blog — June 09
The Problem of Illegality: An Excerpt from “What Every Radical Should Know About State Repression” by Victor Serge
This classic manual on repression by revolutionary activist Victor Serge offers fascinating anecdotes about the tactics of police provocateurs and an analysis of the documents of the Tsarist secret police in the aftermath of the Russian revolution.
As we approach the 100th anniversary of Victor Serge’s (1926) classic exposé of political repression, the specter of fear as a tool of political repression is chillingly familiar to us in world increasingly threatened by totalitarianism. Serge’s exposé of the surveillance methods used by the Czarist police reads like a spy thriller. An irrepressible rebel, Serge wrote this manual for political activists, describing the structures of state repression and how to dodge them—including how to avoid being followed, what to do if arrested, and tips on securing correspondence. He also explains how such repression is ultimately ineffective.
“Repression can really only live off fear. But is fear enough to remove need, thirst for justice, intelligence, reason, idealism…? Relying on intimidation, the reactionaries forget that they will cause more indignation, more hatred, more thirst for martyrdom, than real fear. They only intimidate the weak; they exasperate the best forces and temper the resolution of the strongest.” —Victor Serge
THE PROBLEM OF ILLEGALITY
An Excerpt from What Every Radical Should Know about State Repression: A Guide for Activists by Victor Serge
DON'T BE FOOLED
Without a clear perspective on this problem, knowledge of police methods and procedures would be of no practical utility.
Fetishism of legality was and still is one of the characteristic features of the class collaboration tendency of socialism. It involves a belief in the possibility of transforming the capitalist order without entering into conflict with its privileged elements. But rather than indicating a naiveté quite incompatible with the mentality of politicians, it is a sign of the corruption of the leaders. Entrenched in a society they pretend to be fighting, they recommend respecting the rules of the game. The working class can only respect bourgeois legality if it ignores the real role of the state and the deceptive nature of democracy; in short, the first principles of the class struggle.
If the worker knows that the state is a mesh of institutions designed to defend the interests of the property owners against the non-owners, that is, to maintain the exploitation of labor; that the law, always decreed by the rich against the poor, is enforced by magistrates invariably belonging to the ruling class; that the law is invariably enforced along rigorous class lines; that coercion, which begins with a quiet order from a policeman, passes via the lockup and the penitentiary, and ends with the fall of the guillotine—is the systematic exercise of legalized violence against the exploited, then the only way the worker can view legality is as a fact, whose different facets he should know about, with its different applications, traps and pitfalls (and also advantages, which should be made use of at certain points) but which should be nothing but a purely material obstacle to his class.
Is it necessary to demonstrate the anti-proletarian nature of all bourgeois legality? Perhaps. In our unequal struggle against the old world, the simplest things must be explained again and again each day. We need only mention a number of fairly well-known facts.
In every country, the workers’ movement has had to win, in over half a century of struggle, the right to associate and the right to strike. Even in France this right is still not conceded to state employed workers nor those in industries considered to be of public utility (as if all industries aren’t), such as the railways.
In the conflicts between capital and labor, the army has often intervened against labor—never against capital.
In court the defense of the poor is nothing short of impossible, because of the cost of any judicial action; in effect, a worker can neither bring a case nor defend one.
The overwhelming majority of crimes are directly caused by poverty and come into the category of attacks on property. The overwhelming majority of prison inmates are from the poor.
Up until the war, there was discriminatory suffrage in Belgium; a capitalist, a curate, an officer or a lawyer each had as many votes as two, or three workers. At the time of writing an attempt is being made to reestablish discriminatory suffrage in Italy.
To respect legality such as this is to be fooled by it. Nonetheless, it would be equally disastrous to ignore it. The advantages for the workers’ movement are the greater the less one is fooled. The right to exist and to act legally is, for the organizations of the proletariat, something which must constantly be re-won and extended. We stress this because sometimes among good revolutionaries there emerges the diametrical opposite of fetishizing legality—due to a kind of tendency to make the least political effort (it is easier to conspire than to lead mass action) they have a certain disdain for legal action.
We believe that in countries where the reaction has not yet triumphed, destroying the previous democratic constitution, the workers will have to fight to defend every inch of their legal position, and in other countries fight to regain it. In France itself, the legal status the workers’ movement enjoys must be extended, and this can only be done through struggle. The right of association and the right to strike are still denied to state employees and certain other categories of workers; the right to demonstrate is much more restricted than in the Anglo-Saxon countries; the advanced guard of workers’ defense have still not conquered the streets and gained legality as in Germany and Austria.
THE POSTWAR EXPERIENCE
During the war the governments of all the belligerent countries replaced democratic institutions by military dictatorship (martial law, the virtual suppression of the right to strike, prorogation or recess of parliaments, handing over all power to the generals and the court-martial regimes). The exceptional requirements of national defense gave them a plausible justification. Since the end of the war, when the Red tide surging out from Russia flowed out over the whole of Europe, almost all the capitalist states—this time fighting the class war, and under threat from the workers’ movement— treated their previously sacred legislation as worth less than the paper it was written on.
The Baltic states (Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia) and Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia brought out against the working class brutal laws untainted with democratic hypocrisy. Bulgaria refined the effects of its brutal legislation with extra-legal violence. Hungary, Italy and Spain were content with abolishing, so far as the workers and peasants were concerned, any legality whatsoever. More cultivated, and better organized, Germany, without resorting to special powers, established what can be called a regime of legal police terror.1 The United States brutally applies its laws on “criminal unionism,” sabotage and . . . espionage! Thousands of workers were arrested under an Espionage Act passed during the war against German subjects living in the United States.
The only countries left in Europe where the labor movement still enjoys the benefits of democratic legality are Scandinavia, England, France and a few small countries. It can be said without fear of being disproved by events that with the first really dangerous social crisis this advantage will be promptly and abruptly withdrawn. Very definite signs have appeared which demand our attention. In November 1924, the British elections took place on the basis of an anticommunist campaign, the basic evidence for which was a forged letter from Zinoviev, supposedly addressed to the British Labour Party and intercepted by the state. In France there have on several occasions been attempts to dissolve the CGT. If I am not mistaken, this dissolution even received formal approval. Briand in his time even—illegally—went so far as to militarize railway workers, in order to break their strike. Clemenceau’s tactics are not something belonging to the distant past—and Poincaré has shown, since the occupation of the Ruhr, an evident desire to imitate him.
Now, for a revolutionary party, being taken unawares by being outlawed means that you disappear. On the other hand, being prepared for illegality makes you certain of surviving any measures of repression. Three striking examples from recent history illustrate the truth of this.
1. A great communist party which allowed itself to be taken unawares when made illegal:
The Yugoslav Communist Party, a mass party, which in 1920 had more than 120,000 members and sixty deputies in the Skupchina, was dissolved in 1921, in compliance with the State Defense Law. Its defeat was instant and total. It disappeared from the political scene.[2]
2. A communist party which was taken only half unawares:
The Italian Communist Party [PCI] was obliged, even before Mussolini’s rise to power, to pursue what was at best a semi-legal existence, because of fascist persecution. The furious repression—with 4,000 workers arrested in the first week of 1923— was at no point able to smash the PCI, which on the contrary was strengthened and fortified, its membership rising from 10,000 in 1923 to almost 30,000 at the beginning of 1925.
3. A great communist party which was not in the least taken unawares:
At the end of 1923, after the revolutionary events of October and the Hamburg insurrection, the German Communist Party was dissolved by General von Seeckt. Prepared over a long period, and with flexible, illegal organizations, it was none-theless able to continue its normal existence. The government soon had to reconsider a measure of such evident inanity. The German Communist Party came out of illegality with its forces hardly impaired, to get over three and a half million votes in the 1924 elections.
THE LIMITS OF LEGAL REVOLUTIONARY ACTION
What is more, legality, in the most “advanced” capitalist democracies, has limits which the proletariat cannot respect without condemning itself to defeat. Propaganda in the army, a vital necessity, is not legally tolerated. Without the defection of at least a part of the army, there is no victorious revolution. This is a law of history. In every bourgeois army, the party of the proletariat must arouse and cultivate revolutionary traditions, possess extensive organizations, tenacious in their work, and more vigilant than the enemy. The most democratic of legal systems would not in the least tolerate action committees at the very points where they are most necessary: in the great railway junctions, the docks, the arsenals and the airports. The most democratic of legal systems does not tolerate communist propaganda in the colonies: as proof, take the persecution of the Egyptian and Indian revolutionaries by the British authorities; and also the regime of police provocation established by the French authorities in Tunisia. Finally, it need scarcely be said that international communications services must at all times be subject to investigation by the political police.
Nobody maintained the need for illegal revolutionary organization more firmly than Lenin—in the period of the founding of the Russian Bolshevik Party and later, during the founding of the European communist parties. Nobody fought harder against the fetishism of legality. At the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democracy (in Brussels and London, 1903), the division between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks took shape precisely over the question of illegal organization. The motive was the discussion of the first paragraph of the statutes. L. Martov, who for 20 years was to be the leader of Menshevism, wanted to concede membership of the party to anyone which lent it his services (under the control of the party)—that is, in reality, to the many sympathizers, especially in intellectual circles, who would try not to compromise themselves to the point of collaborating in illegal actions. Intractably, Lenin maintained that to belong to the party it was necessary “to participate in the work of one of its (illegal) organizations.” The discussion appeared to be splitting hairs. But Lenin was a thousand times right. You cannot be half, or a third a revolutionary. The party of the revolution must, of course, make use of every contribution; but it cannot be content with receiving just vague, discreet, verbal, inactive sympathy from its members. Those who do not agree to risk a privileged material situation for the sake of the working class, should not be in a position to exercise real influence within it. The attitude towards illegality was for Lenin the touchstone for differentiating between real revolutionaries and others.[3]
PRIVATE POLICE FORCES
Another factor must be taken into account: the existence of private police forces outside the law that provide the bourgeoisie with excellent hired guns.
During the world war, the information service of Action Française was notably successful in supplying Clemenceau’s courts-martial. It is well known that Marius Plateau was at the head of AF’s private police. Meanwhile, a certain Jean Maxe,[4] the zealous compiler and distributor of the Cahiers de l’antifrance, devoted himself to spying on the vanguard movements. It is very likely that all the reactionary formations inspired by the example of the Italian fascists have espionage and police services.
In Germany, since the official disarming of the country, the essential forces of reaction have been concentrated in extremely secretive organizations. The reaction has understood that, even in parties supported by the state, clandestinity is a precious asset. Naturally all these organizations take on the functions of virtual undercover police forces against the proletariat.
In Italy, the fascist party is not content with having the official police at its disposal. It has its own espionage and counterespionage services. Everywhere it spreads informers, secret agents, provocateurs and police spies. And it is this mafia, police and terrorists all in one, which “suppressed” Matteotti—as it had many others.
In the United States, the participation of the private police in the conflicts between labor and capital has grown fearfully. The offices of famous private detectives provide the capitalists with discreet informers, expert provocateurs, riflemen, guards, foremen and also totally corrupt “trade union militants.” The Pinkertons, Burns and Thiels detective agencies have 100 head offices and about 10,000 branches: they supposedly employ 135,000 people. Their annual budget comes to $65 million. They have set up industrial espionage, factory-floor espionage, espionage in the workshop, the shipyards, offices, and wherever there are workers employed. They have created the prototype of the worker-informer. [5]
An analogous system, exposed by Upton Sinclair, operates in the universities and schools of the great democracy whose praises are sung by Walt Whitman.
CONCLUSIONS
To sum up: the study of the workings of the Okhrana shows us that the immediate aim of the police is more to know than to repress. To know in order to repress at the appointed hour, to the extent desired—if not altogether. Faced by this wily adversary, powerful and cunning, a workers’ party lacking clandestine organization, a party which keeps nothing hidden, is like an unarmed man, with no cover, in the sights of a well positioned rifleman. Revolutionary work is too serious to be kept in a glasshouse. The party of the revolution must organize so as to avoid enemy vigilance as far as possible; so as to hide its most important resources absolutely; so as not—in the countries which are still democratic—to be at the mercy of a lurch to the right by the bourgeoisie, or of a declaration of war so as to train our comrades in the behavior which is demanded by these imperatives. [6]
