The US police state's MO has always been more of the "infiltrate, foster an environment of sectarian splitting and paranoia, let them self-destruct themselves" model than the "mass murder" model.
Take the Black Panthers, for example. Arguably the biggest misstep they made was being overly confrontational and militant toward the police state. It stepped up the urgency to destroy them, and allowed the bourgeois propaganda-media arm to cultivate a specific image of the Panthers as dangerous black supremacist, leather-and-beret-wearing terrorists hell-bent on killing cops, starting a race war, and burning down respectable white neighborhoods. It gave the police the excuse to start/exploit provocations to kill and arrest the leaders - Fred Hampton, Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, Huey P Newton, etc - and arguably more importantly get away with it in the eyes of the public. The problem of the Panthers' militant attitude being a misstep is that they weren't a mass movement. Their threat level was always disproportionate to their size. So the confrontational militancy gave the police state the leeway to repress the leaders while they were still small, decapitating the movement. But arguably more important to the downfall of the Panthers than decapitation was infiltration, co-opting of moles in the organization, spreading disinformation and fostering a climate of paranoia, and letting them turn inward on themselves. The Panthers were militant enough that they killed some of their own members who were suspected of being infiltrators. When the leadership was decapitated, the membership ate each other out of paranoia; or, the murders of suspected infiltrators were convenient charges to hang around prominent members/leaders, and they dug that grave themselves.
A pretty running thread through the destruction of all major American left-wing movements is the dichotomy between those who discourage a violent militant stance and those who encouraged a radicalization toward that stance (see the RevComs and the SDS-Weatherman split). This dichotomy would inevitably lead to splitting along sectarian lines, and the more militant radicals who engaged in largely directionless violent acts that went nowhere would invite repression within the boundaries of bourgeois law. And uncannily, government-sponsored infiltrators and informants would tend to deliberately encourage these splits, especially on the militant violent side of the dichotomy, precisely because doing violence invites repression.
Any rebuilt and successful communist party would have to work in the open; avoid sectarian splitting over petty disputes; observe a strict dichotomy between open party work within the boundaries of bourgeois law and an underground apparatus that operates outside the boundaries of bourgeois law; an insulated leadership; and representing a movement of mass character that cannot be easily decapitated or repressed. Questions of how exactly we build such a movement and avoid the mistakes of the past, is a question we communists will have to answer every day in the course of praxis.
You can technically organize in the open in the US, but you will end up getting murdered by the FBI/DHS/CIA for doing so.
The US police state's MO has always been more of the "infiltrate, foster an environment of sectarian splitting and paranoia, let them self-destruct themselves" model than the "mass murder" model.
Take the Black Panthers, for example. Arguably the biggest misstep they made was being overly confrontational and militant toward the police state. It stepped up the urgency to destroy them, and allowed the bourgeois propaganda-media arm to cultivate a specific image of the Panthers as dangerous black supremacist, leather-and-beret-wearing terrorists hell-bent on killing cops, starting a race war, and burning down respectable white neighborhoods. It gave the police the excuse to start/exploit provocations to kill and arrest the leaders - Fred Hampton, Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, Huey P Newton, etc - and arguably more importantly get away with it in the eyes of the public. The problem of the Panthers' militant attitude being a misstep is that they weren't a mass movement. Their threat level was always disproportionate to their size. So the confrontational militancy gave the police state the leeway to repress the leaders while they were still small, decapitating the movement. But arguably more important to the downfall of the Panthers than decapitation was infiltration, co-opting of moles in the organization, spreading disinformation and fostering a climate of paranoia, and letting them turn inward on themselves. The Panthers were militant enough that they killed some of their own members who were suspected of being infiltrators. When the leadership was decapitated, the membership ate each other out of paranoia; or, the murders of suspected infiltrators were convenient charges to hang around prominent members/leaders, and they dug that grave themselves.
A pretty running thread through the destruction of all major American left-wing movements is the dichotomy between those who discourage a violent militant stance and those who encouraged a radicalization toward that stance (see the RevComs and the SDS-Weatherman split). This dichotomy would inevitably lead to splitting along sectarian lines, and the more militant radicals who engaged in largely directionless violent acts that went nowhere would invite repression within the boundaries of bourgeois law. And uncannily, government-sponsored infiltrators and informants would tend to deliberately encourage these splits, especially on the militant violent side of the dichotomy, precisely because doing violence invites repression.
Any rebuilt and successful communist party would have to work in the open; avoid sectarian splitting over petty disputes; observe a strict dichotomy between open party work within the boundaries of bourgeois law and an underground apparatus that operates outside the boundaries of bourgeois law; an insulated leadership; and representing a movement of mass character that cannot be easily decapitated or repressed. Questions of how exactly we build such a movement and avoid the mistakes of the past, is a question we communists will have to answer every day in the course of praxis.
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