The modern bourgeois state uses pervasive electronic surveillance, archives of data and algorithms that accelerate information gathering that previously required the intervention of many agents. An obvious goal is to maintain the efficiency of the state in defending the interests of the bourgeoisie, though another goal of this widespread surveillance is, ultimately, to intimidate workers and deter them from action. It is inevitable that communists and union organizers, in order not to compromise their work, will be forced, and already are in many countries, to take corresponding defensive measures.

The communists will take advantage of bourgeois legality as long as and wherever possible, and will work openly to spread their program and contribute to union organization. We know, however, that as the class struggle intensifies, it will be necessary to adopt defensive attitudes everywhere, both of the party and of the class. When the balance of power in society is reversed in favor of the revolution, the communists and the working class will have to know how to use the same weapons of the capitalist state and turn them against it for the suppression of the power of the bourgeois class.

Victor Serge, in his 1926 pamphlet, "What Everyone Should Know About State Repression", details the methods of the Okhrana secret police of the Tsarist regime in Russia and the countermeasures of the Communists. The Okhrana was the Tsarist political police for the control of trade unions and Bolsheviks, as well as other "enemies of the state", such as anarchists and Socialist Revolutionaries of the time. But it was also used to keep tabs on the Empire’s own officials.

The Okhrana was established in 1881. On March 13 of that year Tsar Alexander II was killed in an attack by populists. The police operated scientifically, systematically collecting data and observations useful to their objectives. They recruited talented and erudite men who understood the theory and history of revolutionary movements, and infiltrated subversive groups undercover to monitor, inform, maintain detailed personnel files, and plot manipulations and provocations. The Okhrana also conducted external surveillance by shadowing and intercepting correspondence. Highly paid agents meticulously recorded their observations and cross-referenced the reports in dossiers on various profiles.

Police Chief Zubatov extended surveillance throughout Russia and from 1911 in Europe, listening in on the telephone conversations of even government ministers. The “secret service”, especially after 1905, did not immediately dismantle the revolutionary organizations that had just been discovered. Instead, they let the movement develop, infiltrated provocateurs into it, to liquidate them later by beheading them at their peak.

Obviously, all this was not enough to prevent the October Revolution in 1917. In the Okhrana headquarters in Petrograd, the Bolsheviks found a secret archive containing 35,000 names of provocateurs and a copy of a “Directive on Intelligence Services Secrets”, an “ABC of Provocation”, which shows how psychological manipulation, economic coercion, profiling and the exploitation of personal vulnerabilities were used to coerce revolutionaries of weak character, the disillusioned, the destitute, the exiled, especially prisoners, and how the secret police maintained their cover through arrests and releases orchestrated to make them credible.

Serge witnessed the defeat of the Okhrana and its agents and how the revolution, still successful, was "invincible" against such methods. All the hacking and decoding of correspondence, and the maneuvers to counter revolutionary tactics - similar to today’s forensic analysis, biometrics, and automatic data processing - ultimately proved powerless to stem the discontent of exploited workers, starving peasants, and soldiers during the Great War, and failed to decapitate the Bolsheviks, despite arrests and exiles.

The strength of revolutionary propaganda comes from the party’s message that enters in tune with widespread worker complaints, and possesses intrinsic resistance if rooted in their lived experience, which cannot be easily broken by violence, deception and coercion; the terror instilled by political police is nothing compared to the terror of poverty, hunger and the horrors of imperialist war.

Of course there will always be infiltrators, corrupt people, traitors in the party and in the unions. But working-class organizations will learn to defend themselves. Within the party, the best defense is to apply correct communist practices in all aspects of its life: centralization, discipline, discretion, close, correct relationships. and fraternity among comrades, banning all pretensions, improvisation, and personalism. External provocation, often presented behind an ostentatious assertion of doctrinal orthodoxy, must be countered not by trials or by giving in to a climate of suspicion, but by sound party work, known and clear to all.

Serge imparts good advice. Communicate only what is necessary: "The inattention of revolutionaries has always been the best aid to the police", and warns against foolish affectations: "The greatest virtue of a revolutionary is simplicity and contempt for all posturing, including ’revolutionary’ and especially ’conspiratorial’ ones".

But in the pre-revolutionary era, finally, Serge writes, the party defends itself for the large number of new enthusiastic acolytes who suddenly offer themselves up for its orders, in a great mass unknown to any police register, paper or electronic.

In fact, if not formally in their lying democracies, the communist party is already illegal and their codes and constitutions already have the rules that prohibit it. They establish criminal laws that currently, in a minority of the world’s countries, the bourgeoisie still does not believe the courts should enforce. More than judicial illegality, economic illegality is legally in force for the party: communists would never be granted access to the mass media, which cost millions and are tightly controlled by capitalist lodges.

The threat of legal persecution is therefore always pending, and the party knows that this awaits them as soon as the class struggle progresses and shows signs of emancipating itself from the shackles of political and trade union opportunism. Moreover, strict adherence to the law already hinders the activity of revolutionaries and trade unions. Due to the restrictions on the right to strike, imposed in all democracies, for a workers’ union to fight successfully, it is already forced to take actions that the law considers illegal. In Serge’s time, as today, trade union movements had to deal not only with official law enforcement agencies. In Italy during the Fascist era, the Chambers of Labor were burned down by fascist squadristi, protected by the police. In the United States, private agencies, such as the Pinkertons, proliferated, employing informants, provocateurs, and even armed agents to undermine workers’ organizations.

This does not mean that in a workers’ union, where “rights” have been taken away or never granted, you find it necessary to reclaim them and fight for them. The demand from workers to gather, organize, and demonstrate will clash with the capitalist power structure and even more so for the party. For example, propaganda within the armed forces, which is illegal everywhere, is supported by the party and deemed necessary. While the Italian Socialist Party, in keeping with its progressive, legalistic and parliamentary doctrine, was caught off guard by the attack of the gangs, then of the fascist government, the Communist Party of Italy already had its own efficient clandestine network.

Modern intelligence services have significantly evolved in the surveillance and infiltration tactics pioneered by the Okhrana, using digitalization of all aspects of life. Informants are now as physical as they are digital, while Psychological operations, including the dissemination of disinformation, are carried out by structured organizations. Physical surveillance is combined with cell phone tracking and call recording; online connections, searches, social media browsing and activity, and banking transactions are tracked. A dense network of cameras covers every intersection in cities and the countryside.

Some international companies have created software, which they use to collect data and sell to states. It has been widely demonstrated that governments have used the infamous Pegasus "spyware" to hack cell phones and monitor journalists, lawyers, political opponents, activists, and various groups and trade unions.

In short, even in the richest and most “free” nations on the planet, technically everything is ready for the instant imposition of martial law and the suspension of so-called civil liberties, and the recourse to the classic “low-tech” methods of kidnapping, beatings, rape and torture, just like in Serge’s time.

A comrade from the United States recalls when the workers at Homestead in 1892 went on illegal strike and faced bullets, and the Pinkerton bombs: they didn’t worry about illegality and clandestinity then because they fought in the open and en masse, gaining the support of many citizens. He recalled the postmen’s strike of 1970, who were even denied the right to strike: they didn’t retreat against the deployment of the National Guard and the state of national emergency declared by President Nixon. They paralyzed the national postal service until they achieved, not yet the right to strike, but collective bargaining and wage increases.

Around the world, police and the military repress proletarian strikes and uprisings by arresting, imprisoning, or deporting. Yet the struggle persists; illegal strikes can achieve results, even while the movement also faces heavily armed police forces. Where unions have been disbanded, new ones emerge, even more weakened but combative.

The party’s defense also lies in the awakening of the class instinct, in bonds of solidarity, in the mass revolt of workers and their spontaneous activity. Moreover, this will be fostered by the party’s conscious leadership. This social dynamic, under favorable conditions, will culminate in insurrection and civil war against imperialist war and against the state.

Capitalism is destroying itself. Despite all its sophisticated surveillance apparatus and the brutality of its wars and prisons, it cannot escape the historical inevitability of class conflict. The same technologies developed under capitalism to maximize profit, and which today enable dictatorial control over the working class, also create the conditions for its collapse and violent dissolution. All the world’s secret police forces will suffer the same fate as the Okhrana, despite their "scientific" nature and cowardly provocations, powerless against the forces of social revolution and the rising international tide of the proletariat.