> On Jul 6, 2026, at 07:54, Anthony Teso via groups.io > <[email protected]> wrote: > > One correction for the record, since the thread is accumulating errors. The > FBI did not install "the US Italian mob" in Local 544. Tobin placed the local > under IBT receivership and used gangster muscle to enforce it, while the > federal prosecution served the convergent interests of Tobin and the > Roosevelt administration. The distinction matters, because the actual story > is worse for the state and better for the analysis: the bourgeois democratic > state and the labor bureaucracy collaborated openly to behead a > class-struggle leadership. That is the lesson of 1941. Not that Cannon lacked > nerve, or that nerve was inadvisable, but that the American state, given a > war, will treat revolutionary opposition as sedition while the official labor > movement holds its coat.
I accept your correction. The original mission of the FBI and its predecessor, the Bureau of Investigation (BOI), was to disrupt left groups and later, Black civil rights groups, in the US (https://www.google.com/books/edition/Enemies/KdnrWL1UBGgC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=isbn:9780679643890&printsec=frontcover). There was a second charter for the FBI's predecessor, the BOI, which was to provide a police function for the Justice Department to regulate the commerce clause, https://web.archive.org/web/20120510194722/http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/history/brief-history/docs_findlay43. Thus, the BOI was instrumented in conducting the Palmer Raids during 1919-1920 to prosecute leftists, its first charter, which gave way, during the 1920s, to the prosecution of mobsters Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, and others nvolved in illegal liquor distribution, its second charter. The FBI repression of the left in the 1950s was again accompanied by FBI repression of the Italian mob. But that was in the 1950s while the FBI had continued its job #1 against communists and revolutionary socialists in the 1930s and 1940s. I mistakenly saw a continuum from the 1920s that was not there. When I looked into this, the FBI prosecution of US organized crime was more apparent than real: J. Edgar Hoover consistently denied the existence of organized crime and insisted that the crime figures he brought to justice were unaffiliated individuals, despite evidence to the contrary (https://archive.org/details/mafiaencyclopedi00sifa_0/mode/2up?q=hoover). Mark -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#42353): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/42353 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/119987077/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
