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As Inauguration Day approaches and Donald Trump prepares to begin his second term as President, the American people have already been faced with threats to their civil liberties. His attack on civil liberties is an attack on the unity of the working class. Trump aims to turn one group of workers against another. President-elect Trump aims to turn the native-born worker against the foreign-born, or immigrant, workers, as well as non-LGBT+ workers against LGBT+ workers.
As Communists, we recognize the need to struggle for progressive reforms, including those in the domain of civil liberties. As Lenin eloquently explained, “Revolutionary Social-Democracy has always included the struggle for reforms as part of its activities… In a word, it subordinates the struggle for reforms, as the part to the whole, to the revolutionary struggle for freedom and for socialism.” Thus, the Communist struggle for civil liberties is understood within the context of the struggle to build the road to American socialism. In order to do this, the American working class will need to act as a unified whole – that is why Communists must oppose any attempt to divide workers from each other.
Historically, the Communist Party USA, when it served as a real Communist party, was at the forefront of the struggle for civil liberties in the 20th century. This work began with the formation of the International Labor Defense (ILD) in the 1920s. The ILD concentrated on legal defense for militant workers and immigrants. Notably, the ILD defended Sacco and Vanzetti, who were Italian left-wing immigrants framed for armed robbery, as well as the Scottsboro Boys, who were nine African American youth that had been accused of raping two white women in 1931.
Later, at the dawn of the Cold War, the ILD was reborn as the Civil Rights Congress. They presented the famous petition “We Charge Genocide” to the United Nations in 1951. This petition identified the persecution of African Americans as a form of genocide according to the Genocide Convention of the United Nations.
After the McCarthy period of the 1950s, the CPUSA remained active in the struggle for civil liberties. They were at the forefront of exposing the Watergate scandal under President Nixon to the American people. Later, when civil rights leader Angela Davis was imprisoned on trumped-up murder charges, Communists led the Angela Davis Legal Defense Committee. This formation later developed into the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (NAARPR). NAARPR took up the case of the Soledad Brothers, who were three African American prisoners that had been charged for the murder of the prison guard John Vincent Mills in 1970. NAARPR was also involved in the case of the Wilmington Ten, who were wrongfully convicted of firebombing a white-owned grocery store in Wilmington, North Carolina amid rising racial tensions. Under the Reagan presidency, the Communist Party opposed Reagan’s actions against the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO). Reagan fired thousands of air traffic controllers for going on strike to demand higher wages and better benefits in 1981. The Communist Party recognized that the right of workers to organize and to go on strike is a fundamental civil right.
Today, civil liberties are threatened once again under an increasingly reactionary American government. It will take a coalition of all anti-monopoly elements, be they liberal, conservative, and otherwise, to effectively organize for the preservation and advancement of our civil liberties. We see this coalition forming today under the leadership of class-conscious sections of organized labor. This is exemplified by the drive of independent unions such as the United Electrical Workers (UE) for a third-party labor movement. This movement will be independent of the two major bourgeois parties of the ruling class, the Democratic and Republican Parties, which are beholden to the interests of monopoly capital.
