I'm just inquiring as to how 'feds' are caught. The mistakes they make that get them caught.
Also, i enjoy scrolling hexbear in my free time. And i've read Capital volumes 1 through 4 and the communist party manifesto, so don't worry, i ain't no fed gang.
Beans amirite 🤣🫘
Hmm. I don't want to hand my opposition a free guidebook of exactly what to avoid so they can do a better job of being a fed however, in general terms:
Feds basically try to "groom" people by convincing them of things - you deserved that position on the central committee, you should be the leader of your own party, you can trust me and we can plan out an adventure time, you are right to feel vengeful towards other party members. That sort of thing.
They seek to isolate people, generally the more psychologically vulnerable people (e.g. the ones who are too trusting or who are easily led by someone who sounds convincing and authoritative). A lot of what they do cannot be done in broad daylight, they need to be away from prying eyes to avoid being called out.
They encourage poor behaviour. They discourage people from reading, they discourage accountability and integrity, they discourage unity, they discourage good OpSec ("It's okay, it's just you and me - you can trust me. Now that I've gotten you all riled up about Donald Trump's reelection, tell me what you'd really do to stop him if you had access to the right resources.")
Always beware the adventurist. Not all adventurists are feds, and every radical experiences wistful thoughts about adventurism from time to time but the genuine adventurists are either prime targets for feds or they themselves are feds. Either way, hard pass.
They demonstrate a lack of fluency in theory and in the correct use of terminology. You know how a liberal fundamentally fails to grasp the Marxist concept of class? Yeah, that's what a fed is like, They'll try and they'll fail but they'll attempt to cover their tracks by gaslighting you and making excuses and doing shit like pretending to get stuck with the word on the tip of their tongue while they hem and haw and click so you'll feel compelled to finish their sentence for them.
They tend to be a liberal caricature of radicalism, of whichever flavour you happen to prefer. "How do you do, fellow leftists? You know I was thinking the other day about how Stalin did nothing wrong, amirite?"
They encourage hastiness (what a clunky word!) If you are slow and deliberate, you can be observant and you can notice when things aren't quite adding up. If everything feels pressured and you are being pushed to make rash decisions, then it is easier to steer you towards making a bad decision that can be very harmful in a variety of ways. Patience and being measured is anathema to feds and to wreckers.
They don't tend to offer up recent insights voluntarily from their studies. "Did you know that there were basically competing police forces in the Spanish Republic and they battled it out on the streets for primacy? Kinda wild to think, especially when the fascists were breathing down their neck at the time..." because they aren't learning theory and history on the same level as we are/should be, and also their understandings and conclusions often betray a liberal bias. So they generally avoid doing this, whereas comrades will be excited to share interesting things they have learned from their studies.
They don't like being pressed for more info. They tend to have a superficial understanding of things. They'll have their front constructed but as soon as you start probing their knowledge, they will desperately try to distract or avoid or do anything to salvage their cover. The best thing a comrade can do around a suspected fed or infiltrator of any kind is to conceal the depth of their own knowledge and pretend to be much more naive of theory and history than they are. This gives a likelihood of disarming the infiltrator and they will feel more complacent about talking themselves to the point that they have overextended themselves. The ones who flaunt their knowledge and who are very forthright with their positions and understandings are the ones an infiltrator will be very guarded around. There's roles for both types of comrades in an organisation but if you start getting suspicious about somebody then you have little to lose by hiding your power and biding your time while carefully observing to see if everything fits together more or less as expected or if things are incongruent. Apologies for being vague in what I'm saying here but I hope you get what I'm driving at without me being more explicit.
They can be cult-y. Trying to make splinter factions, trying to create a "family" out of a select group of people within the org, using drugs as a means for in-group bonding and loosening lips and for social control, fostering addiction with members who are prone to it. That sort of thing.
Comrades want the best for you and to see the best in you. They will guide you to be your better self, they will caution you against making errors, and they will try to build you up and encourage you to do the right things. Infiltrators will do the opposite. They will encourage the worst behaviours, they will guide you towards misconduct and malfeasance, they will try to break down your protections and find any gap in your armour to exploit. If they can't find one, they will try to make one. A comrade is one who you can count on to be the angel on your shoulder, guiding you towards the right things, while an infiltrator will the be devil on your shoulder, guiding you towards the wrong things. Didn't want to get all religious-overtonesy with you but I'm relying on metaphor to stay a bit vague here so that's what I've got.
Feds often start off good and then gradually dial up their shenanigans over time. You are the frog in the pot of water. Remember to check the temperature from time to time and don't rely on the fact that it was nice and cool when you first hopped in because all things change over time and that especially applies to feds.
Beware of the person who wants to get too close to you too quickly, who is too familiar too readily, and who tries to get more information out of you than they should.
We are probably all guilty of at least some of this stuff some of the time but look especially for patterns and trends. Everyone slips up sometimes but a moment of indiscretion or acting rashly is very different to a gradual trend in escalation of these things or a pattern of repeating certain behaviours or strategies over and over again.
Those are some of my thoughts.
Always beware the adventurist. Not all adventurists are feds, and every radical experiences wistful thoughts about adventurism from time to time but the genuine adventurists are either prime targets for feds or they themselves are feds. Either way, hard pass.
So much this! Socialism needs to be organically created, it needs to be a mass movement once material conditions are right. And material conditions are nowhere near right in most of the imperial core and "civilized" inner periphery.
Some have called me paranoid because of this belief. But they don't have half their immediate and extended family working as cops of one sort of another. There's no way I can simply lay low after a hypothetical adventure. I would be found real quick.
And due to the above, please don't invite me into any orgs, online or IRL. The less I know about yours, the safer you folks are. I'm just here to chat about events and news and gossip that's already very public. IRL the most I do is reading groups, and I always tell anyone there up front about my family. I hate that it makes me look like yet another all-talk-no-substance fair-weather Marxist but it's the only way I know to keep everyone involved safe.
I've already had a few relatives try to gently and friendly-like ask me about my politics once they find out I'm not a chud. Innocently asking about what forums I'm on with phrases like "I'm pretty liberal myself, I just want to help people." I just dodge that sort of thing with variations of "I just follow the news, I'm not really the activist type." I neve go to any family event unless I am stone cold sober and I can stay sober. I need to keep my guard up even among family that cares for me. It's such a fucked up situation.
I hate that it makes me look like yet another all-talk-no-substance fair-weather Marxist but it's the only way I know to keep everyone involved safe.
Nah, you're making a decision that's in the best interests of the movement despite the personal costs of doing so. That's very different because you are making a difficult compromise to do what's right for organisations whereas fair-weather Marxists do what makes them feel good regardless of the consequences. In fact, in my opinion that's effectively the direct opposite.
I can sympathise with your frustrations though. My health is pretty trash. I'm not capable of doing much organising besides helping out with the local FNB-adjacent org here and there while providing some input to assist the back-of-house stuff like procedures and all that. I'd like to do a lot more. I'd like to be on the frontlines. But my circumstances do not allow it, so I contribute locally and to more international stuff like this site because that's what I am capable of, so that's what I try my best to do.
There's a place for everyone, even you. It sucks that the place that best suits you might not be the place that you most desire to be in. But contributing to reading groups and participating in the discussions is still very important - you have no way of knowing what you might inspire in someone else, someone who might go on to become leader of the vanguard in your region one day. You can still be a role-model and you can still have valuable input, it's just a pity that you probably won't get that direct feedback where you get to see your actions reap results directly. You know, Allende was instructed in Marxism by an old Italian anarchist bootmaker (anarchist comrades, I kid you not - on the matter of boots, Allende deferred to the expertise of the bootmaker [!!]) Allende would then go on to lead the only successful parliamentary revolution directly because of this anarchist bootmaker's guidance and, despite the coup, there is so much to learn from Chile under Allende. Even if it all went to shit afterwards. He dared to struggle. He didn't win but he gave it his best shot. Could this bootmaker have ever known how close Allende would get to succeeding? Could he have ever known what achievements he would inspire by his conversations with Allende?
So I guess what I'm saying here is that you have a similar sort of opportunity here. Treat every comrade you encounter as being the next Allende because you never know exactly what will grow from the seeds that you plant.
you deserved that position on the central committee, you should be the leader of your own party
Aw, shit. They said that kind of shit to Jesse Jackson, didn't they.
You know, I actually don't know anything about Jesse Jackson. I'm not American so I managed to completely dodge his backstory somehow.
2 things to add
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Feds can, like union organisers, work in teams. They'll have the fed who behaves like you've described - Trying to break things up and radicalise people - and there'll be another one who is the one who spots prime targets for the first one.
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This is more of a mentality thing, it's more to beware of yourself and to be able to be critical of others. If someone is so shitty they might as well be a fed, then there is no difference between them and a fed, which means they are functionally one. Not all feds are actual feds. If a person exhibits the behaviour described above, then they are a fed even if they aren't employed by anyone to do it. Doing the work of feds, makes you a fed, wether or not you realise it.
Very valuable contributions.
One thing that your comment reminds me of is this question - what's the difference between a wrecker and someone who is messy? The only difference is intention. And what use are intentions to we who are materialists anyway? A wrecker is as a wrecker does,
Just a word of caution. It's also poor form to just go accusing people of being a fed or a wrecker without solid evidence because that can cause a lot of damage too. If you have suspicions, observe and be patient. Keep track. Keep a journal if you need to. You have been wrong before and you will be wrong again, so don't go cashing in all your credibility on an overblown hunch and don't go causing unnecessary disruption in an org just because you started seeing things that weren't really there.
Raise your concerns with a trusted member of leadership. Make sure that you make a time to talk privately. Give them clear, concise feedback and observations from what you have seen or heard and not from how you have interpreted things. The unfortunate reality is that if you get rid of one infiltrator/infiltrator ring then they'll probably send the next one in soon after, especially if we're talking feds and an org that has attracted their attention. Sometimes it's better to see where the knife will come from than it is to allow yourself to be stabbed in the back. Don't gossip. Don't spread rumours. Trust in your org's leadership and if you have serious concerns about them failing to act appropriately, raise these concerns directly with your leadership. They may have something in the works. Don't go fucking up their long-term strategy all because you decided to play detective one day and you wanted to blow the lid off the whole thing.
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I'm trying to rephrase something I read previously but the long and the short of it was: Identifying and outing feds by behaviour *can be a losing strategy, because it can lead to hostility towards otherwise honest behaviours, discriminate against ND users who don't fit 'normal' behaviour patterns and even if you do accurately out and eject someone they are just the fed that you noticed, those who are better at concealing their activity or who otherwise don't raise suspicions can still get by and you're given a false sense of accomplishment. There's a reason why fedjacketing is not permitted here. The better approach is to have robust systems in place that defang or reduce the scope for hostile actors to gather information, distrupt, or dismantle. It's a bit like how people say that in the USA, Marxist reading groups of just a half dozen people are infiltrated. At a certain size of org you'll probably have to accept that you're being monitored.
(edit: i think this is all stuff I gleaned from reading about cops at protests, and people being like 'omg they're so obvious you can see the outline of their gun and their shoes are so pristine' and someone was like 'well, yeah, they're just the ones you noticed')
Identifying and outing feds by behaviour is a losing strategy, because it can lead to hostility towards otherwise honest behaviours, discriminate against ND users who don't fit 'normal' behaviour patterns
Yeah, this has happened to me a LOT (different context though—it was accusations of being a scammer, or of having some other kind of malicious intent) and it’s fucking heartbreaking, because people often believe what they want to believe, especially in online spaces, and once the mob has made up its mind about your guilt, there’s nothing you can say or do that will save your soul.
It’s amazing too how much this happens in leftist spaces, where you’d think there would be a bit more awareness of like, the fact that some people are ND, etc.
But no. I have even been attacked like this BY OTHER NEURODIVERGENT PEOPLE.
Also if you identified a fed, you can pile on them the boring work nobody wants to do. Let FBI fund you party activities.
There’s this pervasive myth that exists both online and IRL, that cops are going to be obvious. Frex: I once got fucking yelled at by my dealer because I was smoking with two people who were in his words, without a hint of irony dressed like ‘80s TV detectives. This is fucking asinine and only plays in their favor. “Feds” aren’t stupid, or at least not as stupid as we think.
Personally I subscribe to the idea of the "buddy system" for feds. There'll be one fairly obvious low effort fed account that quickly gets caught and a much stealthier one that goes under the radar due to all the attention focused on the first account. One calls attention to their bad infiltration job so the actual infiltration goes unnoticed.
One missile whose job is to engage the air defense system, and the missile behind it who's job is to get through
