Far removed from printed pamphlets smuggled past border guards and passed hand to hand, these new networks are, in the description of the sociologist Manuel Castells, “the fastest, most autonomous, interactive, reprogrammable and self-expanding means of communication in history”.14 They create and foster civic cultures of democratic dissent and debate. They were central to the revolutionary self-activity that led to the Arab Spring of 2010-12 and other mass anti-capitalist actions such as the Indignados campaigns in Spain and Greece, and the occupations of public spaces such as St Paul’s in London and Zuccotti Park in New York by the Occupy movement.15
Governments and security agencies are keenly aware of the power of social media and the Internet. As Edward Snowden’s revelations about the US National Security Agency (NSA)’s monitoring of private citizens’ online activity demonstrated, they devote enormous resources to tracking and controlling these networks. They also seek to control and limit file sharing and Open Source technology. Yet the genie is out of the bottle. During the first days of the Egyptian revolution of 2011 and the occupation of Tahrir Square–events which were propelled by anti-Mubarek activists posting provocative videos on YouTube and then going viral on Twitter–the Egyptian government attempted to “switch off” Internet access and mobile phone networks within the country. On 27th January, 2011 it blocked text and Blackberry messaging. The next day it ordered Egypt’s biggest Internet Service Providers (ISPS) to turn off their connections. The ISPS then used ISP routers to access and delete most of the IP addresses connected through that provider. Ninety-three percent of Egypt’s internet traffic was disabled.
In response a global community of hackers, cyber-anarchists, Open Source activists and libertarians rallied to reconnect Egypt to the World Wide Web. Instructions to circumvent the blockages, to use dial-up by mobiles or laptops, were sent via fax and ham radio. These were blogged, re-blogged and tweeted. ISPs outside the country set up new channels to connect to Egypt. Google and Twitter set up a new system that converted voicemail messages into tweets. With Twitter accounts in Egypt blocked, Twitter created a new account called @twitter-globalpr which handled this traffic. Al Jazeera fed satellite news to telephones on the ground, which brought more protestors on to the streets. Within five days the attempted disconnection was circumvented and the Egyptian government, which had lost $90 million due to loss of telecommunications and Internet business, restored the ISPs.
The government had been defeated by a mass counter-power to the traditional military/state/media machine on which ruling elites have long relied. This counter-power is based on autonomous social networks difficult to isolate and shut down (although individual activists and groups can of course be suppressed) and it is used by activists who share its anti-authoritarian ethos. It is not sufficient on its own. The occupation of Tahrir Square by students and other militants was the beginning, not the end, of the Egyptian revolution. In February workers formed new trade unions separate from Mubarek’s corrupt state-run unions and threatened strike action against the regime, followed by Women’s Rights groups who marched in Cairo demanding an end to discrimination and violence against women. All these formed a critical mass of opposition that led the military to turn against Mubarek. Without the workers’ and women’s protests it is doubtful if the student revolt on its own would have succeeded. But it was that revolt–and its planning and dissemination on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube–that laid the groundwork.
The development of networks of free information and collaborative working has enormous political implications, even though social-media networks are heavily constrained by corporate ownership and the cultural logic of late capitalism. Networked individuals are still individuals. They have to want to access networks and find politically useful and incendiary information. Stoking that desire is the job of socialist parties, trade unions and other campaigning groups. The liberatory potential of social media is only tapped when it is politicised and weaponised in mass campaigns with clear goals and strategies. Ultimately, as the radical cultural theorist Jeremy Gilbert has suggested, huge global tech monopolies like Apple and Microsoft should be brought under democratic public ownership and run as mutuals or cooperatives by workers and users, empowered and regulated to provide a truly free and open social network.16
Even without public ownership, Castells makes the essential point that “Mass self-communication is based on horizontal networks of inter-active communication that, by and large, are difficult to control by government or corporations”.17 Iskra, by contrast, was far easier to control. Krupskaya later admitted that Lenin did not show Martov and the other editors all the correspondence he sent out and received. They did not sense that What Is To Be Done? was not simply an attack on wavering Economists, whose reformism Martov also rejected, but that it heralded an entirely new approach to revolutionary organisation and strategy. Between 1900 and 1903 these differences were obscured in Lenin’s and Martov’s mutual struggle to outmaneuver Plekhanov and to produce Iskra on a regular basis. But the elements of a major confrontation between them were stirring.
Lih and other defenders of Lenin maintain that “latter-day readers of What Is To Be Done? have removed Lenin’s book from its context and thereby fundamentally distorted its spirit and impact”.18 But many of Lenin’s contemporaries who were acutely aware of its context made their criticisms of it at the time–and because of these criticisms Lenin’s formulation of party membership, based on What Is To Be Done?, was rejected by a majority at the Second Congress of the RSDLP. This congress, held mainly in London in August 1903, has become the stuff of legend.19 The Second Congress of the RSDLP was in all but name the First Congress, its founding moment and crucible (the actual First Congress had been in Minsk in 1898, attended by nine self-mandated delegates and swiftly dispersed by the police). It was the culmination of years of work by Social Democrat leaders and activists, and was meant to form one united all-Russian Marxist revolutionary party around an agreed constitution and programme.
The Organisation Committee, which Iskra dominated, planned the conference, authorised numbers of delegates and sent out credentials. As a result, the Economists had only three delegates, the Jewish Bund (although much larger than Iskra) only five, with six unaligned. The remaining thirty-three delegates were all from Iskra. Iskra’s careful preparation was not entirely a response to reformism within the Russian left. The Bund was as committed to a socialist transformation of Russian society as the Social Democrats. It also wished to create an RSDLP. Its leader, the Marxist revolutionary Mark Liber, was the third most frequent speaker at the congress after Lenin and Trotsky, passionately making the case for the Bund to have the sole right to represent the Jewish proletariat within the Russian Empire (as part of a wider alliance within the RSDLP). This position was rejected by both Martov and Lenin.