Irish Indymedia & the Technical and Ideological Apparatus of Activism

Monday November 10, 2003 21:23

by Marc Mulholland

Extract of Story from the Newswire:

"The leaders of the various leftist groups have decided not to participate in a site they regard as beneath their dignity. They know that they will be attacked by ireful posters in disrespectful and probably vulgar and abusive terms. The rank and file of the various vanguard revolutionary parties are obviously discouraged from going to have a look-see. Those who do speak-up for their parties usually (though not always) sign on anonymously.

Comment on content is mostly sect-ish point scoring. This can be entertaining, though more often boring and obscure. There are sometimes vigorous and illuminating debates. Even these, however, tend to be very limited in scope. The median Indymedia contributor despises the market, barely accepts that democracy exists, and assumes that the most malevolent motives move all 'bourgeois' and 'imperialist' politicians.

It's a pity that the project was not much more broadly based politically, but I suppose the zealots are always going to colonise these fora and drive out the less committed.

In all, though, I think the evolution of written word publishing has had interesting effects on the far-left, with potentially far-reaching effects. I’ll elaborate . . . . ."

Irish Indymedia and thoughts on the Technical and Ideological Apparatus of Activism

Irish Indymedia is an oddly vociferous place. It was set up as a site to collate reports derived from amateur activists and participants rather than the established media.

News stories are mostly press releases advertising planned demonstrations, or fulsome reports by the organisers afterwards. Here one can find hard to come by information. Generally, however, they are of relatively little interest, and not a serious alternative to the established media at all.

Much more fun is to be found in the comments section. Those who regularly contribute seem fairly few in number and dispersed between the SWP, the Socialist Party, anarchists and the odd Sinn Feiner. A very few liberals / conservatives / libertarians sally in to have crack with redbaiting. However, Indymedia's readership and contributor base must be far bigger than any of the left-wing party newspapers in Ireland (with the exception, possibly, of AP/RN - Sinn Fein's newspaper).

The leaders of the various leftist groups have decided not to participate in a site they regard as beneath their dignity. They know that they will be attacked by ireful posters in disrespectful and probably vulgar and abusive terms. The rank and file of the various vanguard revolutionary parties are obviously discouraged from going to have a look-see. Those who do speak-up for their parties usually (though not always) sign on anonymously.

Comment on content is mostly sect-ish point scoring. This can be entertaining, though more often boring and obscure. There are sometimes vigorous and illuminating debates. Even these, however, tend to be very limited in scope. The median Indymedia contributor despises the market, barely accepts that democracy exists, and assumes that the most malevolent motives move all 'bourgeois' and 'imperialist' politicians.

It's a pity that the project was not much more broadly based politically, but I suppose the zealots are always going to colonise these fora and drive out the less committed.

In all, though, I think the evolution of written word publishing has had interesting effects on the far-left, with potentially far-reaching effects. I’ll elaborate.

When I was involved in the Militant, we used to laboriously produce leaflets with mechanical gestettner machines. Papers & pamphlets were painfully and expensively produced by skilled designers and compositors. All this served to put the technology of practical ideological dissemination far out of the reach of the 'rank and file'. It simply took too much skill and effort to put together and publish a credible pamphlet without the aid of the 'organisation'. (I did manage it twice, but both times had no means to distribute them - being too embarrassed to push them myself).

The leadership cabal had a monopoly on the publication of 'perspective' documents. As they constructed the various canonical documents, they gained that mastery over understanding and exposition that comes from writing.

Writing is far more important in developing ideas than is oral debate. The leadership would always affirm that the ideas 'emerged' from a process of debate. If so it was like Mao's Zedong's 'Mass Line'. Mao argued that the piecemeal and scattered ideas of the rank and file should be gathered together by the Communist leadership, which then cogitated, shaped and composed them into 'theorised' knowledge. This line, in turn, was to be delivered back to masses as their own clarified thought. Something similar happened, in microscopic scale, within the various ‘revolutionary parties’. It was not real democracy. In fact, real debate requires multiple sites of focussed reflection. It requires multiple writers. Otherwise, as was always the case, the leadership, in writing up documents, had an invincible advantage in establishing their hegemony.

This stage of the ultra-left (mid -1980s) - the un-Reformed stage where a priesthood controlled all access to the Holy Book of publishing - began to transorm with the emergence of cheap and easy desk-top publishing (early 1990s). The impact of this was, on the one hand, to facilitate the emergence of factions, capable of producing and maintaining their written 'platforms' and congealing into permanent petty parties. Monoliths like Militant began to fragment. The Anarchist alternative to Leninist parties began to proliferate.

On the other hand, single-issue 'fronts' assumed a certain independence from their Leninist sponsors as they had easy access to their own means of ideological propagandising and organisation. 'United Frontism' took on a new substance and permanence. (A few, such as ‘Black Panther’ in Britain, broke from the organisation that had sponsored them).

The hard-left world seems recently to have been further revolutionised by internet publishing - even cheaper, easier and more accessible that DTP. Most obviously, it gives a voice to every dissident. For this snowstorm of criticism, there is an audience in and around every vanguard sect like the SWP, SP or whatever. The Leninist leaders have ever greater difficulty in insulating their members. The Weekly Worker has made a huge impact on ultra-left by appearing free on the net every week. As a scandal sheet of the leftish sects, it is hugely popular with the activists. No leadership cabal is now safe from the most searching and often violent critiques (though they employ the familiar rhetorical and organisational measures to minimise the damage).

The internet makes access to alternative ideas much easier for the rank and file of the ultra-left groups. More importantly, it allows many more sub-leadership individuals to set down their thoughts and ideas in connected prose, a process that has huge potential to expose internalised assumptions to critique. To read is one thing, and its subversive effects can be countered by party leaderships. But to write is really to force oneself to think through ideas. Particularly if such scribblings are instantly published on the WWW, there is created the psychological conditions necessary to generate that self-regard required to unhitch oneself from self-effacing respect for the leadership's 'understanding of theory'.

All this, I think, threatens the semi-cultish hold the leaderships of leftist groupuscules have historically exercised over their memberships. It seems to have fuelled the factionalism of parties such as Militant over the past 15 years or so. Now, arguably, it is creating a genuine cadre - right across the party divides of the ultra-left – which inclines towards abandoning the ego-centred shibboleths of their petty party leaders in favour of constructing a broader left unity. It is a revolution from below, or the middle ranks anyway. So far it is incomplete and prone to local reverses, due to the bureaucratic manipulations of united fronts by the like of the SWP (who have massively weakened, for example, the Anti-War Movement).

Initiatives like the Socialist Alliance and the Scottish Socialist Party have many explanations, including the plans and ambitions of Leninist leaders. But it also indicates the release of an activist constituency from the serfdom of vanguard party loyalty and their consequent availability as organisers of a potentially much wider hard-left electorate. The Anti-War Movement - even if variegated - indicates something of the potential scale. Opinion polls suggest that the united ultra-left in France would attract serious consideration from some 31% in presidential elections. More realistically, maybe somewhere between 10% and 20% in contemporary western societies would support anti-capitalist environmentalist movements, if not actually 'socialist transformation'.

There are many causes for all this. But one should not ignore those mundane transformations of the means of production, distribution and communication that activists directly rely upon. They have the capacity to produce significant shifts in the superstructure of activist politics. Bill Gates is the unwitting father of the new New Left.