The 1AC’s horizontal heuristic is powerless in the face of state repression. Relying on ad hoc structures of trust, shared identity, and affinity to cohere [mutual aid/direct action/whatever] allows the state to inject repressive forces along those same lines. Only effective organization built around democratic centralist procedures and clear structures of accountability can fight state disruption.

The failure of the communist movement has not occurred in a vacuum, with the blame falling only on ourselves. We operate under conditions of scrutiny and repression, with the state going so far as to infiltrate and surveil study groups and mutual aid collectives. To fight back, radicals use security culture, the cumulative practices and technologies for rooting out and inhibiting the work of state agents, informants and provocateurs, and the process of turning these practices into cultural norms and training new radicals in them. In many movement spaces, veterans zero in on the newly activated and begin passing down elements of security culture, like workers telling new hires about job hazards that management refuses to fix. Most radical security practices were developed for underground work, from pipeline blockades to anti-fascist streetfights, and reflect the needs of this work: encrypted apps, masks, need-to-know information sharing, unadvertised actions, and organizing within private groups of trusted comrades. None of these methods are foolproof. Informants and undercover police wiggle their way into Signal chats, catch wind of surprise actions, and identify masked militants. The game of cat-and-mouse between the ruling class and the Left is always developing, with no tactic offering absolute safety from state agents who are capable of learning and adapting to our forms of struggle. But for activists engaged in militant direct action, security culture often means the difference between imprisonment and walking free. Attempts to translate security culture into aboveground base-building and mass politics, however, often create friction between commitment to privacy and discretion and the needs of public, outward-facing work. Organizers radicalized in ambiguously legal protest movements naturally bring the tools they learn to other forms of work, such as economic organizing and study groups, as if encrypted texting is a spell to keep the police at bay rather than a contingent tactic for a specific terrain of struggle. This can look like union organizers convincing uninitiated workers to plan campaigns exclusively on Signal or radicals showing up to quiet vigils with their faces concealed. Rather than being applied unilaterally, these security practices need to be weighed against any trade-offs in effectiveness. For example, if an elderly tenant interested in getting their sink repaired has trouble learning to use Signal, it may be best to just err on the side of efficiency over precaution and send them an email. Similarly, if a new protester is intimidated by your balaclava, the benefit of earning their trust may outweigh the cost of being photographed at an action. Security practices cannot be applied mechanically, but need to be tailored to the needs of the moment. Dogma, whether political or tactical, hands infiltrators an easy-to-memorize means of blending in, while adaptability and critical thought makes their ingenuousness stand out. Methods developed for underground activity translate unevenly into party-building and mass work, sometimes fitting neatly, sometimes derailing good organizing, and sometimes turning into a useless ritual. Like our enemies in blue, we need to learn and adapt to stay ahead. While the world of cloak-and-dagger direct action may be alien to those of us immersed in mass work, state repression remains a constant threat. Agents have crashed mergers between parties, severed ties between dear comrades, and created entire collectives as fronts for their activity. A repressive apparatus capable of handling complexity and change requires an equally adaptive response. While most handbooks on security are meant for the underground, there is a small body of thought on security in public movements, mostly passed down directly from organizer to organizer. The closest thing to a bible of movement security is J Sakai’s Basic Politics of Movement Security, which takes security not as a specialized practice, but as something embedded in how we debate, organize and relate to each other. In his words: Security is not about being macho vigilantes or being super suspicious or having techniques of this or that. It’s not some spy game. Security is about good politics, that’s why it’s so difficult. And it requires good politics from the movement as a whole. Not from some special body or leadership or commission—from the movement as a whole. This is demanded of us. It’s part of the requirement to be a revolutionary, that you try to work on this.11 When Sakai uses the term good politics, he’s not referring to a certain Marxist doctrine, but to an ability to understand our circumstances and make the correct decisions, whether in mundane practice or grand strategy. In almost every instance of infiltration on public record, the state has taken advantage of the movement’s political failures, leveraging them to gather information or disrupt organizing. This is intimately tied to the cultural interventions discussed in the section above. The primary solution is not to design some special tool for identifying police, but to create resilient organizations that can’t go up in flames because of the ill intent of a minority of members. In the previous section, we identified two forms of uncomradely behavior—treating comrades like enemies to be torn down and objects to be used. The state is well-aware that we suffer from both of these problems, and have historically used them against us. Treating comrades like enemies hands the state a tool to sabotage revolutionary movements. Organizations only function when their components work harmoniously toward a common goal. When we engage in political conflict, we need to recognize that our comrades are trying to use different means to achieve the same ends, not to stop us from achieving those ends. Agent provocateurs, who do intend to stop us, almost always stoke bad faith in these disagreements to generate an organizational breakdown. Racism, sexism and other forms of oppression compound this problem. When these dynamics go unaddressed in the movement, leaders are able to form cliques that exclude the oppressed, denying them status as comrades and equals. Sakai calls this men’s solidarity, where the sense of brotherhood between men allows them to insulate each other from criticism. Sakai’s term is shorthand here: The problem is not specific to men or masculinity. White women and petty-bourgeois intellectuals, for instance, are both capable of creating similar reactionary in-groups that privilege their cultural norms and allow them to defend each other from criticism and change. If you look closely, you will also find similar patterns outside of oppressor-oppressed dynamics, though that’s where you’ll find them most chronically. Sakai explains the concept using the story of a radical named Tom, who he describes as an aggressive and macho movement leader in Chicago. His politics amount mostly to poor whites building “White Power” in alliance with the Black Power movement. Those who held this vision formed a wing of the Rainbow Coalition built by the Chicago Black Panthers, with whites representing themselves as a distinct national community. While Sakai leaves his last name and organization unspoken, he is implied to be Tom Mosher, a federal informant active in a number of radical organizations during the 1960s and 70s—the group Sakai describes seems to be either Rising Up Angry or the Young Patriots Organization, both based among working-class, white Appalachian migrants in Chicago. This is not a full treatment of the Rainbow Coalition or the Young Patriot Organization’s politics, which were as complex as any mass movement, but the point stands that their most conservative elements became a source of power for the state. Tom was insulated by a leadership clique of childhood friends, who recognized the issues with his politics and behavior but defended him because of their relationship. A group of white and indigenous women, disturbed by his behavior and believing him to be an informant, called for Tom’s expulsion and mobilized enough support to kick him out. This wasn’t, however, the end of his career in the movement. Tom ingratiated himself with middle-class leaders in Students for a Democratic Society, relying on the same bond of solidarity between men to worm his way back into activist spaces. He moved to California, freely participated in armed revolutionary organizing, and eventually either instigated or carried out the murder of a Black Panther before coming out publicly as an informant and testifying against the Panthers in court. A similar case forms the basis of Courtney Desiree Morris’s Why Misogynists Make Great Informants. In 2008, the anarchist organizer Brandon Darby revealed himself to be an informant for the FBI, reporting on protesters at the 2008 Republican National Convention. As Morris points out, however, Darby’s career as a provocateur began before he was officially recruited by the FBI. When he began informing, Darby already had a wealth of experience destabilizing movements for his handlers to draw on.12 As a leader in the Common Ground Collective, a disaster relief project in post-Katrina New Orleans, Darby dismissed, insulted and assaulted female volunteers, alienating women from the organization and its work. Common Ground blamed Black men in the surrounding community rather than the white men in its leadership, failing to hold Darby accountable for his actions. As Morris demonstrates, Darby’s comrades would not have had to catch him in the act of calling his handler to prevent him from informing. If they had held him accountable for his destructive behavior, he would not have reached the point where the FBI identified him as a possible asset and brought him into their fold. Instead, his male comrades’ desire to placate him shielded a future informant. In both of these case studies, agents were able to take advantage of insular, self-reinforcing cliques of male leaders and use them to drive out women and people of color. Cadre were scattered, recruits were alienated, and movements were driven into the ground. On the other hand, when we treat comrades like objects to be used, we create a different kind of harm. This commonly takes the form of tokenism—creating the illusion of concern for the oppressed by promoting a small number of them into leadership, without addressing their needs dynamically or building a mass base among them. Nonprofits are notorious for doing this by hiring individual women, low-wage workers and people of color as spokespeople while glossing over the complexity and division within those communities. This creates public goodwill by implying that the nonprofit’s positions reflect those of the community, whether that’s accurate or not. The culpability of liberal professionals in tokenism, however, does not mean revolutionaries are immune to it by virtue of our politics. Like the 80/20 rule described earlier, a run-of-the-mill organizing maxim can help us navigate the weeds of exclusion and tokenism: Leaders should always work to replace themselves with new leaders. Rather than creating a permanent clique that steers a collective for its lifespan, cadres should invest time and energy into bringing those on the periphery into the center, giving them mentoring and encouragement. This concept is deceptively simple, hiding a host of choices organizers must constantly make around who and where to direct their time and attention to. When you have time for a single organizing conversation, who do you choose to have it with? When you need to assign a task, which of your comrades do you ask first? When elections for new leaders are coming up, who do you encourage to run? Who do you treat with suspicion, and who do you choose to trust? All of these questions intersect with class and identity, slowly changing or maintaining the revolutionary Left’s composition. This makes every organizing act fundamentally political, because everything we do impacts who gains the expertise and confidence to step up and take leadership and who does not. This work does not stop when you’ve filled a quota of women or people of color in elected roles; it requires a permanent commitment to building mass leadership among the oppressed. Infiltrators thrive on both insularity and favoritism. These are two sides of the same coin, allowing them to take advantage of organizations that pivot too far in either direction. The self-replacement of leaders is not holy water that casts them out, but dispersing cliques and planning for cadres to regularly turn over leadership turns the state’s work surveilling and sabotaging the Left into a long war of attrition. Security is woven into every part of how we organize. Whether we know it or not, we’re constantly engaging with state agents trying to disrupt our work. Copjacketing, when one accuses a comrade of being an agent without hard evidence, only gives them another weapon to breed distrust and dysfunction. The most powerful defense against disruption is to build organizations that can’t be derailed by bad actors, tearing up the parts of our culture that the state most easily uses to its advantage and replacing them with tight relationships, clear politics, and democratic practice.