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	Workers Vanguard No. 1112	19 May 2017

RCP on FBI: “Communists” for Comey

What do Bob Avakian’s Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) and James Clapper, the former Director of National Intelligence, have in common? They’re both up in arms over Trump’s sacking of James Comey. The RCP has gone so far as to mobilize rallies, through its “Refuse Fascism” front group, to “protest the firing” of the director of the FBI, declaring it an “ominous” attack on America’s “norms.” That’s right, the FBI of J. Edgar Hoover’s anti-Communist lists and infiltration of anti-Vietnam War activists and leftists, including the RCP itself.

The RCP’s stand should arouse nothing but revulsion from black activists drawn to its protests against racist cop terror: While the cops gun down black men and women indiscriminately, the FBI under its COINTELPRO operations carried out targeted assassinations of black militants, including 38 Black Panthers, and framed up countless others. The FBI was instrumental in the bombing of the predominantly black MOVE commune in Philadelphia in 1985. Today, and not least under Comey, it conducts surveillance and entrapment campaigns against Muslims, “Black Lives Matter” activists and leftists. The FBI was and is a murderous tool of the ruling class against all perceived enemies of racist American capitalism.

What could the RCP be thinking? You can be sure it has to do with the Democratic Party. Having reviled Comey for months for undermining Hillary Clinton, the Democrats are now embracing him as a freedom fighter. After all, he was investigating supposed collusion between the Trump campaign and Putin’s Russia. As Jeffrey St. Clair put it in a scathing commentary (counterpunch.org, 12 May), the liberals “have adopted Comey as a martyr in their Russian witch hunt and have started praising the FBI—an agency literally engineered to prosecute (if not invent) the Red Scare—as a ‘beacon of integrity and independence’.” One-upping their bourgeois allies in the Democratic Party “resistance,” the RCP argues that the Trump regime is illegitimate “not mainly [!] because of potential ties to Russia,” but also because it’s “fascist.”

In its May 9 rally leaflet, the RCP’s “Refuse Fascism” calls to “DRIVE OUT THE TRUMP PENCE REGIME!!!” As to the other major bourgeois party, the Democrats, mum’s the word. This is hardly new. During the Bush Jr. years, the RCP’s “World Can’t Wait” campaign called to “Drive Out the Bush Regime!” which it also labeled “fascist.” Somehow the “fascist” Bush gave way to the election of black Democrat Barack Obama. The current White House is certainly brazenly racist and Trump himself exhibits power-hungry, bonapartist appetites. But the only reason for the RCP to claim that “fascism” has come to Washington is to boost the fortunes of the Democratic Party.

Many bourgeois pundits are describing the Comey firing as “Nixonian,” comparing it to Richard Nixon’s firing of the special prosecutor investigating Watergate. Nixon’s goons did break into the DNC headquarters. Today, however, the “crisis” is over Russian “meddling” in the elections, hacking of DNC emails and ties to Trump—all without the slightest shred of evidence. Hacking foreign governments is the stock in trade of all spy agencies; the U.S. rulers are especially devoted to this pursuit. And when it comes to “influencing” elections—i.e., bloody coups, outright invasions and “regime change”—the U.S. imperialists are second to none.

It is immaterial whether the DNC hackers were mobilized by Vladimir Putin or the tooth fairy. The real attack on the electorate begins with the rigged nature of bourgeois democracy—where voters choose which representative of the capitalist system will oppress them—and includes the increasing assaults on black voting rights, as well as the anti-democratic Electoral College.

Democrats, liberals and reformists like the RCP complain that Trump is exceeding his presidential prerogative. In fact, it is in the nature of the imperial presidency to have a strong executive with virtually unfettered powers. In a May 15 article online, the RCP decries Trump’s attempt to “remove the slightest independence” for the FBI and to bring it under “air-tight control.” Under the four-decade reign of J. Edgar himself, the FBI had plenty of “independence” as it carried out nefarious acts in the interest of the bourgeoisie.

From the standpoint of the working class and oppressed, political crises within the ruling class are not a bad thing. We welcome popular erosion of trust in the phony facade of democracy behind which the bourgeoisie conceals its dictatorship. At the same time, Marxists are not indifferent to questions of bonapartism and demand the fullest possible defense and extension of democratic rights, the better to organize the proletariat around its own class program against the capitalists and their state. For its part, the RCP joins hands with the Democratic Party as it scrambles to refurbish its credentials and those of the American imperialist order.

For over a decade, the RCP has subjected its membership to lengthy sessions learning in more depth than is humane the thoughts of Chairman Bob Avakian. Having emerged from its studies, the RCP has landed with a spectacular splat in the camp of the class enemy and, this time, not simply of its parliamentary spokesmen but of its secret police. One can safely say that the RCP represents the lunatic fringe of the pro-Democratic Party reformist left. Their pledge of allegiance to bourgeois rule is the real scandal. Let us hope it will be one from which Avakian & Co. do not recover.