The following text is a revised and expanded version of the author’s online intervention entitled “Surveillance and Conspiracy, Lenin and Sci Fi: Tactics for the 21st Century,” which took place on 9 March 2024, in the framework of the international series of events Leninist days / Jornadas leninistas (27 January to 25 to May 2024), organized in commemoration of the centenary of Vladimir I. Lenin’s death.

“Leninist ideas can be put into dialogue with other contemporary discussions on secrecy. Concepts such as a data multitude and a community of irreplaceable singularities flatten the important distinction between the masses and the core organization so important in Lenin’s texts. They are valuable philosophically, but they aren’t well suited for an effective elaboration of the politics of the secret that we need to meet power mask-to-mask. If an organization is led by comrades who position themselves as irreplaceable singularities and don’t train those next in line who could then replace them, the organization will be vulnerable to crackdowns. I propose we model a politics of secrecy today on Leninist tactical secrecy as allegorized by Cixin Liu and Kim Stanley Robinson.”

— Alla Ivanchikova

Aliens, Mars, and the Politics of Secrecy

Keywords: Cixin Liu; The Three Body Problem; Kim Stanley Robinson; the Mars Trilogy; Lenin; Secrecy; What is to Be Done; Socialist Sci Fi

In the summer of 2020, when George Floyd was killed and racial justice protests erupted in Minneapolis, the police flew a military-grade predator drone over the crowd of marchers. The US agencies—the forces that ramped up their surveillance efforts of protests nationwide—at that time began to worry that masks worn by protesters would thwart facial recognition technologies.[1] These agencies’ researchers ran experiments with various programs and found that the technological capabilities for face recognition were in fact disrupted by the masks. To run these experiments, they used photos collected from visitors entering the United States, as well as from people applying for visas or immigration. This deep database of face photos—an artifact of the War on Terror—has been deployed repeatedly to train facial recognition technologies and other machine learning systems in operation today.[2] Predictably, the disruption caused by Covid-era masks was temporary: technology was promptly updated to accommodate the inconvenience of people resisting it. Many companies, including Panasonic’s FacePro used in the U.S., boast that their software can correctly identify a masked face.[3] In the arms race between evasion and surveillance, surveillance will always have the upper hand.

In her 2019 book, Shoshana Zuboff labeled our current era “surveillance capitalism.” Surveillance capitalism, she argues, is a new form of sovereign power. “It replaces contracts,” she writes, “the rule of law, and social trust with the sovereignty of the Big Other” (“Big Other,” 83). The Big Other, for Zuboff, is a regime that deprives individuals of their right to privacy, including the privacy of their own thoughts. Search engines capture our most private moments—our desires, fears, symptoms, hypochondriac anxiety, our preferences and needs that we don’t disclose to anyone else. “Even the panopticon of Bentham’s design,” she writes, “is prosaic compared to this new architecture” (82). In her analysis, Zuboff lays the blame on companies, such as Google or Facebook, who stole our data, she argues, “while democracy slept.”[4] Zuboff calls out the reprehensible business model that is allowed to exist due to sluggish regulation—a model that profits from extracting our personal data. Some have pointed out, however, that the term surveillance capitalism is imprecise: in calling for better regulation, Zuboff fails to take a deep enough account, perhaps, of the way governmental agencies benefit from this poorly defined legal landscape, which gives them access, via said companies, to vast amounts of citizens’ and noncitizens’ private data.[5] The U.S. spends close to $100 billion a year on its black budget, which goes mostly to intelligence (National Intelligence Program, Military Intelligence Program, and government security classification system).[6] Private companies such as Vigilant Solutions amass data gathered in public places, from shopping malls to highways, via face recognition and automatic license plate recognition cameras, to then offer this data to police departments.[7] An extensive nationwide network of government-owned Fusion Centers was put in place to aggregate data from multiple sources, both private and public, to facilitate cooperation between the FBI, the U.S. Department of Justice, and Homeland Security. Set up under the guise of preventing terrorism, illegal migration, and crime, this extensive infrastructure of surveillance now enfolds the social body almost completely.

In this paper, I ask: What forms of resistance are possible under such conditions of surveillance? How can we imagine organizing in a panopticon that not only monitors your actions and speech, but knows the general contour of your thoughts?

Activists use social media platforms for agitation, mobilization, and recruitment. There has been much talk about Twitter Revolutions.[8] However, the politics of visibility, virality, and sharing encouraged by social media has its obvious limitations. Sharing online enables “shareveillance.”[9] Moreover, as some point out, the internet, when used for mass mobilization, “is a huge resource for autocratic leaders.”[10] The internet can be easily cut off, leading to the scattering of the masses; social media networks can be used to identify and neutralize entire networks of activists. Governments can ban platforms that encrypt user messages (such as Signal and Telegram) and persecute their founders.[11]

In this political climate, some theorists, among them Clare Birchall and Jack Bratish, began to question our valorization of the politics of transparency and visibility. Birchall, in her important intervention Radical Secrecy, argues that we should question our attachment to transparency, our view of it as a supreme moral good. Instead of calling for greater transparency, she contends, we should develop a politics of secrecy. “For too long,” she writes, “secrecy and its productive possibilities have been obscured by the fear that it is always a gateway to microfascism and by a moral attachment to disclosure” (my emphasis, 150). The predominant way of thinking about secrecy, as exemplified by Zuboff’s analysis, is to view it as privacy rights and to demand better privacy protection. Birchal argues that we need to find a politics of secrecy away from the call for greater privacy: We need “reformulations of the politics of the secret and opacity [that would] enable us to begin to rethink the role of sharing in a data ecology that demands visible, surveillable, quantifiable, and entrepreneurial subjects” (167). Similarly, Bratich argues for exploring camouflage, masking, and clandestinity as political tactics that could be deployed by progressive forces, in the name of liberation rather than domination. Masking, he argues, allows for visibility without readability or identification, enabling forms of anonymized collectivity. “The State abhors the masks that are not its own,” he writes (51). “The coming politics of secrecy might involve a confrontation that is not face-to-face, but mask-to-mask” (52).

How can we deploy “secrecy,” “conspiracy,” and “concealment” to our advantage? The politics of the secret can be not just effective, but attractive. A community can be made stronger around a shared secret. The Right deploys and weaponizes conspiratorial desire masterfully to amass populist support. How do we begin to conjure a politics of secrecy and camouflage for the progressive Left? In what follows, I bring together V.I. Lenin, aliens, Martian colonies, and revolution, and propose that many tactics outlined by Lenin are well-suited to operations under the conditions of extreme surveillance today. Specifically, Lenin’s thoughts on the structure of the militant party, which he develops around 1902-03, teach us how to organize under severe repression and while being watched. In his famous “What Is to Be Done?” and other works of that period, Lenin develops principles of such organization, and I argue that these principles, as well as the key distinctions Lenin makes, are useful for organizers today. Along with my discussion of Lenin, I then offer a reading of two science fiction texts, which I view as allegories of resistance under total surveillance—The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu and The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. These books, which discuss the role of tactical secrecy in revolutionary struggle help us develop an affective reorientation—from the desire for greater visibility towards a desire for concealment and patience. I view these works as a vehicle through which to comprehend the increasing role of tactical secrecy in today’s datafied world. Moreover, these authors help us imagine the politics of the secret as a path to victory.

A Return to Lenin

When I was a child growing up in the USSR, our elementary school curriculum featured a story about Lenin called “Sometimes One Can Eat Inkwells.” Written by a wonderful writer Mikhail Zoshenko, the story is from his book Stories about Lenin, written for kids. The plot is still etched in my memory: It is about Lenin who, while imprisoned, conceals his communication with Party comrades by using a system of invisible ink. He cheats the jailors by pretending to eat instead of writing. He makes an inkwell from mushed bread and fills it with milk. He then writes in milk ink between the lines of a book he pretends to be reading. When he sends the book back to his relatives, he knows it will be checked by his jailors. This milk ink, invisible to the wardens, becomes visible to Lenin’s comrades, when they heat up the pages – a process that makes the milk turn brown. Each time the suspicious guard stops by the door to look inside Lenin’s cell, Lenin simply eats the inkwell–a piece of bread filled with milk.

The story is likely based on the anecdote that appears in Nadezhda Krupskaya’s book, Reminiscences of Lenin. She writes: “To avoid being caught while writing with milk, Vladimir Ilyich made small milk inkwells from bread, which—as soon as the cell window clicked—he quickly put in his mouth. ‘Today I ate six inkwells,’ Vladimir Ilyich jokingly added to his letter.” Invisible ink was in fact frequently used by the Bolsheviks to evade police surveillance. They deployed a combination of milk, lemon juice, and sulfuric acid and wrote messages between the lines of letters, books, and other innocuous literature. They also used various intra-party ciphers and code to evade detection.

Socialist parties were severely repressed in Tsarist Russia, with some brief exceptions—in 1905 (the first Russian Revolution) and after the thaw of 1912. For most of its pre-revolutionary history, the Bolsheviks operated under conditions of complete or partial illegality, where they were continuously infiltrated and surveilled by the Tsar’s two police forces: the gendarmes and the Okhranka (the secret police, tasked with rooting out revolutionaries). In this task, both agencies were very successful. The police’s biggest achievement was without a doubt comrade Roman Malinovsky who spied on both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks for years. He was Lenin’s trusted comrade and a member of the Party’s Central Committee; he was even elected to the Duma (the House of Representatives) on behalf of the Bolsheviks all while being an undercover agent. Through Malinovsky, the police were able to get access to the entire network of revolutionaries, learning of their whereabouts, strategies, and plans. They were able to access numerous sensitive documents. Bolshevik Alexei Badayev thus writes on the Malinovsky case:

He was responsible for the arrest of Party workers and for the destruction of entire organisations, and supplied the police with particulars about meetings which had been arranged, the real and assumed names of Party comrades who were living in illegality, the names of the members of leading Party committees, addresses where literature was stored, in fact, all features of Party life.

From 1910 to 1914, Malinovsky helped the police arrest many key comrades, including Yakov Sverdlov and Joseph Stalin. His status as an agent became known only after the October Revolution when police archives were opened.[12]

These setbacks also meant that the Bolsheviks acquired considerable experience working in hostile conditions. They also built upon the (imperfect) experience of the previous generations of revolutionaries in Russia, including members of the Narodnaya Volya who had been ruthlessly persecuted by the Tsarist regime.

A CIA manual, called “Communism,” produced in 1949 and declassified in 1999, recognizes this as a particular strength of the Bolsheviks. It also recognizes that this experience was passed on, via the Comintern, to many other communist parties worldwide. Parties that inherited these legacies were then able to survive under extreme repression (dictatorships, Hitler’s occupation, and in exile). The manual closely studies the Communist Party of France, the Communist Party of Germany, and the Communist Party of Greece, Spain, and Portugal as examples of resilience under repression.

The Underground Party is the Party Underground

The manual was written at the onset of the Second Red Scare (McCarthyism), just two years after President Harry S. Truman had signed an executive order that required screening governmental officials for communist sympathies and affiliations. In 1949, the USSR successfully tests its first nuclear bomb, which, no doubt, added to the anti-communist hysteria in the US. The manual is a testament to that era and provides an in-depth study of communist parties worldwide. It is notably free of the “fluff” or anti-communist propaganda that inundated Americans during that time. Instead, it dissects the principles and practices of communist parties’ organization, providing extensive and detailed organizational charts of each of the parties it studies. It contains valuable insights into these structures. As a starting point, the CIA provides a comparison of two types of parties: social-democratic (reformist) and Communist (revolutionary) in terms of how they adjust to state repression. It then seeks to identify and describe Communist parties’ key features that make them resilient when compared to what it calls “evolutionary Marxist parties” (social-democratic):

[T]he Communist Party will operate under any conditions, legal or illegal. It considers the transition to illegality an extremely undesirable but otherwise ‘normal’ consequence of the class struggle.

This advantage is not enjoyed by the evolutionary Marxist parties (Social Democrat), which operate strictly by legal, parliamentary-democratic methods. When ostracized and suppressed, such parties often undergo severe morale and organizational crises. . . . they interpret their ostracism as ‘failure of the leadership,’ ‘failure of doctrine,’ and begin to disassociate themselves, psychologically and organizationally, from their past.” (12)

The strength of the Communist parties lies in core teachings: State repression is just another, more severe instantiation of class struggle that is ever-present in a capitalist society.  Departing from this point of view, evolutionary Marxist parties experience illegality as a real rupture that makes them question their reformist (evolutionary) doctrine.

The manual continues:

[T]he Communist Party does not, as a rule, need to scrutinize its basic philosophy or raison d’etre under illegal conditions. Party continuity is taken for granted by the Communists. When the party is outlawed, it does not waste precious time and energies wrangling over basic theory and metaphysical issues. It does not have one form of organization for legal and another for illegal conditions. The underground Party is the Party underground.  (original emphasis, 13)

The question of organization and party continuity is intriguing here; the manual uses some of the terminology used by Lenin when he wrote on the question of organization circa 1902-03. Most certainly, the writers of the CIA manual have a biased view: They see communism as an enemy, as a force to contend with and to subdue.[13] However, it is instructive to see the CIA’s sober assessment of the strength of Leninist-type parties. The authors note, for instance, that these parties’ built-in structure prevents them from falling apart under pressure, including the extreme pressure that comes with being outlawed by a dictatorship. In some ways, a Leninist party is like a float (my metaphor): under legal conditions, half of it is visible, the other half invisible. Even when the climate is favorable for organizing, the Party operates as if repression were always imminent—a “normal part of class struggle” (12). Because of that training, when adverse conditions arrive, such a party can go immediately and completely underground: the float sinks as if pulled under the surface of the water by a nibbling fish. “The underground Party is the Party underground,” the manual reiterates over and over for its reader (original emphasis). By quoting from the CIA manual, I do not mean to reduce democratic centralism to a caricature—a rigid, militaristic, and authoritarian structure. To do this would be to give fodder to fears that Leninist parties are necessarily anti-democratic and controlling of its members. What I mean to do here is to point out the value of certain tactics—of clandestine work—that were developed by organizations that suffered state repression. These tactics, reimagined for the surveillance capitalism era, could be useful to organizers today. It is also important to note that the US’s secret services eventually managed to successfully interfere and break down many of the features that made communist parties resilient, such as organizational continuity. Instead of party continuity, the history of communism in the US is defined by major intergenerational ruptures that have proven difficult to overcome.

When Lenin develops operational guidelines for the Party around 1901-1903, he points out that his view is determined by the hostile conditions in Tsarist Russia. In his 1902 work, “A Letter to a Comrade on Our Organizational Tasks,” he develops the guiding principles of Party organization and suggests specific procedures for conspiratorial work. In what follows, I will describe these principles and tactics. The key goal that Lenin addresses in this period is the goal of building an organization: “an enduring militant Party.” He continues developing these ideas in his most famous work of that period, “What Is to Be Done?” Once again, these principles should not be absolutized and taken up as a dogma. Lifelong Lenin scholars, such as Paul LeBlanc, argue that Lenin, during that era, saw the social-democratic principles as aspirational for the Party and saw the demands placed on the Party by illegality as temporary. We should be careful therefore to not reduce Lenin to just conspiratorial work, seeing him through the prism of only that particular period in the Party’s history. My intention, however, is to show how Lenin, in the context of rich debates with his Party and non-Party peers, distilled some principles and tactics that allowed the Party to remain operational under extremely unfavorable conditions. What are these principles and tactics?

Lenin contends that the central need of that period is party continuity—this becomes a key guiding principle that determines relationships and processes within the party. Organizational continuity is key to revolutionary struggle: when it is in place, experiences are passed on; publications do not cease. But how to achieve continuity under state repression when crackdowns and arrests are frequent? The difficulties of building a successful movement under autocracy were being discussed by many activists of that period, not just Lenin. In “What Is to Be Done?” he quotes an anonymous writer from Rabocheye Dyelo—a workers’ newspaper—who complains about police raids:

[T]he young agitator, lacking a detailed knowledge of working class conditions and, consequently, of the conditions under which agitation can be carried on in a given factory, ignorant of the principles of secrecy, and understanding only the general principles of Social-Democracy [if he does], is able to carry on his work for perhaps four, five, or six months. Then come arrests, which frequently lead to the break-up of the entire organisation, or at all events, of part of it. The question arises, therefore, can the group conduct successful activity if its existence is measured by months?

The answer, for Lenin, lies in the distinction between the Party and the masses. There are more distinctions to be drawn, but this is the first one to make if one were to tackle the issue of organizational continuity under adverse conditions. Some socialists, Lenin contends, are deeply confused about the distinction between the masses and the Party and correspondingly, about the role of clandestine work in revolutionary struggle. He quotes another newspaper article author—a so called “economist”—who writes: “the masses cannot proceed by secret paths. Can we conceive of a secret strike? Can we conceive of secret demonstrations and petitions?” This type of confusion stems from an inability to distinguish between Party work (building an organizational core) and mass work (raising the consciousness of the masses in support of socialism and against autocracy). Different levels of secrecy are involved in each of these tasks. For the organizational core, secrecy, conspiracy, and an ability to evade the police are key, Lenin argues. Mass work is also necessary, because revolution will be ultimately made by the masses. The masses, however, are not professional revolutionaries. When they rise, they are and must be visible to power: They protest and strike in the open. Lenin explains that even in the case of strikes, which claim public space and are the work of the masses, there is room for secret work: while the masses go on a strike, the struggle against the police—for instance, police suppression of the news of the strike getting out, etc.—requires a specialized force; the masses alone cannot do this. The revolutionaries, with their secret presses and specialized skills, must play a supporting role in a strike.

In “What is to Be Done?” Lenin writes:

[W]orkers, average people of the masses, are capable of displaying enormous energy and self sacrifice in strikes and in street, battles with the police and the troops, and are capable (in fact, are alone capable) of determining the outcome of our entire movement— but the struggle against the political police requires special qualities; it requires professional revolutionaries.

Having made this key distinction between party work and mass work, Lenin then outlines the tactics that allow the party to conduct its work under illegality and state surveillance. These tactics are 1) the doctrine, 2) centralization, and 3) operational compartmentalization.[14] Intriguingly, these are also among the principles that the CIA manual singles out as having been passed to many communist parties worldwide via the Comintern. Once again, these should not be taken as principles of party organization at all times. These were developed under specific conditions, which required suspension, Lenin underscores, of some democratic procedures, such as free and open elections. So, let’s talk briefly about the tactics of conspiratorial work.

 

Lenin believed in the crucial role of the newspaper—Iskra at the time—not just for the communication of ideas to the masses, but for the development of the doctrine within the Party. The newspaper must serve, he writes, as the “ideological leader of the Party, evolving theoretical truths, tactical principles, general organizational ideas, and the general tasks of the whole Party at any given moment.”[15] As I noted earlier, the CIA manual recognizes the importance of the doctrine for communist parties’ resilience. Communists not just survive, but often thrive under hostile conditions, its authors admit, because the doctrine of class struggle prepares them for repression even before it arrives.

The second principle is centralization. “[D]ecentralization,” Lenin writes in “A Letter to a Comrade,” “is absolutely impermissible to any wide degree and even altogether detrimental to revolutionary work carried on under an autocracy.” But how to combine centralization with secrecy? Lenin instructs that central institutions must be set up, preferably somewhere where they can be safe from police raids. Centralization ensures organizational continuity through the principles of vertical information flows and substitutability. Information is key: The center must have “a complete picture of the whole movement”—collected through reports from local cells. Information must be transmitted to the Center regularly: Because the center has all the information about each committee’s work, subcommittees can be promptly reconstituted if their members are arrested.

It follows from this that substitution is another important tactic. In “A Letter to a Comrade,” Lenin proposes that individual comrades in key positions should be made replaceable so that the Central Committee is able to find substitutes immediately in cases of arrests. “[O]nly then will arrests and dragnets lose their terror for us,” he writes, because “[t]he arrest of a committee will then not destroy the whole machine, but only remove the leaders, who will always have candidates ready.”

Elections can be still held, but their use is limited under conditions of secrecy as mass and open participation in elections is impossible. Lenin had to defend his vision from accusations that this type of centralization would give rise to abuses of power by the center. He writes: “The whole art of running a secret organization is making use of everything possible, in ‘giving everyone something to do,’ at the same time retaining leadership of the whole movement, not by virtue of having the power, of course, but by virtue of authority, energy, greater experience, greater versatility, and greater talent.”[16] State repression necessitates the development of a broader range of tactics of concealment that compromise the horizontal connections necessary for the normal democratic processes in the Party, and Lenin acknowledges that.

Centralization of command must be combined with operational compartmentalization: The arm must not know what the foot is doing. This principle has been put in practice to great effect by many communist parties under repressive conditions. It involves several tactics, but the general idea is to reduce information flow to the bare minimum necessary and thus reduce risks to the organization associated with the arrest of particular members. For instance, under Nazi occupation, the Communist Party of France organized its membership according to the rule of three, where each member only knew the comrades in their triad. In Hitler’s Germany, cell members often did not know of the existence of other cells in their own factory.[17] Compartmentalization means that each comrade only knows what’s necessary for their work.

The reduction of numbers means that party committees should be small. Lenin writes: “The number of committee members should be cut down; each of them, whenever possible, should be entrusted with a definite, special, and important function.” Moreover, “The leadership of the movement should be entrusted to the smallest possible number of the most homogenous possible groups of professional revolutionaries.”[18]

The personal connection principle ensures security: regular meetings should be closed party meetings where everyone should know each other. General meetings, which are larger (30-100 people) and more open, should be led by comrades who do not hold important leadership roles. Important comrades, or “[b]est revolutionaries,” should not attend general meetings at all because that would expose them to spies.[19] Party members involved in mass work, such as factory groups, should try to get to know all workers who participate in these groups personally.

Lenin also suggests the use of intermediaries—they facilitate connection between organization-building (Party work) and mass work. Intermediaries are like onion skin: they make it harder for the police to access the organization’s core. For example, factory workers should be able to communicate their opinion to Iskra editorial staff, Lenin reasons. However, they should not have the addresses of the staff: intermediaries should be used for such feedback and communication. The same principle applies to comrades communicating with the Central Committee.

Finally, Lenin emphasizes division of labor: It serves the goal of maintaining organizational continuity under hostile conditions. Lenin explains that there should be various degrees of secrecy in organizational work according to the division of labor: “strictest secrecy and military discipline must be maintained in the distributing groups. The propagandists’ groups must also maintain secrecy, but be under far less military discipline. Workers’ groups for reading legal literature, or for organizing discissions on trade-union needs and demands call for still less secrecy, and so on.”[20]

In his writing of that period, Lenin dispels the myth (prevalent in his time and in ours) that the organization should be accessible and broad. What is accessible to the masses is accessible to the police as well. Strict secrecy and discipline at the core are what will allow the organization to grow into a force capable of mobilizing the masses on the periphery. While many of Lenin’s contemporaries suggested building a movement within the masses first (such as trade union work), for Lenin, the foundation on which we build a strong mass Party under hostile conditions must be kept secret. When building such a Party, we start with what can survive under police repression and only then build legal forms and organs on top of it, whenever and wherever it becomes possible.

This topic prompted fierce debates a few years later, during the debate among socialists over what was then called “liquidationism” and “otzovism.” Grigory Zinoviev, in his History of the Communist Party characterizes liquidationism as a threat from the right and otzovism as a threat from the left. The key question was legal versus illegal work.

Otzovists were ultra-leftists who demanded recalling (from the Russian “otzyv,” which means “recall”) social democrats from the Duma (the Parliamentary Organ). They boycotted the elections to the Duma and thought electoral-reformist work was a betrayal of revolutionary goals.[21]

By contrast, liquidationists were those who, after the thaw of 1911, attempted to form a legal workers party and thought that in the new conditions opened up by a degree of legalization, legal, above-ground work should be strongly prioritized, to the point of the illegal organization being liquidated. Bolsheviks opposed the liquidators fiercely. As Lenin wrote scornfully in his “Liquidationism Defined” essay, liquidationists maintained a “negative attitude towards the surviving underground organisations” (original emphasis), which he thought was a grave political mistake. Lenin’s position was that the Party must take advantage of the possibilities opened by the new legal landscape without compromising its basic structure, which it had built under conditions of illegality. There was still censorship, he claimed, and there was still an autocracy. There were still severe restrictions of the Party’s operations.

As a revolutionary Party, Lenin contends in his 1912 “Legal Party and Illegal Work,” Bolsheviks must use legal organizations as “strong-points for propagating the ideas of illegal nuclei among the masses.” In this critique of liquidationism, Lenin builds on his earlier works that deal with Party organization discussed above but develops his ideas according to the new conditions. He writes: “In terms of the form of the organisations, the illegal ‘adapts itself’ to the legal. But in terms of the content of the work of our Party, legal activity ‘adapts itself’ to illegal ideas.” The short-sightedness of liquidationism was almost immediately proven by the return of repression in 1914 when the entire Bolshevik fraction in the Duma was arrested. The fraction’s member Badaev thus writes about it:

The war brought still more stringent police measures and the Party was forced completely underground. Our fraction often discussed the question of resuming the publication of a workers’ newspaper and the matter was on the agenda of the November Conference when the whole of the Duma fraction of the Bolsheviks was arrested.

Throughout the war, we were unable to resume the publication of Pravda.

Allegories of Resistance: The Three-Body Problem

Storytelling is a tool that allows us to experience revolutionary fervor or blunt the sharp desire for change. It also can help us cultivate an attachment—an attachment to secrecy, for example, rather than an attachment to disclosure, by showing us how tactical secrecy can lead an organization to victory. Here, I discuss two works of science fiction—Cixin Liu’s famed trilogy Remembrance of Earth’s Past (The Three-Body Problem is the first and most well-known of the books) and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy—as allegories of resistance and resilience under repression. A Netflix adaptation of Liu’s trilogy was released in 2024. These works offer us opportunities to think about organizing under the conditions of tremendous power asymmetries and total surveillance. I propose that they train us in new ways of thinking and feeling concealment—as a collective tool of resistance in our counterrevolutionary era marked by technological surveillance of the masses.

Liu’s trilogy is premised on catastrophic news received by humanity. An alien race from an environmentally unsustainable system of three suns—Trisolaris—learns of Earth’s existence and sends a fleet of 1000 ships to settle Earth and rid it of human presence. Humanity has 300 years until the fleet arrives to attempt to thwart the effort, but there are two challenges. Trisolarians—a technologically advanced civilization—deploy a quantum entanglement network remotely to a) observe everything that humans do and b) to interfere with physics experiments to block the development of basic human science. Humans, therefore, can only rely on the science they already have rather than hope to advance their technology to meet the technologically more developed foe on comparable footing.

Humans respond in two ways: defeatism and escapism. Defeatists are pessimists who believe that, given the conditions, humanity will be utterly defeated by the aliens on doomsday (when the fleet arrives), no matter what humans do. “Wooden boats cannot sink an aircraft carrier”—the saying goes (The Dark Forest, 71). Defeatists spiral into depression and hedonism. In turn, escapists propose building intergenerational ships to escape Earth. The Planetary Defense Council (PDC) is an international body charged with the defense of humanity and must contend not only with the alien threat but with defeatism and escapism. It is not difficult to see in Liu’s text an allegory of run-away capitalism, whose seemingly insurmountable contradictions endanger the planet, leading to defeatism among the left and escapism among the rich who want to leave the planet or sit out disasters in their New Zealand bunkers. In the Planetary Defense Council, we can see an allegory of an organization that attempts to solve the problems of runaway capitalism rather than escape or accept defeat.

The organizational dilemma presented by Liu is stark: How does one organize a defense of humanity when humanity is weak and under total surveillance? Similar to a Leninist-type party, the PDC holds on to the belief in the actuality of victory; it must accomplish the impossible. To do so, it organizes its work on two levels: open and clandestine. The newly formed Space Force, charged with a mainstream defense project, operates in the open. Over the course of three centuries, the Space Force will attempt to build a space fleet and weapons systems to defend humanity from the alien fleet. All its actions, however, will be hampered by alien interference with science. In addition, the entire defense plan will be completely transparent to the alien surveillance system. Knowing this, the PDC also develops a clandestine strategy, called the Wallfacer Project. But how is any secret work possible, given that alien surveillance can observe every conversation or experiment that takes place on Earth? The answer is simple and surprises many: it’s low tech. The only place inaccessible to alien surveillance is the human mind, so the Wallfacer project relies on “deceit, trickery, disguise, and misdirection” (37). Four Wallfacers are carefully chosen and then given nearly unlimited power and resources to execute their clandestine strategy. The PDC states: “The subject of this misdirection and deception will be the entire world, both enemy and ally, until a huge, bewildering maze of illusions is erected to make the enemy lose its judgement, and to delay as long as possible the moment it works out our true strategic intent” (101).

Spoiler alert: Fast forward three-hundred years, every mainstream strategy developed by humanity fails. They fail because of the vast technological superiority of the Trisolarians and because of the transparency of human defense projects to the aliens. However, one out of the four chosen Wallfacers succeeds. The Wallfacer project is based not on technology but on strategy. In the end, when humanity emerges victorious, Trisolarians admit: “we underestimated the importance of strategy.” Both humans and Trisolarians initially think that technological superiority—including the power of surveillance—is decisive, but in the end, it is not.

Liu’s parable of the Wallfacer teaches us an important lesson. The key principles at work in the Wallfacer project are the ones that I’ve already discussed from Lenin: centralization, compartmentalization, reduction of numbers, and organizational continuity. Minimizing the number of members in the most important secret organizational layer is a principle emphasized by Lenin: Here the number of key members is four. Compartmentalization is also observed—each Wallfacer is absolutely compartmentalized from humanity, from the rest of the organization, and from each other: No one on Earth knows what their real strategy is. Centralized command allows for the pooling of resources for the Wallfacer project. The principle of continuity emphasized by Lenin is also observed: Wallfacers come in and out of hibernation for 300 years, which is the timescale of their strategy prior to doomsday—the day humanity faces the enemy.

Lessons from Liu and Lenin can be applied productively to our current condition as well. Organizing for social and political change currently happens under hostile conditions, surveillance of the masses, and defeatism among the left. However, technological superiority is not decisive. Surveillance is a significant issue but even “total” surveillance has limits. Liu’s trilogy invites us to embrace and love the politics of the secret. Victory is possible even in vastly asymmetrical conditions when the strategy is right. And the response to high-tech surveillance does not have to be high-tech.

The Mars Trilogy

Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Mars Trilogy offers us another example of the power of clandestine organizing. In book one of the trilogy, Red Mars, an attempt at a revolution on Mars fails, and revolutionaries are defeated by massively overwhelming forces. Many revolutionary leaders are killed. Here, too, we have an allegory of organizing under adverse conditions: The political and technological preponderance of imperialist forces, as well as complete visibility of organizers to their enemy. As in Liu, however, secrecy, coupled with the right strategy, paves a path to victory.

This is a work that bears the mark of its era: The volumes came out in 1992, 1993, and 1996. Written just after the collapse of the USSR, during the era of socialism’s most disastrous world-historical defeat, the trilogy ponders what it means to survive a planetary-scale failure. Mars serves as a figure of both potentiality and vulnerability. Its unfinished revolution heralds the possibility of a socialist future. At the same time, the conditions of organizing on Mars are such that anti-capitalist resistance is uniquely vulnerable to governmental police forces. Mars is a small planet with no atmosphere. Humans live in artificial habitats—cities where an artificial atmosphere is generated under cupolas. These habitats are easily controlled and monitored. During the failed revolution, these cities’ cupolas are punctured from above and the rioters are either killed or immediately subdued.

The repression that follows the failed revolution is so severe that the surviving resistance must scatter and hide. This poses unique challenges: Because all ecosystems on Mars are easily controlled, with all movement easily surveilled from space, resistance has nowhere to go. They must surreptitiously build their own habitats, while evading detection from space. Having a considerable number of scientists and engineers among them, they manage to build an extensive infrastructure of hidden “sanctuaries” in the unpopulated south polar region, using hidden geological structures such as lava tunnels and craters; they even build a community underneath the south polar ice cap.[22] Their complex life-support infrastructures are designed for long-term stability and intergenerational survival and are undetectable to the extensive surveillance apparatus of the Martian government. The sanctuaries are by necessity small and semi-autonomous; they maintain strict radio silence and practice mimicry by moving around at night in “boulder cars”—rovers designed to looks like boulders from a satellite.

Like Liu, Robinson teaches us to think collectively and muti-generationally, avoiding the pitfalls of both localism and short termism. In Robinson, the Martian revolutionary is a cartographer, engineer, climatologist, physicist, psychologist, visionary, biologist, and much more. From the depth of the 1990s, Robinson tells us: build infrastructures of resistance, keep out of sight, and plan for the long term. Be patient. Robinson’s thinking is Leninist: there is an emphasis on the organizational core, which must remain hidden, as opposed to the masses in Martian cities, whose spontaneous uprising the revolutionaries anticipate. In Green Mars, the second book of the trilogy, there is a section titled “What is To Be Done?” that describes the Congress of Resistance—a secret meeting of revolutionary leaders convened in the anticipation of the second revolution. And the crisis of Martian capitalism eventually arrives: global warming on Earth leads to the collapse of the Antarctic ice shield, causing ocean waters to rise rapidly. Mass displacement and chaos on Earth gives Martians an opening for an uprising—a bid for independence that the masses support.

The initial challenge the revolutionaries face eventually turns into an advantage. The autonomous infrastructures of resistance prove resilient against governmental harassment. They can no longer be simply subdued with a missile strike. Now, it is the government-run cities that are vulnerable to sabotage, while the locations of sanctuaries are mostly unknown. Fifty years after the failed revolution, the resistance gets another chance to act, and this time, to win.

Robinson understood the importance of memory and material infrastructures for the Left’s survival. Many of us remember how in the 1990s, material memory and infrastructure became the object of Reaction’s attack, which included the destruction of monuments worldwide and expropriation of the commons. These infrastructures also comprise progressive printing presses, think tanks, university departments, websites, political parties, and activist groups (no matter how small). Robinson presents us with a Leninist vision of surviving a planetary-scale defeat and bouncing back from it. By showing us, in detail, how a small group of revolutionaries—there are 5,000 who survived in hiding—can seize the moment of a popular uprising and lead the revolution to victory against the imperialist government of Mars, he conveys to the Left that it, too, can win—in the era when defeat seems total. Like Liu, he helps us foster an attachment to tactical secrecy, teaching us to cultivate a sense of belonging to political communities formed around concealment and patience.

 

The Politics of Secrecy

Where does this leave us in terms of the politics of secrecy? What does Leninist theory add to the contemporary debates about concealment? How do we meet power, to once again use Bratish’s phrase, not face-to-face but “mask-to-mask”? Leninist tactics and Lenin’s key distinction between mass work and party work are useful. The question we must contend with today, as much as100-years ago, is of organization.

Consider this: When outlining a politics of secrecy, Birchall discusses two concepts—a “data multitude” (a Hardt and Negri-inspired concept, 163) and a community of “irreplaceable singularities” (a Derridean concept). The proposal for the politics of “radical secrecy for the data multitude” concerns how to make the masses opaque to power. Birchall discusses a number of tactics that make us less intelligible to the “shareveillance” regime.[23] For instance, there are activists and technical experts who develop tools to assist activists or protesters in becoming less visible to state and corporate surveillance, and that’s a good thing. It means that processes of secret-keeping can be automated and relegated to the sphere of technology (e.g. cryptography). For instance, the now defunct “Secretbook enable[d] users to hide messages in photos on Facebook by making many visually imperceptible changes to encode the secret data” (159). These messages, hidden both from human and nonhuman (algorithmic) readers, required a decrypting password to unlock them. One might say Secretbook offered what could be seen as a contemporary version of the invisible ink used by Lenin and comrades. However, as Birchall warns, there are concerns with such obfuscation tactics that are hard to overcome. One of the key problems, she notes, is scalability: as soon as a tactic of obfuscation becomes popular, the government and corporations can develop technical countermeasures to combat it. We saw it in the example of the arms race between face masking and facial recognition technologies.

Let’s consider the question of tactical secrecy for the data multitude from a Leninist point of view. Is trying to make the masses illegible the best approach? A Leninist tactician might suggest that obfuscation doesn’t have to scale to be effective, and here is why: if we apply Lenin’s distinction between mass work and party work, secrecy shouldn’t scale but must be limited to a small group of professional revolutionaries. Some organizational structures, relationships, messages, and strategy must be protected by secrecy, but not all: There should be degrees of secrecy. By contrast, the masses, just as strikers a century ago, can and should strive for full visibility—on social media and in the public space. They should seek to reclaim public space. The Wallfacer and the mainsteam planetary defense project examples in Liu demonstrates just that: Political work should be split between two levels—open and secret—and the number of people within the secret layer can be very small. The politics of secrecy, when understood as an essential part of revolutionary organizing, must be reserved for the few and deployed not absolutely and universally, but as a limited tactic in a struggle. In Lenin’s time, one had to reconcile the need to build a mass organization with the need for organizational continuity under conditions of illegality (frequent arrests). In our time, we need to reconcile using social media to popularize progressive ideas, document protest, and maintain the momentum of social movements with the need for organizational security.

Birchall also proposes we find refuge in what she calls “the unconditional secret”—a Derrida-inflected concept (180). The unconditional secret is the core of each singularity[24] that makes it inaccessible to others (“a singular excess that cannot show itself,” 181). Birchall quotes Derrida discussing the idea of “a community that is such only in an alliance that not only does not cancel out the singularity of the allies but, on the contrary, accentuates it” (Derrida, 24, quoted in Birchall, 172). Derrida’s community of irreplaceable singularities that are inaccessible to each other, however, is also in striking contrast with a Leninist view. While it is useful as an aspirational vision of a community, ts utility for political struggle under repressive conditions (or under total surveillance) is questionable. For Lenin, comrades in an organization forced to work under repression can and must be replaceable, not singular. The principle of substitutability might seem cruel or lead to accusations that Leninist parties don’t value individuality or even lie of comrades. Once again, it is important to underscore that this principle should be applied in limited ways and in specific circumstances. Substitutability is key to organizational continuity in hostile conditions, where an organization (in whole or in part) is forced to operate in secrecy.

This is just a brief example of how Leninist ideas can be put into dialogue with other contemporary discussions on secrecy. Here, both concepts—a data multitude and a community of irreplaceable singularities—flatten the important distinction between the masses and the core organization so important in Lenin’s texts. They are, no doubt, valuable philosophically; however, I would argue they aren’t well suited for an effective elaboration of the politics of the secret that we need to meet power mask-to-mask. We cannot keep everyone—the multitude—opaque in the day-to-day work of organizing, but we can strive to ensure the opacity of the organizational core. If an organization is led by comrades who position themselves as irreplaceable singularities and don’t train those next in line who could then replace them in the case of arrests, the organization will be vulnerable to crackdowns. I propose we model a politics of secrecy today on Leninist tactical secrecy as allegorized by Liu and Robinson.

Works cited and references

Badaev, Alexei. “The Bosheviks in the Tsarist Duma,” The Co-operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the USSR, Moscow (date unknown) [written in 1929]. https://www.marxists.org/archive/badayev/1929/duma/ch17.html

Bey, Hakim. T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. Autonomedia, 1991. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/hakim-bey-t-a-z-the-temporary-autonomous-zone-ontological-anarchy-poetic-terrorism

Birchall, Claire. Radical Secrecy: The End of Transparency in Datafied America. University of Minnesota, 2021.

Bratish, Jack. “Popular Secrecy and Occultural Studies. Cultural Studies 21.1 (2007): 42-58.

Communism: Clandestine Communist Organization. A CIA Interim Report, 1949 [Declassified in 1999].

Derrida, Jacques. A Taste for the Secret. Cambridge: Polity, 2001.

Goodman, Amy. “Big Tech Stole Our Data While Democracy Slept: Shoshana Zuboff on the Age of Surveillance Capitalism.” A Democracy Now Interview (Part One) with Shoshana Zuboff, Mar 1, 2019. https://www.democracynow.org/2019/3/1/big_tech_stole_our_data_while

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. Penguin, 2005.

Heilweil, Rebecca. “Coronavirus is the First Big Test for Futuristic Tech that can Prevent Pandemics.” Vox Feb 27, 2020. https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/7/28/21340674/face-masks-facial-recognition-surveillance-nist

Heilweil, Rebecca. “Masks Can Fool Facial Recognition Systems, but the Algorithms are Learning Fast.” Vox Jul 28, 2020. https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/2/27/21156358/surveillance-tech-coronavirus-china-facial-recognition

Julia Hollingsworth, “Why Protests are Becoming Increasingly Faceless.” CNN Aug 25, 2019. https://www.cnn.com/style/article/protest-design-future-intl-hnk/index.html

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Lenin, V.I. “A Letter to a Comrade on Our Organisational Tasks.” Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1964 [1902], Moscow, Volume 6, pages 231-252. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1902/sep/00.htm

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Notes

[1] A young man was arrested in suburban New York following a law banning wearing masks in public in August 2024 (see Nguyen)pau.

[2] Heilweil, “Masks”

[3] Heilweil, “Coronavirus”

[4] See Zuboff in Goodman

[5] See Packard

[6] Birchall, 147

[7] Linder

[8] Kassim

[9] Clair Birchall’s term.

[10] Sakor et al

[11] The founder of Telegram, an encrypted platform, has been arrested and charged in France (Sebag).

[12] After a period in exile (1914-18), Malinovsky was eventually captured and executed in Petrograd in 1918.

[13] In fact, over the long term, the US’s secret services managed to successfully interfere and break down many of the features that made communist parties resilient. Instead of party continuity, the history of communism in the US is defined by major intergenerational ruptures.

[14] “Compartmentalization” is not a word used by Lenin; it has been used by twentieth-century Leninist parties (and their enemies) to denote precisely the tactic that Lenin outlines in his works of that period.

[15] “Letter to a Comrade”

[16] Ibidem

[17] See Macdonald

[18] “Letter to a Comrade”

[19] Ibidem

[20] ibid

[21] Zinoviev writes: “Among the leaders of the Otsovists there were many old party-workers intellectuals and Bolsheviki who later came back to us. But in the difficult, terrible years, in which the future fate of the Bolshevik party was actually decided, the extreme “left” Otsovists did very serious injury to Bolshevism and in reality aided the Mensheviki. As a result of its revolutionary impatience, its rashness, its attempt to spur the party to a coup at a time when the masses were not yet ready for a struggle, its foolish boycott tendency, its revolutionary phrases, and its senseless theory, that the movement can be “activated” by trying to supplant the large working masses by a small party – as a result of all these characteristics Otsovism was in the above-mentioned period a great danger to the revolution. The Bolsheviki were compelled to carry on a long and very violent fight against the “left” Otsovist tendency, a struggle which led to a sharp split.”

[22] In his vision of a decentralized network of sanctuaries on Mars, Robinson seems to be influenced by Hakim Bey’s book Temporary Autonomous Zones (1985).

[23] Birchall shows that in contemporary communicative capitalism state surveillance and the culture of broad access and open sharing became inseparable—a phenomenon she calls shareveillance. Citizens are encouraged to access the net broadly and to openly share while the state apparatus—often via private companies—gathers data and surveils in secrecy (150, 167).

[24] “Singularity” is a complex term but it roughly stands for an individual person in this context.

 

Featured image: Martian Colony. AI-generated image by Alla Ivanchikova. Courtesy of the author.

Alla Ivanchikova