Russia and the Internet: Anything Goes as Long as It Sets False Goals for the Working Class

Among the news stories circulating lately in Russian media circles, one that stands out is the inevitable blacklisting of one service or another for refusing to cooperate with the Russian state. The latest “victim” of Rozkomnadzor (the Russian cyber-surveillance agency), the bureaucratic arm of the capitalist state, is Telegram, a service used by most Russians to stay informed and communicate. Instead of the stifled app, the state offers a “better” alternative (perhaps better for the police, to facilitate government surveillance)—a chat service curiously similar in design and functionality called Max (perhaps an acronym for “maximum-security prison”?), which has proven capable of blatantly spying on users, providing the government with direct access to their activities. Another problem has arisen from the fact that the app, being connected to government databases and storing all user information, is particularly vulnerable to breaches. By supposedly protecting the average Russian citizen from the “Western threat,” the state has played right into the hands of organized crime: brilliant! Many Russian middle-class people who love “democracy” and “freedom of speech” (some of whom masquerade as “Marxists”) have denounced all of this as an attack on the “dignity” of the average Russian. But here, for us revolutionary Marxists, a question arises spontaneously: What has changed for the Russian worker? Have food prices perhaps gone down? Has this “attack on dignity” perhaps caused more damage than the European-made ammunition fired by the proletarians forcibly conscripted into the Ukrainian army? Or is the “restriction of free speech” more significant than the many Russian proletarians fighting in the trenches? In fact, the defenders of “freedom”—even while claiming to be Marxists—cannot believe that the Russian proletariat has not staged uprisings or a “revolution” against this “injustice.” It must be noted, however, that these same bourgeois “socialists” have organized the most active workers into peaceful demonstrations, calling for the “abolition of censorship”! What a proposal! Where is the party that organizes workers into militant actions, rather than limiting itself to feeble cries for “freedom of information”? The workers followed these “Marxist” traitors straight into the hands of the omnipresent Russian police, resulting in dozens of arrests—just as had happened previously with the failed pacifist demonstrations “against the war.”

We can answer these questions posed by our “friends” with relative ease. In his work, “The German Ideology,” which was unpublished at the time, Marx wrote:

“While the bourgeoisie of every nation still upheld its own national interests, large-scale industry has created a class that shares the same interests in all nations and for which nationality is already a thing of the past…”

The Russian state, for example—or any other state—cannot stop the flow of information or stifle workers’ discontent simply by imposing restrictions on the Internet. Russia is still part of the international economy and cannot be isolated from the Internet, which, like every technology in the current capitalist system of production, is first and foremost a tool of commerce for the bourgeoisie. That is why the brazen claims by European nationalists to “exorcise” the Russian “barbarians” from the Internet have not materialized in the four years since the start of the imperialist war in Ukraine, and it is for the same reason that the Russian state has not blocked mass access to the Internet, despite the cries of its ideologues warning of “Western degeneration.” This or that faction of the bourgeoisie may restrict certain services, but the communications network must remain intact—and so we will resist. In fact, despite all the efforts

of the capitalists over the long centuries of communist struggle, despite all the arrests, surveillance, and censorship, our line still stands today and will stand until the victorious revolution of the proletariat.

As for the question raised by our bourgeois socialist “friends” regarding the apathy of the Russian proletariat, as we have already noted, material conditions—however dire—have not yet reached the lowest point for revolutionary action; the moment of awakening has not yet arrived; the proletariat is disorganized and holds back out of fear of state repression, which is a disguised advantage, because Russia currently lacks a party ready to lead the revolutionary vanguard in liberating both the Russian and the international worker.

We do not need appeals to bourgeois concepts of “freedom.” We need proletarian organizations committed to economic action and a party capable of leading them in class struggle. We need a revival of true revolutionary Marxism, which died out long ago in Russia with the demise of the October Revolution, but which continues to burn—albeit as a small flame—in the tradition of left-wing communism and the Communist International.