Says Lenin:
“Whilst you lack the strength to do away with bourgeois parliaments and every other type of reactionary institution, you must work within them because it is there that you will still find workers who are duped by the priests and stultified by the conditions of rural life; otherwise you risk turning into nothing but windbags.”
One of the main concerns communists have addressed is the fear of losing so-called “privacy” on the internet when engaging on bourgeois social media. Many refuse to use Instagram, Facebook, the two most used bourgeois social media on the internet, out of privacy risks.
Yes, they are privacy hellholes, but organizing in a communist party is also an “attack” on your privacy. Having your name written down on a list somewhere is at least expected if you engage in revolutionary activity. Karl Marx himself was constantly spied on by the Prussian government spies during his time working at the Rheinische Zeitung, and he even acknowledged seeing spies following him to his peers.
There are times we should be careful about exposing ourselves and our organization, when doing certain activities. But we aren’t a sect, and we should learn to show our faces to the workers, even at the cost of our privacy, otherwise our ideas will remain unknown. Is our privacy more important than the revolution?
Besides, the spying and tracking capabilities of bourgeois apparatus goes way beyond sending data directly to through their software. Facebook, for instance, is known to create “shadow profiles” associated with your browsing behavior before you even create an account there. Google has fingerprinting techniques which make possible to identify you even if you change your IP. And everywhere you go, you leave metadata identifying your machine to servers anywhere.
Fighting for privacy through individual means and boycott is a meaningless struggle which only serves to keep us low profile and inaccessible to workers who engage in bourgeois social media. As communists we should strive to occupy ALL spaces with our critiques, and leave no vacuum possible in political discourse. Where there’s vacuum, it’s bound to be filled with content, and in a political vacuum if it’s not filled with our ideas, it will be filled by bourgeois ideology.
Yes, yes, yes. Not only that, we must be the last people to leave. If forced to leave, we must have the tenacity to return over and over again. We are already disadvantaged enough as is. If the US uses USAGM as an arm of war, namely psychological war, then I see the media, social or traditional as a sort of battlefield and not a place to relax with friends. I’m sure many of us have experienced how uncomfortable it is to argue on social media. This is why I liken it to a battlefield. In war, in battle, it’s not going to be comfortable. If you are anti-imperialist, it is a duty to engage and I agree very strongly with your last paragraph.