The Internet, Communication and Horizontal Organisation

international | arts and media | opinion/analysis Tuesday January 17, 2006 02:07 by Terry room101ucg at yahoo dot co dot uk

This is the final part of a three part series on the potential role of alternative net based media could play in political mobilisation. Part one is here, and part two here.

The Internet does not just function as an information dispersing device, it also can be a two way process, a means of communication.

Consider the importance of communications.
In Britain in the 1970s, during what was the longest declared state of emergency outside that at the time of the 1926 General Strike, it was announced ‘flying pickets’ were to be halted en route, to prevent a repeat of the 1972 miners strike wherein such tactics were successfully used (18). Such police roadblocks did come into play in the 1984 strike.
Surely the publication of their location, via text messaging and the instantaneous communication of the Internet, would defuse their potential.

Likewise any successful tactic can be generalised, the police put under popular surveillance through the publication of the numbers of unmarked cars, near-instant countrywide or indeed international response to particular events, the details of particular companies, say bailiffs or private security, widely publicised for action.
Indeed the possibilities are endless.

This role of communications is recognised by the state, Bunyan in his analysis of the British State’s emergency planning based on the British Army’s ‘Manual - Land Operations Volume III: Counter-Revolutionary Operations’ argues that it included plans to deprive all of the population, bar certain approved persons, of telephone access. (1)

However there are effects of far greater import than the ability to quickly share tactical information.

It is my contention that the Internet by facilitating horizontal organization can help arrest the process of bureaucratization and conservatisation within social movement organisations, and thereby help to arrest the development of forms of organization which ultimately act to inhibit struggle.

‘Down with Empire! Up with Spring!’, an article in the Earth First! journal ‘Do or Die!’, contains account of the role that can often be played by hierarchical organisations and the processes involved:
“All through the '70s environmental groups were gaining increased support and membership lists were expanding dramatically. By building mass based organisations environmentalism was split into campaigners and supporters.

Bigger offices and bigger salaries were needed to manage the movement. This division - a creation of scale - acted (and still acts) as a terrible internal pressure crushing the radical content and practical usefulness of groups.

Those attracted to 'campaign' jobs were often exactly the wrong class of people (inclined to paper pushing rather than physical action) while most of the support their 'supporters' gave was the annual return of cheques and membership forms - conscience-salving exercises.

When serious people got involved in groups their action was often curtailed by other 'campaigners' (or the cop in their own head) reminding them that it could alienate the 'public' and thus cut into membership and funding.

This process was most prevalent in what was then the most radical of the environmental groups - Greenpeace (GP). In 1977 Paul Watson one of GPs directors (who became an icon when he drove a dinghy straight into the path of a whaling harpoon) was heading an expedition to the Newfoundland ice floes. At one point he grabbed a club used to kill baby harp seals and threw it into the waters. The sealers dunked and nearly drowned him yet worse was to come on return to the office - betrayal. Throwing the club into the sea was criminal damage and he was told by a faceless lawyer, "I don't think you understand what Greenpeace is all about." He was expelled from the corporation.”

They then go onto detail the impact of this process in Britain in the 1990s:
“In the early 1990s Friends of the Earth (FoE) central office made a concerted effort to restrict the growth of the new movement. Negative public statements about EF! were issued (most notably about the Sarawak jailings) but it wasn't until the April 1992 Thorne Moors sabotage that FoE central office showed its true colours when Andrew Lees - then head of FoE - condemned the action on TV:
"We have to be very careful that this style of anti-environmental action does not actually get misrepresented as something the environment movement support. We decry, we deny it. It has no place in a democracy which relies, and must rely, on public demanding the politicians deliver the goods."

This public condemnation of the very essence of direct action showed how far FoE central office had come from its early radical days.”
(2)

That such organisations can act as a brake on struggle in more radical situations, would seem to be borne out by historic experience, most dramatically in regard to the German Social Democrat Party (S.P.D.).

By 1914 the S.P.D. had in the region of a million members as part of a tightly controlled and centralised party machine which employed 15,000 as salaried staff. Several of its publications had circulations over 100,000, altogether a collective circulation of over a million and a half. Furthermore innumerable trade unions, sporting and cultural associations were affiliated with the party, which, with its 110 seats in the Reichstag was the largest party in Germany in electoral terms, as well as in terms of membership. (3)

However, as Murray Bookchin describes: “it came to resemble a bureaucratic machine for acquiring power under capitalism rather than a revolutionary organisation to eliminate it.” (4)

Case in point in 1914 it was to support the German war effort, effectively eviscerating the Second International, during the course of the war much of its left wing was to split off, this was then partly formed into the Independent Social Democrats (U.S.P.D.).
The Communist Party of Germany (K.P.D.) was another break way, as was the Communist Left, the later producing incisive critiques of the role of parliamentary parties.

To summarise the conservative part played by the S.P.D. leadership in the revolution of 1918/1919, it left most of the state apparatus intact, co-operated with the proto-Fascist Freikorps in suppressing the strike wave of the spring of 1919 and Ebert, S.P.D. leader, didn’t even want to proclaim a republic.
Programs of socialisation and demilitarisation were put into permanent cold storage.

Partly it got away with this out of political naivety and organisational loyalty on the part of its grassroots, however I would argue that inability of the rank and file to control the party was also a factor.

By 1920 the hitherto marginal U.S.P.D. had come within a whisker of halving the S.P.D. vote. Indeed as the S.P.D. vote expanded at the time into formerly conservative voting rural electorates we could say that the election results obscure the extent of the backlash against the S.P.D. .

Discontent erupted at the first post war party conference in Weimar in June 1919.

As one delegate put it: “It is not quite incomprehensible that our comrades in other countries, who judge by outward appearances more than we do, should sometimes harbour doubts about the genuineness of a revolution which leaves the old leaders, Hindenburg, Erzberger and others in leading positions in the army, state and parliament, a revolution which reprieves the kings and murders the revolutionaries (Applause).” (5)


A horizontally organised movement would not be acting so at odds with it’s membership’s desires, nor would a horizontally organised movement be acting at odds with its stated policy so easily.
The Internet facilitates horizontal, non-hierarchical organisation, on a mass scale.
Furthermore lack of co-ordination among the left opposition outside of the S.P.D. greatly aided the government’s ability to maintain control, a lack of co-ordination which could have been over come more easily had they had today’s communication technologies.

In ‘The Advent of Netwar’, a publication of the RAND think tank, Arquilla and Ronfeldt describe what they call ‘all channel’ networks as organisations in which: “all members are connected to each other and do not have to go through other members to communicate and co-ordinate with each other.”
(6)

They argue that: “all channel networks do require rapid, dense, multi-directional communications to function well and endure – more so than do other forms of organisation.”
“The new technologies – e.g. advanced telephone, fax, e-mail, computer bill board and conferencing systems, supported by fibre optic cables and satellite systems – finally provide the level of connectivity and bandwidth that favours all channel organisational designs. Today diverse, dispersed, autonomous actors are able to consult, co-ordinate and act jointly across great distances on the basis of more, better and faster information than ever before.”

They claim that: “For years a cutting edge of this trend could be found among left-leaning activist NGOs concerned with human-rights, environmental, peace, and other social issues at local, national and global levels.”

The Internet allows for continual instant horizontal communication across wide distances.
There is not necessarily a central point through which such communication must be mediated.

So you can have unmediated news, without editorial control, and which is interactive in that viewers/readers can respond on to the site. More apt in this case is the fact discussion does not have to go through a party centre. So instead of branch A in location A, and branch G in location G, and branch H in location H, separate from each other, all feeding reports into the central committee in the capital, and all receiving orders back, branch A, branch G, and branch H can all share information and reach decisions together equally.

Of course the Internet is not essential to such forms of organisation, but it does help. Furthermore, in regard to decision-making its role is perhaps better at sharing the information that helps make decisions, rather than dispensing with face-to-face meetings.

Such information spreading and opinion sharing allows everyone to get the birds eye view restricted to the leadership in traditional left organisations. Without knowing what people in another branch think on any particular issue makes it difficult to change party policy. Control of information is control of decision making, because information will shape decisions.

To conclude, we can see that Cleaver’s analysis of the role of the Internet in developing the international pro-Zapatista network and following from that anti-globalisation could be a largely accurate one.
However I would not ascribe the same importance to this movement as he would, for a variety of reasons beyond the scope of this essay.

Nonetheless from the experience of pretty marginal contemporary social movements, and from the historic overview of the role of information and communications we can imagine that alternative media on-line may have certain effects in the future in the context of more widespread social conflict in Western Europe. Given, that is, a continuing growth in Internet usage.

Those effects are likely to be a downward trend in the relative power of the media to isolate particular radical elements or to dampen down discontent, as well as the facilitation of horizontal over vertical organising forms.

As bureaucratised organisations act in a conservative fashion this is likely to have a destabilising impact. An effect favouring direct action over lobbying, confrontation over compromise, illegality over legality and favouring unconstitutional extra-parliamentary methods in general.

I should note it is not my contention that there is always a radical mass straining at the leash of a bureaucratised and conservative leadership, it is my contention that this is what happens in particular radical moments.
References:

(1) Bunyan, Tony, The History and Practise of the Political Police in Britain,
Quartet Books, 1977, page 270.

(2) Ibid pages 284/285.

(3) Anonymous, Down with Empire!, Up with Spring!, in Do or Die!, no. 10, Earth First! U.K., Brighton, 2003.

(4) Bookchin, Murray, The Third Revolution, Popular Movements in the Revolutionary Era, Volume 2, Cassell, London, 1998, page 301.

(5) Ibid page 300.

(6) Quoted in Ryder, A.J., The German Revolution of 1918: A study of German Socialism in War and Revolt, Cambridge University Press, London, 1967, page 227.

(7) Ronfeldt, David F, Arquilla, John, The Advent of Net War, RAND, 1996.

Additional Bibliography:

Laurie, Peter, Beneath the City Streets: The Secret Plans to Defend the State, Granada, St.Albans, this edition 1983 (originally 1970)

Mommsen, Hans, The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy, translated by Forster, Elborg, and Eugene Jones, Larry, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and London, 1996. (originally Frankfurt, 1989)