This is a good riposte to a piece that brought my attention.

The dismissiveness of those who can easily build networks and be around well informed people to those without such a privilege can be aggravating. If an online movement lacks material analysis, engage with it. ‘Simulated’ activism can derive in itself from the lack of opportunities at ground level. I’ve worked freelance jobs where unionism is pretty impossible, to low pay service work where you’re held in a panopticon and any sniff of organising would result in a boot out of the door. The internet in such a case is the only tool. Lack of ‘real’ political work is not always down to a lack of ‘interest’ or ‘cunning’. There’s also an ableist undercurrent to this which is worth remarking upon.

It’s moreover an analysis that does not give any attention to the fact that the outlets which were more or less seen as the foundations of ‘classic’ social movements and those that had a hand in forming the Labour Party in the first place: the debating societies (away from undergraduate meetings), the pub debates (to a large degree, given that pubs in many places now are pretty deserted or demolished and have given way to nightclub hedonism), the self-published leafleting and in isolated industrial towns especially the Methodist chapels, have now gone. In its place is, for better or for worse, internet use, social media threads, blogging, forum discussions. Utopian ideas of the net are old hat and I am not suggesting an innate positive about any of this, but this is the new paradigm of social networking and even working class intellectualism, and any attempt to rebuild a movement, ‘real’ or ‘ simulated’, has to understand that.