11-18-06, 11:33 am

 
Aristotle, one of the great minds of antiquity, thought that the population of states would have to be limited to the few thousand who could be directly seen and addressed at one place. Otherwise, he asked, who would be the herald of such a vast multitude, “Unless he have the voice of a Stentor? Clearly then, the best limit of the population of a state is the largest number which can be taken in at a single view.” The Master unknowingly taught us a very valuable lesson: the development of science transforms the problems of humankind.  

When the United States government developed atomic and nuclear technology, and proved the devastating power of that weaponry, the world changed. Our strategy and tactics changed. They had to.  We were suddenly thrown headlong into a world where the annihilation of the human race was possible, and peaceful coexistence between the socialist and capitalist systems was not only desirable, but absolutely necessary.  

Today we're now confronted with a new reality: the Internet. Netscape released the first web browser, “Mosaic”, 12 years ago. In that short amount of time, the web has moved from being the plaything of largely white, technical professionals to the largest, most highly trafficked communication medium and market in human history.  It has transformed and touched nearly every aspect of our lives, including the way we work, shop, communicate, learn, collaborate, date, and think. It’s changed the way we read the news (not to mention the nature of news itself), the way we play games, the way we listen to music, the way we make friends, the way we fundraise, the way capitalists exploit, and the way activists act.  

It’s facilitating the fluidity and interoperability of world markets and it is accelerating the globalization of the relations of production. Today a company can have a corporate office in Dallas, a programming team in Colombia, a tech-support staff in India, and a factory in China, with real-time digital information sharing and coordination between all of its production branches. The development of the Internet has also proceeded side by side with the growth and monopolization of the telecommunications industry.  

And, whether we like it or not, the Internet is begging us to re-examine our method and approach to party membership, party organizational forms, Marxist education, and agitation. It's given us the potential to not just reach millions with our message, but to engage many more people than an organization of our size could have just twelve short years ago. It’s also presenting new fundraising opportunities for us that we have so far failed to capitalize on.  

A Brief History of iTime

The Internet actually started as a project of the US Department of Defense during the 70’s, although it wasn’t until the early 90’s that a physicist developed HTML (a markup language for describing the layout of visual elements) and a web browser capable of rendering HTML into a human-readable display. This, in turn, led to the first mass distributed web browser, “Mosaic” in 1994 and the explosion of content we now think of as the “World Wide Web”.  

Many of the early pioneers of the Web frontier imbued the web with all kinds of utopian potentials and mythical proportions. In 1996, 56% of all Internet users said they went online for “alternative sources of political news”, while only 18% of people went online because they found it convenient. The adopters wanted to topple the traditional forms of the media, bring down the man, and build their own new virtual order. 

Yet by 2000, the Internet had already grown by leaps and bounds. Its user base had changed demographically; more and more low-income households were accessing the web; women achieved gender parity.  

The growth of this user base led to a mainstreaming of the Internet. All manners of pre-existing corporations and organizations went online, and we quickly found that this digital world, in a lot ways, mirrored our physical world. Working people embraced the Web because they found in it a real and immediate pay off. They could communicate with friends and co-workers. They could read their favorite newspaper. They could shop at their favorite store. They could gamble at their favorite race-track. The list goes on.  

By 2004, 89% of those who read political news online found it at traditional news sources like the New York Times, and 48% did so because it was convenient. Still, 33% of people that read the news online said they did so because they didn’t get all the information they needed from traditional news sources. Considering that in 2004, 70 million American adults went online on a typical day, 33% is still an amazing number.  

The quick adoption of broadband Internet has also ushered an entirely new host of web applications including streaming media and multi-user online game playing.  

Partly because of the nature of the digital medium, and partly because of the inability of corporations to fully control the Internet, we’ve witnessed the growth of peer-2-peer file sharing networks. These networks represent a direct challenge to the commoditization of art (including music, film, books, literature, etc.). Not only do they threaten the profits of the entertainment industry, they threaten one of the core ideological foundations of capitalism: commodity fetishism.  

Disengagement / Reengagement

Over the past couple of decades, social scientists have started researching the 20th century phenomenon of “disengagement”. Since the end of WWII, American’s have participated less and less in all kinds of civic engagement and social capital, including political interest, campaign activities, and associational membership. In other words, people stopped voting, they stopped going to church, they stopped attending meetings, they stopped volunteering for campaigns, and so on. 

Although there is not yet any general consensus on the causes of this disengagement, several possible reasons explored include pressures of time and money, urban sprawl, suburbanization, commuting, and mass media and entertainment.  

Yet today, from where I’m sitting, I believe we’re in the middle of a massive reengagement of the American working class. But not just back into the traditional participatory forms they left. They’re also finding a host of new ways to connect through the growth of online activism.  

Consider the 2006 elections and the participation of just one of a new host of online organizations: MoveOn. MoveOn set a goal of making 5 million GOTV phone calls during this election cycle. They had two primary phone banking methods: physical phone banks via weekend house parties and much larger virtual phone banks made up of volunteers calling from home. The only requirement for those that called from home was the ability to talk on the phone and use the Internet at the same time.  

How successful was MoveOn? For starters, 3.2 million people made phone calls for MoveOn, and their membership base grew by 450,000. They smashed their phone call goal with over 7 million phone calls. They raised and spent over $27 million, with over 250,000 members contributing $3.6 million to individual house races and another $2.8 million for targeted MoveOn television ads.  

MoveOn members didn’t just throw their efforts behind the more obvious possible wins – they targeted another 9 races that other progressive organizations wrote off as lost causes. And of those 9 “unwinnable” races, Democrats won 5.  

Not only did MoveOn contribute to the defeat of the ultra-right in the house – they very well may have tipped the balance in the Senate through their efforts in the two closest Senate races. In Virginia, where Democrat Jim Webb’s margin of victory was a little over 7,000, MoveOn members made an amazing 500,000 phone calls! And in Montana, where Democrat John Tester won by only 1,700 votes, MoveOn members made another 73,000 phone calls.     I write all of this not to simply praise MoveOn’s results (although they do deserve praise). More importantly MoveOn, and other organizations like it, have shown us the value of online organizing. 

MoveOn approaches people where they’re at: online. And they start by engaging people exactly where they found them; they give people the chance to participate in online campaigns by emailing and e-faxing representatives or donating money for TV ads or electoral campaigns. And they’ve proved that these basic forms of online activism, particularly online fundraising, are wildly successful! It’s now possible, by utilizing the Internet’s ability to cast a massive net quickly and inexpensively around a potential membership base, to raise millions of dollars, and to flood our elected representatives with emails, faxes, and phone calls when it counts.  

Yet, most importantly, MoveOn didn’t stop there. It doesn’t have to end with this basic, quick, online activism, which typically involves little more than a few mouse clicks and some light typing, or maybe a quick call to your congressional representative. They’ve proven that it’s possible to take people a step further: to draw them in to both traditional and time-tested forms of activism (like the physical phone banks, protests, etc.) or entirely new organizational forms made possible by the Internet (like the virtual phone banks, e-town hall meetings, etc.).  

In sum, MoveOn has used the Internet to let people act on the problems of the day in their own time. They’ve found a way to aggregate all of those tiny slices of time that people are willing to give up, which by themselves couldn’t affect change, but together, create something much more powerful than the sum of their parts. And they’ve complemented traditional organizational forms with all new ones, giving people new tools and new voices for change, entirely independent of any geographical constraints of the participants.

--Matt Parker is systems administrator for the Communist Party USA and an amateur jazz drummer.