The men and women of the MOVE organization. (credits)

It’s been just over 30 years since 11 people died in one of the great unspoken tragedies on US soil. That tragedy is the MOVE Bombing, in which Philadelphia police used C-4 explosives to siege a home situated in a Black neighborhood (Philadelphia’s Osage Ave.) Why did they do it? The MOVE organization was a black liberation group, loosely affiliated with what we would call the “New Left,” a wide variety of reformist and liberation movements across many social issues. Alongside the New Left were the traditional targets of state ire- the Marxists, the unions, the separatists. All of these leftists shared a common factor- they were threats to the US neoliberal hegemony, and that meant they had to be crushed by any means necessary.

For many radical activists, MOVE wasn’t a wake up call. It was an affirmation of what they already knew. For years, since the advent of the Cold War, the United States had been engaged in a sustained war of aggression on the radical left both at home and abroad, and there was no sign that they were going to let up. Even with the fall of the Soviet Union, the intelligence agencies such as the State Department, the CIA and the FBI continue to victimize the marginalized to this day. The radical left represents everything the ruling class hates and fears: queer liberation, decolonization; and of course, socialism and communism. To understand the extent of the USA’s war against the left, it is most important to know its history- the structures and precedents they set in place that allow them to victimize and kill freedom fighters years after the Red Scare ended. A cursory overview of the history reveals not only overt destruction of leftist movements, but also a sustained program of infiltration and even ideological warfare against the left.

Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1950.

Leading up to 1950s, communism was gaining influence with its vast successes. The words of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels resonated with the working class globally. Vladimir Lenin would inspire the Bolshevik Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 and become the leader of Soviet Russia. Communism offered an alternative to the crushing reality of capitalist exploitation that would fuel movements worldwide. In the United States, communism gained sway thanks to its contributions to the organization of labor unions that would secure essential rights for workers. It also was one of the only ideologies in the time period to take a definite stance against the rise of fascism. During World War II, the actions and sacrifices of the Soviet Union ensured a turning point for the Allies against Hitler. For the State Department, this all came to a head during the years of 1949 and 1950. These two years marked two important shifts in the balance of power between capitalism and communism. Firstly, on August 29, 1949, the Soviet Union had its first successful atomic bomb test. With this, the United States was no longer the only dominant military superpower in the world. Then, on October 1st, Mao Zedong would declare the creation of the People’s Republic of China. Now two extremely large socialist nations had been established, and communist sentiment spread like wildfire everywhere- notably in places like India, the Philippines and Vietnam (which would see the Vietnam war as a result.)

On February 19th, 1950, Joseph McCarthy addressed the Republican Women’s Club of Wheeling, West Virginia and told them the following: “ “I have here in my hand a list of 205 — a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.”

Joseph McCarthy can be considered the true forefather of American anti-communism, and the predecessor to the government officials who now ruthlessly attack the radical left. The fear and media frenzy he whipped up over his allegations came to be known as “McCarthyism” and laid bare capitalism’s hostility towards social change.

That 1950 address hardly concealed McCarthy’s anger at the godlessness of Marxist thinkers. He opines that “Karl Marx dismissed God as a hoax, and Lenin and Stalin have added in clear-cut, unmistakable language their resolve that no nation, no people who believe in a god, can exist side by side with their communistic state.” He described the basic contradiction between communism and capitalism as moralistic, with the communists clearly the immoral party. “Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity,” he opines, despite some historical warnings to the contrary.

Despite McCarthy’s motivations, he wasn’t alone in his fear of communism, and the persecution of those assumed to be members of the Communist Party swept the nation in the 40s and 50s. Contrary to popular belief, McCarthy himself was not associated with the infamous House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), as he was on the Senate. HUAC, however, was energized and inspired by sentiments such as McCarthy’s. It was operating and surveilling communists as early as 1938, and would continue on until 1975. It enjoys the distinction of first perpetuating the idea of communism as inherently “Un-American” and participated in various witch hunts, demanding blacklists of supposed communists within Hollywood. The idea of liberating the working class from capitalist exploitation being Un-American, while novel, set a dangerous precedent that fuels the attitudes the US government has toward the contemporary left. Since these institutions challenge the capitalist cornerstone of US democracy, they are presented as treasonous criminals.

A newspaper clipping exposing the actions of the FBI.

In 1956, things were rapidly changing. Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, delivered a landmark address to the 20th Congress, in which he denounced the “cult of personality” surrounding Josef V. Stalin. The anti-communist revolts such as Poznań 1956 protests in Poland and the Hungarian uprising were in full swing. In Vietnam, Ngô Đình Diệm began allowing more US troops to occupy the country after rejecting countrywide elections and beginning an anti-communist crackdown following his own rigged election.

In the midst of all of this, the FBI quietly began its Counterintelligence Program in August. It would come to be known as COINTELPRO, and it’s goal was simple: to undermine and destroy leftist movements, starting with the Communist Party of the USA. In 1975, the Senate investigatory panel known as the Church Committee would go on to call COINTELPRO “a secret war against those citizens it considers threats to the established order.” COINTELPRO rode a wave of anti-communist sentiment within the US government in order to justify its infiltration, wiretapping, threats, and subterfuge against any movements they felt posed significant danger. Among the groups admitted to being targeted: The Young Lords/Puerto Rican independence movement; black nationalist and liberation groups that included Dr. Martin Luther King and the SCLC, Huey Newton and the Black Panthers, el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz (Malcolm X) and the Nation of Islam, and others; La Raza and the Chicanx movement; The American Indian Movement (AIM); and the Socialist Workers Party.

Weaponizing terms like “extremism” and “domestic terrorism,” the FBI indiscriminately targeted colonized and marginalized people as well as the working class via the use of wiretaps and informants. In their own words, they wanted to encourage “factionalism” and discord within these movements. It was not surprising that in the 60s and 70s, with social justice becoming a hot button issue, they also turned their crosshairs onto the New Left.

COINTELPRO set the stage for the aggression the US state apparatus enacts with utter impunity. They targeted and essentially “bad-jacketed” revolutionaries, planting false information meant to cast these leaders in a negative light not only to the general public but to the members of the organizations themselves. Such was the case with Stokely Carmichael, whom FBI director J. Edgar Hoover saw as a “black messiah.” By spreading the rumor that Carmichael was a CIA agent, Hoover managed to get Carmichael exiled from both the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panthers, which Carmichael had hoped to merge. Men and women like Carmichael often had their lives ruined, as the FBI did not want their messages to influence the general populace. A March 1968 FBI memo on Dr. Martin Luther King’s movement reads: “Through counter-intelligence it should be possible to pinpoint potential trouble-makers and neutralize them…”

Black youth giving the Black Power salute outside a ‘liberation school’ run by the The Black Panther Party. (credits)

Described in “The FBI’s Covert Program To Destroy the Black Panther Party,” a report by the “Select Committee To Study Governmental Operations,” on behalf of the United States Senate, details in plain language the depths the FBI was willing to go to wipe out radical Black activists. The document pulls directly from memos and correspondences by CIA and FBI agents. Specifically referencing their adherence to Marxist-Leninism and the writings of Mao Zedong, the FBI considered the BPP to be “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country,” and would go to any lengths to stop their ideology from not only spreading to the “ghettos” but also to the schools and universities. Despite claiming they would never enact violence against the Panthers, they alluded to trying to set up violent conflicts between the Panthers and other organizations by “[letting nature take] her due course.” The FBI engaged in all manners of propaganda to demonize the Panthers. One memo states providing BPP “seasons greetings cards” which depict the Panthers as violent criminals. The memo recommends that “You should anonymously mail these cards to those newspaper editors, public officials, responsible businessmen, and clergy…”

COINTELPRO represents the worst of the USA’s machinations towards the radical leftist movement, and also makes quite clear that any organization in proximity to Marxism is a threat. It makes a lot of sense to contextualize modern abuses by the intelligence agencies from this lens. So long as an organization is anti-capitalist, the US had a vested interest in making sure they were viewed as criminal, then would quietly wipe them out either internally or externally. That capitalism is intrinsically tied to these actions is not immediately obvious until you view how closely interrelated the USA’s actions were with those on the ideological forefront against communism.

Milton Friedman of the Chicago Economics school.

When it came to cultural warfare, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) took the reigns. Like the FBI, the CIA was also engaged in rooting out and surveilling communists. A brief overview: In 1959, President Eisenhower was trying to weaponize Cuban defectors who had fled Fidel Castro’s socialist Cuba following the revolution. They recruited these defectors and members of other “dissident” communities. Verne Lyon, a former CIA undercover agent, detailed the CIA’s illegal activities in setting up an established network of proprietary companies, fronts, and covers they used to carry out domestic missions, allowing them to bypass congressional orders they do not operate within the country. These acts of espionage would be carried out by “old boys,” former agents and associates of the CIA.

This would lay the foundation for CIA’s Project CHAOS, which would serve as their very own COINTELPRO. CHAOS was used to actively spy on people, particularly those associated with the 1967 antiwar movement. The CIA openly collaborated with the FBI and COINTELPRO through the CACTUS program, a highly classified channel used to transmit information between the FBI and CIA. The Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Conference, Black Panther Party, May Day, and even John Lennon was among the subjects broached.

Yet the insidiousness of the CIA extends far beyond the FBI’s overt wrecking of social justice movements. The CIA had a vested interest in combatting the cultural Left, as it were. They wanted a war of ideas, and to thoroughly crush movements such as Marxism. Cue Milton Friedman, a faculty member of the University of Chicago’s Department of Economics, Law School, and Graduate School of Business, better known as home to the “Chicago School” of economic theory. Friedman was an ardent capitalist, and was a father figure to the Chicago Boys, a group of Chilean economists who studied under him during the 1950s. Friedman’s ideas would be instrumental in shaping Chile. Hating the socialist leader Salvador Allende, Richard Nixon wanted to hear Chile’s economy scream and backed the uprising of the fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet, who subsequently allowed the Chicago Boys to shape the economy. Friedman himself visited Pinochet in 1975, praising his and the Chicago Boy’s work.

According to Peter Fleming, in his piece entitled “What is human capital?,” Friedman and Theodore ‘Teddy’ Schultz were instrumental in developing human capital theory as a means of making capitalism intrinsic to the human spirit and communism inherently coercive and illiberal. Schultz was connected to the Ford Foundation, which was ostensibly a front for the CIA. Friedman was ardent about theorizing a form of capital that could not be separated from the individual, and any external ownership would thus be slavery. Basically, in contending that a man was his own means of production, Friedman crafted the ultimate ideological weapon against communism. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan would frequently employ this sort of rhetoric to quash worker’s movements at home and denounce others abroad. This was all made much easier thanks to heavy funding of organizations like the Ford Foundation by the CIA in their journey of ideological warfare.

Influential postmodernist thinker Michel Foucault.

On the other end of the spectrum, the CIA also noticed dissent within the Left and worked to understand and utilize it. For example, the CIA instructed its operatives to study French post-modernist theory such as that of Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes, detailed in this report procured under a Freedom of Information Act request. The split between the post-modernists and the Marxists represented an opportunity for the CIA to drive a wedge between the New Left and the traditional Communist parties. The first pages of the report celebrate the “anti-Marxist” and “anti-Soviet” thought as being important tools to deny criticisms of US capitalist policy, which the CIA hoped to exploit and translate into defection even if those same French intellectuals still criticized the US. Gabriel Rockhill explores the ideological contradictions in-depth here.

The CIA was unrepentant and ruthless in their goals, leaving no stone unturned when it came to combatting anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist narratives. Thomas Braden proudly states “I’m glad the CIA is ‘immoral’” in his insider account of the work done for the CIA. He details the rules for spreading dissent through front operations: “Use legitimate, existing organizations; disguise the extent of American interest: protect the integrity of the organization by not requiring it to support every aspect of official American policy.” In addition, he viewed it as a necessary evil, believing “ the new [CIA programs] should be capable of the same affirmative response as the ones we forged 17 years ago, when it seemed that the Communists, unchecked, would win the alliance of most of the world.” It was quite clear the CIA knew that the Soviets had inspired the workers, and that they would continue to do so. Thus, communism had to be destroyed.

A contingent of Black Lives Matter protesters walk along Washington Avenue in Minneapolis. (credits)

What does all this mean for radical activists today, living in the shadows of COINTELPRO and CHAOS? The methods of the programs were continued well into the future. Food Not Bombs and various other organizations were found to have been spied on by via wiretap. The Anti-Defamation League was found spying and informing on various leftist organizations. This is nothing new for law enforcement and intelligence agencies, but as we move forward into contemporary movements of the New Left such as #NoDaPL, Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ+ liberation, it is critical to understand and counteract. For socialists and anarchists alike, the US government has never seem so poised to infiltrate and cause harm, as organizations like the Party for Socialism & Liberation or the Black Rose Anarchists move onto massive social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

Consider what happened to the Occupy Movement. FOIA requests revealed that The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) closely monitored the Occupy Wall Street movement, providing agency officials with threat assessments. They also mined Twitter and other social media for information on Occupy activity. Black Lives Matter has been similarly targeted, at least since Ferguson, in which “ DHS’s Office of Operations Coordination released over 40 pages of documents… detailing live updates and Google Maps images of Black Lives Matter protestors’ movements during an April 29th protest in Washington, DC.” Human rights attorneys filed a lawsuit against the FBI and Department of Homeland Security claiming they were withholding records of surveillance against Black Lives Matter. A September 2016 report in The Guardian noted that the New York Police Department collected information on the Movement for Black Lives, and utilized undercover moles to observe protests.

The infiltration runs deep, and in the technological age, it's even easier to do. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have all been found to give special access to Geofeedia, a social media monitoring company who considers activists “overt threats.” It is the same platform used by the police during Ferguson, and the ACLU found records indicating at least 13 police agencies have gained access to it. In 2015, Yahoo’s chief obeyed NSA and FBI requests to send hundreds of millions of emails to their offices for surveillance purposes. Fernando N. ver der Vlist, of the University of Siegen, Germany and the University of Amsterdam published an article in “Surveillance & Society” titled “Counter-Mapping Surveillance: A Critical Cartography of Mass Surveillance Technology After Snowden.” Vlist states in the abstract that “we do not only live in a society where surveillance is deeply inscribed but more urgently, that it is increasingly difficult to study surveillance when its technologies and practices are difficult to distinguish from everyday routines.” He details just how interconnected and far-reaching surveillance programs are today with shocking clarity.

The diagram Vlist constructs detailing the NSA’s overview of surveillance networks.

Leftists must heed history going forward, and take care to defend themselves against the machinations of the United States’ capitalist machine. They have stopped at nothing to disrupt, fracture and outright destroy radical movements. Going forward, the conversation must be shifted towards critically assessing operational security as well as continuing to hold the United States accountable for the injustices it has committed in the name of national security. If you are to learn one thing about the extent of the hatred the United States holds towards the radical left, it is that one must hold must strong and speak truth to power. In the words of comrade Huey Newton:

“ The walls, the bars, the guns and the guards can never encircle or hold down the idea of the people.”