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defending victims of government frame-ups
Unconditional defense of victims of capitalist oppression or state persecution has a long history in the working class. The International Labor Defense (ILD) was founded in 1926 by James P. Cannon in collaboration with IWW leader Big Bill Haywood who, himself, was living in Moscow to escape a twenty-year frame-up sentence.
The ILD drew up a list of 106 political activists who were victimized by capitalist courts. Each case of these long-forgotten fighters for social justice was publicized. The class bias of the courts, cops and politicians was exposed and the full force of labor solidarity was mobilized. Demonstrations and picket-lines were organized in many cities. No one stood alone.
While the ILD was the chief international defender of Sacco and Vanzetti, it also supported dozens of lesser-known anarchists and union organizers.
Each prisoner received a regular stipend and holiday gift. Every contribution was receipted and listed in the ILD newspaper. In fact, the financial records of the ILD were open to inspection by the whole workers’ movement.
But the ILD was best known for its completely non-sectarian approach to defense. While the ILD was largely sustained through the efforts of the Communist Party (CP), it is noteworthy that not one of its cases involved a Communist Party member.
Cannon successfully prevented the bitter sectarian disputes inside the CP from interfering with the functioning of the ILD. All victims of capitalist persecution were defended regardless of their individual political orientation. The class principle “an injury to one is an injury to all” found political expression in the ILD.
Nature of Frame-ups
Class solidarity is the most powerful weapon of the working class. Our strategy, therefore, seeks to maximize the political unity of the working class.
In defense cases, it is important to recognize that the capitalist class often uses more than physical violence against its victims. Using the full resources of its state apparatus, capitalism has tremendous capacity to distort, manipulate, and even invent “facts” and “evidence” against opponents of the status quo. Institutions like the FBI, CIA and National Security Council purposely exist to disrupt, disorient and discredit social protest movements and even governments which oppose imperialist policies.
The Bay of Tonkin provocation was staged in 1964 in order to justify sending more U.S. troops to Vietnam. Even though we did not have the facts, we correctly took the word of the Vietnamese fighters against the U.S. government’s description of the event. Several decades later, documents have proved that the U.S. government did indeed provoke the incident.
We always take the word of the oppressed against the capitalists. This is true even when we do not have hard supporting evidence. We simply do not possess the resources to unravel all aspects of a complex web which is essential for a successful frame-up.
But the capitalist state does have these resources. In many instances, for example, there is ample “evidence” which supposedly proves the guilt of the accused. Numerous eyewitnesses are produced and physical evidence is supplied which backs up the prosecution’s case.
The frame-ups of the Black Panther Party members, the Wilmington 10 and Joanne Little all occurred in the last twenty years but they differed little from the earlier frame-ups of Joe Hill, Sacco and Vanzetti, and Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.
In each case, evidence was manufactured to obtain convictions. Racist and anti-communist prejudice was the glue which kept these dirty frame-ups from crumbling.
We unconditionally and automatically accept the word of working-class fighters or victims of racial and sexual abuse against the word of cops or other agents of the capitalist state. This is true even when the state’s case rests on the testimony of alleged victims, who themselves, are Black, Latino, women or unionists.
Many of the prosecution witnesses against the Black Panthers were Black. The John Sayles film, Matewan, records an historical incident where the leading mineworker’s union organizer was framed-up for rape by testimony from a working-class woman. This type of manipulation, and more, has reoccurred numerous times.
Quick Response
An immediate response to appeals for aid from the oppressed or sections of the working class movement is absolutely necessary to stop or limit the extent of victimization. Capitalists must be taught that attacks on individuals or organizations opposed to the status quo will meet resistance from the whole movement – and fast.
Solidarity is, therefore, fundamentally conceived as a mass action oriented political approach, not a limp moral sentiment.
To ensure this automatic reflex, we must have absolute trust among ourselves. We trust the word of a comrade above anything else. This mutual confidence is an indispensable component of building a revolutionary party.
Our confidence in one another is based on our common acceptance of a class-struggle program. Socialist Action fights to build a world free from class oppression, violence, racism and sexism.
We have no interest in stealing, raping, murdering, or drug-running. Only capitalists and their cronies profit from these crimes.
We also have stringent membership requirements inside Socialist Action. Currently, we have a three month provisional membership period to acquaint a potential member with our norms. We never lie to each other, we never do anything to discredit our ideas or organization, we never engage in illegal activities, and we never violate the majority decisions of our organization.
We have democratic procedures to deal with instances where infractions or our membership norms occur. These measures, when necessary, serve to uphold the Leninist norms necessary for a revolutionary party, not the least of which is that we never lie to each other.
But sometimes rumors crop up or linger which question the loyalty of a comrade. This has happened several times in the working-class movement. Lenin, Trotsky and James P. Cannon always had the same approach. These matters have to be settled with great speed and decisiveness. No question marks about one’s integrity can hand over the heads of party members.
Control commissions are useful in protecting the party against unsubstantiated rumor campaigns. This was the case with comrade Sylvia Franklin, who was Cannon’s secretary in the Socialist Workers Party national office. Louis Budenz, an ex-Stalinist turned FBI informant, implicated Sylvia as a Stalinist agent. A federal grand jury included her name on a list of people supposedly in the employ of the GPU (the predecessor of the KGB). Others repeated the charge.
The rumors became so serious that a control commission was convened in 1950 to determine the facts. In this example, no evidence was found. Sylvia’s name was completely cleared. In the interest of party unity, all questions of her loyalty were put to rest, even by comrades who had expressed doubts.
Where no firm and indisputable evidence exists, the word of a comrade is always believed. And all comrades are treated equally.
In order to set such an example, Lenin publicly supported Malinovsky as head of the Bolshevik contingent in the Duma (czarist Russia’s parliament) even though there were numerous rumors that he was a Czarist agent. Though there was substantial evidence that Malinovsky was a spy, including information provided by several Bolsheviks, it was all circumstantial and on “indisputable” as Trotsky said referring to a similar case.
Under Lenin’s leadership, the Bolsheviks decided that it was more politically damaging for the party to question the word of a comrade than it was to suffer the very real physical dangers inherent in having a possible spy as the Duma fraction head.
After the revolution, Czarist documents proved that Malinovsky was indeed a spy.
During the investigating committee of the affair, Lenin commented that the Czar did not gain as much from having a spy among the Bolsheviks “as much as our Party did from Pravda and the whole legal [Duma] apparatus. The agent provocateur had to serve both these organs in order to justify his vocation. Both these organs were under our immediate guidance . . . [and] policy was entirely determined by the resolutions of the Party.”
Thus, Lenin understood that the membership’s understanding of the revolutionary Marxist program, combined with the democratic decision making structures of the party, was the best protection against provactive political twists and turns being forced upon the party by the intervention of a spy.
Under similar circumstances twenty years later, Trotsky acted exactly the same way to preserve an atmosphere of total trust and confidence with the party ranks. Joseph Hansen writes in Intercontinental Press on August 9, 1976, that “Trotsky was insistent on our maintaining confidence in each other – of not engaging in spy-hunting, and above all of not permitting disinformation planted by the GPU or other police to sow suspicion and disruption among our own ranks. Trotsky followed this rule himself. For instance, “in the absence of convincing proof that ‘Etienne’ (Zborowski) was guilty of disloyalty or of being an agent, Trotsky and Sedov maintained their confidence in him.”
As a matter of fact, a control commission was organized in Coyoacan, Mexico to investigate the rumors about Etienne, but it found nothing.
Years later, it was discovered that Etienne had been a Stalinist agent working in the international headquarters of the Fourth International. In fact, he may have been responsible for the death of Leon Sedov (Trotsky’s son).
Nonetheless, Trotsky insisted that although it was quite impossible to completely guard against repression and infiltration by capitalist or Stalinist agents, it was quite possible to destroy the party by incriminating each other.
The Communist Party paid a heavy price when it abandoned this approach. Numerous expulsions of loyal and dedicated members occurred in the 1950’s as a result of false information planted by the FBI which was not sufficiently corroborated by “indisputable” evidence.
A similar disruption occurred inside the Black Panther Party in the 1960’s. Innocent members were expelled based on information which was later found to be part of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program.
During the same period, the FBI manufactured a racist letter from an “anonymous” Socialist Workers Party member to Kwame Somburu (a leading Black spokesperson for the SWP). The letter was obviously designed to cause racial strife inside the SWP. A national leader of the SWP spoke during a discussion of the letter in the New York branch and stated that he suspected that it was concocted by the FBI. In any case, he said, no “member of the SWP was capable of writing such a letter.” The disruption attempt did not work because of the mutual confidence SWP members had in each other’s commitment to a revolutionary program. FBI documents later proved that the letter did originate from the government finks.
As a result of these lessons, we never doubt the loyalty of any member. Not for a minute. It has nothing to do with any “good old boy” clique sentiments. It’s our class-struggle concept of building a Leninist combat party which requires strict adherence to this policy.
While most of this report has dwelled on the crucial importance of solidarity within our own party, we extend this same trust and confidence to rebel fighters everywhere. Our solidarity with the oppressed and other sections of the workers’ movement is based on our common pro-working class orientation against capitalist injustice. We solidarize with all fighters for a better world and with all oppressed victims of this system.
