Don't get paranoid

I presented the March 8 members' aggregate of the Communist Party with the rough working draft of a Party security document. The production of this is long overdue. We have been talking about it for perhaps eight years or more. We have even included openings on the whole question to various schools we have organised, but until now nothing seemed able to induce its birth. A far more substantial draft for discussion has gone out in internal mailings to comrades this week with my apologies for its long gestation period.

Of course, no doubt there are comrades out there who would object to me even openly mentioning this fact. There is a certain brand of nervous, hysterical posture that Victor Serge characterised as "conspiracy mania". One of the main points in the preamble underlines Serge's stand "against posing, adopting airs of mystery, dramatising simple events, or 'conspiratorial' attitudes" (V Serge What everyone should know about state repression London 1979, p57).

There is perhaps all the more reason to emphasise this fact given this reactionary period. A narrow obsession today with maintaining 'security' at the expense of our ongoing political work - even if born of a healthy desire to protect cadre during difficult times - would be in effect to do the job of the state's security services for them. Of course, they are plotting against us, but we shouldn't get paranoid about it.

As the draft document makes clear, our approach to this question is essentially political, not technical. Thus, we can - and should - all have a giggle at the expense of the 'secret squirrels' in our movement. These are comrades who think that they can fool the 'spooks' by putting on funny voices or - seriously - whispering on the telephone. If BT could install a handy volume knob on the handset for my old mam, I dare say MI5's budget may run to something even more sophisticated.

Thus, in any straight 'technical' duel between organisations of the workers' movement and these special departments of the state, we will always lose. But as the draft document underlines, "the ultimate guarantee of the freedom of the Party to make revolution is the correctness of its scientific world view and its ability to merge with the broad masses of the class. We thus guard against infiltration, state provocation, and sabotage primarily through our open fight for correct politics".

I think we see a wonderful example of this if we look to the experience of the Russian revolutionary movement, in particular its Bolshevik section and specifically the brilliant career of one Roman Malinovsky.

A highly talented individual, elected to the Bolshevik central committee at its Prague conference (1912), Malinovsky went on by the end of that year to be elected to the tsarist duma. In 1913 he became president of the Bolshevik parliamentary fraction. At the same time, he was an okhrana (tsarist secret police) agent from 1910, the "pride of the service" accor