Capitalism is a dictatorship of the small group of bankers, bosses and billionaires who own and control the means of production, agriculture and transportation; the state apparatus (the government, military, courts and police); the educational system and the media. Despite the pretense of democracy, the capitalist class uses this ownership and control to maintain itself in power and suppress serious challenges to its rule.
In the U.S., the 1960s anti-racist ghetto rebellions and massive anti-imperialist movement against the war in Vietnam rocked the capitalist class to its core. These uprisings forced the rulers to step up their use of their Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In cooperation with local police forces, the FBI, through its Counterintelligence (COINTEL) program, planned or fomented physical and psychological attacks on leading communist and militant anti-racist political forces like PLP, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Black Panther Party.
CHALLENGE (1/16/13) quoted from attorney Brian Glick’s book War at Home. The FBI’s COINTEL tactics included : “[i]nfiltration: … [to] not merely spy on political activists … [but] to discredit and disrupt their activities; [l]egal harassment: … [a]buse the legal system to harass dissidents and make them appear to be criminals … [using] perjured testimony; and
[i]llegal force: … [c]onspire with local police departments … to … commit vandalism, assaults, beatings and assassinations …”
These attacks did not stop with the 1976 liberal Church Committee congressional hearings and report which partially exposed COINTEL. The following describes a police attack on PLP in Los Angeles (from a 1982 PLP pamphlet):
    On June 18, 1977, PLP and the International Committee Against Racism (InCAR)    held a mass anti-racist demonstration in the Los Angeles garment center. The demonstration was organized to combat the sweatshop and slave labor conditions faced by L.A. garment workers, most of whom are immigrants. The demonstration was called in connection with InCAR’s campaign to organize a new anti-racist garment workers union, which had been gaining a mass base of support.
Cops Attack, PLP Resist
Acting on behalf of the garment bosses, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) attempted to break up the demonstration. The cops attacked. Naturally, the demonstrators resisted. A sharp clash resulted. Many demonstrators and cops were injured. Indeed, the cops took a real beating. Subsequently, two dozen members and friends of PLP and InCAR were arrested and charged with resisting arrest and assaulting officers …
PLP members faced serious jail time as a result of these false charges. However, before the trial, PLP exposed the fact that two undercover police spies for the LAPD, Connie Milazzo and John Dial, had infiltrated PLP meetings, including the meetings of the Legal Defense Committee set up in the wake of the police attack. The criminal charges then had to be thrown out because of the “misconduct” of the bosses’ agents in the police department and the prosecutor’s office.
But the conspiracy to get PLP continued: “The fact that the case was thrown out of court because of the exposure of their own criminal behavior infuriated the LAPD. They decided to get PLP and InCAR by instituting a new and unprecedented legal tactic.” A civil suit was filed by ten cops against PLP and 20 individual members for $2 million in damages, stating there was a “conspiracy to injure L.A. cops” (PLP pamphlet).
The cops got plenty of help from the judge who barred PLP’s lawyers from introducing any evidence showing an LAPD conspiracy to attack PLP. “While police attorneys were allowed to ask questions about PLP’s membership, policies and structure,…defense attorneys … were prohibited from asking questions about…the LAPD’s vicious record of racist attacks on demonstrators…” (PLP pamphlet).
The judge also allowed the cops’ attorneys to use the trial to subpoena and question PLP leaders about the names of Party members and of our inner workings. When Party leaders refused to name names, the fascist judge ordered them jailed. To their great credit, these leaders did not follow the bosses’ rules, and refused to expose their comrades and the organization to harm.
With this judge’s assistance, and the bosses’ agents’ predictable use of anti-communism in the trial, they eventually got a verdict of $334,000 in their favor. The cops’ attorneys then began a long campaign of harassing individual Party members to try and collect on their judgment. Nevertheless, they were unable to break the political will of the Los Angeles PLP.
A key lesson of this police assault on PLP is that members and friends must be ever vigilant in the face of attempts by the rulers’ spies and armed thugs to undermine our unity and organization. Even in a period of less class struggle, the capitalists are still haunted by the specter of communism, which would mean their loss of the trillions in surplus value (profits) they’ve stolen from the working class. As Mao said, to be attacked is a good thing. If we turn the assault around on the class enemy by building PLP, it will bring workers’ revolution one step closer.