberties against forces (like the cops) who infringe on these rights.
3) We never advocate violence, but if violence is used against us, we might be justifiably compelled to defend ourselves.
Such defensive formulations can be used in a strike situation or in any kind of struggle. And in defense cases, likewise, their use can help to reach a broader audience among workers, the oppressed, and their allies by approaching these forces at their level of understanding and interests in order to point the way forward and help them to see why it is important for them to become involved.
In contrast, calls such as “no free speech for racists” or “smash the fascists” are far less attractive or even repulsive to most working people, or students, because they seem to argue for intolerance or even violence. Instead of taking advantage of an opportunity to educate people about how the fascists work to destroy our democratic rights, such slogans can allow the fascists to appear as the victims of a movement that wants to limit free speech.
When confronted with mobilizations by racists and fascists, our movement has recommended the tactic of counter-mobilization. That is, rather than physically blocking the fascists—or trying to get the authorities or university administration to ban their ability to meet or speak—we could strive to build a large and visible rally that would dwarf the reactionary forces. At the rally, we could then make our own anti-racist views known to the public and the media.
Perhaps the most notable use of this tactic took place in February 1939, when the Nazi-like Silver Shirts held a large assembly at Madison Square Garden. In response, the Socialist Workers Party was key in building a mass rally of workers in the streets outside the auditorium. The counter-protest grew to about 100,000—five times the size of the fascist rally—and the SWP led the march that followed. Unfortunately, the peaceful march was attacked by cops on horseback, and the workers were forced to defend themselves.
A more recent use of the counter-mobilization tactic took place in Boston in August 2017. A week after the notorious white-supremacist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., at which counter-protester Heather Heyer was murdered, a spectrum of right-wing groups organized a march and rally on Boston Common. It was met by a mobilization of over 40,000 protesters (according to the police), which far outnumbered the rightists. Protesters chanted slogans such as “Black lives matter” and “No Trump, no KKK, no racist USA!”
In summary, Workers’ Voice, like our predecessors in the socialist movement, puts defense work toward the forefront of our activities. We stand for solidarity with all trade-union and political movement activists who have been victimized, while building independent and broad defense committees. At the same time, we point out the need to carry out activities in an open and democratic manner, with tactics and demands that are readily understandable to working people. These methods can help to make our movements more resistant to attacks by the government, the bosses, and the far right.
