Socialism & the Agitation for Freedom of Speech & Organisation

The Executive Committee of the S.P.G.B. received from Mr. V. Sastry, Secretary of the Federation of Indian Associations, a letter inviting us to co-operate in the formation of a Defence Committee with the objects of providing legal aid to persons recently arrested for offences against the Trade Disputes Act, 1927, and of conducting a campaign against that and other restrictive legislation. Subsequently the “Anti-Labour Law’s Victims Defence Committee” was established, with Mr. Sastry as Secretary, and with the active backing of various individuals, including one or two Labour M.P.s, and the following: J. Maxton, J. McGovern, Fenner Brockway, and Walter Padley (I.L.P.); Ted Grant (Revolutionary Communist Party); and M. Kavanagh (Freedom Press). The newly formed Committee appealed to us for a donation.

While the S.P.G.B. sympathises with the Committee’s declared object of resisting capitalist encroachments on the activities of workers and their organisations, we declined to associate with this committee or to contribute to it, just as in the past we have refused to associate with numerous other such bodies set up with similar objects. The S.P.G.B. does not consider it desirable to associate with other political organisations and individuals, the aims and methods of which we oppose, in order to further the specific object of agitating against a particular Act of Parliament or action of the police or the Government. Since our own Socialist aim and the democratic principles on which we work compel us to oppose organisations that are not working for Socialism, or that are advocating methods which will not achieve that aim, only confusion would be caused in the minds of the workers if we abandoned our basic opposition and allied ourselves with the organisations in question.

Even on the particular question of interference with working-class activities, experience has abundantly shown what confusion exists in the minds of the self-styled advocates of free speech and freedom of organisation. Normally the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress rank themselves, along with the Liberal Party and the Liberal Press and the Communist Party, as the natural guardians of working class rights. Yet we have recently seen the first two bodies defending the new anti-strike Regulation against which, among other measures, the newly-formed Defence Committee is protesting. Although at present the Liberals and the Libeial Manchester Guardian are inclined to oppose the Regulation, we recall that at the time of the suppression of the Dally Worker, the Guardian and other Liberal papers supported the suppression, though disagreeing with the method. As for the Communist Party, their Daily Worker (now allowed to appear again) has been asking the same authorities which suppressed the Daily Worker to take action against the Trotskyists, to which group belong the four people the present Defence Committee seeks to protect. Recently the Socialist Appeal (Mid-October, 1943), an organ of the Trotskyists, was protesting that the Communist organisation, Central Bcoks, had refused to handle an Indian pamphlet about the famine. Socialist Appeal said : “Such is the love of the principle of ‘freedom of the press’ by these revolutionary gentlemen.” We, however, recall that the Trotskyist attitude in the past has been no better than that of the Communist Party. Trotsky and Lenin (before Trotsky’s exile from Russia) were united in their advocacy of suppressing the press and organisations of their opponents, including, of course, working-class organisations with which they did not happen to agree.

We know nothing of the Federation of Indian Associations which is sponsoring the Defence Committee to protect the Trotskyists, but in view of the known sympathy of some of the Committee’s supporters with the Congress Party in India, it is relevant to recall that the Indian advocates of independence from British rule are no different from the British capitalists in their attitude to working-class organisations. When the Indian Congress Party was in office in Bombay they introduced a Trade Disputes Bill modelled on the British Act. As the Indian Labour Journal (October 23, 1938) remarked, the bill “takes away the legitimate constitutional and powerful weapon of the workers, namely the strike, by declaring it illegal and therefore punishable in a large number of cases.”

The S.P.G.B. is in favour of allowing all groups and individuals unfettered rights of expressing their point of view, but we also recognise the very important fact that while capitalism lasts, the capitalists who control the machinery of government will always be able to use their power to suppress minority groups if they so desire. It is in the interests of the working class to resist such efforts so far as they are able, but working-class opinion needs much clarification before it recognises that working-class interests are not served by the suppression of any point of view, and, further, recognises that the suppression of working-class minorities will not end until the working class achieves democratic control of the machinery of government for the purpose of introducing Socialism.