One of the most sensational cases in US legal history is approaching its third month of trial at the Federal Courthouse here in Foley Square. Every day the court hears further testimony on the crimes of the defendants. Spying. Phone-tapping. Mail interception. Burglaries by the score. Terrorist acts. It's all there. Most of it isn't even disputed any more. Tom Martin — from New York City on the trial the media can't find space to report.
Perhaps it's something to do with the defendants. After all this isn't just any old case. On trial are the rulers of the mightiest power the world has ever seen: the United States government and its agencies. And thrown into question is the whole secret apparatus by which the tiny minority capitalist class maintains a rule over the vast majority of people in this country.
This case has been nearly eight years in the making. Putting the US government and its agencies on trial are the Trotskyists of the Socialist Workers Party and its affiliate, the Young Socialist Alliance. They are demanding no less than $40m in [illegible] to bar further illegal government activity against them. Furthermore, they are seeking a declaration that the legislation used by the government to justify its harassment — including the notorious Smith and Voorhis Acts — is unconstitutional
What the case reveals, however, goes far wider than the facts of government surveillance. Most significant is that it could be brought at all. Says SWP national secretary Jack Barnes: [illegible] a decade or two ago, in the 1950s, it would have [illegible]
The thinking behind the SWP's decision to file the suit in July 1973 was explained by party leader Larry Seigle in a talk to a socialist education conference last year:
'Our decision to proceed was based on sizing up the shift that was occurring in the relationship of class forces on a world scale, and the long-term tactical problems and divisions that this would keep producing for the capitalist class, The move we were making in 1973 could not have been made with success twenty, ten, or even five years earlier, We had to go through the Vietnam War, the end of the long economic expansion, [illegible] went with it, before we could con[illegible]
'What was involved was a small party of revolutionary Marxists going up politically and legally against the secret police, Taking them on directly and aggressively. We know that a small group, with the right ideas, with the right degree of self-confidence, and with the right timing, can have a huge impact. A small organisation acting in a bold way in the interests of an entire class can set an example and inspire broader [illegible] after the FBI, And everything we said then is more true now, Of that there can be no doubt at all.
As the suit unfolds in the Foley Square courthouse, SWP and YSA members have been able to take the issues into a series of mobilisations by working people against the policies of the Reagan administration. They have won a ready hearing among the 160,000 members of the United Mine Workers of America on strike for a new contract since the beginning of April; among the 100,000 who marched on the Pentagon on 3 May to demand an end to US support for the El Salvador junta: among the 25,000 railworkers who demonstrated in Washington just a few days earlier against Reagan's budget cuts; among the millions of black people demanding an end to the racist killings in Atlanta.
What is happening in the Foley Square courthouse is part of a growing challenge by American working people to the direction of capitalist politics today. That is why the government finds itself in the unusual position [of defendant rather] than plaintiff, And by taking the issue into the courts the Trotskyists [have been able not only to expose the government's] illegal activities, but also to explain in some detail the alternative kind of society they would like to see — and how it can be achieved. Capitalism itself is on trial. So it is not surprising that its mouthpieces in the media would rather working people didn't get the facts about it,
When the SWP and YSA filed suit in 1973 they did not [just draw] up what lawyers call a complaint, in which you outline your case. In the complaint, we charged that the government, the FBI and other secret police agencies have been involved in a conspiracy since 1938 to disrupt the SWP ... We charged that this conspiracy involved the use of informers, burglaries, blacklists, wiretaps, bugs, mail openings, and other illegal acts, We charged that the cops collaborated with right-wing terrorists in physical attacks against the party and the YSA. We put into this complaint everything that we could think of, everything that the workers' movement since 1848 shows that the secret police do.
[We had] no evidence, We had no proof. But we now know that inside the government, in the Justice Department, at the FBI, inside the White House, our complaint hit like a bombshell, Because as it turns out, it was all true, Exactly, precisely, true. Every 'wild accusation' that we put in the complaint hit home.
The first phase of the suit was marked by the accumulation of huge stacks of evidence to show that the FBI and other government agencies were guilty of everything charged by the SWP/YSA — and more. As Jack Barnes put it in court: 'We knew all kinds of wrongdoing had been done, but the scope of it was fantastic.'
Among other things, information that the FBI was forced [to disclose] showed that:
* FBI agents broke into the SWP national headquarters at least 94 times in one six-year period. More than 8,000 letters, many of them personal, were photographed and filed; bugging devices were installed.
* Sixty-six members of the SWP and YSA in 1976 were FBI informers. In all 316 informers had infiltrated the party and YSA between 1960 and 1976. A further 1300 non-members had also been urged to [illegible] on the Trotskyists' activities, A sample of 18 [illegible] files showed each cost the taxpayer an average [illegible] paid [illegible] by right [illegible]
* Poison-pen letters [illegible] to employers of SWP members;
* [illegible] distributed red-baiting the role played by the SWP and YSA in the anti-war movement.
Much — though by no means all — of this activity was part of the COINTELPRO program launched by the FBI in 1961 with the aim of destroying the SWP and YSA. One of the things that most concerned the agency, according to a memo from FBI director J Edgar Hoover dated 12 October 1961, was that: 'The Socialist Workers Party has, over the past several years, been openly espousing its line on a local and national basis through running candidates for public office.' In other words, it was guilty of putting forward its ideas publicly,
What came out between 1973 and 1976 made it impossible for the FBI to go on pretending its hands were clean. At the same time it couldn't prove any illegal activity on the part of the SWP. So the government changed tack. Maybe the FBI had done some bad — even illegal — things after all, But the Justice Department would get after those responsible. And it certainly wouldn't happen again. In September 1976 it was announced that the FBI had been told to halt its 38-year-long investigation of the SWP, Couldn't the party call the whole thing off now?
As an incentive, the government even proposed an out-of-court settlement which would bring the SWP and YSA several million dollars in damages. But the Trotskyists flatly turned down the offer, seeing it as a desperate attempt to pretend the FBI had changed its spots and prevent the full facts of government illegality and violence from being aired publicly.
Just how desperate the government was became clear in 1977 when the trial judge, Thomas P Griesa, ordered the FBI to turn over 18 informer files to the SWP. When attorney general Griffin Bell refused, Griesa cited him for contempt of court. Bell was only saved from going to jail when the Court of Appeals overturned the contempt citation, saying in effect that the attorney general — the nation's chief law officer — is above the law!
This ruling can be seen as key in determining the government's approach to the third phase of the suit, when it became clear that the SWP and YSA would not settle but would pursue the matter to open trial. As one government pre-trial document put it: 'The issue is whether the government has a right to keep itself informed of the activities of groups that openly advocate revolutionary change... even if such advocacy might be within the letter of the law.'
This was confirmed by FBI special agent Charles Mandigo when he took the stand on 13 April. Mandigo criticised the 'assumption that the investigations of the plaintiffs can be justified on strictly a list of possible criminal violations, It is not the case. There is independent authority underneath the President of the United States to conduct national security investigations.'
In effect, the defence is now claiming that the President, the US government, and all its agencies are simply exempt from the due processes of the law: the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. They make the rules — yet they can't afford to play by them, What greater tribute could there be to the power of the Trotskyists' ideas? For that is what is unambiguously at stake in this trial: the ideas of the SWP and the YSA. And that is just where the government is most vulnerable,
One of its latest attempts to regain the offensive has been a declaration by the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) that it is considering whether non-citizen SWP 'members or affiliates' can be excluded or deported on the basis that the party advocates the 'doctrines of world communism' — defined as 'totalitarian dictatorship' by the Immigration and Naturalisation Act of 1952. The obvious intention is to intimidate non-citizens from having anything to do with the SWP.
But who are really the 'totalitarians'? The Trotskyists have taken great pains to explain in court the ideas of workers' democracy: the rule of the majority through soviet-type institutions, the right of opponents to freedom of speech and association (including the formation of parties) unless they forcibly attempt to overthrow proletarian rule and so on. In particular the SWP leaders have stressed their identification with the struggle for democratic rights led by Solidarity in Poland.
As an editorial in the SWP's paper The Militant pointed out: 'Socialists are the firmest opponents of totalitarian dictatorship. It is the government's practices — exposed in the current trial — that bear the unmistakable stamp of totalitarianism,'
Another major point of discussion has been the question of violence, or 'terrorism' as the government crudely describes it on occasion. The SWP denies that it advocates violence. But nor does it renounce it, either, Its 1980 presidential candidate, Andrew Pulley, put the Marxist position in a nutshell when he explained to the judge:
'What I am saying, your Honour, is that the United States government will not tolerate the majority of the American people to democratically and orderly change things. This is why our government has carried out coups d'etats all over the world and set up totalitarian regimes... That is why they put the Shah in power and kept him in power, trained people in the most advanced techniques of terrorism...
'As proven by the people in Cuba, and American history also, when the masses of people decide to change society fundamentally they are confronted by force and violence by the existing government and right-wing organisations, who use terror to maintain the status quo. The people of Cuba and elsewhere, in the US Civil War, the war against the British, showed that the masses have to defend themselves effectively to move forward.'
What the government cannot understand is that the SWP and YSA fight openly for the ideas they believe in. Hours and hours are spent by the defence attorneys in trying to 'trick' the Trotskyists into saying something else. In so doing they reveal very graphically the mentality of capitalist politicians who promise one thing and do the exact opposite. And at the same time they give the SWP and YSA witnesses an unparalleled opportunity to dissect the operations of the capitalist state and put forward the Marxist alternative,
The SWP and YSA know that state harassment of their activities won't stop whatever the outcome of the trial. But then their aims were always wider than that. As Andrew Pulley put it in a statement just before the trial opened: 'Racist attacks, violence and undemocratic practices are not the policies of just one individual politician, political party, or government agency. They are not an aberration. The tiny handful of bankers and businessmen who rule this country, and the Democratic and Republican parties that serve their interests, must use these practices to preserve their profits, property, and political rule.'
In pressing this suit to highlight the methods of capitalist rule, the SWP and YSA are acting on behalf of the millions of victims of US imperialism around the world and hastening the day of its downfall. And in doing so they have earned widespread recognition from other opponents of the White House administration. Perhaps it was put best by noted black entertainer and civil rights activist Dick Gregory:
'I'm glad the Socialist Workers Party has carried the fight through to the end and not faltered, but has gotten stronger and stronger. There are a lot of people that the government can appeal to with money but I thank God the Socialist Workers Party is not one of them.'
Having failed to buy the SWP and YSA, the American capitalists are now trying to silence them through a media boycott of the trial. They have good cause to fear that working people might find the Trotskyists' ideas attractive at a time when Reagan's new budget seeks to drive down living standards in order to finance further war expenditure,
But just as the SWP has daily testified to its internationalism in the Foley Square courthouse, so socialists around the world can help to break through this media boycott by getting out the facts of the case through every means possible, The comrades of the SWP and YSA, who have pitted their tiny resources against the most powerful ruling class in the world, are surely entitled to expect no less.