Resolution on People’s Progressive Culture and Modern Media

wrong-doers and major movements from Seattle to the Arab Spring and the Occupy have relied increasingly on them for rapid mobilisation of protesters. The Open Source Movement, Wikipedia and Wikileaks have made available to individuals and organisations considerable free space for political discourse and for developing a democratic people’s media. We still find ourselves at a primary stage in utilising such spaces through the party website, blogs created by mass organisations and individual comrades using their pages/accounts on social networks. While paying urgent attention to improve the quality of the party website, we must make concerted efforts to use the entire range of social media avenues in a more planned and purposeful manner.

28. Governments across the globe are doing everything they can to destroy the democratic potential and strike power of social networks and the internet generally. They are particularly worried that their excessive dependence on information networks have opened up a new field of subversion thanks to the “hactivists” i.e., social and political activists who use their hacking skills for anti-establishment and pro-people objectives, such as the US-based group Anonymous (one of the initiators of the Occupy Wall Street movement).

29. In our country the union and State governments are arbitrarily using Section 66A of the IT Act – the recent cases in West Bengal (where a university professor was beaten up and arrested for just forwarding a witty, innocuous cartoon) and Maharashtra (where two girls were arrested under this clause as well as section 505(2) of the IPC in Mumbai for posting and “liking” a perfectly reasonable comment after the death of Bal Thackeray) are telling – to curb freedom of expression. We support the popular demand of immediate scrapping of this authoritarian Section 66A and oppose every attempt to curb internet freedom. On the international plane, we condemn the US-led witch-hunt of fighters like Julian Assange, the leading light of Wikileaks, who have taken asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, Wikileaks whistleblower Bradley Manning who is bravely exposing the war crimes and other misdeeds of the US state from the dock, and Aaron Swartz, a tireless campaigner for free access to information who apparently committed suicide under pressure of the US police.

30. In spite of the corporate-controlled character of the dominant media, greater intervention in this sphere is certainly possible and necessary. To make organised, systematic, and sustained efforts to intervene in all spheres of the media, it is necessary to build/activate the party’s media cells in the national and state capitals as well as other prospective centres. Improving the Party’s own network of organs and publications and systematic intervention in the dominant media must be seen as two sides of the Party’s integrated approach towards better utilisation of the modern media for effective communication and dissemination regarding the Party’s ideological-political positions and the whole gamut of struggles led by our comrades.

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