"I must type out this screed! I am accomplishing a revolutionary victory!"

Several years ago I ended up in argument with a fellow Toronto activist about "internet presence" and its supposed necessity. His argument was that communist groups needed to use various "social networking" tools to make themselves viable while my argument was, despite recognizing the importance of using whatever means were available for agitation, that it might be a mistake to treat internet activism as a stand-in for on the ground organizing. (And yes, I realize the possible irony of discussing this problematic on a blog.) That is, I was opposed to the idea that organizations were somehow defunct or passé simply because they lacked an internet following. My contention was that a presence on the internet––particularly because internet presence speaks to a certain level of first world privilege and even the privilege ofto work online rather than organizing in concrete circumstances––is in no way a substitution of on-the-ground agitation and organization.Here it is worth citing some examples. First of all, the CPI(Maoist) lacks a significant and coherent internet presence and yet, despite this, it is leading the people's war in India. Although this lack of internet presence may indeed produce problems when it comes to expressing its existence, development, and aims to a broader audience, it has not affected its ability to grow in regions where, to be clear, people are not able to access the internet on a regular basis anyhow. By the same token, when we look at a smaller but still large revolutionary organization (compared to first world organizations) such as the Communist (Maoist) Party of Afghanistan, we also find an inability to plug into "social media" aside from a very small and struggling website. Nor are CmPA activists online arguing for their point of view, despite being the largest secular revolutionary organization in Afghanistan, especially in comparison of at least one other Afghani maoist organization (who I won't bother to name because the few activists of this extremely marginal group have nothing better to do but troll on the internet) that the CmPA couldn't locate for a long time in Afghanistan, despite their internet presence, due to their marginal status.What we discover, here, is a disparity between concrete organizing and an (overbloated) focus on internet presence. And in this disparity, which was the point I was trying to make to this old activist acquaintance, we might learn something about the limitations of social networking. While it is important to note that the tools afforded by various online sites and mediums are indeed useful, and should be treated as part-and-parcel of organizing (not only are these useful for agitation/propagation, they can also bolster on-the-ground campaigns), we should also recognize that such tools may become treated as intrinsically rather than instrumentally revolutionary. The always immanent danger is that a person or group with significant internet presence may mistake this presence as evidence that they possess revolutionary significance and thus valorize a retreat into internet leftism.Internet leftism can and does produce the illusion that an active website possesses a significant level of political strength simply because it regularly publishes analyses and debates with other websites that also produce a similar quantity of theoretical engagements. To claim that this demonstrates the efficacy of organization, without investigating whether this internet leftism communicates to any concrete mass organizing, simultaneously demonstrates the limits of this kind of discourse. We often discover (and I have been guilty of this) a theory alienated from practice due to the fact that the only practice is internet ideological engagement, a refined version of the "talk-shop". A theory divorced from any form of revolutionary activity amongst the masses in the social context in which one lives is a theory that cannot thrive on a deep form of social investigation; it investigates only amongst a vague internet population from anywhere and everywhere––it is close to book worship While the theoretical engagements of that emerge from internet leftism may not appear as divorced from reality as extreme versions of academic obfuscation––and some internet leftists (though not all) may even demonstrate their scorn for the theoretical work of "petty bourgeois" academics––the content, if not the form, is most often the same. Moribund theory couched in the right terminology, determined by axioms pulled only from books and other online screeds, stands in for a living theory derived from struggle, distorting one's concrete circumstances. Perhaps the most asinine variant of this theory is the kind that openly and unapologetically fetishizes internet organizing itself as a stand-in for doing something in the real world, hence the innumerable theories promoting crowd sourcing and social media as revolutionary praxis It is in this context that a call for new methods, practices, and symbolic orders makes sense. The old methods of organizing in the city, town, and region––in the streets themselves, in sites of production and reproduction, in the concrete and messy world that is embodied rather than abstracted online––are treated as old-fashioned a priori. Clearly this kind of organizing doesn't work if you aren't actually doing it: opportunism is normative because it has been embraced, treated as a fact of nature. What is actually a retreat is conceptualized as embarking on a new front, a new stage of struggle.A certain disdain for the people is often produced by activity primarily confined to internet agitation, and it is easy to demonstrate that such a disdain exists simply by examining how leftists treat each other, and not necessarily because of an actual line struggle, on sites such a revleft or what have you. And these are only leftists engaging with other leftists; the people as a whole––those masses we are trying to reach––are treated with disdain because they exist only symbolically, or as objects to be determined and redetermined in whatever argument we're invested in (and yes I am using thebecause I am also and often guilty of this practice). This disdain also has to do with the medium: we are engaging with others as if they are disembodied consciousnesses; space is heavily mediated but time is not––we can hammer out an angry reply without having time to second-guess ourselves, without having to engage with someone directly. Outside of these online engagements, when we deal with the other in day-to-day organizing, only dogmatic Sparts demonstrate this kind of disdain for the masses and other leftists––they've been trolling long before internet leftism even existed!There is, of course, a certain approach to the mass-line that I have encountered on more than one occasion that, based on the [false] understanding that agitation/propagation is something separate from a mass-line politics, could produce a critique of internet leftism that is dismissive simply by arguing that it is a violation of the mass-line. That is: the masses are not online and, since internet leftists spend all their time online, they aren't engaged with the masses at all. After all, if you assume that agitational work is not part of mass work then you will also assume that internet leftism is a violation of the mass-line for the wrong reasons. [] The online tools afforded to usput us in touch with the masses but only if they are directly linked to the work we are doing in our concrete social circumstances. In this way, like a communist newspaper or campaign propaganda if used correctly, they can extend the sphere of influence and become part of a politics that seeks to embed itself in the masses.Back to my original point. Internet leftism is not a substitute for on the ground organizing just as a newspaper, a book, or a journal are also not substitutions. The use of the tools afforded to us by online mediums can definitely supplement our organizational potential, but these tools are also limited just as they are monopolized by the particular privileges of class in terms ofand––there is not some idealwhere everyone in the world possesses equal access to online tools and the time to use these tools. Add to this the problem of translation, the problem of dealing with imperialist fire-walls, the problem of having to devote revolutionary resources that need to be in the streets to online agitation and it may be that those who have the most time to represent themselves organizationally online in a manner that makes them look more significant than they actually are might also be those who are utterly insignificant in the concrete terrain of their struggle (again, the Afghanistan example is salient).If we think of the Spartacist League as being a good example of how agitation/propagandization becomes a stand-in for a more comprehensive form of organizing––how they have confused the instrumental with the intrinsic––we can understand the meaning and limits of internet leftism. Interestingly enough, these dogmato-revisionists are disinterested in contemporary forms of social media, still fetishizing the newspaper over everything else. This obsession with the newspaper is not, unfortunately, driven by the fact that newspaper agitation forces the activist to be in contact with the masses; this is clear because the Spartacists disdain the masses and, at every moment when they have the chance, treat the very people they hope to "convert" (since they are, ultimately, an organization that treats communism as a religion) as ignorant dupes. Rather, this is simply a fetishization for a particular instrumentality. The fetishism inherent to internet leftism is similar; it is just an ironic fact that the Sparts, still acting as if they live in 1917, don't realize that they could better operationalize the same tired politics through social media conventions. And we should know better than to imitate their approach online, assuming we are different simply because we are not annoying people by shoving a newspaper in their faces. At the very least the Spartacist League interacts with people, however badly, face-to-face. We should not replicate their practice online.