Below is an excerpt from the Socialist Workers Party 2022 Political Resolution, printed in The Low Point of Labor Resistance Is Behind Us: The Socialist Workers Party Looks Forward. It describes the consolidation of the FBI as the rulers’ main political police force in the late 1930s. Today Washington is working overtime to try to refurbish the FBI’s reputation, to better use it against militant workers, communists and anyone who it fears threatens its rule. Copyright © 2023 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
In September 1939 the Democratic Party administration of Franklin Roosevelt issued a “Presidential Directive” to ensure “the internal safety of our country.” That executive order initiated a transformation of the FBI, which up to then had been a federal police force pursuing interstate law-breaking, financial fraud, and organized crime, a force most of whose field agents were lawyers or accountants. It was reborn as a federal political police acting at the behest of the president, whichever party occupied the White House. Its agents carried arms as a matter of course. The FBI was now aimed above all at stabilizing and preserving the capitalist state, as preparations accelerated for the U.S. rulers to take the country into the expanding imperialist slaughter.
Long-established “red squads,” “bomb squads,” and “radical units” of state and local police departments, as well as company goons and other private security forces, were no longer sufficient to the global needs of U.S. finance capital. Even under conditions of bourgeois democracy, the imperialist ruling class, whose executive committee sits in Washington, must have a national political police able to operate secretly and largely with impunity. …
Roosevelt’s 1939 executive order instructed the FBI “to take charge of” investigations related to “espionage,” “counterespionage,” “neutrality laws,” and, most importantly for the working class, what his administration called “subversive activities.” The latter was an undefined and elastic term calculated to include militant trade unionism, independent working-class political action, and, above all, any determined opposition to the US rulers’ entry into the second imperialist world war.