Facebook’s excesses greeted with silence

THERE are serious questions facing social media and especially, Facebook.

Questions regarding what was in fact central to our struggles during the apartheid era, especially for the so-called independent Marxist Left outside the alliance of the ruling ANC with the SACP. This left has a huge presence on Facebook, not only in South Africa, but around the globe.

Nobody raised more strongly and sharply the destructive consequences apartheid had for the democratic notions of freedom, power and conscious control over our lives than this left.

I will leave aside for the moment that the SACP has certainly not stepped forward to lead an explicit struggle for socialism after 1994, which it was supposed to do.

However, an essential part of this left’s ideological, political and philosophical repertoire was the utilisation of the Marxist notions of fetishism, alienation, reification and especially how almost everything under capitalism was commercialised and commodified, including knowledge and information, the business of Facebook. In other words, the aim of the anti-capitalist struggle was to combat these systemic consequences for the working class and wider civil society, with which the struggle for socialist emancipation was inseparably linked.

It is precisely for these reasons that I never cared much to join Facebook and only reluctantly did so later, in, I think, 2015. But what has struck me with incredible force is how these Marxists are instead inseparably part of the Facebook frenzy, totally oblivious or uncaring about the major and unpalatable contradictions this practice and its political context represents for their long-held beliefs and views.

All the Marxist notions of fetishism, reification and commodification have silently died. So much uncritical fetishism is there in their orientation to Facebook that it represents for me one of the biggest contradictions and conundrum of this left. Most of them seem quite addicted to Facebook in the most intriguing fashion.

When I mentioned in a post in 2016 that I, together with assistance from the Legal Resources Centre, was taking Facebook to court to compel them to release basic information about their presence in South Africa, there was hardly a response from this same left. This was especially baffling since this was not only the first time Facebook faced a legal challenge in South Africa, but the case was about the basic right of the public to company information about Facebook, like its physical address, contact details, list of directors and so on. I took this step after all my attempts to obtain this information from administrative staff at Melrose Arch – where their South African office is based – failed.

The action against Facebook was successful, in that the information I sought, which they repeatedly and arrogantly refused to provide, was given to me. But not even a post in which I mentioned this important success got much of a response from this left.

I was struck by the hypocrisy. I mean, this was Facebook, which enjoyed a virtual global monopoly in its field, operating like all other global capitalist giants and with a fierce determination to rake in ever-bigger profits.

Today, the fact that data is literally money is an oppressive and dizzying reality which poorer subscribers have to contend with daily, whether it be with Facebook, Vodacom and so on. Data is brutally commodified, as those from the working class who are lucky to be on Facebook will tell you. We don’t own or control data.

To the contrary, it owns and controls us.

More disturbing is that Facebook is increasingly intervening and actively censoring posts, including banning people when they don’t like the content, according to criteria they impose on subscribers.

This is a serious, oppressive and alienating invasion of communication and political rights which Facebook is trampling on with impunity. White men in grey suits or denim these days are still controlling the world.

Yet, you do not even see the left on Facebook raise these key and critical issues in their posts.