Blogging, Democracy and Revolution

I came across this well-written piece on the role of social media in social change, written by Jesse McLaren. I've often thought that the role of new media, social media etc etc has been under-theorized by Marxists. You tend to see stuff that goes in one of two directions: either an uncritical boosterism about social media as the motor of revolutions or completely dismissive and contemptuous. Jesse has a nice balance, pointing to the contradictions - the corporate dominance of the internet, on the one hand combined with the internet's ability to spread information rapidly; the fact that social media is nothing without the mobilization of actual people combined with the equally relevant fact that social media can provide a powerful mobilization tool, broadening and deepening activist networks, etc. As he concludes:

To make the most of social media we need to see it in context: as a communication tool that can magnify resistance movements, and whose online potential is related to its connections offline.

In all those senses it is a welcome tonic to the one-sidedness that has dominated most discussions I've come across. On the other hand I did feel like it missed some key points that were worth exploring. For instance, Jesse says the following about the mixed nature of ideas:

Social media doesn’t inherently “erode normal human relations” any more than it has magical powers. It simply reflects the ruling ideas, and as the German socialist Karl Marx argued: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.” These ruling class ideas don’t completely dominate: most people have contradictory consciousness—and the experience of collective struggle can expose the contradiction and through the process people’s ideas can change.

But this isn't just that people accept living under capitalist relations and therefore the online ideas reflect that. It's like the film industry. It's not just that people like right wing action movies or celebrity-worshipping superhero blockbusters because they reinforce the experience that workers have every day. It is a much more active process: Hollywood will spend upwards of $100 million on marketing alone to get that $100 million superhero movie on the lips of everyone in North America, Europe and, increasingly, China. The same thing applies to the internet. Perform a search for any particular product or service you might want, or for an artist whose work you love. You will be met first and foremost by a series of "sponsored search results" courtesy of Google's adwords program. Those who pay more are more likely to end up at the top of search results.

Secondly, the internet fits into the web of media that provides global advertising and ideological coverage to reinforce the dominant players. Some of that $100 million blockbuster marketing budget goes into banner ads, sponsored twitter campaigns, Facebook campaigns, cross-platform marketing campaigns (including complementary video games, youtube videos with sponsored ranking and banner ads), pinterest campaigns. You name it, the big players have that social media covered.

Thirdly, the dominance of the big players also applies to news and the message that gets out about domestic and international events of any importance. I may write this blog on what happened in the Middle East this week or last but when you check the news in your Google search it won't be my blog that provides the top hit. Not to mention that while it's great to get news instantaneously, most news content is now written by a few large newswire services like Reuters. Newspapers from the New York Times to the Globe & Mail use the newswires for their stories, ensuring a nearly homogenous worldview is conveyed by the big media players.

Fourth, the internet seems to exist in the ether: I just type an e-mail and it ends up in your inbox, like magic. But it doesn't. It requires a lot of physical infrastructure to make it work and that infrastructure is easily monitored - as we've seen with Snowdon's revelations about the NSA's global data-mining of innocent people - and easily disrupted. During the Arab Spring governments regularly shut down the internet in their own countries. In Egypt, of course, they discovered that the revolution wasn't really on Twitter after all because even shutting down the internet didn't stop Egyptians from overthrowing Mubarak. Here in Canada, effectively all of the internet infrastructure to homes is owned by a few companies like Rogers and Bell. Even the smaller, "independent" ISPs rely upon renting infrastructure belonging to one of the big players.

All that said - and the above discussion could be deepened and expanded much further - the internet is overall a positive thing. Just like the printing press allowed capitalists to more efficiently produce propaganda to win support for, say, an unjust war - so too did the printing press allow the workers movement to organize and share ideas and experiences. The internet takes the printing press, makes it instantaneous and international. It allows us to perform research into, for instance, the historical economic data on the USA going back to the 19th century - without having to pay the outrageous sums demanded by university libraries if you aren't faculty or a student there. In Toronto recently, the internet met smartphone tech to demonstrate brilliantly that while there is increased surveillance (watching from above) there is also increased sousveillance (watching from below). When the cops shot and killed 18-year old Sammy Yatim, the sheer brutality of the response was known by tens of thousands within a few hours because people nearby filmed it on their cellphones and then uploaded it to YouTube. That helped to generate the response that brought thousands of protestors on the streets within 24-hours and put the police on the back foot.

But these points really only expand upon what Jesse wrote in his piece. The bigger absence, the elephant in the room if I may, is the lack of discussion of blogs and the blogosphere. Blogs basically fit into the overall discussion about the relationship of social media to progress, social change, freedom, etc. However, there is a significant debate in some socialist organizations - in particular, in the socialist Tendency of which Jesse is a part, the International Socialist Tendency - about the role that blogs can play in relationship to debates in the party, in the movements, etc. The general view has been that individual blogs are OK, if unimportant, when they comment on the broader world. But they are to be shunned as tools to further debate and clarity inside of socialist organizations. They are deemed "unaccountable", "elitist", "undemocratic", et al. because they are the preserve of unaccountable individuals, not to mention being subjected to the same sorts of selection pressures as discussed above (though a discussion about how items and blogs and videos go viral is in order, as it provides an exception to the rule of big money dominating the internet).

However, the flip side of this is that the internet can provide a means to encourage and spur spontaneous and horizontal engagement and activism. It may be chaotic and inconvenient but surely we want our members and activists debating with each other in each and every forum possible. This can lead to problems - like substituting internalized debate that isn't tested in practice in the outside world for the kinds of activism that can help clarify ideas. It can lead to expanding small differences into large ones. And, of course, anybody can write anything - a lie, etc. and might not have to fear suffering the consequences. But all these things apply to all forms or media and all forms of organization. Even without social media socialist and activist organizations were quite able to end up in unproductive infighting, with people making defamatory claims and counter-claims against each other. In the 1980s ACT-UP, an AIDS activist group that had some explosive growth as the AIDS crisis radicalized tens of thousands of LGBTQs, imploded a few years later as it turned inward. Similar things have happened to other movements in the last 30+ years. It happens. Avoiding debate is not the way to deal with it. Better is to build an organization of outward looking cadre with strong and clear politics, unafraid to grapple with debate and challenges because they are confident in their politics.

What's more blogs and other forms of social engagement - Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, et al - offer the opportunity for people who never get published to have their say. They don't have to have perfect grammar or a university degree. There is much less pressure to be perfect because the stakes are lower - there's no printing bill to pay, no need to organize distribution via physical shipping, etc. It allows for spontaneous and ad hoc groupings of radicals and activists to unite around a virtual publication, engage in debate and then, once the struggle has passed or the moment of crisis that generated the flurry, the publication can shut down. It can re-emerge later in a new form, with a new collective, etc. Counterposing formal structures of accountability to this kind of dynamic and fluid method for engagement is conservative and bureaucratic in its impetus. Of course our movements need structures but debates, crises, and upsurges don't wait for approved structures to emerge and take account of them. They emerge already in motion and our structures must adjust to meet them and engage with them. Structures and structural traditions can help to shape such insurgencies into accountable forums. And insurgencies are the lifeblood that make structures relevant and renewed.

More Capitalism vs Democracy

I was reading this article in Foreign Policy - a "debate" between two highly respected international economists, Nouriel Roubini and Ian Bremmer when I came acros the two quotes below. What was interesting was just how similar they were to the quote I pulled the other day from the Globe & Mail about how the US political system was dysfunctional. Here's the FP quotes.

Nouriel Roubini:

I think the fundamental problem is that tough choices need to be made -- gradual fiscal austerity, structural reform -- [which] imply [the necessity of] governments that can look beyond electoral cycle. And we don't have a situation in which this is possible, when growth is anemic, unemployment is high, and deleveraging is painful. Governments don't have the leadership to do the right thing, not nationally, and not in terms of international cooperation. So, smart individuals might be here and there, but fundamentally, there is a political economy problem in most advanced economies that remains unresolved.

Later, Ian Bremmer says, in a discussion about the role of China:

China is an issue because it understands better than anyone else that the short-term electoral cycles in the West are going to create inability to make the kind of policy moves that are required to create long-term sustainable economic growth and trajectory. 

These quotes, part of a longer piece on the fact that national governments - in particular western, industrialized countries - are out of policy ammunition to deal with the economic crisis. Of course, what has really run out is business as usual types of policy ammunition. We are now faced with more difficult choices ahead - a point to which I will return with a longer article later this week.  But without even having that deeper analysis, we need to ask ourselves some hard questions: if capitalism can't provide affluence and it can't even manage to function well within the bounds of political democracy, then what the hell good is it for most of us humans?

Capitalism vs Democracy

This article in the Globe & Mail about the ongoing debt crisis in the USA and Europe caught my attention. Not because it offered any interesting or unique insight into the origins or solution to the present debt crisis facing western capitalist nations. What was interesting was the matter-of-fact assumption that democracy was a hindrance to the ability of capitalism's profitability and growth to be restored. As Konrad Yakabuski sees it, western political institutions are "dysfunctional" because populations don't want to see their living standards hammered in order to pay for a debt crisis that has been caused by the failures of the system and the attempts to overcome those failures by rewarding the wealthiest and most corrupt members of society.

European leaders are similarly hamstrung by dysfunctional political systems. Their attempts to contain the euro-zone debt crisis have repeatedly come up short because the measures needed to comfort financial markets exceed the tolerance of voters.

In reality it's not the political system that is dysfunctional per se. It's failure is a result of the fact that capitalism is failing. The pressure that this crisis creates demands one of two responses - abolish capitalism or see not just pundits imply the need for a curtailment of democracy - but see it implemented in practice.

Dear NDP: The Globe & Mail Doesn't Like You

The federal Liberals can re-discover their True Grit - The Globe and Mail

I've thought that the Globe & Mail were a laugh since, years ago, I read an editorial condemning affirmative action as discriminatory - written by an editorial board, which, at that time, was entirely made up of white men. I mean, these guys have the kind of chutzpah that only rich, white bastards can have. God love 'em for it.

And now yesterday's editorial begging the beaten and pathetic* Liberal Party of Canada to get their act together. Why? Because only the Liberals and the Conservatives are worthy of governing. The NDP has not yet passed the Globe editorial board's test of governing competence. I have to say that I'm glad the Globe has relieved us voters of the too-heavy responsibility of deciding who is and isn't to our liking.

Keep on rocking in the free world, guys. By the way, if you want to look a little less like a white boys club, may I suggest that you put Margaret Wente on your editorial board? Not only is she a woman, she's also a snob and an asshole. She'd be just like one of the boys.

*I must admit that I feel sorry for the Liberals who are reduced to making Bob Rae their interim leader. If that isn't the kiss of death...

Democracy: A Waste of Taxpayers Money

The Public Safety and National Security Committee met yesterday to debate setting up an inquiry into the decision-making that led to the G20 debacle. Unfortunately, the Conservatives on the committee prevented a vote being taken on the motion at hand by talking out the allotted time. Besides suggesting that any kind of public accountability would simply give a forum to "thugs and hooligans" they also suggested that accountability is just too darn expensive.

During Monday’s debate, the government side argued it would be premature to undertake a study and a waste of taxpayers money to hold hearings during the summer while MPs are supposed to be working in their constituencies."

Would it cost as much, say, as a $2 billion Summit in the biggest urban centre in the country? Or perhaps the problem is that the money would be used to spread anarchy since the NDP "seems to be lining itself up with anarchist groups" like Amnesty International and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, according to Tory MP Dean Del Mastro. Well, we certainly wouldn't want the government to spend money on anything that might cause anarchy.

MacLeans Magazine Is Right! Lock Up The Thugs!

Democracy makes MacLeans froth like a dog

I never thought I'd say that I agreed with that bile-oozing catalogue of demagogic, Tory-fellating asininery that is meant to be our version of Time Magazine. These toads give new meaning to trollness. That's why I was surprised to find myself in total agreement with this week's front cover title - "Lock them up: Why the G20 thugs don’t deserve any leniency - Canada"

Dammit, they're right. Those G20 thugs should be locked up and the key thrown away. Why just last week the US military killed a bunch of people in Afghanistan. And Harper spent $2 billion to host these miserable cretins, including the oppressors of Tibet (China), the blood-soaked British Empire (retired), and the god-awful French who still find time to keep their claws into parts of Africa, not to mention treating their own North African population like utter shite. Never mind that France, the US and Canada played an important role in deposing Jean Bertrande Aristide, the democratically elected president of Haiti, in order to replace him with death squads backed up by Canadian and UN troops - who committed a massacre in 2005 in Cite Soleil. These thugs came out of this summit with the plan to impose austerity (read: layoffs, tax breaks for the rich and massive service cuts for the rest of us) on the majority of the world's population. I mean, what would you call any group of people who lash out uncontrollably, leaving death and destruction in their wake - sociopath, perhaps but thugs will do for me.

Oh, wait. I misunderstood the article. MacLeans meant that WE are the thugs. Shee-it, what was I thinking?

"Only the professionalism and preparedness of police prevented circumstances from being much worse. Rather than an inquiry, we need further police effort to ensure every one of those lawless thugs is brought to justice."

Ha ha ha. Are these guys serious? They must have been drunk when they wrote this. Or, embarrassingly, it was written by some boob who'd only managed to catch Christie Blatchford's trollish and dubious take on events. Somebody ought to tell this writer, after all, that the government spent $1 billion on security, had 20,000 cops on the scene, and had infiltrated the main anarchist organization for over a year, and was therefore in on all the plans. If that's preparedness, then the bar has been set pretty low. But having ensured us that no matter what fuck-up the cops engaged in we were clearly hallucinating it or missing the point, the editorial dismisses the complaints arising from the largest mass arrest in Canadian history:

"It’s possible many of those arrested for breach of the peace were not directly involved in any violence. But they were released in a matter of hours. Canadians’ constitutional rights have survived the ordeal unscathed."

Let's see, 1000+ arrested, less than 20 charged with any offences. That's a charge rate of 2% - or rather, a failure rate of 98%. And given that the cops failed to do what they received $1 billion to do, the fact that they compounded that failure by suspending the civil liberties of everybody, doesn't reflect well on their, you know, preparedness. But, again, this utter failure to achieve any aims that one could regard as reasonable goals in the present circumstances - to permit business and normal life to continue uninterrupted by the G20 circus, to permit the citizenry to exercise their constitutionally enshrined right to express a dissenting an opinion - doesn't seem to disturb MacLeans Magazine, which fulminates that "whatever steps the police took to prevent [the black bloc from disrupting the Summit] were both necessary and welcome."

That's a pretty big blank cheque when, given the 5 metre high fences and 20,000 cops on parade - along with all the toys that the boys in blue love, from helicopters to sound cannons - there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell that anyone was getting anywhere near the Summit. All the cops had to do was sit side-by-side at the fence, sipping tea, and poking through the holes with a stick every now and again and nobody would have made it over, let alone inside the Convention Centre. The truth is MacLeans has a deeper agenda at play here and it is one that ought to chill our spines if these cockroaches ever got the reins of power.

"The protection of free speech and assembly can only exist when there is proper respect for the rule of law. Legitimate protest acknowledges the existence of state authority while providing a different point of view. "

This idea that the citizenry must exist in a state of servitude to the state, accepting its authority no matter what, is frighteningly reminiscent of fascist ideology. What if the state is corrupt or serving interests other than your own? Should Nelson Mandela have "acknowledged the existence of state authority"? How about protesters during the Vietnam War? Or those who fought against the laws of the Canadian state that prohibited access to abortion - or criminalized homosexuality? Clearly, MacLeans either hasn't thought through the madness that they doth preach or someone should give them a very basic lesson in the precepts of democratic rule, in which the state exists to serve the sovereign people and not the other way around. Or perhaps they know full well what those precepts are and are just honest about their view of the role of those of us who can only access power through mass mobilizations. Our role is to shut up or face the justifiable consequences.

Crypto-fascist kookery aside, the MacLeans article is like a sad, over-told joke, proclaiming as has been done again and again that "the global protest movement appears to be losing steam." What are they talking about? The anti-capitalist movement that had it debutante ball at the Seattle protests in 1999? Somebody ought to update these guys on the history of the last ten years. It's been rather tumultuous what with multiple wars, both those that Canada has participated in and those that we have supported - like Israel's thrashing against anything and anyone who might have a problem with genocide. The cycle of mobilizations has certainly seen its ups and downs, such is always the case. But with the conflicts that mobilized people not ending. With growing anger at Israel's treatment of the Palestinians and their supporters int he wake of last year's invasion of Gaza and the more recent aid flotilla slaughter. And with the bewilderment and bitterness that the economic disaster of global capitalism is causing, it is hardly the case that the "global protest movement" is going away. With general strikes rocking Europe and with 25,000 marching in Toronto - the largest mobilization since 2003 - if anything there is a renewed vigour. In any case, none of us need worry about our civil rights or the issues of the day, the important thing is that the G20 leaders agreed a consensus on what next.

At the end of the day, debate over street violence, protest and police ought to be secondary to the summit’s practical achievements. And the G20 summit did conclude on a note worthy of some optimism: a pledge to cut government deficits in half by 2013. While this only applies to the most advanced economies within the G20, it is still a step in the right direction. Bringing the world’s major economies back to fiscal balance is crucial to closing the book on the Great Recession.

This is a fitting closure to an obtuse and delusional editorial. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman and others have noted, implementing austerity when the economy is still such a mess is merely a recipe for an even deeper recession, perhaps depression. The threat at the moment isn't inflation generated by too much deficit spending. It is deflation, particularly in the face of a dramatic shrinking of money supply by reining in government spending. The Japanese could teach us a few things in this department, having done the same thing back in the 90s, causing what became known as "The Lost Decade". In a recent NY Times article Krugman argued that there have been two major Depressions in the past 150 years and that we are entering into a third. And this Depression will be the result of foolish economic policy, ie. imposed austerity at a time when stimulation is necessary. Claims that the crisis in Greece or Ireland demonstrate the need to slash and burn public services, pensions and wages are not rooted in reality, but in a destructive dogma.

I don’t think this is really about Greece, or indeed about any realistic appreciation of the tradeoffs between deficits and jobs. It is, instead, the victory of an orthodoxy that has little to do with rational analysis, whose main tenet is that imposing suffering on other people is how you show leadership in tough times.
And who will pay the price for this triumph of orthodoxy? The answer is, tens of millions of unemployed workers, many of whom will go jobless for years, and some of whom will never work again.

To my way of thinking, people who deliberately inflict pain on others to demonstrate who is in charge is the very definition of thug. And yes, MacLeans, I agree: these thugs ought to be hunted down and brought to justice. Let's start with you.