The FBI's strategy with COINTELPRO involved many of the same tactics that Pinkerton used to fight the Molly Maguires and other worker-organizations and anarchist groups. Infiltration was primary, as was careful use of disinformation (creating false documents purporting to be from leftist groups) and in the case of Black Panther Party members (as well as possibly others), assassination.

All this we know from information gathered by the US Senate in 1975 (the Church Committee) but we could be forgiven for suspecting even more targets and tactics existed. Since the revelations, it has become even harder to gain information about the activities of the FBI, but we do know they have been very active in infiltrating anti-capitalist groups during the anti-globalistion protests, doing door-knocks on the homes of activists before protests to intimidate them (including many of my friends). With the advent of the ‘war on terror,' the FBI has been able to redefine environmentalist and anti-capitalist groups as ‘domestic terrorists,' giving them even more power to act with impunity against those whom the government and the rich fear.

Fortunately, groups like Anonymous and Wikileaks have made it so we do not need to wait for another Senate Committee to get information of the FBI's activities, but if over one hundred years of FBI harassment and killing of political dissidents (plus another 50 years of their predecessor, the Pinkerton Detective Agency) is any indication, it's not good.

F(or) B(eautiful) I(nsurrection)

Perhaps more important, though, is to keep in the forefront of our minds why Pinkerton and later the FBI arose, and who they worked for: the rich. It has always been the wealthy who need protection from the poor. They need us to work in their factories and shops, to obey laws about stealing from them, to fear poverty more than we fear our enslavement to their demands.

“Investigative" agencies like Pinkerton and the FBI exist because the rich do not know how to stop us. They need to pay people to learn about our actions, infiltrate our meetings, sabotage our plans, and assassinate us when we get to powerful. As terrifying as the tactics and power of such forces are, the rich have more reason to be terrified than we ever do. What might we do to resist such power?

I suspect the solution may be at the beginning of this essay, in the very movements which Pinkerton and later the FBI arose to fight.

The Whiteboys and Molly Maguires, the Rebeccas and the Luddites, each arose as movements to attack the rich. Each was subversive and each claimed a mythic (or deific) leader whom gave them power. For the Whiteboys it was an ancient Irish goddess, the Molly Maguires a mythic heroine. The Rebeccas claimed an old crone gave them the women's clothes they wore to confuse the hired soldiers of the rich, and a night watchman fleeing from an attack by Luddites claimed later to have seen their ghostly king striding tall amongst them, wielding a pike. The later movements which arose also rallied around mythic figures, many of them comrades recently murdered by Pinkerton agents or later the FBI.

That mythic center not only gave each group coherence, it also allowed them to continue when specific leaders were targeted and killed. Further, agents of the state cannot kill a goddess or a dead heroine, anymore than they can ever fully crush a resistance.

Already we see new resistance struggles rising up with the mythic as its banner. Animist, indigenous, and pagan spiritualities everywhere form the backbone of many new movements, and its highly likely that infiltration already runs rampant, especially on social media. We should absolutely ask hard questions about the extent of this surveillance (is that meme page really run by a leftist? How many of those faceless twitter accounts are actually run by whom they say they are, rather than all by one individual?), but rather than become paralyzed by fear regarding this inevitable sabotage, we should be emboldened. We’re coming into our power, and the rich have noticed.

May we raise our mythic banners high against the citadels of the powerful, and may our gods and spirits guide us.

Rhyd WildermutH