The Declaration of Independence, adopted on July 4, 1776, begins:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness …That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government …
American lawyers, merchants, and slaveowners used these words to inspire the working masses to overthrow the British. But the Declaration created a slight problem for the new ruling class: at any moment, ordinary Americans might get it into their heads that they could use those rights against them! Their solution to this problem has always been brutality, repression, deception, and lies.
Freedom of speech for whom?
During World War I, as 20 million men, women, and children were being slaughtered, President Woodrow Wilson signed the Espionage Act of 1917. The act made it illegal to, “Willfully cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty in the military or naval forces of the United States, or . . . willfully obstruct the recruiting or enlistment service of the US.”
The capitalists were desperate to stifle any opposition to the bloodletting. When the US entered the war, the government launched an intense propaganda campaign to convince American workers to join the military. It didn’t work. Too few young men wanted to die in a struggle to determine which gang of imperialists would dominate the world. So, the ruling class started conscripting them.
Anyone speaking out against war or conscription could land in prison for up to twenty years. Despite the Espionage Act’s clear intrusion on the right to free speech, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld it as constitutional in Schenck v. United States. Writing on behalf of the court, the famously liberal justice Oliver Wendell Holmes equated antiwar speech with shouting “fire!” in a crowded theater.
In a two-hour speech to a raucous crowd in Canton, Ohio, Socialist Party leader, Eugene V. Debs, called for destroying “all enslaving and degrading capitalist institutions,” including the military, and re-creating them “as free and humanizing institutions . . . [for] the emancipation of the working class and the brotherhood of all mankind.”
Was this yelling “fire!” in a crowded theater? For the ruling class, absolutely! Debs was arrested for violating the Espionage Act and accused of “obstructing military recruiting.” He was sentenced to ten years in prison for giving a speech about emancipation and brotherhood.
Debs served 32 months. 2,000 others were arrested, and 900 went to prison—all for speaking their minds in the “land of the free.”
Liberal hero Franklin Delano Roosevelt rounded up all of the Japanese-Americans on the West Coast and forced them to work for little or no pay in internment camps. / Image: Dorothea Lange, Wikimedia Commons
Concentration camps for American citizens
During World War II, which saw as many as 85 million slaughtered, liberal hero Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. All of the Japanese-Americans on the West Coast—120,000 men, women, and children—were rounded up, forced to sell their property and businesses, and sent to overcrowded internment camps hundreds of miles away from their homes.
Surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards, they spent three years in these concentration camps. For little or no pay, they were forced to grow crops and produce military goods—often for private contractors—in dangerously poor conditions. Three quarters of them were American-born citizens. So much for their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
What are democratic rights?
Where does this hypocrisy come from? As Lenin explains in State and Revolution, every state is the tool of one class to suppress all other classes in society. The American state is a capitalist state. It serves the interests of the capitalist minority and oppresses the working-class majority. There’s no such thing as “liberty and justice for all.” This is why communists always ask: liberty and justice for which class?
SO why does the American government pretend that we, the working class, have rights at all? Since there are many more of us than there are of them, they need to direct our discontent into safe channels. They want us to put our energy into fighting for our rights in their courts and voting for their parties in their elections, so we don’t overthrow their system as a whole.
And when that doesn’t work—when workers use proletarian methods like strikes and mass demonstrations—the capitalists clamp down, as Trump is doing now and Biden did before him. Suddenly, all our so-called “rights” disappear.
This is because governments, laws, and rights are not sacred and eternal things standing above the class struggle. They are weapons of one class against another. You’ll never hear a genuine Marxist talk about “democracy” in the abstract. We stand for the right of workers to speak and assemble as a means to an end in the struggle against the capitalists. Workers can use democratic rights to fight the class war, and defending these rights against the class enemy’s attacks is just one part of a revolutionary program to abolish the capitalist government and institute a new government of the working class.