12.03.1998
Don’t get paranoid
Party notes
I presented the March 8 members’ aggregate of the Communist Party with the rough working draft of a Party security document. The production of this is long overdue. We have been talking about it for perhaps eight years or more. We have even included openings on the whole question to various schools we have organised, but until now nothing seemed able to induce its birth. A far more substantial draft for discussion has gone out in internal mailings to comrades this week with my apologies for its long gestation period.
Of course, no doubt there are comrades out there who would object to me even openly mentioning this fact. There is a certain brand of nervous hysterical posture that Victor Serge characterised as “conspiracy mania”. One of the main points in the preamble underlines Serge’s stand “against posing, adopting airs of mystery, dramatising simple events, or ‘conspiratorial’ attitudes” (V Serge What everyone should know about state repression London 1979, p57).
There is perhaps all the more reason to emphasise this fact given this reactionary period. A narrow obsession today with maintaining ‘security’ at the expense of our ongoing political work - even if born of a healthy desire to protect cadre during difficult times - would be in effect to do the job of the state’s security services for them. Of course, they are plotting against us, but we shouldn’t get paranoid about it.
As the draft document makes clear, our approach to this question is essentially political, not technical. Thus, we can - and should - all have a giggle at the expense of the ‘secret squirrels’ in our movement. These are comrades who think that they can fool the ‘spooks’ by putting on funny voices or - seriously - whispering on the telephone. If BT could install a handy volume knob on the handset for my old mam, I dare say MI5’s budget may run to something even more sophisticated.
Thus, in any straight ‘technical’ duel between organisations of the workers’ movement and these special departments of the state, we will always lose. But as the draft document underlines, “the ultimate guarantee of the freedom of the Party to make revolution is the correctness of its scientific world view and its ability to merge with the broad masses of the class. We thus guard against infiltration, state provocation and sabotage primarily through our open fight for correct politics”.
I think we see a wonderful example of this if we look to the experience of the Russian revolutionary movement, in particular its Bolshevik section and specifically the brilliant career of one Roman Malinovsky.
A highly talented individual, elected to the Bolshevik central committee at its Prague conference (1912), Malinovsky went on by the end of that year to be elected to the tsarist duma. In 1913 he became president of the Bolshevik parliamentary fraction. At the same time, he was an okhrana (tsarist secret police) agent from 1910, the “pride of the service” according to Beletsky, the director of the police department (ibid p16). Of course, in such a prominent position he was able to betray scores of revolutionaries. Yet - and as Lenin pointed out in hindsight - through his duma speeches denouncing tsarism and his other mass work for the party, he ‘made’ tens of thousands of others, despite his intentions and those of his paymasters. In order to be a prominent Bolshevik, one that was “being groomed to be one of the leaders of the party” he had to promote Bolshevism. As Serge puts it, “when you have on your side the laws of history … then you are invincible” (ibid p43).
And conversely, precisely because the organs of the bourgeois state are not - by definition - motivated by an understanding of “the laws of history” (or even of mundame, day-to-day revolutionary politics, normally), they are eminently beatable. For example, in 1914 the tsarist police department received information on worrying tendencies towards reunification of the Russian Marxists, the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks.
They reacted energetically to this bad news. The intelligent but hapless Beletsky immediately dispatched a circular to his sub-directors of all investigative institutions instructing them to deploy their full complement of agents in the field to prevent this reunification.
Beletsky subsequently admitted using Roman Malinovsky to widen the split. “Beletsky’s point of departure was that the threat posed by a revolutionary organisation was in direct proportion to its size. The police also arrested Bolshevik leaders who were seeking to reunite the RSDLP in the wake of the resolutions adopted at the plenum of the central committee in January 1910" (Nurit Schleifman Undercover agents in the Russian revolutionary movement London 1988, p21).
The well spring of Beletsky’s political philistinism did not lie in his personal psychological profile, but in world view of the class that he served. The healthy functioning of a democratic centralist Party - animated continually by the open fight for revolutionary politics - generates what Paul Le Blanc calls the “‘anti-bodies’ within itself to counter the infection of provocateurs” (P Le Blanc Lenin and the revolutionary party New Jersey 1993, p193).
It is this essentially political approach that comrades must always bear in mind as they come to discuss and suggest amendments to the draft security document before them.
Mark Fischer
national organiser