On December 10th, Dutch government radio admitted that the Dutch government infiltrated or set up three organizations--the Marxist-Leninist Party and two friendship societies, one for Kampuchea and one for Albania. These organizations also did succeed in recruiting genuine members between 1969 and some date in the 1980s.

Among other goals of the organizations set up by the Dutch spies was to obtain support from China, which the Dutch intelligence agencies claim they succeeded in doing. In the West, the governments deliver money to their lackeys running for election or serving as dictators around the world, even where it is illegal. On the other hand, the majority-exploiter governments make a big stink if China or some other competitor spends money on politics in their allegedly free countries that supposedly allow a free competition of ideas as a selling point for the whole organization of their societies.

This incident shows that the Dutch government in its zeal to catch the Chinese government cheated its own people of a chance to organize Dutch communist organizations without interference. This alone gives the lie to the "free world" often discussed by the Dutch and the rest of Western Europe and the united $tates. Infiltration by the state is especially damaging to communist and anarchist organizations, because people often join them because they detest the idea of secret services, so any talk of "fair play" in a "democracy" needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

Far more damaging to the international proletariat is the setting up of organizations where armed struggle is going on or about to happen. These organizations set up by cops and spies seek to divert the naive where struggle has reached a certain level of intensity. Peru and Nepal have a plethora of parties, mostly because of the needs of the exploiters. Equally damaging is those instances of organizations that suddenly have major support in the imperialist countries arranged by the CIA. In Iraq, it is public knowledge that the "Communist Party USA" works with the U.$. puppet regime, (a case of minor support) but similar activities are also happening covertly in many Third World countries. On the other hand, an additional complication is that sometimes the exploiters do briefly ally with the exploited when the exploiters are in a bad squeeze. The case of Germany sending Lenin back to Russia in a train car in World War I is an example. When there is a war going on or could be going on in a given region, we cannot rule out that a faction of exploiters would ally with the exploited on fairly positive terms.

From the bourgeois point of view, the infiltration of communist groups serves dual purposes. One is to dampen or track activity in those groups and the other is to prevent activity in the first place. As the people learn that communist organizations are infiltrated, they may give up trying to work with them. Even planting false stories of infiltration aids in this goal. In response, we Maoists have dual duties--one is not to deny enemy activity and the other is never to justify cynicism or paralysis of the exploited and oppressed.

Speaking of an eastern European comrade, Comrade Stalin said "what does he know?" in reference to the idea that there are no enemies in his party. De-classified documents also show that U.$. police infiltrated the Black Panther Party and went so far as to co-chair a Trotskyist group.

Likewise, in Kanada an organization of 2500 found itself infiltrated by agent provocateurs. In the imperialist countries unprepared for armed struggle, the enemy joins communist organizations and tries to provoke them into unplanned armed activity.

Meanwhile, the imperialists carry out illegal act after illegal act through wars only to be let off with impunity. While these infiltrators waste taxpayer money and risk others' lives in an effort to provoke violence, they fail to arrest war criminals such as Henry Kissinger, Caspar Weinberger and Donald Rumsfeld.

In any case, the capitalist class will continue to look for communist scapegoats in the majority-exploiter countries, with the hope that the public will blame the communists for terrorism, war and everything else the imperialists are carrying out or causing to happen. The fact that the communists have no power and only the blame and the fact that even the Dutch intelligence agencies make it more difficult to organize fair-weather communist organizations is a plus of the kind Mao referred to when he said it is good that the enemy attacks. The quality of movements under attack improves while the quantity dissipates. In countries like the Netherlands, the fair-weather types who avoid communist organizations would be from the petty-bourgeoisie anyway, so there is no real loss of contact with the "masses," because of the intelligence agency activity.

As MIM pointed out in its 2004 Congress resolution, the enemy does set up entire organizations and it also takes small organizations and makes them transit points for huge operations dwarfing anything the communist organizations in that country could dream of doing themselves. Nonetheless, we would never exchange our internal problems for those of the bourgeoisie--their inter-imperialist wars, imperialist rivalries and shady business competition that undermines the whole capitalist system without any communist's lifting a finger.

The nub of our problem is that just because the enemy sets up organizations favoring Stalin and Mao we cannot afford to abandon the principles of Stalin and Mao. Since we cannot always know precisely which organizations are fakes, and to what degree, it is important to approach this question in principle. We must establish principles to follow that take advantage of our strengths and emphasize the enemies' weaknesses. If we succeed in doing this, it won't matter if we do not precisely know which organizations or leaders are fakes and which are not, because in the long run our principles will guide us to getting that right in practice more often than not. For example, if we have a purge, and it throws out 100 people, the question is not how to be absolutely right about every single purged individual but how to be sure that overall the 100 thrown out damaged the enemy more than us. If we wait till we find payroll stubs for every enemy on CIA payroll we will lose for sure, because our ability to function in that realm is a relative weakness. If however, we can come up with a policy that disproportionately affects the spies and cops, we will win, and this is something that the party can do.

Crucially, we must teach our own movement the difference between discussions of historical origins and line. This is also related to why ad hominem criticism is never right. It hardly matters if David Duke or a CIA spy says 2+2=4. 2+2=4 is still true. Likewise, maybe the first Maoist organization in the Netherlands started with just spies. Nonetheless, that is no excuse for the Dutch to avoid Maoist principles. That is an example of how we have to distinguish between origins and line. This truth is also evident when we work it in reverse. People with good origins often end up quitting or otherwise betraying the movement. The enemy has to emphasize the psychological and individual to split up the strength of the globally exploited and oppressed. The enemy hopes that by targeting the leaders, there will be no one left who can implement Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. The enemy miscalculates and in sports terms there is no way that the proletariat and oppressed can lose unless they defeat themselves or if the bourgeoisie carries out internal war that destroys the planet--game over, called on account of destruction of the atmosphere.

What to do about potential paralysis

Contrary to some dreamers, there are always enemies in communist parties that have been around the block. Only parties just starting that no one has heard of yet can hope not to have enemies inside yet. MIM has a number of policies and recommendations to deal with the enemy problem at arm's length to take advantage of the proletariat's strengths relative to the enemy's. We guarantee that MIM and the organizations it admires have infiltrators perhaps going to the very origins and leadership of the organizations as does happen some times.

1. MIM members do NOT claim to be MIM members and travel to the Third World struggles except by prior arrangement or at open conferences. In practice with the current low level of International Ministry support mandated by our Party Congress, even this issue should not come up. MIM has NO pre-arranged plans for meeting in the Third World at this moment. So, if anywhere in the Third World you meet someone from the imperialist countries seeming to spew the MIM line, you may be talking to an unaffiliated persyn or you may be talking to an agent.

There is never any reason for People's Wars to be trusting toward imperialist country alleged comrades. Someone carrying MIM Notes around could be anybody. MIM Notes is free, so carrying that around does not mean anything either, so we warn everybody, especially the Third World comrades, that no imperialist country comrade is worth risking security for. In the best of circumstances, the comrades from the majority-exploiter countries are not weeded out by systematic armed struggle, so chances are very high that the best one could hope for is that any imperialist-country "comrade" is really a Menshevik with some sympathies for the international proletariat. We suggest that Mao's teaching that without a people's army the people have nothing be taken seriously in relationship to the majority-exploiter countries.

2. Lenin's "better fewer, but better" is the best security advice for proletarian parties. Write off dead wood hanging about the party. Newbies should be aware of this problem. Newbies and others starting their political commitment should ask themselves, "if I were a leader of a communist party, how would I be able to tell a police agent from a newbie?" This is another reason to emphasize the self-reliance and self-activity of comrades and it is also a reason not to be expecting proletarian unity and action to come about spontaneously and easily. It is part of our underdog status that we must continuously exercise our brains on this question and improve through small increments and sometimes by leaps and bounds.

3. Party leaders should not substitute talk for a standard of action. The fact that someone discusses a cool political line with a party leader does not mean anything. Effective work in public and effective marshalling of resources is what counts in security questions. It does not mean there should be no place just to talk.

4. Lenin's advice on making police agents work hard is applicable. He had a police agent on his central committee, but there could have been a lot more if the standard of work for the central committee were low. The police agent that managed to get in did much work for the revolution.

5. Do not answer pig questions. People asking your name, address, occupation, age, race, education level, hair color etc.--any of these--could be innocent or nice but stupid people or they could be cops. There is no reason to take a chance. Nice people should learn not to ask pig questions--ever. Whether people are too inept not to carry this out or whether they are cops hardly matters to the party: such people need to be written off.

6. Politically cut down the psychologists, individualists, geographic opportunists and Liberal pragmatists.
a) Psychologists are interested in your persynal motivations. So are cops. Alleged Marxists who cannot distinguish between questions of motivation and line are never going to amount to anything anyway, so dispensing with them in order to dispense with cops is no loss in the majority-exploiter countries.

Let people interested in persynal motivations read some autobiographies. W.E.B. Du Bois and Bobby Seale have them published already. So we should make use of what is already available and not re-invent the wheel.

On the whole, the question of persynal motivation is unimportant. Marxism is a science for solving certain problems of food, clothing, shelter and peace. Marxism-Leninism-Maoism presumes that people are interested in these subjects and that presumption has proved as historically correct as the presumption that people are interested in medical doctors because they fight epidemics. We spend no time worrying about a lack of humyn interest and hence we do not worry about persynal motivations. Those motivations could be right or wrong, and given the low level of scientific effort by psychologists and psychiatrists, those motivations could be misunderstood, but ultimately the question is unimportant. There are going to be people interested in the Marxist agenda until those social problems are gone.

In this psychologist category we can include the ad hominem attack crowd and all identity politics and most of post-modernism. They emphasize subjective experience and motivations while we Maoists emphasize picking the right basketball team to play for and then putting the ball in the hole--sports-talk for implementation. Even if no basketball team will draft you, you still have to put the ball in the hole. To translate--if it is difficult to work with an organization, there still has to be a way to raise the level of the proletariat's game. For the exploited and oppressed to win, it will not be necessary for every persyn to work directly with a party-affiliated organization, though it is certainly desirable.

b) Individualists of all kinds make police infiltration easier. Typically the individualist raises one persynal pet peeve to a level of principle without realizing it. For whatever reason, individualists hang about communist movements in a manner indistinguishable from cops looking to obtain information without having to work for it. Someone uninterested in broad historical questions should not be given credibility as a "comrade." Someone who would raise this or that ad hoc point above unity and struggle around broad historical questions should be written off. If they're talking about something millions and billions of people cannot reference, it cannot be a basis of unity and struggle.

c) Geographic opportunists only fight for lines that provide leaders in their localities. If that happens to be the CIA with its superior resources, geographic opportunists are satisfied. The geographic opportunists do not think about the logic of what it is going to take to unite billions of people across boundaries. (These kinds of people who passively await something to do in their locality Lenin also referred to as "provincialists.") Likewise pragmatist Liberals.

d) Pragmatist Liberals
Pragmatist Liberals are combining problems from above. In some organizations cops/spies outnumber members. In others it is vice-versa, but in no case are we justified in basing membership struggle around anything other than broad historical questions that could be grounds for a cardinal principle. In other words, we cannot allow spy successes to scare us into taking up origins, size or locality questions as a replacement for cardinal questions. That would be a total victory for the enemy, much akin to how the "terrorists" have already won the battle against "freedom" with the passage of the "Patriot Act."

In the Netherlands, the spies put in a lot of effort with a lot of spies, so anyone who joined based on size would have picked the spy organization instead of setting up their own. Likewise, the U.$. intelligence services have a 10 digit budget, not to mention the cops, so for them to carry out large operations is no big deal. Depending on what they are fishing for, these spies may even put the ball in the hole for the proletariat. This does not give us the luxury of saying anyone who accomplishes something is a spy.

In retrospect we can say we wish there were some other organization the Dutch proletarians formed, but we cannot say that it was wrong to join a spy-arranged organization instead of none at all. This idea would be as wrong as Hoxha's metaphysics against Mao that since there is a bourgeoisie in the party, Mao must be a Liberal. The people who joined the spy-arranged organization did so on principle and on the whole that principle is going to work out more often than not for the proletariat and its working is going to doom the imperialist system a tad faster than by its own suicidal tendencies.

Maybe in many Dutch localities, Dutch secret services were the first to espouse Maoist principles. Because of this we do not obtain the luxury of saying Maoist principles are wrong! First we have to pick our cardinal principles. Then we have to think about how to make life harder for spies and cops.

Lastly, the above speaks of a process of purges and demarcation regarding membership and affiliation practices. Yet it also worth stressing that no purge, no diss and no cop/spy activity ever justifies giving up work against imperialism and imperialist militarism. People who intended to be genuine or who were just thinking through something may find themselves wrongly "written off" or purged. Such people will continue political work and not use the accidents of struggle as an excuse to discontinue work. There are widely varying levels of working with or inside communist parties.

Examples of successful action

In the Dutch case, money for the cause from genuine comrades ended up going right to the Dutch secret services, thus serving to discourage anyone attempting to organize a communist party in the future despite Dutch pretensions to "freedom." Likewise, it is now public that the "Communist Party USA" treasurer was FBI; although the FBI allowed both deposits and withdrawals for political purposes.

So in some cases, the enemy is taking the efforts of hundreds or thousands of people and wasting it. In other cases, the enemy is just watching activity while fishing for bigger fish.

When we emphasize putting the ball in the hole, instead of psychological talk and investigation of "origins," we are going to foil the attempts of the enemy to waste our activity. For example, PIRAO recently reported that Toronto and vicinity has had some distribution of MIM Notes. This particular distribution would foil any possible attempt at sabotage, because the persyn in charge took the MIM Notes from the web site and printed and distributed it him/herself. In other words, this comrade(s) took the assist from the web page, but basically put the ball in the hole him/herself. So this persyn who carried out action knows him or herself that what the enemy could do to interfere was very limited. It's not a case where the comrade sent in $1000 and it went to the secret services.

Now let's apply this lesson to newbies and MIM. In every newbie's political life, the hurdle of commitment involving money is very important. People who get in the habit in their teens or twenties of giving money get on the right track. Others often never commit to political activism despite years of discussion. On the other hand, newbies are going to read stories like this true story about the Dutch. In addition, there will be geographic opportunists and pragmatists telling newbies not to "trust" certain people based on various ad hoc reasons that add up to unprincipled individualist schlock. Separating from that will also involve being able to distinguish between petty-bourgeois vehemence for narrow-minded pet peeves and proletarian militance. The bourgeois Liberals dressed in ultra-left or militant clothing can cause paralysis by spreading the most corrosive Liberalism. To break the impasse of "trust," newbies may just have to put the ball in the hole themselves. They can advance cardinal principles themselves and make a tremendous advance while exercising the brain to work in better unity in the future.

Now we would also say this: for those who cannot put the ball in the hole themselves like Toronto did, we have to say, yes, there is the chance the enemy will sabotage your contribution, but there is also a chance your contribution will do good. In the end, the proletariat wins, because it can afford to take more chances than the bourgeoisie. The imperialist system is doomed.

Note:
http://www2.rnw.nl/rnw/en/currentaffairs/region/netherlands/041210canl