[The following are excerpts from a statement passed in early May by the International Executive Committee of the Fourth International.]
The SWP and YSA lawsuit has played a central role in uncovering some of the crimes of the FBI, CIA, and other government agencies within the U.S. The suit forced the U.S. government to release tens of thousands of pages of hitherto secret documents.
Among other revelations, the SWP and YSA lawsuit uncovered:
• Documented proof of FBI burglaries of SWP national headquarters;
• Extensive spying directed not only against the SWP, the YA and other left political parties, but against the Black, the antiwar, the women's liberation, and the Chicano movements;
• FBI visits to landlords, employers and relatives leading to loss of jobs and housing;
• The use of informers to spy on people, steal records and instigate provocations;
• Bugging of telephones;
• Opening and copying private correspondence;
• Using bomb threats and physical violence;
• The existence of an "SWP Disruption Program"—a specific government program started in 1961 to spy on and try to disrupt the political activities of the SWP and the YSA.
The documents show how the FBI plotted against the Black movement, how it tried to drive union militants from their jobs, and how it tried to prevent the rise of the movement against the war in Vietnam.
Documents have disclosed how the Immigration and Naturalization Service maintains a blacklist used to harass, exclude and deport non-U.S. citizens. It was shown how the INS acts in collusion with the secret police agencies of other governments, including the racist regime of South Africa, and has had a special relationship with police agencies in Canada and Mexico. The SWP and YSA lawsuit in addition brought to light many of the U.S. government's international operations. In 1976 the CIA was forced to hand over to the socialists hundreds of documents on its secret operations around the world, although this was only a small portion of its massive file on the world Trotskyist movement and was of course heavily censored before being delivered to the socialists' attorneys.
The lawsuit has effectively exposed the real content of the policy of the American government vis-à-vis democratic rights —its use of informers, electronic surveillance, interception of mail, burglaries, blacklist, etc., all directed against legal political organizations solely on the basis of their political ideas. This extensive use of the secret political police in the United States shows that this type of massive, undercover repressive apparatus is not just restricted to police states and military dictatorships but, on the contrary, is part and parcel of capitalist rule, even in the bourgeois democratic countries.
Through their battle with the U.S. government, the comrades of the SWP and the YSA also have been able to take advantage of the courtroom confrontation to explain and popularize their political ideas and positions, answer the government's slanderous charges concerning "terrorism" and "subversion," and openly assert the revolutionary Marxist program to "educate and organize the working class to establish a workers government in order to abolish capitalism and achieve socialism." In this sense, the trial is also one of Marxism and the basic ideas of scientific socialism and an important instrument in fighting the attempts of the U.S. government to present the defense of these ideas and the activities based on them as criminal activities.
The legal argumentation of the U.S. government and its attempts to resurrect the McCarthy period witch-hunt legislation aimed at suppressing socialist ideas and activities is part of a broader drive by the U.S. government against democratic rights and the opposition of the working people to imperialist remilitarization.
The SWP and YSA lawsuit represents an important fightback against the U.S. government's policies and for the political rights of all working people.
A victory would be a victory for every trade unionist, Black activist, feminist, and opponent of the U.S. government's policies.