Communists Must Oppose the Social Media Ban

An Open Letter to Communists

By L. Luria

Never have I seen Parliament more united. The prospect of social media access requiring one’s papers to be checked appears to have brought everyone ‘around the table’ where other thuggish assaults on the vestiges of bourgeois liberty have seemingly lacked the lustre. Myself being a beneficiary of a relatively free and open internet in my youth, and as someone who began calling myself a Communist at around 12 years old on account of such circumstances, the lack of care and attention this has drawn from other Communists has left me more irritated than usual at the state of our Real Movement’s self-appointed representatives.

To the Communists, whichever organisation you might find yourself in: How’s the paper round going? How’s youth recruitment? When was the last time a ‘cadre’ was ‘developed’ after an encounter on the street? I would hazard a guess that everyone in your ranks between the ages of 14 and 30 haven’t become Communists on account of your really effective newspaper stand, nor by picking up leaflets near a protest, nor by miraculously coming to consciousness from their imminent experience, only to be tipped over the edge by an after school encounter with one of your activists. The Communist movement, such as it is in contemporary Britain, is like any other ‘radical’ political tendency in that it’s the beneficiary of a relatively free and open internet full of teenagers. Subjective dislike of this fact will not change reality. The notion that experience alone fosters political consciousness has always been erroneous, the relation between thought and activity, the development of a language to express the half-formed assumptions which otherwise would fit within the preestablished axiomatic forms of the present order, have always been the means by which revolutionary political organisation develops and matures. That your group might have been lucky enough to put the final bit of work into the development of a few people means nothing when put against the whole process of political enculturation, that anything autonomous from establishment thought is, for the overwhelming majority, nurtured by a wholly online process of teenage identity formation. How do people develop the desire to read revolutionary literature instead of something else, to see themselves ‘becoming a revolutionary’ rather than slotting into something more normal? You might find it grubby and uncouth to admit that desire, specifically the desire for recognition, plays a determinate role in political subject formation, but I insist that you (if you’re younger than 30) take stock of your own ‘coming of age’ process and realistically assess what took place for you to become what you profess to be.

If that fails to convince, or if you somehow found your way into Marxism through some other route, I would remind you that in present circumstances only the rich possess both the capacity and the will to educate their children to a standard that the state has neither the means nor the inclination to match; private tutoring, cultivated households, the inherited assumption that one reads all survive a ban on social media for the children of the wealthy. It’s the poor, those for whom the comprehensive school exhausts the whole of sanctioned education, who will be invariably sealed off. Since the grammar school system was dismantled and the comprehensives have slid ever further into stultifying sub-mediocrity, the state has demonstrated over multiple decades that it has no desire to educate the children of the poor to anything approaching the sufficient cultivation of critical thinking, judgement, or reasoning faculties which revolutionary politics necessitates. Nothing I know, nothing I care deeply for, was gleaned through formal education. This goes for almost everyone I know, especially for every Communist I know; the historical reality of social media’s emergence is such that it has at once foreclosed the former sites of intellectual enculturation and assumed the position of being the determinate real site for relativity free discourse today, thereby granting it a critical role in the process of consciousness-raising and ‘cadre development’.

It baffles me that people belonging to my age bracket, the mid-twenty-somethings who I can say with certainty have spent at minimum fifteen years watching YouTube videos and engaging in some or another way with online discourse, can suggest that the effect of these platforms on their own maturation, political or otherwise, has been negligible, or that some other site of free and open discussion exists anywhere to the degree of widespread determination as social media. For my generation, an early adolescence dominated by the discourse of new atheism, feminism/anti-feminism, and so on, has invariably moulded our set, and as materialists we have to account for the role this discourse has played in our own consciousness, even if from the standpoint of wholesale rejection. While one might look back and say these discourses were all for nought, the discursive environment of the late-00s and early-10s undeniably formed a type of subject which is now beginning to act decisively in British politics. The diversity of thought which persists now among my generation is remarkable if put against most of our country’s history: Nobody has become “right wing” by reading The Telegraph, nor “left wing” by reading The Guardian – ‘Sargon of Akkad’ has had a more significant role in the burgeoning of political consciousness than any of the Paul Masons, Andrew Marrs, or Peter Obornes of this world.

The capacity for an individual to strike out against the rote orientations on offer from Question Time or Daily Politics is in itself good from the standpoint of fostering revolutionary capacity, granting at least the possibility of developing a sufficient language to speak against the present state of affairs, whether or not these expressions, or the thoughts behind these expressions, are themselves wholly compelling. If a person assumes an ‘anti-establishment’ political outlook only at age 16 or later, this person has already spent the years where their neuroplasticity was at its highest, consuming either news programming or whatever books might be lying around their parents’ house – what their politics might become after the age of 16, such individuals will invariably refer back in some way to that which crystallises in their formative years, to whatever figures of authority they happened upon at that time. We can’t account for the import of a given idea or set of ideas from the outset, what they will find themselves objectively expressing, what machinations they will perhaps run cover for, but we can certainly wager that broadening the range of discourse through which one can engage, permitting thought beyond the scope of BBC programming and the inherited views of family, ethnicity, religion, etc., is qualitatively more beneficial for the pursuit of potentially revolutionary politics. UKIP, and subsequently Reform, owe a tremendous debt to the online milieu which sprung up around the personality of Nigel Farage, a great many people who at the time of the Brexit campaign were under 16 years old and are now well into working and voting age. The same goes for Corbyn’s Labour Party, for whom a great many 14 and 15 year olds joined as a vehicle by which they could express the more radical political postures they had developed via social media discourse. Consider this beyond the schema of bourgeois politics, the immense potential that Marxists have had to give young people a means to cultivate themselves, to assert their own will politically in service of a more profound and meaningful historical mission.

When I first posted about this, somebody replied that “maybe just maybe they'll all be normally socialised and not get their brain melted with gore and pornography.” There is no ‘normal socialisation’ in our period, and any defence of ‘normalcy’ is, in these terms, a defence of the existing state. For the sake of the Marxists it should suffice to remind you that we understand breakdowns in the social order as constitutive of modernity itself rather than some recent affliction visited upon us by smartphones. The loss of ‘normalcy’ is a constant under present relations of production, so much so that to impose conditions formally equivalent to the world before social media is in itself a perversion of actual normalcy, taken to mean the normal conditions and processes of everyday life, the means of enculturation, the shared space and language of our present society. There is no stable socialisation to which the young might be returned, there is only the question of whether the commons of relatively unregulated discourse or regime broadcasting take precedence and mould the political imaginary and demarcate the horizon of thought for all subsequent younger generations.

One also hears reassurance that the ban will prove unenforceable, that young people will route around it as they route around everything. The ban would be enforceable readily enough were the measures to mandate biometric age verification at the device level, a proposal already floated despite previous opposition in Parliament and elsewhere to the Digital ID system (see now thick our defenders of bourgeois norms are proved to be when all you need to force down the last remnants of privacy is to invoke ‘The Children’). If all the above occurs, in tandem with the proscription of VPNs already threatened in Parliament (again, to near uniform approval), then all means of exit narrow to zero. Even if route-arounds are viable, by making it increasingly harder to engage in online discourse you limit the number of people (especially as time passes and restrictions intensify) who will wish to gain access. Worse still, by necessitating a criminal route of access, the process of assuming autonomous political subjectivity becomes itself equivalent to watching gore videos and weird pornography, branded by equivalence to criminal and underground activity. Communists aren’t criminals simply on account of having an autonomous political position.

Being a Communist means thinking according to a significantly longer time horizon than bourgeois politics permits – I would again ask those who deny the significance of this ban to examine their own political trajectory, how they formed the ideas they have, when and where they were first exposed to revolutionary ideas in a serious way: Why would you sit back and allow a generation to grow up in your wake who you’ll be unable to recognise yourself in, who’ll talk and think more like your parents than like you? By the time they get to 16, what will they make of social media? It will become, as it is for the older generation, an extension of the television, a repository for Gogglebox clips and sandwich reviews. On a broader level, doesn’t the unity of Parliament on this question give you any pause for concern? The entirety of the frontline Bourgeois establishment marches in lockstep, the only criticisms being that such measures ‘don’t go far enough’, drunk on their own agreement, giddy with the prospect of what new edicts they can impose to further control your behaviour, guide and shape the youth, impose their standard on the next generation at the critical historical juncture wherein established political authority has never been more unpopular. Further still, while one hand moves to seal the under-sixteens out of social media, the other is legislating, through the Representation of the People Bill, to lower the voting age to sixteen, bringing some 1.6 million sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds onto the register in time for the next general election; combined, we see the desire of our Parliamentarians to bring forth generations reared on nothing but licensed broadcasters and an atrophied school system incapable of cultivating judgement, permitted to vote at the precise instant they have been rendered pliable and unequipped, innocent of the means by which our moribund political consensus might be questioned (one wonders why this is all happening now, at a time when unprecedented decline in support for the State of Israel has been specifically noted as a downstream consequence of teenage social media use, and when two political parties seriously threaten the existing duopoly on both flanks).

Should the ban come in, what remains? Unless you intend on loitering at school gates distributing pamphlets and newspapers, risking arrest or having your picture pasted around parents’ WhatsApp channels, the prospect of any genuine thought arising among the under-sixteens becomes effectively null. They will be returned to the embrace of the television, the metered simulation of interior life, cut out of the commons through which consciousness, however crude, might arise autonomously within a discursive frame intelligible and adequate to contemporary life. Who, on turning sixteen and being admitted, will arrive equipped to know what’s being said, tell one position from another, to recognise a good argument from a bad argument, or even to recognise the basic structure of online argumentation itself which has become unavoidably determinate in shaping contemporary politics? A generation reared as their parents were will arrive incapable, yet somehow even worse than their parents, on account of the significant decline in education standards over the past fifty years: a future whereby generation after generation is afforded no occasion by which the faculty of judgement might cultivate and who can’t think or speak as we do.

In general, on the question of liberty, Communists often find themselves incredulously identifying with the state. I implore you all to take the words of Friedrich Engels seriously, from the Kommunistische Zeitschrift, that “we are not among those communists who are out to destroy personal liberty, who wish to turn the world into one huge barrack or into a gigantic workhouse. There certainly are some communists who, with an easy conscience, refuse to countenance personal liberty and would like to shuffle it out of the world because they consider that it is a hindrance to complete harmony. But we have no desire to exchange freedom for equality. We are convinced that in no social order will freedom be assured as in a society based upon communal ownership.” To this end, Communists must be willing to accept all manner of morbid symptoms if it means a spark of possibility might be recovered from out of the dregs of contemporary life, and therefore we must defend the right for teenagers to have access to social media, without reservation or caveat.