Workers World, Vol. 3 No. 23
In its indictment against the Communist Party, the Kennedy Administration has committed one of the most sinister violations of the right of free association to date. The infamous demand made by the Justice Department that it register its members is typical of all police dictatorships and is calculated to destroy whatever remains of democratic rights in this country.
When Supreme Court Justice Black, in one of his dissenting opinions, used the phrase “government by intimidation,” he was, in the language of a jurist, admitting that this country is in reality a police state.
Indeed, this country has gone a long, long way since the days when what is now called the FBI was a mere subdivision of the Treasury Department and its major activities were in connection with such matters as counterfeiting, tax evasion and narcotics traffic.
Today is has become a vast secret army of political police. It differs in no substantial way from Himmler’s Gestapo or the old Czarist Okhrana. What a commentary this is on the fortunes of the mighty U.S., the colossus of world finance capital.
That the indictment against the CP comes almost 15 years after the beginning of the witch hunt shows that the U.S. ruling class has acquired a pathological fear of anything and everything which in the slightest way threatens to go beyond the political standards set by the kings of finance and industry.
A ruling class that has to resort to these methods after so many years of repression must feel that its social foundations are shaky indeed. In truth, the entire piratical oligarchy which rules over the destinies of so many millions of people lives in daily fear of the ever rising tide of revolutionary struggle all over the world.
No wonder then that in its mad efforts to continue its rule of plunder, exploitation and oppression, it seeks to silence all opposition.
But like other decadent ruling classes which have outlived their usefulness and exhausted their historic mission, they cannot long maintain themselves by intimidation, force and violence.
Today, the so-called Justice Department may order working class organizations to register as “foreign agents.” Of course, no working class organization will heed any such order!
Tomorrow, before the bar of history, however, it will be the Justice Department which will be “registered” as the infamous agent of a decadent and parasitic ruling class which once upon a time attempted by threat and coercion, force and violence, to dominate all mankind – and failed.
Last updated: 11 May 2026