[P2P-F] cyberleft and digital rebellion

Sun Feb 22 18:02:59 CET 2015

The Birth of the Cyber Left
by TODD WOLFSON

In an instant, the immaterial aspects of the financial capitalist system
melted away, as the tightly held logic of neoliberalism came crashing
inward. The world watched with fear and awe as the collapse of the
speculative markets quickly exposed the entire financial system, and
foundational institutions— imbued with all of the power and majesty of
global capital—crumbled before our eyes. The price of the hubris, however,
went beyond the boardrooms of Lehman Brothers, and in a few short months
the grim realities of the crisis took a vicious toll on working people.
Families lost their houses to fore- closure, elderly couples lost their
life savings to the rapacious market, and working people lost their jobs
and livelihood to the aggressive greed of an unchecked financial system.

In the shadow of the growing economic disaster, which unjustly meted out
punishment on the most precarious, political leaders stepped in with
massive bailouts, engineered by the very people who created the crisis, in
an effort to save banks deemed “too big to fail.” And in time, as our
collective memory waned, these same political leaders fixed their gaze on
the meager support system of the poor and working class, demanding
austerity budgets and calling for shared sacrifice. The sacrifice, however,
was not shared, as the market rebounded for the few, while the growing
legion of poor and work- ing people were left to shoulder the burden of the
twenty-first century’s first global economic and human crisis.

While the financial collapse has heaped untold misery on the working class,
this crisis, like those before it, has also presented real political
opportunity. As people suffer and injustice reigns, trust in state power
and financial markets has evaporated, and the ties that bind us to the
current social and political configuration have loosened. With this social
dislocation comes the possibility for uprising.

The Great Refusal, as Herbert Marcuse (1991) once called it, has begun to
show itself, as organizers, activists, and everyday people across the world
respond to the economic crisis and growing specter of poverty and
inequality. In this “post-collapse” moment, we have witnessed new forms of
organizing and protest that have rekindled the radical imagination.
Beginning in 2009, communities from Cairo, Tunis, and Reykjavik to
Santiago, Athens, and New York rose up, redrawing the political landscape
and in some cases rebalancing the political scales. In some of these
rebellions, dictators and their corrupt systems were swept asunder; in
others, the struggle continues to this day; and in others still, a new
narrative emerged that challenged the neoliberal logic that socializes risk
while privatizing profit.

While the character of each of these struggles is distinct, some critical
commonalities bind this cycle of resistance together as a diverse but
singular moment of rebellion. Traits like the creative use of new media and
social networks in resistance, the desire for meaningful democratic
participation, the physical and virtual occupation of space, and the
leadership of young people, who increasingly face dwindling job prospects
and growing student debt. These patterned attributes help to form the
silhouette of a new figure of resistance, a new sociopolitical formation.

*D**i**g**i**ta**l Rebellion *is an attempt to map the underlying logic of
this new figure of resistance as it has materialized across the world. I
undertake this mapping exercise through a historical and ethnographic
analysis of the Global Social Justice Movement from 1994 to 2006, with a
particular focus on the indymedia movement. While indymedia and the Global
Social Justice Movement precede the contemporary moment of struggle by less
than a decade, in many ways the tactics and strategy of resistance in that
period already seem quaint, as activists waged their fights using
bullhorns, bulky Web sites, monodimensional mobile phones, and black
balaclavas instead of Guy Fawkes masks. However, much like objects in a
rearview mirror, the Global Social Justice Movement is much closer than it
appears. It is my contention that the logic of struggle that developed
through that period offers the necessary tools to understand the mental
terrain of occupiers and Cairo combatants today.

At this broad level, extending the cyclical theory of social
movements, in *Digital
Rebellion *
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0252080386/counterpunchmaga>I argue
that historical and sociocultural patterns connect different periods of
political protest. Specifically, I argue that the patterns of struggle in a
particular period are best understood as developing, in an ideal sense,
through a multilateral dialogue between social-movement actors and both the
past and present.

Examined from one perspective, social movements and social-movement actors
are in conversation with the corporeal world in which they exist. Viewed
through this materialist lens, we can see that a particular logic of
resistance emerges in response to the social systems and social world of
which it is a part. Thus, in the era of Fordist capitalism, revolutionary
movements formed large centralized party-like formations that mirrored the
economy of scale that was the dominant episteme of the time.
Correspondingly, in the contemporary moment of informational capitalism,
activists forge nimble, networked formations as a facsimile of the
networked society they exist within. In this sense, movements both
challenge and integrate, sometimes unconsciously, different elements of
their social environs.

The logic of resistance in a particular moment, however, does not develop
in a straightforward conversation between activists and their physical
present. Instead, the logic and vision of resistance in a particular
period2 also develop in dialectic tension with history, and specifically
the previous stages of resistance. Along these lines, the Old Left and New
Left were in constant, though sometimes hidden, dialogue3 about issues of
structure, strategy, and composition, and as I argue throughout this book,
contemporary social movements are also in dialogue with the history of
resistance that has preceded it. This premise forms the theoretical
underpinning of this book, which is that in order to appreciate the
social-movement logic of a particular moment, one must understand this
triangulated interaction between social-movement actors; the materialist
present; and the long, unfolding history of resistance. Using this lens, we
can then begin to trace the commonalities and differences between the
Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and Students for a Democratic
Society, on the one hand, and the Global Social Justice Movement or Occupy
Wall Street, on the other hand.

*Defining and Historicizing the Cyber Left*

To get analytic purchase on the transformations in contemporary social
movements, I introduce the term *Cyber Left**.* Through this concept, I
contend that we are on the cusp of a new stage in left-based social
movements, enmeshed with the changing nature of new digital technologies
and the globalizing economic order. I use the term *Cyber Left *to
historicize this emergent mode of movement building, and I argue that the
way activists have employed communication tools (from the Internet to cell
phones) has shifted spatial and temporal configurations within movements,
creating new possibilities for organizational structure, democratic
governance, and media strategy.

With the growing fervor of technological utopianism coming on the heels of
Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring, the use of the term *cyber *is
admittedly complicated. To this end, I want to make clear that I do not use
*cyber *to argue that social movements have moved online, nor do I suggest
that social life has been transformed solely by the networking power of
Facebook or Twitter, nor do I argue that this shift in the operations of
social movements is necessarily positive. In fact, the most successful
movements are still driven by face-to-face relationships, trust, analysis,
a strong understanding of local concerns, leadership development, and
on-the-ground organizing, as I discuss throughout this book. Instead, I use
*cyber *as a descriptive term to define the novel set of processes and
practices within twenty-first-century social resistance that are engendered
by new technologies and in turn have enabled new possibilities for the
scale, strategy, structure, and governance of social movements.…

While I use the term *cyber *to capture the new dynamics in contemporary
movements, this is a study that is focused on chronicling the American
*left**.*5 Historians of the American left generally speak of two central
phases of social- movement history in the United States. The Old Left, from
the early twentieth century to the end of World War II,6 was influenced by
Marxism and the Bolshevik Revolution7 and principally focused on trade
unionism, the development of political parties, and the central antagonism
between the bourgeoisie and proletariat. In the postwar period, the U.S.
government waged a war on critical Old Left institutions like the Communist
Party, and this, alongside the horrors of Stalinism, led to the eventual
collapse of the Old Left. Out of the ashes of the Old Left, however, the
civil rights movement emerged and acted as a critical bridge to the New
Left.9 In the 1960s, New Left institutions such as Students for a
Democratic Society developed on the heels of the civil rights movement,
while being shaped by Mao’s peasant-based revolution in China. Challenging
the dogma of the Old Left, New Left activists questioned the central role
of class and the industrial proletariat, articulating a host of concerns
from gender and racial equality to ending the Vietnam War and U.S.
imperialism.10 The New Left in turn led to the birth and growth of the
nuclear-disarmament movement, the environmental movement,11 the gay- rights
movement,12 and later stages of the feminist movement.

Following these two broad stages of social movements, I contend through
this research that we are seeing the outlines of a new phase, the Cyber
Left, that has taken the shape of a globalized, digitized, radically
democratic net- work formation. This new stage of resistance is grounded in
the experiences and insights of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation
(EZLN) in Mexico. In1996, the EZLN made a widespread call to activists,
revolutionaries, and media makers to forge “a collective network of
resistance against neoliberal- ism” and “a network of *communication*among
all our struggles.” Out of this call and the vision and relationships it
established came indymedia, People’s Global Action, the World Social Forum
process, and many other networks and institutions that mark the initial
stage of this period of struggle.

This is excerpted from *Digital Rebellion:  The Birth of the Cyber Left
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0252080386/counterpunchmaga>.
*Copyright
2014 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Used with
permission of the University of Illinois Press
<http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/89cmd2yt9780252038846.html%C2%A0>
” .

*Todd Wolfson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Journalism and
Media Studies at Rutgers University. Trained as a socio-cultural
anthropologist, his research focuses on the convergence of new media and
social movements and he is author of numerous articles on social movements.
Todd is also co-founder of the Media Mobilizing Project, which uses media
and communications as a strategy for building a movement of poor and
working people in Philadelphia and beyond. Todd is also on the leadership
team of Progressive Philly Rising and he sits on the board of the Taxi
Workers Alliance of PA. Todd’s research and community work has been
supported by the Knight Foundation, Social Science Research Council,
National Telecommunications and Information Administration, and the Dodge
Foundation amongst others.*

***

Todd Wolfson's "Digital Rebellion"

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