Likewise, economic and social elites have always had a variety of means at their disposal, both legal and extralegal, for subverting and destroying any challenges to their power.
The book, “Whiteout”, by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair, is a veritable smorgasbord of stories from the skeleton closets of US military and intelligence circles, detailing their close (and no doubt ongoing) “amicable arrangements” with underworld actors around the world, on affairs of mutual interest and benefit.
This should not surprise us. Naturally, the US is in no way unique in such regards, albeit sometimes more fastidious about maintaining “plausible deniability” about them.
Other countries have had their “Freikorps” (Germany), “Porros” and “Zetas” (Mexico), Corsican Mafia, etc. These kinds of armed gangs have always been “freelancers“ to some extent, acting on their own initiative, but also aligned with existing economic and political elites who share mutual interests. Often their membership comes from a hodgepodge of backgrounds, including cashiered ex-military, petty criminals, adventurers, and assorted misfits in search of a mixture of unconventional economic opportunities and thrill seeking.
During General Suharto’s 1965 coup d'état and ensuing genocidal campaign of annihilation against leftist or perceived leftist elements throughout Indonesia, such unconventional formations played an instrumental role in carrying out the bloodiest carnage against regime opponents or suspected opponents. The film by Joshua Oppenheimer, “The Act of Killing” (2012), goes into bloodchilling detail about the motivations and modus operandi of these groups (including numerous interviews with the perpetrators, who have enjoyed total impunity over the past five decades since the coup in that country). These groups called themselves “Vrijemannen” (Dutch for “Free-men”), and were basically street hoodlums who usually, under normal conditions, had busied themselves with more pedestrian criminal enterprises, like garden variety racketeering (eg, extorting protection money from small shopkeepers) but who, immediately after Suharto’s coup, found themselves anointed as quasi-official irregular forces deployed in an all-out war to “save the country” from the clutches of supposedly nefarious “Communists” plotting its destruction. Most such “Communists” were simply peasants who may have at one point or another joined left-leaning mutual aid organizations to defend themselves from brutal and corrupt landlords, extortionate tax collectors, etc.
In light of this history, we should not be surprised to see similarly inspired and motivated groups in the USA itself. During periods of economic and political upheaval, opportunists are bound to smell such opportunities, even without the explicit initiative of a Jay Gould or a General Suharto to cheerlead them on. Even in the USA, we too soon forget the history of internal “dirty wars” against the Wobblies, for example (eg, the Everett Massacre, or the numerous radical labor organizers who were kidnapped and hauled out on cattlecars into the middle of Arizona’s Sonoran desert to die of exposure). For minority groups, this kind of treatment is nothing new. One need only recall Black Panther leader Fred Hampton’s summary execution in his bed by Chicago police, or the numerous cases of “informants” on the official FBI payroll who turned out to be active duty KKK militants.
Yet, as frightening as such events no doubt are, most often the damage done by reactionary agents and opportunists probably pales in comparison to the harm we do ourselves by ascribing to them a power they lack on their own. Most of the harm done by COINTELPRO, for example, was indirect, via setting different individuals and radical groups against each other, spreading paranoia, fomenting rivalries and splits, false accusations, etc. Such things can happen even without the help of a nefarious government or underworld agency, of course. So one should never make their jobs any easier. While common sense and discretion are always welcome, we have to always remember that social movements cannot accomplish anything major by primarily clandestine adventures, or staying “on the downlow”, or “sneaking one past the Man”.
Also, a liberatory social movement cannot “beat the capitalists at their own game”. In his prophetic essay, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”, Oscar Wilde gravely warned of the dangers of a “barracks socialism”, noting what he already considered in 1890s London to be the excessive seriousness of East End radicals who preached the Communist Manifesto as a quasi-religio-military crusade, requiring something akin to monastic austerity for success. A century later, we can review a 20th century littered with the wreckage of just such “barracks socialisms” against which Wilde warned. The Soviet Union was the epitome of this baleful phenomenon. Despite promising beginnings and some truly ambitious and innovative efforts in many fields, particularly education, the Soviet system, ironically, became the world’s leading preserve of industrial Taylorism, the ultimate attempt to “beat the capitalists at their own game”. Such tragically misguided efforts completely discounted the wisdom of humble grassroots radical agitators, often women, who understood that “the workers of the world must have bread, but they must have roses, too”. Or as Emma Goldman famously said, “If I cannot dance, I want no part of your revolution!”
Furthermore, it’s a basic truth that political violence inherently favors reactionary forces. A liberatory social vision calls for democracy, equality, and horizontal structures instead of authoritarian and excessively hierarchical ones. But organized violence and war always require top-down, authoritarian structures to be effective. In the end, this is a fairly decent point in favor of a principled social democracy that stops short of embracing any ideas of all out, literal class war and a decisive “final victory”. As a purely practical matter, milenarian visions, and the actions and conflicts necessary to realize them, usually lead to unpredictable and often unpleasant results and outcomes.
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