How the Left Got Fucked, Part 2

Anti-globalization, the anarchists, and the FBI

Much like the way American Protestant Christian groups split with each other over petty doctrinal issues, these groups split with — and often openly hated — each other over remarkably minor differences of opinion. These fractures may certainly have been organic, meaning there was no outside agitation or internal sabotage. But it’s impossible to have any real certainty over this given the legacy of another US government instrument’s activities in the preceding decades: the FBI.

This is part two of what is turning out to be a much longer series than I’d originally planned. Expect at least two more installments.

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As I mentioned in the first essay of this series, I’d read something a few months ago that disturbed me so thoroughly that I needed to take a break from writing about politics. I also told you I’d discuss what I’d read, but I’d need to give you context and background first.

I’ve given you an important part of that already: CIA funding of leftist thinkers and groups during the 40s, 50s, and 60s. And I tried to make clear a difficult ambiguity regarding that funding, which is that the CIA’s influence over those they funded wasn’t necessarily direct. Instead, as in the garden metaphor I mentioned, those who got funding became more prominent while those who didn’t were choked out.

That funding was primarily channeled through the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a front organization they created in Germany just after the end of World War II. Its stated goal was to showcase American culture and intellectuals in order to counter Soviet communist influence in those same areas, but it did much more than that.

The ultimate legacy of the CCF and other CIA covert funding programs was to help a new “anti-communist left” gain dominance over other leftist tendencies in the United States and elsewhere. By “anti-communist,” I don’t just mean anti-Soviet or anti-Stalinist. Instead, this left exhibited an extreme animosity towards any collective liberation movements focused on ending capitalism, and it held a particular pessimism and even disdain for the potential of the working class to rise up against their bosses.

Instead of focusing on collective actions and building an organized resistance to capitalism, the anti-communist left — especially those influenced by the Frankfurt School — was obsessed over finding and uprooting the psychological, mental, and social roots of oppression, inequality, exploitation, and violence. This obsession led to all manner of new fields of study and antagonistic sub-tendencies which can be best seen in the proliferation of new variants of feminism during the next few decades, a constant fracturing that has continued to the present day.¹

The same held true for those who nevertheless still tried to create or maintain organizations of collective power during the following decades. When I first became radicalized at the end of the 1990’s, I met members of multiple socialist organizations: the Socialist Alternative, the Socialist Workers, the International Socialist Organization, the Freedom Socialist Party² and quite a few other smaller groups. Much like the way American Protestant Christians split with each other over petty doctrinal issues, these groups split with — and often openly hated — each other over remarkably minor differences of opinion.

These fractures may certainly have been organic, meaning there was no outside agitation or internal sabotage. But it’s impossible to have any real certainty over this given the legacy of another US government instrument’s activities in the preceding decades.

That’s the Federal Bureau of Investigations, the FBI. Founded upon the legacy of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, a private detective force of anti-union thugs employed by Abraham Lincoln and rich industrialists, the FBI has always been the US government’s primary weapon against anti-capitalist movements in the United States.