As COVID spread across the world, many activists were forced to take the struggle against capitalism online. Traditional avenues of organizing in the real world were cut off, and it was necessary to adapt. Social media discussions, Facebook groups, Zoom meetings, and Twitter threads replaced traditional face-to-face organizing methods. This was inevitable; online activism was better than no activism.
Online activism has its good points. Formerly local groups could suddenly attract and organize people in other cities, provinces, or even other countries. It allowed for people in the most isolated small town to find like-minded people and begin discussing revolutionary ideas about how to change our society for the better. This has been a positive process.
However, online activism also has many problems. All too often online groups become echo chambers divorced from the real world struggles of the working class. These groups attract toxic personalities and internet Stalinists who have no base in the real world and represent no one. Some layers of the far left have become far too comfortable in such online spaces. This is because you can comfortably say whatever you want, denounce whoever you want with little to no real-world repercussions.
As lockdown measures lift across the country, it is now time to turn back to real-world politics. We need real people, real movements, and most importantly—real organizing.
The need for organization
Different organizations had different reactions to the pandemic and lockdown conditions. The trade union bureaucracies reacted by cancelling entire congresses and shutting down avenues for mass democracy. The NDP responded by charging an exorbitant $150 entry fee to its online congress which naturally limited debate and democracy.
Many on the left created online spaces where people could discuss and share ideas. We have already explained the positive side of this, but these spaces have now largely devolved into toxic cesspools filled with infighting and personal attacks. No organization was built out of these methods during COVID.
Of course, we do not pretend that organizing is easy. Organizing can be a very difficult endeavor. It is often spoken about, but rarely is it successfully done. The pressures of organizing can lead to burnout and frustration by honest activists who have the drive to change the world but are inexperienced in how to do it. Organizing in the real world takes concerted effort. It means planning meetings, going out in public and giving presentations, setting up tables to engage with fellow workers, publishing literature and articles with a consistent political line, and most of all it requires patient explanation of revolutionary ideas. Organizing means winning the working class to socialism.
These traditions and methods take years to develop, and cannot be spontaneously manifested. Fightback was founded 20 years ago. At the time, we were the smallest left organization in Canada. We were told many times that we would never be able to build a serious organization using these methods, and that we must instead look for shortcuts. We ignored this bad advice from fair-weather friends. Now, we can confidently say we are the largest revolutionary organization in Canada due to these consistent methods of real-world organizing.
Fightback, the Canadian section of the International Marxist Tendency, adapted these traditions to online organizing during the pandemic. We organized mass online meetings which were enormously successful and captured the interest of thousands of young activists across the country. We held our annual Montreal Winter School online for the first time, resulting in 1,150 registrations. We also held our second-ever Western Marxist School in Alberta, which attracted over 200 registrations. Unlike other organizations, we did not cancel our congress, and instead held it online. With over 300 people attending from over 30 cities, it was clearly a massive success. It is important to underline that these successes are not accidents—they are the result of years of real-world organizing. They are the fruits of solid organizational traditions.
Internet tankies
Unfortunately, not all stories are so positive. One particularly ugly phenomena that has taken root over the past period of online organizing is the anonymous online tankie. This noisy subgroup of the online left is often found espousing an eclectic mix of identity politics while cheerleading the “successes” of Chinese capitalism. Heaven help you if you dare to criticize them, as they are incapable of honest debate. Instead, the online tankie thrives on personal attack and slander, which they quickly follow with a purge of their opponents to stop any response from being put forward.
We must be clear: These people have no real political or personal life. They are effectively the incels of the left. They have all the time in the world to shitpost online and disorganize and disrupt the movement, but do not lift a finger to help push forward the revolutionary struggle offline. The plight of the working class is secondary to them.
In fact, many of them believe in Third-Worldist ideas. This is an ideology which claims that the working class in western countries does not exist, and is in fact complicit in the crimes of capitalism. This is a ridiculous notion that does not face up to close observation. Did the Amazon workers at the Brampton warehouse, who faced horrible working conditions and a mass COVID outbreak, benefit from capitalism? What about Dael Muttly Jaecques, a bus driver for 18 years, who caught COVID and died while driving the route to and from the warehouse? These tragedies are entirely ignored by the online tankies.
The reality is that although it is easy to shitpost online all day, it builds nothing. These online “activists” have adopted a cancerous approach to organizing. Therefore, while it was absolutely necessary to focus our efforts online for a time, we must turn back to the real world. Anybody who wishes to actually change society must go where the masses are: the streets, the workplaces, the schools, the neighbourhoods. They must organize in the real world and join a real revolutionary organization.
Without organization, the working class is merely raw material for exploitation. The revolutionary potential inherent in the working class would lie untapped without proper organizing. Spontaneous movements will always arise, but they come and go, often defeated due to bad leadership. If nobody builds a permanent organization, demoralization follows after such defeats as activists struggle to understand why they were defeated.
A real organization saves the best activists from each movement, organizes them around a common program, and prepares them for the next struggle. It acts as the revolutionary memory of the working class as a whole, ensuring past mistakes remain in the past and lessons are learned for the future.
If you are reading this, and wish to remain online in these toxic left spaces, we have only one thing to say to you: Bon voyage! We wish you the best, but we turn our back on such methods. If however, you wish to fight and win, then we implore you to join us in the real world. As Marx once said, the workers have nothing to lose but their chains.
We have a world to win.
