BY LARRY SEIGLE  
This case has a long history, much longer than we usually think of. Like so much of what we in the Socialist Workers Party and the Young Socialist Alliance are involved in today, our fight against the FBI has its roots in the period around 1848, when the modern communist movement began in Europe. That was when the industrial working class first entered the political arena as a class, with a vanguard consciously charting a course in its historic interests. And the ruling classes responded with, among other things, the unleashing of police spies, agents provocateurs, and political frame-ups.

Our fight against the political police today continues the fight waged by Marx and Engels, beginning in 1848, against the series of frame-ups of leaders of the Communist League, including successful defenses of Marx himself. These led up to the notorious Cologne trial in 1852, which took place in the wake of the defeats of the 1848-49 revolutions. All the police methods we see today came to light there: the accusation of illegal conspiracy based solely on political ideas and activities, the false testimony of informers, even “mail covers” and police forgeries. The original “black bag job”—to use a current FBI term—took place in preparation for that frame-up.

Our fight today has many parallels with the fight by the German Social Democratic Party against the Anti-Socialist Laws in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The party fought for the right to function openly, as a legal party. And it refused to begin acting as a conspiratorial society even when forced into illegality.

Our war with the FBI today is in a direct line of descent from the fight that the Bolshevik Party and the entire Russian workers’ movement waged against the Okhrana, the tsars’ FBI, which fielded an army of informers against the working-class movement. When the Russian workers finally got their hands on these informer files—it took a revolution to do it—they found records of almost 40,000 agents provocateurs. That was the first time in history that the entire account of a secret police operation, including its spy and disruption efforts, fell into the hands of the working class.

Our fight against the political police also has, of course, a long tradition in this country. It includes the national campaign against the execution of the Haymarket frame-up victims, the battles against the Pinkertons and other labor-spy outfits, and struggles to stop police and KKK racist terror against Blacks, Mexicanos, and Asians. Another early chapter was the crusade by the Wobblies, the Industrial Workers of the World, to establish their right to free speech on the street corners. It was a pre-World War I equivalent of our fights today to establish the right to petition in shopping malls and to defend our right to sell our newspapers on street corners and at plant gates.

Our heritage also includes the fight against the arrest, trial, and imprisonment of Eugene Debs and other antidraft and antiwar fighters in World War I. It includes the fight against the anticommunist and anti-immigrant witch-hunt and deportations after that war, known as the Palmer raids (named after A. Mitchell Palmer, the attorney general at the time). It includes the fight against the monstrous frame-up and murder of Sacco and Vanzetti, and countless other cases of political persecution aimed at the working-class movement. It is a continuation of the fight waged on behalf of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were martyrs of the witch-hunt in the 1950s.

The secret police apparatus as we know it today began to take shape at the end of the 1930s, on the eve of the war. This is when our case begins.

Roosevelt was replacing the New Deal with the War Deal, as the imperialists prepared to subject humanity to the second world slaughter. As the U.S. capitalists got ready for war against their rivals abroad, they also prepared their offensive against the working class and against Blacks and Chicanos at home. Their aims were to silence all opponents of the war drive, to channel all motion toward a labor party back into the two capitalist parties, and to make working people accept the necessity of sacrifice. All struggles for improvements in wages and working conditions, or for an end to racial discrimination and segregation, had to be subordinated to the needs of the imperialist war.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home