Why Start This Website?
There are millions of websites, so why start another?
As mentioned elsewhere, this is partly, even mostly, an experiment or rather an exploration into low resources/high availability web publishing.
Right now it’s a personal project but I hope that it may help to develop the debate both technically and politically about how we as socialists use the web.
When the web was first growing there were masses of adverts which went along the lines “start your own web shop, open 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year worldwide.” There probably still are if you look through your spam folder.
When I first had a telephone (a landline phone) of my own, I had a curious thought. It potentially connected me to any one of millions, in fact hundreds of millions, even billions of other telephones and therefore people worldwide.
It was quite an intoxicating thought, but if I had wanted to talk to a million people rather than one individual then it would have been problematic. You could imagine the time and expense from my home telephone.
Of course, capitalist corporations had/have more resources. They hire people to make the phone calls for them. Or they have access to radio and television to talk to millions of people at the same time, and newspapers to write for millions to read.
What is it I’m trying to say?
It’s that we still have this divide. In capitalist countries like the UK, where I live, the internet (or really the world wide web that was developed upon it) has not changed anything about who owns what.
The web has not changed the class relationships in our society, nor has it broken the domination of the media by capitalist corporations.
If you are a socialist, giving a socialist message on the web then you’re still effectively the home telephone user, or someone who is tolerated on a small range of platforms created, owned and controlled by others.
In the past Socialists started newspapers. They trained themselves to write, organise and to print newspapers. This gave them access to millions of people, or at least hundreds of thousands on their own platform.
It’s no accident that people like Marx and Lenin spent so much of their lives as editors and writers of socialist newspapers. It’s true that they also wrote for the capitalist press (eg. Marx writing for the New York Tribune). But, Lenin emphasised the importance of a “party” press, of a working class socialist press that is not beholden to capitalists.
It’s fundamental, because, on their platforms, be it a website, social media or a newspaper, socialists are always, at the very best, simply tolerated.
Back to the telephone. The websites that we produce are analogous to a telephone compared to a cable television package.
Websites that cater for, and advertise to, millions of people are light years away in terms of infrastructure from a website built with Wordpress on commodity hosting.
Sure, you can build a pretty website. You can put your articles up with lots of pictures, flashy effects, cool layouts …it could look as good as The Guardian, BBC, CNN etc etc. But, frankly, you’re kidding yourself.
It’s as if Marx had hand-written each edition of “Neue Rheinische Zeitung” and then passed this single copy around his friends and acquaintances.
This may seem to be a harsh comment, and it is. As such it doesn’t deny the hard work done by people who write and publish socialist material. But, in the era of corporate domination of web publishing and increasing restrictions on corporate owned and controlled social media, we need to do better. We need our own platforms, as socialists always have.