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.

  • Star Wars Enjoyer @lemmygrad.ml
    91·
    4 years ago

    There really is no such thing as ‘privacy’ in the modern world. The state already has all of your data, they already know where you live, and where you work. If you keep a phone on yourself while you’re out, they can easily track it to triangulate your location. If you interact with the internet at all - and I mean, even just a little - corporations and the state will see everything you’re doing, even with VPNs. My service provider sent me a cease and desist order for piracy, while I was using a VPN that multiple people told me was good for specifically that. They know what you’re up to, and it’s fruitless to resist them on that. Heck, the FBI probably already knows every Lemmygrad user’s full name and address, I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re all already on a list. Esp since many of us came from the leftist side of Reddit, which was selling our data.

    So, it’s much better for yourself and those around you to stop caring about ‘privacy’ and instead dedicate your time to progressing movements. The people who get paranoid about their internet privacy end up - in my opinion - becoming very toxic about it, that’s not helpful to anyone.

    If we keep sacrificing the revolution for our own privacy, then selfishness will be the downfall of the collective.