WeeklyWorker

17.12.1998

Cyberspace revolution

Steve Riley argues that communists should make full use of the internet, and reviews two invaluable websites

Hard as it might be for some of us in the real world to appreciate, not everyone knows what the World Wide Web is, and what it is good for. With all the talk of ‘virtual this’ and ‘cyber that’, many people have let reality go over their heads. Internet-related matters, for very many people indeed, have been relegated to the ‘weird and fantastic’ shelf, along with Michael Moorcock and The X-Files.

When I was asked to review a Marxist internet resource for the Weekly Worker, I tried to imagine who would be interested to read this stuff. Obviously, if you are bootstrapped and wired then you already know, but read on anyway and I will try not to teach your granny to backup her files. The vast majority of people in the world, savvy political operators included, can find valuable and remarkably flexible extensions to their bookshelf, journal subscriptions, meeting places and discussion groups on the internet.

This is not going to be a technical review, but simply by virtue of the subject matter technology cannot be written out completely. So best to get a few basics out of the way. The reason why the internet should perhaps be spelt with a leading upper case ‘I’ is because there is only one of it. It stretches as far as the world’s telephone system, and, if you use two- way radio, even further. It is a link-up of interconnected computer networks, so anyone connected to any part of it has the potential to communicate with anyone else who is also connected. The term ‘cyberspace’ is used because people connected up can go places. Resources on the internet: libraries, discussion groups - individuals - all have addresses and locations. Travel to these places is simply a matter of knowing the address - distance no object. And being there is just like using other non-paper media - microfiche for instance - or like having a telephone conversation with many people at once.

What then is the World Wide Web? The WWW is the only computer term I know with an acronym longer than itself. It is also one part of the internet, two other major parts being e-mail and news groups. WWW is visible through a web browser like Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer, which display images, sounds and movie clips as well as text. This makes the WWW an attractive modern communication medium. Of course travel in cyberspace is not physical reality, but like knowledge it is real enough, and finds physical expression through the changes it brings about in our actions. As a growing part of the real world, its importance in daily working class life is set to increase.

The business and governmental sectors have caught on. The OECD reported in 1996 that the number of users worldwide was in the order of 50 million people, and forecast that trade over the internet would amount to $5 billion by the year 2000. More recently Webpromote Weekly (August 7 1998) an e-mail journal, forecast that advertising revenue alone would amount to $7 billion by the year 2002 and by the same year 55% of US households and 32% of European households will be online. By whatever measure your choose to take, the rate of growth of the internet is hundreds of percent per annum. Any government which can afford a telecommunications system has a website, and many, like the UK and US, mount extensive information network operations. Each UK government department has its own and there is an extensive House of Commons online library, much of which is open to the public.

With all this potential it clearly was not going to be long before political parties got their fingers into the many juicy cyber-pies. The ease with which a website can be set up means that every organisation and sectlet in the world can web-publish in the late 90s with the same speed that they could desk-top-publish throughout the 80s. There are hundreds of little sites out there, left and right, worldwide. Alongside the Labour Party and the Conservative Party, there is the Socialist Workers Party, and of course the Communist Party of Great Britain.

There have been several attempts in the workers’ movement to go beyond the individual group or party-based information site, to provide a web-based electronic community. One such is LabourNet, which provides facilities for political and trade union organisations to work online. According to their mission statement,

“LabourNet promotes computer communications as a medium for strengthening and building organised labour. We are in the forefront of using the resources of the internet to provide communications, news and information for the labour movement.”

It is part of a wider link-up which spans the Atlantic and communicates worldwide. During the Liverpool dockers’ dispute it was the efforts of people involved in LabourNet which disseminated shipping information, strike action calls and reports, almost instantaneously to those engaged in solidarity action. In 1995 the Mexican rebel Zapatistas were brought onto the world stage, greatly aided by a lap-top computer and a modem in the battlefield. Interviews with the revolutionaries, and reports of the reaction of the Mexican government, were disseminated worldwide against authorities powerless to stop the flow of information.

The facilities which internet communications provide for distributed organisation are already considerable, and in the future should be immense. This has given rise to the vision of a worldwide cyber organisation capable of overthrowing capitalism, a vision popularised in the book by Eric Lee, The labour movement and the internet - the new international (Pluto Press, 1997). Lee puts forward an interesting and compelling case for using the internet as a collective organising medium, but sadly misses the point - that politics is the primary determinant. While providing structural bracing to the workers of the world, cyberspace-organised reformism and economism is no more likely to succeed than if William Caxton and Alexander Bell were still hot news.

Current political applications of internet technology mostly revolve round the publishing efforts of one party/cadre organisation or another. A few have emerged however, with a different mission: as an information service to the Marxist left. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the onset of the period of reaction the opportunities for circulating and obtaining left texts contracted quickly. Parties liquidated, bookshops closed, Progress Publishers shut down and the supply of wonderfully cheap volumes from Beijing Foreign Language Press all but dried up. Now we have an internet alternative in two extensive electronic online libraries: the Marx Engels Internet Archive and the From Marx to Mao site.

Given that both of these sites are relatively recent, the amount of work they have published is a remarkable feat. While the two sites are not a cooperative venture, they are aware of each other and provide complimentary coverage. I first came across the MEIA in late 1995 when it was just a young bookshelf. It has since grown to be a large strapping library, and its ambition to provide the complete works of Marx and Engels online is beginning to look credible. The objective of MEIA is for them threefold:

The work is undertaken by a volunteer team of transcribers and web publishers, and offers of assistance are invited. The presentation of the library reflects this, in that it is rather eclectic. Visually, documents have different presentation styles, and the system of menus can be something less that transparent. While I have considerable confidence in the efforts of the producers to transcribe the text accurately, the source is not clearly indicated. The copy of Capital, volume 1, which I looked at, for instance, seems to be taken from the Lawrence and Wishart edition of 1954 which follows the English text edited by Engels in 1887, but there is no indication of this in the electronic version.

While I was looking over the site again for this review, I picked up a copy of the Grundrisse, which I did not previously possess. The publishers’ notes for this text did however acknowledge the source as the Penguin edition, translated by Martin Nicolaus in 1973. It cost me the grand total of 20 minutes local rate call to download the relevant files. As a further aid to research, the site has its own search engine, and the works seem to be indexed. There are also links to supplementary archives of other authors such as Lenin, Trotsky and Luxemburg.

The From Marx to Mao (M2M)site complements MEIA nicely. The major value of this site is reflected in the words of creator, David Romagnolo: “Indeed, the most striking feature of the Lenin holding [of MEIA] is the near total absence of Lenin’s major pieces.” This site states that it aims:

And this latter point is well met. The presentation of the work published by M2M is consistent, and with accurately documented sources. Even the page numbers of the original works are preserved, which is an invaluable aid to cross-referencing. Most of the work of maintaining and extending the site is undertaken by one individual, but again assistance is welcomed. Navigation through the site is an easier experience than with MEIA, and the search engine works well. The already wide range of works available includes Lenin, Stalin and Mao, and the size of each download is helpfully stated. The site is younger than MEIA, and is not as extensive, but it has a more coherent look and feel, which eases its use. While I was there last I picked up a copy of History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), short course (1939) to replace the one I lost some years back.

Both of these resources are of great value to the revolutionary left, and they are not difficult to access. The technology is now commonplace, costing between £500 and £1,000 new. Many comrades will already have access to a computer, which can be made accessible to the internet for £20. Several companies are now offering access to the internet for the cost of your tolerating their advertisements, plus local rate call charges. Many local libraries and colleges also offer use of computers with internet access.

While the revolution will not just happen in cyberspace, it is a part of the real world, and its population is increasing. We should embrace it because it is genuinely useful.