Where to limit the freedom of speech? Analysis in the context of the First Amendment to the US Constitution and the fighting words doctrine

This article is about the limits of the right to free speech. The first section provides a brief introduction to this topic, primarily in the context of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The second section describes the case of Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, which was fundamental to the topic of this paper because the United States Supreme Court created the so-called "fighting words" doctrine based on it. In the next two sections, two court cases are presented that perfectly demonstrate the limits of the right to free speech in the United States: Snyder v. Phelps and Village of Skokie v. National Socialist Party of America. The fifth part shows the right to freedom of speech in the context of Polish civil, criminal, and constitutional law, as well as acts of international law binding on Poland. The last part is a short summary.

The Blue and the Gray and the Red

This chapter analyzes how the Socialist Party of America invoked the “Second American Revolution” to advocate left nationalism, incremental reform, and Christian socialism, or to validate calls for revolution or international industrial emancipation. Pairing the class struggle with abolitionism tied socialism to domestic tradition and rendered the Civil War part of a revolutionary struggle. The Industrial Workers of the World, meanwhile, claimed one of the most contentious legacies of the abolitionists: the defiance of absolute property rights. However, the Red Scare helped undermine the socialist narrative of the war for the Union as a working-class war. Political repression reinforced the decline of revolutionary Civil War memories, which in turn yielded before rising strains of conservative industrial patriotism.

The Red Flag of Emancipation

This chapter considers the production of Civil War memory among Gilded Age socialists and anarchists. These radicals and revolutionaries built on the redistributionist claims of abolitionists and freedpeople, and exceeded those of trade unionists, by challenging not only the legitimacy of slave property or plantations but also the mechanisms of production and property rights. Late nineteenth-century socialists came to see themselves as a postscript to abolitionism, and their “red memory” operated through anarchist networks, militias, and workers’ parties. Most sought an end to partisan debates over loyalty and section, which hindered working-class organization, and used Civil War memory to espouse internationalism, prefiguring the Socialist Party of America and the Industrial Workers of the World.

“Geographies of Peoples”: Scientific Racialism and Labor Internationalism in Gilded Age American Socialism

This article investigates ideas of race in Gilded Age socialism by analyzing the intellectual production of the leaders of the Socialist Party of America (SLP) from 1876 to 1882. Existing scholarship on socialism and race during the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era rarely addresses socialist conceptions of race prior to 1901 and fails to recognize the centrality of scientific racialism and Darwinism in influencing socialist thought. By positioning American socialism within a transatlantic scenario and reconstructing how the immigrant origins of Gilded Age socialists influenced their perceptions of race, this article argues that scientific racialism and Darwinism competed with color-blind internationalism in shaping the racial policies of the SLP during the Gilded Age. Moreover, a transatlantic investigation of American socialist ideas of race presents a reinterpretation of the early phases of the history of the SLP and addresses its historical legacies. While advocates of scientific racialism and Darwinism determined the racial policies of the SLP in the 1880s, color-blind internationalists abandoned the party and extended their influence beyond organized socialism, especially in the Knights of Labor.

Left-Wing SPA-Led and CPUSA-Led Unions and Worker Organizations as the Vanguard of U.S. Social Democracy’s Left-Wing, Circa 1935 to 1950

During the golden era of world trade unionism (circa 1945 to 1980) the trade union movement’s political arm, the workers’ parties (Labor, Social Democratic, and Communist) were at their peak strength attaining a significant amount of electoral support from the citizens in many European industrial democracies. This situation, however, did not occur in the United States where both the Socialist Party of America (SPA) and the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) never exerted similar political power as their European counterparts. Nevertheless, SPA and CPUSA members and their supporters attained significant influence in U.S. trade unions and related workers’ organizations, circa 1930 to 1950. Based on the publication of recent literature, I argue that left-wing SPA-led and CPUSA-led unions and worker organizations were the vanguard of the left wing of U.S. social democracy (the New Deal) from the mid-1930s to approximately 1950. Since the SPA and CPUSA had relatively small membership numbers, it was more effective for these political groups to work through trade unions and other mass worker organizations, such as the International Workers Order, for promoting their ideas and policies.

Workers against Warfare

Working-class antimilitarism before and during World War I was an internationalist and international movement that transcended national boundaries. In the USA and Australia, this movement argued that war disproportionately wasted working-class lives and caused particular hardship for workers and their dependents at home, while employers profited and even profiteered; workers should therefore be loyal to their class rather than their nation and refuse to fight workers of other nations. Yet American and Australian working-class antimilitarists were very much products of their respective countries. National circumstances, which varied, shaped the campaigns they conducted. Entry to the war occurred at very different moments. Conscription was imposed in the USA shortly thereafter; in Australia conscription never passed two deeply polarizing referenda on the issue, which split the governing Labor Party. The labor movement in Australia had far greater political and industrial power than in the USA, where a formidable military-industrial complex had loosened the country’s isolationist moorings. This essay compares and contrasts American and Australian labor antimilitarism with particular focus on the varying roles played by the Industrial Workers of the World, the Socialist Party of America, the Socialist Labor Party of Australia, the Australian Socialist Party, and the Australian Labor Party. On both sides of the Pacific Ocean, working-class antimilitarists suffered for their internationalist principles, but the manner of their suppression was also conducted differently.

The Socialist Party of America, 1900–1929

One of the pervasive myths about the United States is that it has never had a socialist movement comparable to other industrialized nations. Yet in the early 20th century a vibrant Socialist Party and socialist movement flourished in the United States. Created in 1901, the Socialist Party of America unsurprisingly declared its primary goal to be the collectivization of the means of production. Yet the party’s highly decentralized and democratic structure enabled it to adapt to the needs and cultures of diverse constituencies in different regions of the country. Among those attracted to the movement in its heyday were immigrant and native-born workers and their families, tenant farmers, middle-class intellectuals, socially conscious millionaires, urban reformers, and feminists. Party platforms regularly included the reform interests of these groups as well as the long-term goal of eradicating capitalism. By 1912, the Socialist Party boasted an impressive record of electoral successes at the local, state, and national levels. U.S. Socialists could also point with pride to over three hundred English and foreign-language Socialist periodicals, some with subscription rates that rivaled those of the major urban daily newspapers. Yet Socialists faced numerous challenges in their efforts to build a viable third-party movement in the United States. On the one hand, progressive reformers in the Democratic and Republican parties sought to coopt Socialists. On the other hand, the Socialist Party encountered challenges on the left from anarchists, syndicalists, communists, and Farmer-Labor Party activists. The Socialist Party was particularly weakened by government repression during World War I, by the postwar Red Scare, and by a communist insurgency within its ranks in the aftermath of the war. By the onset of the Great Depression, the Communist Party would displace the Socialist Party as the leading voice of radical change in the United States.