[Marxism] Infiltration and remedies

[Anthony Boynton]

I would like to second Luko Willms comments on police
infiltration of the left as they relate to imperialist
countries, and add a few comments (which he may or may
not agree with or appreciate.

I think Luko's comments apply very well to imperialist
countries like the USA, but are a little bit off the
mark when it comes to Ireland and other countries
where guerrilla warfare has developed.

It is true that everywhere the police infiltrate the
left to damage and destroy it. This means trying to
put leftists and left organizations in danger, and
this means dividing them and splitting them into
fragments. Police infiltrators advocate violent
tactics as a means to both ends. They also promote any
kind of faction fight which might weaken or split an
organization.. They also promote any kind of witch
hunt, like a witch hunt against suspected police
infiltrators, which might demoralize the members of an
organization.

I was a member of the Workers League, the Healyite
organization in the United. States. It was a pretty
insignificant organization in terms of the left of the
late 60’s and early 70’s, reaching a maximum
membership of two to three hundred people. A few
people in that organization advocated violent tactics.
Later the same people were the most enthusiastic
supporters of an internal “security” crackdown to
identify possible agents in the organization. 

Interestingly, the one “agent” they identified was
Nancy Wohlforth, the wife of the founder of the
organization, Tim Wohlforth. A close relative of hers
was in the CIA. She and Tim Wohlforth were drummed out
of the organization, in what amounted to a coup d’etat
by the witch hunters who were working with Healy and
his crew in England. 

The new maximum leader, David North, and a handful of
other people all drawn from expensive private
universities including Yale and Stanford, then 
subjected the whole organization to the same witch
hunt that began against Nancy and Tim.

Ex-SWPers on this list may or may not be aware of
this. Nancy and Tim subsequently became, for a short
time, important people in the SWP before they moved
on. 

The Workers League descended quickly into a campaign
of slander against the SWP, accusing them of being led
by FBI agents, particularly accusing Joseph Hansen of
having been an FBI agent and participating in the
assassination of Leon Trotsky.

The Workers League lost most of its membership during
that period of time, but kept all of its assets.

When its international affiiliate the Workers
Revolutionary Party of Great Britain exploded into
fragments, North and his cohorts went through a period
of reorganization. They moved their offices from New
York to Detroit, and changed their name. Now they are
the World Wide Socialist Web and the Socialist Equity
Party. They no longer openly slander others, but they
have never recanted a single word of the slanders they
so recklessly spread in the 1970´s.

Interestingly enough, two of the members of the North
faction were children of high ranking CIA officials,
including one whose last name is Mclaughlin.

The left has always been infiltrated as Luko states.
The best antidote is to be wary of anyone who
advocates dangerous tactics that could cause harm to
members, supporters or the movement; anyone who is
extremely factional and divisive; and/or anyone who is
a witch unter. A person who combines the three has a
very bad combination indeed.

If you suspect a peson is an infiltrator, making that
person the center of attention is a bad idea, because
that will give them an opportunity to factionalize
people. It is better to counter their arguments and
efforts to divide and find weakenesses. If they are
sincere and not infiltrators, their response to your
efforts might indicate ther sincerity. 

If someone is advocating violent or even just illegal
tactics they might not be an infiltrator. An
organization that is open to such tactics however, is
open to the provocation of an infiltrator. 

Since revolutionaries by definition can not reject all
violence, nor all illegal methods, they face the
danger of provocation.

So what is the answer? 

The answer is that an organization's tactics should
match it's IMMEDIATE goals. In the case of a small
organization the immediate goals are almost always to
recruit more people and gain more political influence.

Under those conditions violence is always
counterproductive. Under those conditions illegal
activities may be necessary under conditions where
bourgeois democratic rights have been curtailed, but
only to the extent that they are useful for gaining
new members or winning more political influence. A
good example of this might be publishing a clandestine
newspaper or operating a clandestine radio station.

This raises the issue of military strategy and
tactics, and guerrilla warfare. In many countries of
the world, including Ireland and Colombia, significant
sectors of the left have adopted guerrilla warfare for
justifiable reasons. 

This changes the whole equation discussed above and in
Luko's original email.

The IRA's tradition of clandestine military struggle,
opened it to police infilitration and provocation more
difficult to detect and counter than in the case of an
organization like the SWP in the United States. The
same is true for every struggle in which an
organization of the left opts for a military strategy,
jutified or not by circumstances.

In my humble opinion, military strategies are only
justified under conditions of civil war, insurrection
and self defense. And in the case of self-defense they
should be used as carefully as possible. In all other
cases they are counterproductive.

The key defense against infiltration for a
revolutionary organization is having a set of strategy
and tactics appropriate for the conditions, an
internal political life that is as demnocratic as the
conditions allow (clandestine conditions limit
internal communication and democracy) and which learns
from the previous experience of the revolutionary
movement.

If by some accident of fate or poorly made decision,
you happen to find yourself in an organization led by
people who seem to be fational witchhunters who like
violence without being anywhere near a civil war or
inusrrection, run away as fast and as far as possible.

Anthony



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