The Socialist Project on Social Media Platforms (original) (raw)
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Socialists on Social Media Platforms: Communicating Within and Against Digital Capitalism
Beyond Digital Capitalism--New Ways of Living, Socialist Register, 2021
Socialists around the world are using social media platforms to produce, distribute, exhibit, and consume socialist media and cultural works, and they are openly building events, movements, and organizations within digital capitalism, to go beyond it. That said, the internet and social media platforms are surrounded by all kinds of deterministic, optimistic, and pessimistic rhetorics that cloud a clear view of what they give to and take from socialist communicators, especially as compared to the twentieth century’s mass media industries, whose state and corporate owners tended to filter out and vilify socialist ideas. While digital platforms are enabling socialists to communicate in ways that were not possible in the pre-digital world of mass media, they are supplements to – not substitutes for – building democratic and sustainable socialist organizations and militant working-class movements. Taking it as axiomatic that communications underpins any possibility for socialist organization and politics, this essay contextualizes the ‘brave new world’ of digital capitalism historicizes socialist communications from the ‘old media’ world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the ‘new digital media’ world of the early twenty-first, and then maps ‘another world’ of socialists on social media platforms, with an eye to the novelties, limitations, and challenges.
Intersectional Technopolitics in Social Movement and Media Activism
International Journal of Communication, 2021
Emerging global social movement and media activist practices are integrating intersectional politics into technologically facilitated activism. Based on a multiyear empirical study, this article proposes a preliminary theoretical framework that maps 5 key dimensions of an emergent intersectional technopolitics: (1) intersectional anticapitalist politics enacted in meta-issue movements; (2) distributed online–offline media architectures and motility; (3) multiplicities of genres, forms, technologies, and spaces; (4) translocal solidarity economies and technologies; and (5) liberatory intersectional mechanisms of collective autonomy. The author argues that intersectional technopolitics is an innovative and complex set of coherent global social movement and media activist practices rooted in meta-issue movements integrated with transmedia digital technologies. The article concludes with a critical analysis of contradictions encountered by intersectional technopolitics activists as they interact with the structures of broader social movements, social media technologies, and societal hierarchies.
Left Out? Digital Media, Radical Politics and Social Change
ABSTRACT This paper begins from the basic premise that in considering digital media and its multifarious relations with forms of protest and political mobilization, we are interested in social change. Yet, too often, the key ingredient of protest and political mobilization – the radical politics itself – is left out of our analyses. How can we begin to tackle the challenges posed to democratic politics if we do not talk about actual politics as part of our research? This problem is both conceptual and practical. A politics requires a practice. We cannot understand the nature of the practice without understanding its politics; we cannot understand the politics without appreciating its processes and organization. Yet, so many studies do just this. This paper argues that a fugitive politics limits our abilities to take progressive thought and action forward. By ignoring the actual politics, we end up depoliticizing counter politics because we offer precious few suggestions as to how we can do democratic politics better. Without an understanding of the conditions under which a Left progressive politics could develop then the politics itself threatens to remain ill defined. What might it mean then to put the development of a counter politics at the heart of our analyses? What are the conditions required (including the communicative conditions) for radical political organizations/collectives to endure, build capacity and effect social change? http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/1369118X.2015.1109698
Teorija in praksa (vol. 51, no. 6), pp.: 1222-1241, 2014
The paper looks at the wider role of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the context of their use in global political struggles, but also on the back of their sweeping abuse for surveillance by global capitalist corporations and state institutions. A general question is raised: can the Internet and social media be perceived as a means of social progress or as mechanisms of oppression? The author proceeds from a critical perspective and emphasises that ICTs must be analysed as parts of the social totality. They cannot be understood in a dichotomous way, but only as being full of contradictions. Yet, contradictions do not entail relativism – class inequalities, exploitation and domination are filtered through ICTs together with the manifold antagonisms emerging from capitalist societies.
Mediating Social Media's Ambivalences in the Context of Informational Capitalism
International Journal of Civic Engagement and Social Change, 2016
This essay explores the dialectics of media, by considering the socially reproductive and transformative function of social media from a political economic perspective. The authors claim that while media have consistently generated aspirations and fear of social change, their powerful capability of shaping societies depend on the historically specific social relations in which media operate. They engage such an argument by examining how the productive relations that support user generated content practices such as the ones of Facebook users affect social media in their capability to reproduce and transform existing social contexts. In the end, the authors maintain that the most prominent mediation of social media consists of the ambivalent nature of current capitalist mode of production: a contest in which exploitative/emancipatory as well as reproductive/transformative aspects are articulated by liberal ideology.
tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society
This article aims to illustrate the complexity of the relationships between digital participation spaces and organisations related to the Southern-European and US socialist traditions. Digital communication and, in particular, the various platforms of digital participation have been long living between the illusion of techno-libertarian thrusts and the technocratic tendencies framing the New Public Management approach. The suspicion of socialist-inspired parties but also of post-Marxist social movements towards the digital is connected on the one hand to the organisational structure of the parties and on the other hand to the capacity of neoliberalism to incorporate digital innovation in its cultural horizon. Participation platforms have often been functional to the emergence of a neoliberalism with a human face, capable of offering potential spaces of participation that depoliticise civic activism and transform it into a mere technical tool of minimal governance. In recent years, h...