I was listening to Cosmopod’s recent episode on August Nimtz’s book about Lenin (The Ballot, The Streets, Or Both?) when they mentioned that a top Bolshevik leader, Malinovsky, had turned out to be an Okhrana agent provocateur—and not only that, these secret Okhrana agents (like Malinovsky) had actually assassinated high-level czarist officials on behalf of the police! That seemed so insane to me.
Until learning this recently, I had been guided by The Battle of Algiers, which features a scene, early on, where revolutionary forces test a new potential comrade by ordering him to murder a police officer. Their reasoning? A police informer would never actively harm the police. But the reality seems to be that police informers can be anyone and can do anything, and that ultimately it is impossible to detect all of them. (Lenin himself was fooled by multiple high-level Bolsheviks who were working for the police.)
I decided to take a look at Victor Serge’s book about the secret police ("What Everyone Should Know About State Repression"), published in 1926 after the USSR discovered and examined the Okhrana’s entire archives. It turns out that the police are incredibly powerful and sophisticated (duh), but so long as revolutionary forces are aligned with the proletariat, they will eventually triumph. Serge was probably feeling pretty optimistic, given the time and circumstances. The successful overthrow of the United States government is obviously not guaranteed. As Nimtz says in the podcast, the only thing we can guarantee is class struggle. We can't guarantee the victory of the proletariat, especially with nuclear weapons and climate change as factors.
Anyway, the Okhrana delivered its last paycheck to thousands of police informers the week before the February Revolution. Serge also claims that trying to outsmart the police (by deploying triple agents, for example) is useless, since whatever they tell the police is checked by other informants, and triple agents themselves only come into contact with one police officer, their handler.
Both of these sources—Nimtz’s book on electoralism versus street action, and Serge’s book about police infiltration—have tons of excellent advice for budding revolutionaries. The Cosmopod episode also mentions Democratic Centralism, which I had to actually look up: the idea that party members can freely discuss policy , but once the lower members vote on policy, their decisions are binding for all members. This is (apparently) a great way of maintaining party discipline and preventing factionalism, which we all know to be a major issue. Just thought I would share.
Links:
https://cosmopod.libsyn.com/revolutionary-parliamentarism-with-august-nimtz
https://www.marxists.org/archive/serge/1926/repression/index.htm
Also have to mention that someone here recommended this excellent podcast with Vivek Chibber, who discusses the current socialist moment as well as whether socialists should focus on race or class:
https://soundcloud.com/user-194914331/racecraft-feat-vivek-chibber?ref=clipboard&p=a&c=0