Whistleblower Edward Snowden, a National Security Agency contractor, has revealed the existence of a massive surveillance grid over the entire U.S. population which has integrated wiretapping, Internet and social media monitoring, and the collection and storage of so-called metadata.
Many commentators have pointed out that this is completely illegal and unconstitutional, because the government can search and seize phone and Internet communications of people who are not even suspected of wrongdoing. Snowden’s revelations show that information (metadata) about every phone call made in the U.S. is collected by the Pentagon. The Pentagon also has a target list of up to 1 million people whose every phone call is recorded.
The Party for Socialism and Liberation analyzed these developments in a June 21 internal party document authored by Brian Becker of the PSL’s Central Committee. The document points out that the program’s existence illuminates that the exercise of real power is with the military, which oversees the NSA, rather than the elected civilian government. Although the military is technically under the control of the Congress, in fact, the entire U.S. Senate knew of the program and did not tell anyone.
The government would have us believe the program, which started shortly after Sept. 11, 2001,was kept secret so as to prevent Al-Qaeda from finding out about it. This is laughable, as anyone in Al-Qaeda or similar group would be aware that their email and phone communications were likely being monitored.
Why was the program secret?
The program was kept secret to keep the people of the United States from knowing that the government is spying on us in the largest covert domestic operation in history. Now that the cat is out of the bag, the government and mass media are trying to convince us that the program is needed to keep us “safe.” Of course, that is ridiculous. The point of the program is to construct a system of political and social control for the ruling class.
“It is the Pentagon that is aggregating authority and engaging in contingency planning to quell or repress the inevitable civil unrest and political disturbances that the ruling elites recognize to be the inevitable consequence of growing income inequality, youth unemployment and under-employment, class polarization and environmental disasters.” (PSL Internal Document June 21, 2013)
The document explains that many progressives have come to an incorrect conclusion about the significance of the spying program. “They emphasize the government’s seeming omnipotence. They feel all is lost, that we have entered a gloomy period where people’s rights have been totally eviscerated and that we are on the dawn of a kind of fascist or semi-fascist society. They believe that this revelation shows that the government is all powerful. Their anger at the capitalist state is muted by fear and political passivity because they believe that all hope for change is now just a pipe dream.”
However, all is not lost. The document points out that , “The ruling classes of all societies have used whatever existing technologies are at hand to carry out the surveillance and intimidation of the oppressed classes.
It explains that throughout history, systems of class rule have been enforced by extreme forms of social and political control—but at the same time, mass movements have advanced despite repression. “It is often the lash of military and police violence that draws the movement into a more revolutionary path.”
Repression and surveillance cannot stop mass movements whose time has come
Taking the example of the centuries-long struggle of the African American people , the document outlines the degree of repression targeted against Black people from outright slavery to a violent and racist police state in much of the U.S., which was assisted by extra-legal paramilitary forces like the Klan. Despite these extremes of repression, the civil rights movement surged forward. In Czarist Russia, in Batista’s Cuba, Haiti under the Duvaliers, the Philippines under Marcos and Iran under the Shah—the ruling elites and dictators used the most extensive and brutal means of spying on and repressing the people, yet in every case, the people rose up and toppled these regimes.
“Every ruling class uses the available technologies to build systems of political and social control.
“And every revolutionary movement has had to deal or cope with the technologies of repression and social control that are employed against the population.
“But it is our view that military and police power, no matter how vast, does not prevent the advance of social and revolutionary movements whose time has come….The power of the organized, oppressed people is greater than all other power.”
What has happened in the 12 years that the program has been in place? Has the surveillance program prevented from emerging or smashed any existing social movements? In 2002 and 2003 there were massive anti-war demonstrations that were characterized by the New York Times as being a “second global superpower.” In 2006, undocumented and immigrant workers carried out the first general strike in the U.S. in decades; as many as 10 million workers took to the streets.
While these movements eventually died down in their intensity, they did not die down as a consequence of the NSA spying program.
The 2011 Occupy Movement was a target of a nationally coordinated crackdown from the Department of Homeland Security, HS, FBI and local law enforcement to evict encampments from public places.
But the repression was not so ferocious that “it was a foregone conclusion that it would have extinguished the movement. In fact, we believe that the organizational and tactical orientation of the Occupy Movement was what made it vulnerable to be easily disrupted, subverted and repressed by the government. “
It should also be noted that the leaps in information technology in the past 25 years, and particularly in the last seven to eight years, have empowered not only the repressive state apparatus but also mass movements and grassroots organizing. The Internet has had a democratizing effect on mass communication because it is accessible in ways that no other form of mass communication such as TV, newspapers or radio is.
This newly available mass media is being used for organizing, mobilizing, countering the bourgeois line, publicizing “leaks” that might have been otherwise boycotted by mass media and so on, all in real time. Spying on and monitoring Internet activity allow the government to keep tabs on these new forms of communication and organizing, but it does not change the fact that their monopoly on mass communication is irreversibly broken.
The Marxist view of the state
“While liberals and other non-Marxist radicals believe that the capitalist state can be reformed and become an instrument of social change, Marxism considers the state to be enforcer of the interests and needs of the ruling class. The state arises from within class society but develops to stand above society while it in fact still remains an instrument of class rule, in our case, the rule of the bankers and other monopoly capitalists.” The essence of the modern capitalist state is the institutions of violence, coercion and force, as represented by the army, police, courts and prisons. “In that sense every state is a police state, regardless of the form of the state.”
Of course, the ruling class does not rely on force alone to maintain power, using the media, educational and religious institutions to shape consciousness. In capitalist democracies, significant sectors of the oppressed classes are allowed to elect people who maintain the capitalist government structure. The ruling class would prefer ruling through consent rather than the exercise of naked power, placing tanks and soldiers at every intersection.
“But even in the most ‘democratic’ forms of capitalist state power, the army, police, courts and prisons are routinely used as a mechanism for political and social control.
“When protest turns to rebellion, it is inevitably confronted by military or police power. When workers strike, the capitalists utilize the police and courts to act against the strikers. When landlords or bankers need to evict families from their homes, they are able to call on police power to accomplish their goals.”
Revolutionary optimism of Marxism
Revolutionary organizations, in fact all progressive organizations, must develop tactics and methods to deal with the ruling class’s systems of social control. The ruling class has not become an omnipotent power because of the technologies being used in the NSA surveillance program recently revealed. The power of the people is the greatest power of all, as has been shown by history. The ruling class can only offer a future of more poverty, unemployment and repression, while they get richer. This will lead inevitably to revolutionary social movements which can offer a way out of society’s crisis.
