In 1979, the members of the Black Panther Party published an issue of their newspaper in which they admitted that they had been duped. On one side of the front page, they displayed a headline their paper had featured in the year before that read "Jonestown: 'we have tasted total equality,'" next to the headline that articulated the party's new view of Jonestown: "Jones' aide worked as mercenary in Angola." It was underneath the part of the text that mentioned how People's Temple members had been injected with cyanide. Above these headlines, the Panthers put a summary of the kinds of counterrevolutionary maneuvers that this incident represented: "Tactic used with the black/leftist community: your hero is really a villain."
Above this all, the issue displayed the phrase the Panthers had come up with to summarize such wrecker manipulations: "sealing Pandora's box," with the strategy's steps being to divert revolutionary energy, disinform the people, flip the potential allies of revolutionaries against them, and scare away the international liberation movement from working with the revolutionaries in the imperial center. By isolating and confusing the movement in these ways, the state's aim was (and still is) to shut the Pandora's box of class struggle, to keep the people from mobilizing for their liberation. This is at least how I've personally interpreted their metaphor.
The Panthers did not succeed at overcoming this counterinsurgency effort. They were successfully infiltrated, framed, and assassinated within the ranks of their leadership. But the lessons they provided remain. They gave future generations of communists information on what sorts of psychological weapons the enemy will employ to try to destroy revolution in the core of imperialism. To win, we must study these lessons, and recognize how to identify such deceptive tactics when we encounter them.
Infiltrating the revolution
When I look at stories of freedom fighters being infiltrated, and of this infiltration going far enough that people get hurt, I always wonder what the victims may have been able to do to avoid what happened to them. As an organizer who's on the autism spectrum, this question is especially relevant to me, because when your social judgement is impaired you become an attractive target for predatory individuals. To help inoculate ourselves against such manipulations, we can study the types of ideas and ways of acting that are displayed by the operatives the Panthers talked about, the ones who pretend to be your heroes but are actually the villains.
In the case of the People's Temple, this was a thousand times bigger than the interpersonal manipulation activities that COINTELPRO agents carry out within activist spaces. This was big enough to not just physically and psychologically destroy a vast amount of American radicals, but contribute in large part to the destruction of the American communist movement.
Prior to when the sinister nature of the People's Temple became undeniable, the red flags for its being an intelligence operation were almost impossible to notice on a surface level. The fact that it was receiving the backing of many liberal celebrities and politicians was something to be wary of, but this alone wasn't enough to make the Panthers seem suspicious during the years leading up to the massacre. To recognize what was really happening, the Panthers would have had to have known about the secret abuses within the organization, about how Jim Jones was mentored by the CIA torturer Dan Mitrione, about how the Temple was backed by prominent right-wing figures who were keeping themselves distanced from the Temple's Marxist brand, and of course about the intelligence and mercenary roles of those who were guiding everything Jones did. For the many people within the black community who got drawn into the Temple, its warning signs were barely visible if at all, and its charitable work and appeals to Black America's religious culture appeared to be green flags.
The Panthers were not fools when it came to intelligence, because it's evident that the Temple was able to hide its leadership's CIA connections extremely effectively up until everything got exposed. But there were ideological influences within the party's ranks that made it harder for them to see through the ruse that the spooks were perpetrating, which made for less scrutiny than would have otherwise been present. It's these influences that would go on to cripple the party's legacy.
This influence came from Angela Davis, the one in the party who most vocally supported the People's Temple. Davis personally told Jones: "I know you are in a very difficult situation right now and there is a conspiracy. A very profound conspiracy designed to destroy the contributions which you have made to our struggle. And this is why I must tell you that we feel that we are under attack as well. When you are attacked, it is because of your progressive stand, and we feel that it is directly an attack against us as well. Therefore, more of us need to know that we will be carrying on this idea, that we will do everything in our power to ensure your safety and your ability to keep on struggling."
Davis of course wasn't the only Panther who had praised the Temple prior to the massacre, and when the party's publication clarified that the party had changed its stance on Jim Jones, it was speaking for all of its members, Davis included. But there was a certain ideological strain that had led Davis to be inclined towards allying with the Temple to such a strident degree, and this strain came from the same source that had created Jones: the CIA. I know this claim sounds like slander (and I wish it was), but Davis herself has proudly admitted to have been ideologically influenced by the CIA operative Herbert Marcuse:
In 1968, I was one of Herbert Marcuse's graduate students at UC San Diego, and we all benefited both from his deep knowledge of European philosophical traditions and from the fearless way he manifested his solidarity with movements challenging military aggression, academic repression, and pervasive racism. Marcuse counseled us always to acknowledge the important differences between the realms of philosophy and political activism, as well as the complex relation between theory and radical social transformation. At the same time, he never failed to remind us that the most meaningful dimension of philosophy was its utopian element. "When truth cannot be realized within the established social order, it always appears to the latter as mere utopia." As new generations of scholars and activists ponder the role of intellectuals in shaping radical movements of this era, I believe that Marcuse's ideas can be as valuable today as they were 50 years ago.
Davis may have been forced to change her view of the People's Temple, but the ideas that led her to be so ideologically compatible with its pseudo-Marxist brand were not given up by her. She's even since gone so far as to promote these ideas to a new generation of people who hope to become revolutionaries. If these young people follow the path Davis is trying to set them on, they'll meet the same kind of fate that the last generation met. This was a fate where the CIA gathered enough intelligence on the American communist movement that it could manage to fatally infiltrate and persecute the Black Panther Party; where hundreds of communists and potential communists were murdered in the Guyana compound; and where the strain that Davis led would use Marcuse's Jonestown-adjacent ideas to take U.S. Marxism in a self-defeating direction.
To reveal what I'm referring to with that last point, I'll need to delve into how Marcuse's ideas guided the way Davis and the others within her school of thought responded to the fall of the Soviet bloc.
Defanging the revolution
If you've ever been part of an organizing space, and come across someone whom you eventually deduced to have been an infiltrator, you've seen the kinds of ideas Marcuse represents. These ideas are visible in an intense passion for the broad notion of social change, without the theoretical understanding that's necessary to be an actual revolutionary. When infiltrators enter a group, they adopt the rhetoric and aesthetics of the cause they claim to support, relating with the members about the cause's ideas and instilling inspiration within the minds they seek to manipulate. Then they slip poisons into these ideas they push, such as "you need to split from your group to be a real revolutionary" or "that person isn't truly down with the cause and needs to be treated like your enemy." To manufacture such divisions, these agents can't base their rhetoric around genuinely sound theory. They need to replace that theory with fraudulent theory, like what was propagated by Marcuse and the others within the intelligence-tied Frankfurt School.
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