Netroots UK: New wine into old bottles?

9 January 2011: Michael Calderbank on the challenges ahead for the online left.

In one sense yesterday’s Netroots UK conference couldn’t have come at a better time. The student protests and the impressive UKUncut actions against tax avoiders have demonstrated how social media can help groups to organise and campaign with a spontaneity and immediacy rarely achieved through the formal hierarchies of the traditional left.

Yet if the event was all about the possibilities of 21st Century digital technologies for a new wave of radical activism, then the presence of plenary speakers representing organisations such as the The Guardian, the Fabian Society and the Trades Union Congress showed that institutions whose politics were first shaped in the late 19th century are still exerting a certain authority.

This points to a central contradiction in the Netroots UK project, modelled as it is on the Networks Nation in the US (which lined up online activists both Democrat and non-aligned - behind Obama’s bid for the Presidency). So, too, elements behind the UK version are clearly looking to harness the energy, enthusiasm and know-how of young activists in order to legitimise the Labour party’s claim to lead the anti-cuts struggle, while at the same time bestowing official recognition only of those elements that agree to confine their politics within the limits of middle-class respectability.

But it is clear that even amongst yesterday’s attendees (still more of the wider layers of young activists who didn’t opt to spend their Saturday mornings listening to Polly Toynbee), many web-savvy campaigners have little desire to define their efforts according to the priorities of re-electing a largely unreconstructed Labour party. And while there are some signs that Labour is recognising that it’s old “command-and-control” model of organising is not workable in the digital age, its present party structures have little attraction for many young people. Indeed, it is precisely as a consequence of frustration with the unresponsive and unaccountable channels of formal politics and its associated media discourse that these new forms of communication, information and organisation are developing.

There is still an active debate about the extent to which today’s activists are aiming to exert influence over established political figures and the mainstream media, or whether their aim is to bypass institutionally conservative interests and appeal directly to their peers. So while some participants are clearly aspiring to be the bloggers-de-jour of the liberal media and establish their own profile as “the voice” of the new generation (like latter-day Danny Cohn-Bendits), others - such as the UCL student occupiers - were raising more radical questions about how ‘horizontal’ methods of organising are still susceptible to the de-facto manipulation by self-appointed leaderships. Conspicuous by their absence were the established groups of the traditional far left, which seems to retain a residual suspicion of the internal democratic logic of the digital media. But with trade union involvement (predictably given the venue) largely confined to a layer of professional officials, discussion about low level self-organising in workplaces and communities found it harder to compete with the larger institutional players 38 Degrees, Avaaz.org and Blue State Digital.

The risk here is that mass e-mobilisations take a lowest-common-denominator approach to political messaging which threatens to soften the more radical edge of campaigns, resulting in a bland, amorphous liberalism. Yet if NetrootsUK was rather too quick to gloss over real political differences, it did nevertheless indicate that an important new front is opening up in a broader social struggle. Whether the new forms of organisation made possible by digital technology will be able to emerge or whether established interests will ensure that new wine is poured back into old bottles, will be put decisively to the test as the anti-cuts struggles develop.