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>Then came the 1960s and '70s, when the government encouraged the FBI and local law enforcement to run wild. The FBI's COINTELPRO
(Counterintelligence Program) was initiated in 1956 but its worst excesses were during this period, which also saw many city police forces setting up local "red squads." In addition to "reds" and left unionists, the authorities also focused surveillance, infiltration, repression and occasional violence on civil rights workers, the antiwar movement, advocates of women's rights, leftist student groups, radical African-American organizations such as the Black Panthers, Latino groups like the Young Lords, and supporters of gay/lesbian rights. The FBI kept "subversive files" on millions of Americans, including such luminaries as Martin Luther King Jr. and Albert Einstein. Thousands were arrested. Some, such as young Fred Hampton, a Panther leader in Chicago, were murdered by police. By the mid-'70s, the situation was so out of hand that Congress was forced to take measures to limit overt repression, but incidents continue to this day. Bush has already obviated a few of the '70s restraints on police wrongdoing. <
Comment
Something else happened during the period of the late 1960s and 1970s, that at the time seemed and still seem to be the focus driving the tendency of bourgeois democracy to become increasingly reactionary. This of course is the wave of rebellions that swept the country. http://www.revolutionintheair.com/chron/chron2.html
In Detroit what we experienced was a reorganization of the police department and the expansion of policing agencies, alongside side of the growth of intelligence agencies. Here is the meaning of an increasingly reactionary bourgeois democracy as opposed to political fascism.
The story is complicated. Prior to the 1967 Rebellion the front line police agency was organized as units with 4 officers assigned to a quad car to "keep order on the streets." In street parlance this was called the "big 4." The 1967 Rebellion outstripped the ability of the local authorities to restore "law and order" and sections of the armed forces were called out to restore order.
In the aftermath of the rebellion the police department underwent reorganization on the basis of what was called "tactical mobile units" or the system of the "big 4" gave way to the tactical mobile units combined with beefed by "Red Squad" sections whose task was intelligence gathering. In addition to the Red Squad was the extra legal unit of the police force called "STRESS" with literally the license to kill.
In retrospect it is fairly clear that these series of changes led to the nationwide formation of the SWAT teams or at any rate served as the early roots and inspiration for the SWAT formation.
Detroit could not be rule in the same old way and the election of Coleman Young Jr. was a turning point in its history. During this period of time there were several armed demonstrations of the police in front of City Hall . . . literally. What halted this open drift towards an increasingly reactionary local regime was mass mobilizations of the population under the banner of stopping the terror and abolishing the "STRESS" unit.
Various areas of the country and various cities, depending on their peculiar history and the resistance of the people to terror, degrees of social organizations, trade union, civil rights groups and impact in the electoral arena influence and give force to the shape of the reaction and its strength. The state reorganizes itself in contact and conflict with the spontaneous outbreak of the masses who lack an organizational bond with the state.
To this day Detroit is an extremely violent city with an extremely violent police force. There are of course the internal security forces of large corporations with an intelligence gathering capacity.
To speak of the unions as a social prop is jargon but this is nevertheless the case. In Detroit the industrial unions are involved in every aspect of the economic, political and social life of the community with profound ties with the various church structures and the state itself. Within the Unions various groups vie for power and authority and this often breaks out into open conflict and assassinations.
A complex process unfolded during the 1970s as the city structures were battered by the masses and provoked a wave of increase reaction from the state, corporations, sections of the union and various Civil Rights organizations and Church structures that for various reasons sided with the exiting authorities. It would seem that at this late stage development of the industrial artifact a tendency towards extreme centralization of authority and a closer bond with the state and intelligence agencies is the order of the day.
An increasingly reactionary bourgeois democracy has always existed in certain areas of the country. One can chart this progression on the basis of the expansion of the penal system and rates of incarceration.
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