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It is not the Maoist way to vouch for a comrade based on some set of activities--often small to non-existent in the case of some people vouching-- and think that struggle with the enemy is done. After Stalin died, the pro-Stalin camp divided into two main pieces--the Hoxhaite and the Maoist. The two sides vied to explain how it was that phony communist Khruschev slipped into power and proceeded to split with Mao and Hoxha. One key difference that arose is that Mao said there was a bourgeoisie in the party and Hoxha disagreed by saying Stalin and Hoxha would not allow it. At the same time, we have to point out that in his last years, Stalin was still attacking those who believe there are no enemies in parties following Lenin.
The root popularity of Hoxha's line can well be individualism and Liberalism. Hoxha's line says that a party's leader can prevent the formation of the bourgeoisie in the party. This is actually a form of what MIM calls emperor logic-- historical idealism. Hoxhaism said that what the one persyn does matters so much it can prevent a class from existing. In May 2005, Rasheed Wallace of the professional u.$. basketball team the "Detroit Pistons" "guaranteed" victory in a particular playoff game and struggle between two teams of five people. Even so, people regard such guarantees from professional athletes rather skeptically. That skepticism should apply a million times more to a contest where billions of people face off--the struggle between capitalism and socialism. Rasheed Wallace plays almost 20% of the game as one of the five main players on his team. Hoxha or any individual communist plays a small fraction of their own game relative to what Rasheed Wallace plays in basketball--and this is actually the main reason that the imperialists, their agents and their strategies are doomed. They simply cannot operate at the level that we do. Their class cannot allow itself to do so.
In the situation for parties in state power, not Hoxha, but Mao has proved correct beyond any doubt. In many cases, the party functionaries are today's open capitalists in Russia and China. They appropriated the means of production, but even when the means of production were "public" before 1989, we could tell who really owned them by looking at labor appropriation in the Soviet Union. It is only the same old 1980s stark-raving revisionists who cannot see that now. Those party functionaries had credentials handed to them by people who had credentials who in turn had their credentials handed to them by people following Lenin before them. Obviously the security involved in that was not successful proletarian security and eventually it became bourgeois security.
For the situation of parties out of power, we find that even in cases where there is a People's Army, there is a new Hoxhaite trend. When Hoxha denied the existence of the bourgeoisie in the party and hinged it on whether a party leader is Liberal or not, the Maoists called him "metaphysical"--a reference to sweeping idealism.
What is specifically Maoist is saying that that enemy is there, not just spy agents but outright bourgeoisie when the party has state power and thus access to the means of production. What is slander is saying that Maoism tolerates that situation the way Hoxha said Mao did. The enemy is there, but Maoists still struggle against it. The question is how to carry out that struggle.
This is a very real and intense struggle today in 2005. Echoing the struggle between Maoists and Hoxhaites, the same thing is going on now with some people denying the very police plot that caught Comrade Gonzalo in Peru in 1992--the biggest setback we've had since 1976 and a touchstone question in its own right. A handful of bureaucrats in an organization called the RIM that stole our original name and the representatives of an entire imperialist country labor aristocracy class use Maoist rhetoric to deny the existence of enemies in the party spreading a line for peace accords in Peru. They see no wider police plot that captured Gonzalo, just one operation, contrary to everything we know from subsequently released sources. The RIM bureaucrats are calling state agents and their sympathizers "comrades" and they continue linking to web pages advocating peace accords in Peru to this day in 2005 and go so far as to entangle the People's War in Nepal with their revisionist or state agent activities (depending on the RIM individual involved). The U.$. branch of RIM (RąP=u$A) is busy dumping Peruvian revolutionary Luis Arce Borja in favor of recruiting among anti-Semites, homophobes and Strasser supporters in an Internet forum. That is the real practice of their line--dumping those in favor of Third World armed struggle while kissing up to people entertaining eugenics. That is the real meaning of their pitting the 90% within u.$. borders against the 10%. Not surprisingly, it led the RąP=u$A to cover for open FBI informers.
The RIM is also involved in spreading false consciousness among the Third World proletariat by pointing to the Western labor aristocracy as proletarians who became rich by being "advanced," "working hard" and using better "technology," not by reactionary class struggle to appropriate labor. In coordination with the bourgeois media, the RIM thereby encourages the Third World proletariat to copy labor aristocracy ways culturally as a means of economic development instead of taking up proletarian revolution. The RIM Trotskyist international organization has this spreading of false consciousness as its main effect, because it denies Mao's teachings on Wang Ming and because the most important force for revolution is the billions of people of the Third World, not the hundreds of millions of the petty-bourgeoisie in the West.
We point this out because there is a difference between bourgeois security and proletarian security. The proletariat cannot lose if it unites. The worst that can happen is "game over" on account of nukes or the like. The proletariat cannot outright lose if it unites itself and separates from the bourgeoisie, so ideology is what prevents people from abandoning the struggle to join bourgeois peace accords. Unity does not mean Liberal unity. That is not really proletarian unity, just the proletariat uniting with the bourgeoisie.
We did not arrive at this position by doing a biography of Luis Arce Borja, Esparza, comrade Gonzalo or anyone else. We simply looked at what we and others who bothered had available to us in public to decide. The biography approach is the Liberal police approach. It may be useful in mobilizing people to take down semi-feudalism, the same way taking credit for individual work and setting up private property is a procedure for overcoming semi-feudalism, but the Liberal police approach cannot serve a proletarian goal inside an imperialist country.
Consequently, our security tactics are different, as Mao said in some cases we should be "fish swimming in the sea." Where the majority are exploited and oppressed people, security can mean swimming among other exploited and oppressed people. If the enemy strikes, it only stirs up the other fish even more.
In the majority-exploiter countries, blending in with the exploiters has its limits as a strategy. It's good for fomenting division among exploiters. Our counter-tactics have to stress our weakness in disunity though. The enemy seeks to divide us along the lines of various whims. That's why understanding what a cardinal principle is is key to proletarian security as well for the proletarian camp. People need to be serious about history and try to judge what were the most important events and not divide over what they think is going on in smaller events involving individuals they misjudge. As long as the international proletariat fails along these lines it will lose the struggle, because the bourgeoisie can easily use its existing police tactics to win in that case.
A tactic that applies for MIM more than Mao but which all people can use sometimes is manufacturing the sea. This would apply to anyone trying to overcome electronic surveillance of any kind. In some instances we have to do without electronic devices of any kind. In other cases, we can manufacture the sea to swim in, manufacture the exploiter images to co-exist with. If success in a struggle depends on a device susceptible to surveillance, then it is important that for every correct and open use of such a device that there by 1000 uses that are not correct and misleading. The success of such tactics rely on not answering "pig questions" or if answering them, then only giving false information.
For example, in the "Matrix," if Trinity phones back to base on the submarine and the line is tapped, then the best way to win would be to have one thousand others phone to base at the same time or to create that appearance. Then the enemy has to send out 1000 sentinels to attack one phone caller. At first glance, it is easiest for the imperialists to hire people to carry out this tactic themselves, because they have the technology and the short-term resources. In reality, this tactic is how the technological advantages and Liberal approach of the enemy are neutralized--(and no, in this case, fascism cannot save them either.) So again, the strength of the Liberal police tactics is that they promote individualism and thereby divide the proletariat. If the enemy can track down Trinity and that's all they need to do, they need to discern among individuals. The weakness of those tactics is that they cannot survive a truly group-oriented counter-strategy. In fact, the enemy him/herself cannot help but suffer from group dynamics in their own intelligence production that are not of their choosing. That's even without our lifting a finger while we for our part suffer Liberalism in our own ranks without the imperialist police lifting a finger.
The notion that some enemies are too far out of line with the international proletariat to be counted as actors in a two-line struggle is beyond the RIM figleafs for state agents in the party. They accepted the Hoxhaite slander of Mao as truth. Their purpose is to spread capitulationist ideology in the Third World countries to stop the armed struggles and also to encourage capitulation to the petty-bourgeois majority in the imperialist countries. At least some such as Trotsky have advocated that the imperialists and bourgeois culture play progressive roles in countries like China of his and Mao's day. To tolerate the bourgeois Liberal line in the imperialist countries today is even worse.
As we said in MT 2/3, studies have shown that kindergarten teachers cannot distinguish correctly among five-year-olds regarding work they have done. This is an example of the limits on Liberalism, the drawing of distinctions among individuals-- and this applies to MIM as well when it comes to security. We may get some of the easy cases right, but if we were to go out systematically and try to be a police agency spying on people, studies show we are not going to succeed overall. What we can succeed in doing though with very little difficulty is going out and creating an image that the enemy mistakes for real. The Liberal police effort is doomed, but the proletarian effort to spread false information to the enemy--is inevitably successful.
The bourgeoisie cannot correctly draw distinctions among individuals in its so-called management; even though the bourgeoisie has a profit interest in being able to distinguish among individuals. This comes out most clearly in countries where only the proletariat has progressive potential. Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao all worked for decades in societies where monarchism was a serious political issue. Especially in contrast with Lenin, Stalin and Mao, MIM lives in a situation where Liberalism has no progressive historical role to play. So if we carry out complicated tactical actions to evaluate individuals, we have to ask ourselves if we are wasting time and we should not claim to have understood much. If we carry out massive subterfuges, we can be much more certain that our work will not be for naught.
The simpler our procedure for understanding the enemy in the party the better. The emphasis for us has to be line and procedure, not constantly drawing individual distinctions by trying to hire detectives to find CIA paystubs for example.
Yes, we have to recognize and handle sentiments for peace among the people outside the Maoist party in Peru and other countries and we must propose peace accords in some situations. Having your leader arrested and then calling for laying down of arms is not a Maoist situation. The pro-peace accords people are saying Comrade Gonzalo in prison gave them the credentials they need to advocate the peace accords. Again though, it is the concrete situation and the logic of the struggle at that instance, not the credentials, that is important. Comrade Gonzalo has the best credentials of anyone alive in our hemisphere, but proletarian security and line are never based on identity or credentials, especially not in the imperialist countries where there is no progressive role for individual private property. Obviously it's hard to carry out a People's War if the party retains people who do not believe in it and that is cardinal, not just a matter of two-line struggle. The same sentiments of the masses for peace if expressed inside the party belong to the enemy in Peru.
Likewise, even in Marxist-Leninist- Maoist parties without state power or even a People's Army marshaling resources like a mini- state, there is no way that vouching eliminates enemies in the party once that party has obtained the notice of the bourgeoisie. This is true to such a degree that the bought-off Dutch people had more work for Maoism done by Dutch spies than by anyone else at a certain point in history. That is demoralizing to say the least, and proves the Maoist thesis that the enemy is there, but there is no escaping that we still have to evaluate our comrades and movements by the contributions to the struggle, not based on some process of vouching. Even our evaluations of actual activity going on are bound to be wrong in connection to individuals.
In history inside u.$. borders, there could be hardly many people with better credentials than the late Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale and David Hilliard, but they all sold out. We have to judge them based on what they do for the struggle now. They became easy to judge because they themselves said and say that they are no longer Maoist. That's one simple procedure. Another would be to look at work in front of one's face. Something that is going to paralyze security work is the possibility of error. That is why we have to be clear in our own minds in the majority-exploiter countries that what we want is procedures that favor us more than the enemy, not some kind of Liberal pretense of doing the right thing in every single individual case. There is no doubt that we will err. The only question is whether we can mix in more success than failure with our procedures.
Against this some will say there are just some slackers who subjectively intend to be proletarian but who do not get the job done and MIM is too hard on them by dismissing petty-bourgeois slackers. That is in fact a major reason that Lenin's "better fewer but better" is also key to security in the countries where the imperialist petty-bourgeoisie is the majority. The slackers and wannabes create a situation where the state agents can pose as slackers or wannabes.
The imperialist state plays all sides. It infiltrates to call people enemies who are not enemies and it denies that enemies are really enemies. It is not a case where Liberalism is therefore the best policy. That is the Hoxhaite slander against Mao. The proletarian camp cannot afford to deny that police plots exist. Hoxha believed police plots exist, but his denial of the existence of the bourgeoisie in the party has the same idealist roots as various Liberal denials we see today. That's why it is key to assume that there are military intelligence, FBI (state police) and the like in your party or working closely with you. Only once one makes the assumption, one is prepared to change the way one works--partly by spreading false information about oneself and the proletariat where appropriate but also by not falling for subjective whims on security questions that would be useful for dividing the international proletariat.