Buried in the FBI’s online repository of wanted posters is a capsule history of radical Left militancy. Assata Shakur represents the most militant strains of the Black liberation struggle, while less well-known figures like Leo Frederick Burt, accused of bombing a university building in Madison, Wisconsin, and Elizabeth Duke and Donna Joan Borup of the May 19 Communist Organization represent the white New Left’s turn to sabotage and guerrillismo in the 1970s and 1980s. Until recently, the FBI’s Wanted Posters were the place where you were most likely to see people identified as Marxist-Leninists. The repository highlights at least one younger militant, accused of sabotage for the Earth Liberation Front.
These aging posters index what Marx, pulling from Shakespeare, called the “old mole.” They mark the underground and submerged spirit of revolution, which occasionally bursts into view. When this happens, some cower. Others exult. Along the way, the mole eats into roots, destabilizing treestands. As Peter Stallybrass points out in a close reading of Marx, “The modern German for subversive activity—Maulwurfsarbeit—means literally the work of the mole.”4
The mole represents both repetition—what else can a mole do but burrow?—and newness—wherever it emerges, it breaks new ground. The wanted poster represents a similar dynamic. The images are always outdated. The past haunts the present, but time’s passage is a ghostbuster. The poster will only ever be effective if someone spots the wanted person now and glimpses their former self. Whatever the offense, the act of fleeing, of being on the lam, enacts refusal to submit to constituted authority. One may have engaged in revolutionary activity to end up on the wanted poster, but the fact that the wanted poster remains tacked up in the post office illustrates how revolution simmers, changing its complex properties in the process. Flight becomes a continuous imperative, revolutionary in itself. The old mole grows wings.
If the wanted poster is a hieroglyph of state power, of the police capacity for repression and ability to inflict racialized terror, it can also be turned against state power. It turns out right as New Left militants were appearing on FBI Wanted Posters, anti-revisionist and New Communist Movement groups were producing their own do-it-yourself wanted posters, fashioned in protest against state violence. These urgent documents re-theorize state legitimacy, crime, and violence itself, refusing bourgeois conceptions.
In Harlem, five days of increasingly militant protest followed the killing of a 15-year-old Black boy, James Powell, on July 16, 1964, by an off-duty white police lieutenant, Thomas Gilligan. This episode of unrest inaugurated the decade’s cycle of rebellion across northern cities. Within a day or two of the outbreak of protest, members of Progressive Labor plastered the streets of Harlem with a poster. “WANTED FOR MURDER,” it blared across the top, above a photograph of a white police officer. “GILLIGAN, THE COP,” it read beneath the photo. Which murder he had committed required no explanation. This actually was not the first time Lieutenant Gilligan, a former Marine, had shot someone on the streets of New York City. This killing, however, was the most politically consequential.