A-Infos (en) Workers Solidarity Movement : Irish Anarchist Review 5 - Revolutionary Organization in the age of Networked Individualism

The revolutions and revolts that swept the world in 2011 took almost everyone by surprise. 
One of the first strong attempts to explain why they happened is Paul Mason’s ‘Why It’s 
Kicking Off Everywhere.’  He argues that “the materialist explanation for 2011...is as 
much about individuals versus hierarchies as it is about rich against poor.”    By far the 
most provocative element of his book is the idea that communications technology, in 
particular the internet, is transforming the way people behave and that a significant 
contribution to the revolts of 2011 lie in these changes.  If he’s right it had profound 
consequences for the form and structure of revolutionary organisations including anarchist 
ones. ---- This article also availale on audio & video, see end. ---- In Mason’s book 
these new people are the Networked Individuals.

One critic of the concept Barry Wellman provides this useful summary of what he terms 
Networked Individualism.  He says it is “the move from densely-knit and tightly-bounded 
groups to sparsely-knit and loosely-bounded networks. Each person is a switchboard, 
between ties and networks. People remain connected, but as individuals, rather than being 
rooted in the home bases of work unit and household. Each person operates a separate 
personal community network, and switches rapidly among multiple sub-networks.. the organic 
and multi-dimensional relationships of communities are being transformed into narrow 
digitally-enabled, highly individualized, networked relationships; perhaps most widely 
recognizable as Facebook “friend”-ings accompanied by Facebook “like”-ings as a possible 
substitute for shared community values and norms.” 
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol8/issue3/wellman.html

Mason uses sociologist Richard Sennett’s conception of the networked individual as one 
with “weak ties, multiple loyalties and greater autonomy.”   Mason shows how the 
individual freedoms that were won in the period from the late 1960’s were not, as many 
think, a unique step forward in history. In terms of such freedoms we are not in fact 
always moving forward making gains; gains won can, and have been, rolled back by reaction 
-- sometimes slowly and sometimes in jumps. He references the period before World War One 
and its “zeitgeist of globalized trade, technological progress and sexual liberation... 
followed by a century of economic crisis, militarism, genocide and totalitarian rule.”

Referring to the movement of the 60’s and the 1962 Port Huron statement in particular, he 
rejects the idea that the break with collectivism that statement represented was “the 
doomed precursor of neoliberalism” and instead argues that it failed because it was 
premature.  Premature because technology was not developed enough to allow freedom for the 
majority and premature because “the forces of collectivism, nationalism and corporate 
power were, at that point, stronger than the forces fighting against them.”

The Network effect

At the heart of the concept of the Networked Individual is the Network Effect. Basically 
the more people that use a network the more useful it is. If you were the first person in 
the world with a phone, it would have been of no use. When two people had a phone it would 
still have been of very limited use to either of them. The more people had phones the more 
useful they became to each individual with a phone. They become most useful to everyone in 
the phone network when everybody not only has a phone but has it on them at all times. One 
statistic stood out for me in the entire book: “Facebook put on six-sevenths of its user 
base in the three years after Lehman Brothers went bust.”  In terms of the Network Effect 
this means we should have expected a massive increase in Facebook’s influence in that 
time, far more that the 600% growth alone would suggest.

That ‘network effect’ is the reason so many of us are stuck using Facebook even though we 
dislike its corporate greed, unethical methods and use by the police and other state 
forces as a surveillance tool.  Almost all of us make the judgment that these 
disadvantages, all of which are significant, are outweighed by the advantage of not only 
being able to reach out to hundreds of similar activists, but also thousands or even 
hundreds of thousands of random folk. There are attempts to set up alternative activist 
social network sites, but very few of us use them because the only people there are a 
rather small minority of other activists.

The transformation of people

The argument Mason makes is not trivial: these communications technologies are 
transforming people.  In the book he launches into a description of how the transformation 
of people who play multi-user online computer games affects real world interactions: “a 
woman tweeting at work or from the front line of a demonstration is experiencing the same 
shared consciousness, role-play, multifaceted personality and intense bonding that you get 
in World of Warcraft.” He follows up a listing of tweets (about Libya) that he received 
over ten minutes with the comment that this “beats any ten minutes of Counter-Strike ever 
played.”

Later in the same chapter he returns to the theme, saying “observers of the early factory 
system described how, within a generation, it had wrought a total change in the behavior, 
thinking, body shapes and lee expectancy of those imprisoned within it.  People grew 
smaller, their limbs became bent; physical movements became more regimented. Family units 
broke down.  Why should a revolution in knowledge and technology not be producing an 
equally frantic - albeit diametrically opposite - change in human behavior?”

The use of social networks substitutes for the strong ties that used to exist amongst 
workers when we all left the same streets every morning to work in the same factories or 
down the same mine.  Under such conditions the social pressure to stand by your fellow 
workers and act collectively was enormous, but your connections seldom extended far from 
that pit village or industrial district. You were dependent on the union or party 
leadership for coordination and information from afar. The ties generated by networks may 
be very much weaker; they require very little commitment but they also have a very much 
greater reach.

The orthodox left tends to bemoan and wish for a return to those earlier days when mass 
labour intensive factories concentrated and disciplined thousands of workers in the way 
that both Leninist parties and many unions found useful.  It’s no coincidence that leftist 
terminology from that period is riddled with military terms and analogies -- the working 
class was literally an army that was ordered into battle. Left to one side in that longing 
for the old days is that while these methods might have looked efficient on paper, in 
historical reality they were a disaster.  The imposed centralized discipline created the 
mechanism by which small, well meaning or otherwise, minorities could impose an 
increasingly brutal discipline to ensure that what the party considered the correct course 
was taken.  Stalin’s gulags could not have existed without the centralized discipline 
required to command millions to both enter and operate that system.  In 1956 at the 
British Communist Party’s conference those few who tried to raise the Russian invasion of 
Hungary were drowned out by mass chants of ‘discipline, discipline’

The role of the revolutionary organisation in the networked age

If the central thesis of the book is correct, that is that the advent of mass one to many 
communication in the form of the internet is transforming both production and the way 
people behave then there is a strong argument to radically re-examine everything we 
understand by revolutionary organisation.  This after all is a very, very different 
situation than that faced by any previous generation of revolutionaries for whom mass 
communication was non-existent unless you had built the mass organisation that could 
produce finance, and distribute a daily paper.

What is our model

The current model of revolutionary organisation for all of the far left and most of the 
anarchist movement draws on organisational models that are derived from the organisations 
built under the old factory system. That is they are based on strong ties between people 
and a relatively high level of discipline, either self or collectively agreed in the case 
of anarchism or imposed from above in the case of the various types of Leninism. 
Anarchist organisations tended to allow considerably more autonomy to local sections but 
they were still largely expected to stay within the confines set by the decisions of 
regular conferences and statements of aims and principles. They certainly are not based on 
”weak ties and multiple loyalties” -- indeed many anarchist organisations would rule out 
being a member of other anarchist organisations.

The point here is not that the new tendency towards “weak ties, multiple loyalties and 
greater autonomy” makes it impossible to construct such organisations.  Clearly they 
continue to exist and recruit.  As is the case for unions, which are organised on the same 
basic lines but limit themselves to the economic sphere of struggle.  The point is that 
perhaps it is no longer possible to imagine these organisations building into the sort of 
mass forms that would be needed to co-ordinate revolution as once happened in Russia in 
1917 or Spain in 1936.

We are also at least a decade into a process where it has become apparent that attempts to 
impose that old model of organisation on the emerging movement have shown very little 
success and in many cases have done considerable damage.  There is little to be gained 
from a debate over whether these changes are good, bad or indifferent for revolutionaries, 
the point is that have and are happening. We either find new ways of organising around 
“weak ties, multiple loyalties and greater autonomy” or we retire to the sidelines to 
comment, archive and hold the occasional meeting about the Spanish revolution.

Giving full consideration to this question is the task of another article (or indeed a 
shelf of books and decades of experimentation) but what can be said is that we are talking 
here not of a theory but of an emerging process that can already be observed and learned 
from. One that is over a decade old.   From Zapatista solidarity to the Seattle WTO 
protest through to Tahir, Real Democracy & Occupy the methods of the old left have not 
been to the forefront of emerging moments of struggle.  Instead we have seen the 
development of a largely new set of structures and methodologies that do indeed reflect 
the “weak ties, multiple loyalties and greater autonomy” of those drawn into involvement.

Where the terrain has been such that the advantages of the left organisations in terms of 
the concentration of resources has put them in the driving seat the result has often been 
ugly and disempowering.  The old left controlled the anti-war movement at the time of the 
2003 invasion of Iraq and was unable to do anything to slow or halt the drive to war 
despite the mass opposition.  The old left, if we understand it to include the union 
leaderships, controlled the mass union marches and token strike of 2008-2010 and were 
unable to halt or even slow the drive to austerity.  In both cases the price of failure 
included massive levels of demoralization that made many less willing to engage in future 
activity even if it also resulted in an angry minority.

Just about the only terrain the old left has advanced on in Ireland is the electoral one. 
This perhaps not only because the crisis has made anti-capitalist politics popular but 
more fundamentally because the crisis of organisation arising from this new age of “weak 
ties, multiple loyalties and greater autonomy” is destroying the traditional organisations 
of the political party system of the right at as great if not greater a rate than it has 
destroyed those of the left. The meteoric rise of the Tea Party network over the more 
traditional Republicans in the Republican Party in the US being one example.  The 
electoral gains of the left are of course also on a terrain that is best suited to “weak 
ties, multiple loyalties and greater autonomy”.  Taking 3 minutes to vote for someone 
every 5 years as a very weak commitment. This is why while tens or hundreds of thousands 
voted for the radical left at the election, the next demonstrations called by the same 
organisations attracted only hundreds.

In the last couple of years many on the left, including the WSM have started to try to 
shift their organisational structures and engagement models from the traditional forms to 
new forms.  In Ireland initiatives like ‘Claiming Our Future’ are very obviously based on 
trying to find ways to work with a large network of people with “weak ties, multiple 
loyalties and greater autonomy” rather than try and recruit them into a single 
organization.  There is probably a very interesting question around just how conscious 
such organisations are that they are attempting a fundamental transformation and how much 
it is simply a reaction to the changing world around us and in particular the new 
technologies that are available.

Lessons from the summit protests

My experiences in the early summit protest movement led me to sit down and write a 
relatively detailed discussion of the emerging networks and the role of technology in 
revolutionary politics back in 2004, published as ‘Summit Protests & Networks.’ 
http://www.wsm.ie/c/summit-protests-network-organisation-anarchism  The argument I made 
back in 2004 was that while some “see the two organisational methods as in competition 
with each other. This need not be so, in fact for anarchists both forms should be 
complementary as the strengths of one are the weaknesses of the other and vice versa. The 
rapid growth of the movement has strongly favoured the network form, it’s now time to look 
at also building its more coherent partner. That is to build specific anarchist 
organisations that will work in and with the networks as they emerge.”

This was perhaps an acceptable fudge but one that avoids rather than answers the central 
issue.  There are models of revolutionary organisation that would be based on a very small 
revolutionary cadre influencing much larger mass movements but experience has indicated 
that even in the internet age it is hard for a small group to ramp up mass influence fast 
enough in a crisis.  Previously I’ve argued that at an absolute minimum a revolutionary 
organisation should aim to recruit one person in 1,000 into its ranks, around 6,000  as a 
target for the island of Ireland.  Our experience of the early days of the crisis is that 
the small numbers that the left had in the unions meant that although arguments could and 
were won in union branches where there were active leftists this was a tiny minority of 
branches so the argument was lost overall.  At least at that point in time internet reach 
did not compensate for a lack of people on the ground to make the arguments.

I think this rough maths still applies but what does make sense is to recognize that the 
costs of maintaining a large loose periphery in terms of both time and money are 
magnitudes less than they used to be because of the new technology.  Up to now it simply 
wasn’t possible never mind worthwhile for a small number of volunteers to maintain contact 
with large number of individuals with “weak ties, multiple loyalties and greater 
autonomy.”  When my political involvement started that could only be done though 
addressing envelopes and licking stamps, something that very quickly became too expensive 
and time consuming.

Coherent organisations in networks

There is a political issue here as well though.  When you have a coherent organisation 
intersecting a network it will have an influence on that network a magnitude or two 
greater than the number of members it has should allow.  The internal dynamics of a 
coherent organisation will mean that its members will be immersed in a culture of regular 
political discussion and education and will almost certainly have discussed issues in 
outline long before they appear in the network at a formal level.  They will also have 
faster, more reliable and more trust worthy contact through their coherent organization 
with members in other cities than almost anyone in the network will have.

That sort of formal intervention is mirrored by the similar abilities that the informal 
leaders that arise within networks will have.  Both can only be guarded against through 
good process, awareness of such potential threats and a practice of challenging them and 
defusing them as they arise.  But while the experience of doing so can be an informal one, 
based around people with experience and who are not inclined to abuse that to become the 
informal leadership themselves, at least in the early stages of networks appearing and 
expanding, such skills will be few and far between.

Part of the role of the revolutionary organisation has to be then to build the needed 
skills within the network to identify and diffuse such problems as they arise.  It can 
also carry over these skills from one network to another in both time and space as its 
activists accumulate knowledge and experience.

Do we still need to build the revolutionary organisation

What about building the organisation itself. Does this new ‘networked individual’ and the 
ease of one to many internet communications mean that the size of a revolutionary 
organisation no longer matters.  That the three men and a dog organisation ‘with the right 
ideas’ are as important as an organisation of thousands?

I think size still matters when it comes to organising in real world meetings but I do 
think the new technology changes the way a coherent organization should operate.  It now 
makes sense to see our work in network forms of organisation as also being a way of 
accumulating engagement over time with a very large number of people most of whom will 
never join a coherent revolutionary organisation in normal circumstances.  To use the WSM 
as an example the 7,200 people currently following us via Facebook would have been 
impossible to find never mind retain contact with 20 years ago, As of now every one of 
them has the potential to see a link to each new article published on our site and to not 
only thus read it but also recommend it to their friends.  Doing this via the postal 
system would have cost in the region of 3,000 euro and dozens of hours stuffing envelopes.

In the past these realities necessitated that volunteer based revolutionary organisations 
had what has been called an ‘engagement cliff’ between a very dedicated hardworking 
membership and the broad mass of the population.  Leninist parties tried to get around 
this through ploughing a lot of resources into having their leadership as paid full 
timers. This gave them greater resources to maintain contact with a larger periphery but 
in doing so created very ossified organisations that magnified the problems inherent in 
centralized top down parties as that core group monopolized communications within the 
organisation and between the organisation and its periphery.

In any case the revolutionary anarchist organisation can never be more than a guiding 
light.  Unlike Leninists we do not aim to be the physical leadership of the revolution, we 
do not seek to put our organisation in power.  The anarchist concept of instead being a 
‘leadership of ideas’ ties rather well into a movement composed of people with “weak ties, 
multiple loyalties and greater autonomy” because it addresses the weak spots of such a 
movement without being in opposition to its fundamental characteristic of both individual 
and collective autonomy. In such a system the coherent anarchist organisation aims to be a 
scaffold along which many of the major nodes of a network can rapidly grow and link up as 
they are needed, a scaffold that gets reconfigured and hopefully increases its 
effectiveness with each new round of struggle.

Andrew Flood

Andrew also wrote a very much longer review of the entire of 'Why its Kicking off 
Everywhere'  http://www.wsm.ie/c/kicking-2011-revolts-age-networked-individual

Audio & Video versions of this article

Download the Audio from the Internernet Archive (page)
http://archive.org/download/RevolutionaryOrganizationInTheAgeOfNetworkedIndividualism-AndrewFlood/RervolutionaryOrganisationInternet.mp3
http://archive.org/details/RevolutionaryOrganizationInTheAgeOfNetworkedIndividualism-AndrewFlood

Listen to the Audio on Mixcloud

Revolutionary Organization in the age of Networked Individualism - Andrew Flood by Workers 
Solidarity on Mixcloud
http://www.mixcloud.com/workerssolidarity/revolutionary-organization-in-the-age-of-networked-individualism-andrew-flood/?utm_source=widget&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=base_links&utm_term=resource_link

Watch the video on Youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=v0MBC6_GcyE
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