The new edition of the FBI’s manual for domestic investigations grants agents extensive powers to search databases, go through household garbage and start surveillance on people or groups suspected of crimes. The new manual stresses that evidence of criminal activity is not a pre-requisite for opening investigations or beginning surveillance (NYT, 6/12).
The new rules are in fact only codifying behaviors that the FBI has engaged in since its inception and with increasing frequency since the 1970s. These surveillance powers, “justified” by the “war on drugs” and the “war on terror,” have been primarily used to monitor and harass anti-war, anti-capitalist, pro-labor and other Left-leaning groups.
One activist in the environmental movement was shocked recently when a Freedom of Information Act request revealed that he had been under intense surveillance since 2001. There had been at least five FBI informants in his various groups, and the FBI had collected 1,200 pages of documentation on him (Democracy Now, 6/14/11). Two years ago anarchists were dismayed to discover that Brandon Darby, a man who had run an anarchist collective in post-Katrina New Orleans, had been an FBI informant for years (This American Life, 5/22/2009). In 2007 it was revealed that the FBI had been abusing national security letters, presidential edicts that allowed surveillance without judge-issued warrants, to spy on people with no evidence of a crime (NYT, 3/10/2007).
Of course this kind of harassment of workers has not been limited to the FBI. Immigration Customs and Enforcement raids have been used to intimidate Latino workers from organizing as they were in 2007 at the Smithfield plant in North Carolina (Center for Iimmigration Studies, 7/2009). Anti-war groups formed after the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan have also been subject to spying and intimidation. In 2003 the campus office of an anti-war group at Texas Tech University was raided by local police. That same year a judge subpoenaed records (attendance lists, conference notes, etc.) of an anti-war conference at Drake University (AP, 2/7/2004). Just last year at the University of Washington, university police tried to place an undercover agent in a student group protesting the budget cuts (ACLU-WA, 7/8/2010).
The capitalist state has always used its state power to spy on and intimidate the working class. The current changes in the FBI manual represent not a change in policy, but an increasing boldness on the part of the ruling-class’ police forces that shows their true fascist stripes. But in their efforts to intimidate the working class, they reveal their fear of it.
The capitalist class cannot exist without the subjugation and exploitation of workers. The creation of a workers’ state through communist revolution would threaten to eliminate the capitalist class forever, and they know it. That is why they spend so much time and money trying to intimidate us. The continued growth of PLP, despite this intimidation, will ensure that the capitalists will fail in their efforts to prolong their murderous, racist system.
