Two cases, one tradition
Revolutionary legalism and the politics of defense campaigns
The fall of 2025 marked an escalation in political repression in the United States, targeting labor organizers, Palestine solidarity activists, and immigrant rights advocates. Two cases—Tom Alter in Texas and John Caravello in California—illustrate how this repression operates and how it can be fought.
This article argues that defense campaigns must treat the courtroom not as a site of justice, but as one terrain within a broader strategy of class struggle. This approach—what we can call revolutionary legalism—rejects both liberal faith in the courts and abstentionist refusal to engage them. Legal tactics must be subordinated to a different goal: building independent working-class power.
Two cases, one moment
Tom Alter, a tenured associate professor of history at Texas State University, labor historian, union member, and socialist activist, was fired in September 2025 after speaking at an online Revolutionary Socialism conference on his own time from his home as a private citizen. A self-described “fascist” YouTuber secretly recorded the event, edited the footage, and launched a smear campaign. Within days, Texas State President Kelly Damphousse announced on social media that Alter was fired for “inciting violence” and “jeopardizing the health and safety of the university community.” There was no hearing, no due process, just a Facebook post.
The response arrived promptly. Students protested for five days. The Texas State Employees Union (CWA Local 6186) mobilized, AAUP provided legal counsel, and major academic organizations issued statements of support. On 26 September, a district judge ordered Alter’s temporary reinstatement with back pay. The university complied formally but kept him out of the classroom and upheld the firing after a pro forma hearing. His lawsuit continues.
But the central story is what followed. Alter did not retreat; he helped launch a broad, public defense campaign.
John Caravello, a philosophy lecturer at California State University Channel Islands and member of the California Faculty Association, faced a different form of repression. During an ICE raid in July 2025, he removed a tear gas canister from beneath a protester’s wheelchair. Initially charged with a misdemeanor, he was later indicted on a federal felony charge under 18 U.S.C. § 111—assaulting a federal officer with a “deadly weapon”—the very canister agents had deployed. He faced up to twenty years in prison.
The California Faculty Association responded with a public campaign, organizing rallies and condemning the charges. On April 9, 2026, a federal jury acquitted Caravello after two hours of deliberation, finding him not guilty of assault with a deadly or dangerous weapon on a federal officer. His case, however, became a rallying point. When Alter’s speaking tour reached Los Angeles, Caravello joined him on stage linking academic repression to the criminalization of immigrant solidarity.
Two different cases, two legal forms—but a common dynamic: Repression met not with silence, but with organized public resistance.
Defense campaigns as class strategy
The Committee to Defend Tom Alter (CDTA) illustrates a strategic orientation largely absent from the current U.S. Left: turning an individual grievance into a collective struggle. Instead of treating Alter’s firing as a narrow dispute over academic freedom, the campaign framed it as part of a wider pattern of repression—linking labor rights, political speech and state power.
What distinguishes the CDTA is not its legal strategy but its political one: refusing to withdraw from private litigation and insisting on building a public campaign for free speech and academic freedom. From the outset, the case was treated not as a personal matter but as a collective fight. This orientation is reflected in the committee’s deliberately open and non-sectarian structure. As Alter told Inside Higher Ed, the CDTA “includes whoever chooses to be a part of it for however long they want to be involved.” Organized around a small core of five people who work on the case weekly, participation extends outward to union members, graduate students, faculty, and community activists, with local committees formed across multiple cities—including New York, Chicago, the Bay Area, and Connecticut. This breadth is strategic. By refusing narrow political gatekeeping, the campaign expands its base and situates the case within a wider class context.
The resulting coalition is unusually broad: labor unions such as the Texas State Employees Union (TSEU) (CWA), the California Faculty Association, and the AFT; academic bodies including AAUP and major history associations; and civil liberties and Palestine solidarity organizations. This is not a single-issue campaign or a sectarian front. It is a consciously constructed alliance that insists that Alter’s right to speak, organize, and teach is a working-class issue.
Public mobilization is integral to this approach. Rallies accompanied key legal moments—from campus protests in San Marcos to demonstrations at the headquarters of Texas State University System—and unions helped organize a national speaking tour that turned the case into a vehicle for wider organizing. The goal is not just reinstatement, but the construction of networks and capacities that outlast the case itself.
Caravello’s defense followed a similar trajectory, with unions organizing public pressure and now moving toward a cross-union defense council. Together, these efforts point toward the reemergence—still embryonic—of a coordinated, labor-centered approach to political defense. In this respect, they echo the tradition of the International Labor Defense (an initiative of the early Communist International): non-partisan, expansive, and oriented not only toward legal resolution, but toward building the collective power necessary to confront repression.
The speaking tour as organizing tactic
By February 2026, Alter had turned his firing into a three-month national speaking tour (February–April 2026) that quickly expanded beyond its initial scope. What began as a “patchwork” of invitations became a coordinated, coast-to-coast campaign spanning more than nine states with stops at campuses, bookstores, bars, and community venues. He spoke at more than forty venues, including campuses such as Rutgers, Loyola, the University of Ohio, UC Berkeley, San Francisco State, San Diego State, Cal State LA, UT Austin, University of Pittsburgh, and the CUNY Graduate Center, as well as independent bookstores like Midnight Books in Los Angeles and informal venues like Sean Patrick’s in San Marcos. He shared stages with Sang Hea Kil, John Caravello, members of the CUNY Fired 4, a Prairieland defendant, union activists, and student organizers, linking his case to a wider field of struggle.
The tour had two strategic aims, neither of which was reducible to “raising awareness.” First, CDTA used the case as a lever for organizing. At each stop, attendees were encouraged to join unions, sign petitions, and participate in local defense activities. The tour did not simply draw crowds; it built connections. As Alter told Inside Higher Ed, the events consistently brought together students, faculty, and community members, strengthening campus organizing.
Crucially, the tour fed back into the union strategy. The Texas State Employees Union (TSEU) began bringing Alter to campus not only to speak about his case but also to recruit members, demonstrating in practice that a union is not a transactional service provider but a vehicle for collective struggle. In this sense, the tour served both as political education and organizational development, using a concrete case to reshape workers’ understanding of the role of unions.
That dynamic points to a broader strategic insight that liberal legalism cannot grasp. The public orientation of the CDTA—the rallies, the tour stops, the joint appearances with local activists—is not window dressing around the “real” work of litigation. It is work. When Alter speaks in a union hall in Connecticut or a bar in San Marcos, he is not just telling his story. He is modelling what resistance looks like. He is showing faculty and staff that a firing need not be tolerated in and that a defense campaign can be a platform for organizing, not just for damage control.
The results bear this out. As Labor Notes reported in November 2025: “Membership in the Texas State chapters of AAUP and the Texas State Employees Union has doubled since Alter’s firing as workers unite to defend academic freedom and democratic rights across the state.” That doubling did not come from a clever legal brief or a favorable ruling. It came because the unions—TSEU and AAUP Texas—moved quickly to help form and support the CDTA and go public, because Alter got on a plane, stood on stages, and asked people to join their unions. The courtroom did not build that membership. The speaking tour did.
Second, the tour deliberately linked academic repression to broader attacks on immigrant communities, Palestine solidarity activists, and labor militancy. When UT Austin canceled his April 22 event, citing “security concerns” just days after hosting Clarence Thomas, the TSEU relocated the event to a nearby bar, turning administrative repression into an organizing opportunity.
This is defense work as class struggle. The objective is not simply to win a legal case, but to build infrastructure—to leave behind stronger unions, more militant organizations, and a network capable of responding collectively when repression strikes again.
A century of revolutionary legalism
The CDTA’s approach is not without precedent. For nearly a century, the U.S. Left has grappled with how to turn legal defense into political power—with varying degrees of success.
Lessons from the ILD
The International Labor Defense, founded in 1925 as a political solidarity and legal arm of the Comintern, remains the most developed model we have for this kind of work. It was not a spontaneous outpouring of outrage. It was an institution—a permanent defense organization with a national office, full-time staff, a monthly magazine (Labor Defender), and a budget. Within a year of its founding, the ILD had 156 branches and 20,000 individual members, with 75,000 more affiliated through union and community endorsements1.
The ILD’s principles are worth restating.
Non-partisanship. The ILD did not demand political loyalty. At its founding, James Cannon and Bill Haywood identified 106 “class war prisoners” in U.S. jails—striking miners, Wobblies, anarchists, and anti-fascist immigrants. None were members of the Communist Party, yet the ILD defended them all. This was not ecumenical sentimentality. It was strategic clarity: the enemy is the capitalist class. A historical caveat is necessary: The ILD’s non-partisanship was strongest in its early years, from 1925 to 1927. As Stalinization intensified, the organization became more sectarian—a reminder that all defense work must guard against bureaucratic capture.2
Mass Mobilization. In the Sacco and Vanzetti campaign, Cannon rejected liberal faith in legal appeals. After the Massachusetts Supreme Court denied a new trial in 1927, he wrote in the Labor Defender: “The power of the workers is the court of last resort to which our appeal must be made.”3 He was explicit about what this meant organizationally: not legal briefs, but strikes. “We must confidently proceed at all costs to still further arouse and organize the anger of the working men and women against the slaughter of the two labor fighters and assist it to take the form of huge mass demonstrations and effective strikes.”4
Against the liberal “soft pedal,” Cannon drew a sharp line between class-struggle defense and liberal reformism. He identified two competing policies within the Sacco-Vanzetti movement. The first—his own—puts the center of gravity in the protest movement… puts all faith in the power of the masses and no faith whatever in the justice of the courts. The second, which he called “the policy of ‘respectability,’ of the ‘soft pedal’ and of ridiculous illusions about ‘justice’ from the courts of the enemy,” relied primarily on legal proceedings and sought to obscure the issue of class struggle.5
Political Education. In his 1949 speech on the trial of the Stalinist leaders—a case he opposed even as he condemned Stalinism—Cannon articulated a revolutionary approach to political trials. The Stalinists, he argued, were indeed criminals, but “they are being tried in the wrong court” for the wrong crime. “The very provision of the Constitution… was designed specifically to prevent Congress from passing laws which would proscribe the ‘advocacy’ of any doctrine. But this indictment under the Smith Act… is an indictment against speaking and writing.”
For Cannon, the purpose of a political trial was never to prove innocence within the framework of the enemy. It was to turn the courtroom into a platform: “We will go in that courtroom not as defendants at all, but as accusers of the prosecutors and the system they represent.” His testimony in the Smith Act trial of 1941, published as Socialism on Trial, is a classic example of this approach.
Material Aid. The ILD sent $5 per month ($95 adjusted to today) to each of more than 100 prisoners and $20 ($380) to dependent families; at Christmas, it sent $50 to families and $25 to prisoners. “It must be recorded to the shame of the labor movement that poverty, hardship, and neglect have too often been the fate of dependent families,” the ILD declared. This was not charity. It was a statement: the working class takes care of its own.6
The 1960s–70s resurgence of political defense
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a wave of political trials tested the idea that mass defense could transform legal proceedings. The Chicago Conspiracy Trial (1969–70) saw eight antiwar activists—including Bobby Seale, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman—use the courtroom as a platform to indict the Vietnam War rather than to prove their innocence. The defense attorney William Kunstler turned the proceedings into political theater. Although five were initially convicted, the Seventh Circuit reversed all convictions in 1972, citing judicial bias.
The campaign to free Angela Davis (1970–72) went further, systematically integrating legal defense with mass mobilization. Facing capital charges tied to the Marin County courthouse shootout, Davis was placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list before her arrest. The defense campaign refused to treat the case as a narrow legal matter. The “Free Angela” movement mobilized worldwide, organizing rallies, fundraisers, and educational events that turned her prosecution into a global referendum on racism and political repression. As Charlene Mitchell, who led the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis, concluded: “The major lesson we learned was that the legal and mass defense of political prisoners is an inseparable entity; that you cannot free a political prisoner in the courtroom alone, and you cannot, without a good, political legal defense in the courtroom, make a mass defense.”
Davis herself understood this double orientation. As she later recalled, “the lawyers would have to understand from the outset that what happened in the courtroom would, of necessity, be related and coordinated with the campaign in the streets.” The legal defense was inseparable from mass pressure, which helped frame the trial not as an isolated criminal case, but as a political indictment of the carceral state. Her acquittal in 1972 was widely understood as a victory both inside and outside the courtroom.
The liberal settlement trap
But not every defense campaign maintained this orientation. The most instructive warning story dates back to the mid-1970s. In the wake of Watergate, the FBI and CIA underwent unprecedented public scrutiny. The Carter administration responded not by dismantling the surveillance apparatus, but by restoring its legitimacy. New “guidelines” were introduced, and a secret federal wiretap court was established—one that has never denied a government request in practice. The goal was to convince the public that abuses were over and that the “new FBI” could be trusted.
In this context, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) filed a lawsuit against the FBI alleging a decades-long campaign of infiltration, disruption and frame-ups. The government sought to settle, offering standard terms: modest compensation, a promise to “abide by the law” and an implicit agreement to ratify the legitimacy of the reformed security apparatus. Many accepted similar agreements. Jane Fonda settled her case in 1979.7 The ACLU negotiated settlements that effectively gave political cover to the very institutions it exposed. The price was political, not just financial. As one participant on the SWP’s legal team observed, such agreements helped convince the public that the “new FBI” deserved confidence.
The SWP refused any settlement that would legitimize the state’s narrative. What it sought in court was not mainly financial compensation but a political and constitutional affirmation that advocating socialism and the revolutionary replacement of capitalism was protected under the Bill of Rights. Attorney Leonard Boudin and SWP leaders stressed the fundamental issue: whether individuals and organizations could legally organize for socialism without state surveillance, harassment, or prosecution.
Judge Griesa’s 1986 ruling was a political victory for the entire socialist movement. It declared the FBI’s infiltration and surveillance of the SWP unconstitutional and a violation of First Amendment rights. For the first time, it was established that government informants inside a political organization could themselves constitute a constitutional violation. The court awarded $264,000 in damages to the party and issued an injunction barring the government from using illegally obtained files. The case took fifteen years. Victory required patience, persistence, and a clear political perspective.
Revolutionary legalism as a programmatic alternative
The concept of revolutionary legalism is not new. It was first systematically theorized by Piotr Stutchka, the first Soviet People’s Commissar for Justice, and debated by his younger colleague Evgeny Pashukanis. Drawing on Lenin’s tactical use of tsarist courts and the Duma, Pashukanis argued that a revolutionary party must avoid two errors: fetishizing legal forms (treating courts as neutral arbiters of justice) and the “fetishist denial of legality” (refusing to use legal weapons at all). Pashukanis wrote that Lenin “knew not only how mercilessly to expose tsarist, bourgeois etc. legality, but also how to use it, where it was necessary and when it was necessary.” This is revolutionary legalism: using bourgeois legal forms tactically, without mistaking them for instruments of justice or sources of legitimacy. This dialectical approach has seen a revival in recent years as neoliberal capitalism and the rise of authoritarian populism have drastically eroded democratic rights, forcing socialists to rediscover the Leninist art of fighting on every terrain.8
The courtroom is a battlefield, not a sanctuary. This distinction defines revolutionary legalism. It does not reject the use of courts, but refuses to treat them as neutral arbitrators or sources of legitimacy. Against liberal legalism, which seeks vindication through procedure, and against forms of movement lawyering, which can drift toward settlement as an endpoint, revolutionary legalism subordinates legal methods to the construction of political power. The question is not simply whether to win, but how and at what political cost.
This orientation has concrete consequences. First, discovery is a weapon. Subpoenas, depositions, and document requests should be used to expose how repression is organized, not just to build a case. Second, hearings are organizing opportunities. Every court date should be paired with public mobilization, turning legal proceedings into moments of political confrontation. Third, settlements must be judged politically. A good settlement contains no gag order, admits no legitimacy to the state’s original repressive action, and leaves a public record.
Agreements that restore institutional legitimacy without shifting the balance of power are defeats, regardless of compensation. Transparency, accountability, and structural concessions must be non-negotiable terms.
The Alter case poses these questions in real time. The lesson is to use the state’s own procedures to expose its operations while building power outside the courtroom.
When Texas State offered a post hoc “hearing,” it was an attempt to launder an illegal firing through procedural form. When administrators upheld the decision, they bet that the process itself would exhaust resistance. The response has moved in the opposite direction. Rather than retreat into litigation, the campaign has expanded outward, using the case not only to fight for reinstatement but also to expose the political forces behind the firing and to build the capacity to resist the next attack.
The lesson is obvious. Private negotiations create settlements. Public fights produce power.
The limits of the courtroom
The most persistent illusion social activists face is that “the law” stands above class struggle. It does not. The law codifies existing property relations and is enforced by courts and police, who answer to the same state.
First, the courts are not neutral. They protect property and class privilege. They do not dispense justice; they manage a crisis. A judge may rule for Alter—and that would matter—but it does not mean the courts are on our side. It means that, in this instance, the contradictions of bourgeois democracy worked in our favor.
When Cannon wrote that “the power of the workers is the court of last resort,” he was not dismissing legal tactics.9 He insisted that no procedural victory matters unless it is backed by organized capacity outside the courtroom. The rule of law protects the ruled only when the ruled are organized enough to make violations costly. This does not mean refusing to use the courts. It means entering them with clarity: as a tactic, not a strategy; as one front in a struggle that will be decided in unions, workplaces, and the streets.
Second, legal victories do not translate to class power. Even if Alter is reinstated, Texas State remains a capitalist institution. Even if the AAUP secures reforms, administrators will still face donors and political pressure. The point of a defense campaign is not simply to win a better deal, but to build the capacity to fight—and ultimately to challenge the class structure itself.
Third, the state learns and adapts. After the SWP lawsuits of the 1970s, the FBI did not stop spying; it refined its methods. The same will happen here. No defense campaign can permanently restrain repression. At best, it can buy time, create space, and help organize the forces capable of confronting repression and its core roots.
This is why the CDTA’s focus on building infrastructure matters more than the lawsuit’s outcome. If Alter loses his case but leaves behind a functioning cross-union defense council and a network of organizers prepared to respond to repression, the campaign will have succeeded. If he wins but the organization dissolves, the state will return stronger, and the Left will start from zero.
Conclusion: Building the capacity to fight
The ILD slogan—”An injury to one is an injury to all”—is an organizing principle. The fight for immigrant rights, academic freedom, Palestinian solidarity, and union organizing is one and the same.
The significance of the Alter and Caravello cases lies in the strategies they have generated. They show how defense campaigns can become sites of political recomposition—bringing together unions, activists, and communities in common struggle. The question is not whether repression will continue—it will. The question is whether the Left will be prepared to respond.
Revolutionary legalism rests on a simple premise: the courtroom is only one battlefield. The decisive terrain lies elsewhere—in the working class’s capacity to organize, mobilize, and act collectively. Defense campaigns that grasp this can turn moments of repression into opportunities for growth.
What would it take to build a permanent defense infrastructure today? Not a single centralized organization, but a network: regional defense committees linked through unions, civil liberties groups, and community organizations, with a shared playbook for rapid response. The CDTA’s “patchwork” model—local committees across multiple cities—is a starting point. The next step is to formalize coordination so that when one sector is targeted, others mobilize immediately.
The trial will come. The state will escalate. The university will try to wait out the campaign. But if the networks being built now endure—if unions, academic associations, and community organizations remain active—the outcome of the case will not be the sole measure of success.
The real victory will be the infrastructure that endures when the case is closed. The real victory will be a Left that knows how to defend itself.
The Committee to Defend Tom Alter continues to organize. To sign the statement of support, to request an endorsement from your organization, or to get involved in local organizing, visit defendtomalter.org.
Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Karolus_BR; modified by Tempest.
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Blanca Missé is an Associate Professor of Cinema at San Francisco State University. They are an active member of their union (CFA-SFSU) and are affiliated with Workers’ Voice.