The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy (Digital Barricades)

by Paolo Gerbaudo

In other words, the digital party is the translation of the business model and organisational innovation of digital corporations to the political arena and their application to the idealistic project of the construction of a new democracy in digital times.

What defines the digital party as a new party type is not simply the embracing of digital technology but the purpose of democratisation which digital technology is called to fulfil.

They adopt a philosophy of ‘distributed organising’, to use the terms of Sanders’ staffers Becky Bond and Zack Exley10 to tap into the political labour of their diffuse support base, much in the same way in which social media companies extract value from the ‘free labour’ of their dispersed user base.

Characteristic of all these formations has been the adoption of a flexible definition of membership.

The process of disintermediation of the party decrees the death of the cadre,

More generally, these parties belie the dangerous illusion that politics can be resolved simply through a change in process and restructuring of internal organisation rather than through a systemic overhaul of social structures and political institutions.

This data-driven logic adopts the free membership model of social network sites, and their data analytics, to maintain a constant sense of the mood of public opinion.

Furthermore, the opening up of participation creates new divides between ‘super-volunteers’ and ‘lurking sympathisers’, hyperactive and relatively passive participants.

To this sociology of extreme complexity, fragmentation and class dis-identification added the perception that in a globalised world the party would lose power for a rather obvious reason: because the nation-state, its traditional target of conquest and space of operation, was losing power in favour of global and unelected governance institutions.

Besides the comparative advantage of established parties over contenders, this inertia is due to the fact that political parties are anchored in deep-seated social cleavages that correspond to exceptional revolutionary turns of the modern era, such as the democratic revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries that gave birth to liberal and conservative parties, and the Industrial Revolution that spawned socialist and communist ones.34

The party, as normally understood in common parlance, is however a modern phenomenon which originates from the social conditions created by the Industrial Revolution, the rise of capitalism, the formation of national-popular states, the establishment of representative and parliamentary systems and universal suffrage. As Max Weber famously put it, political parties are ‘the children of democracy, of mass franchise, of the necessity to woo and organize the masses’.

parties can be said to have three ‘faces’ that have been famously identified by Katz and Mair – the party on the ground, the party in the central office and the party in state government.

First, the party exists in its support base as a movement made of members and sympathisers; second, political parties rely on the presence of central organisational offices, headquarters that allow them to coordinate their operations; third, political parties compete for elections to win office and obtain representatives.

The crisis of accumulation of Fordist capitalism, signalled by the oil shocks and the stagflation crisis of the seventies, weakened both the organised working class and traditional sectors of the bourgeoisie, the mass parties’ traditional bases of support.

Echoing the tendency towards outsourcing of neoliberal capitalism, full-time salaried functionaries are substituted by professionals, such as consultants, pollsters and spin doctors often employed on a short-term basis as freelancers, in particular during election campaigns.

The electorate comes to be approached as an ‘electoral market’, with marketing and advertising techniques used to understand and manipulate the people’s desires as if they were little more than consumers, and the key market is usually identified in moderate voters, more likely to switch sides.

With its mediatisation of politics, the television party type has eroded the role of the ‘party on the ground’ and strongly contributed to generating a passive attitude in the electorate, reminiscent of the ‘couch potato’ lifestyle attributed to TV viewers.

To summarise, it is not hierarchy and centralisation which in and of themselves constitute an enemy of democracy. Rather, the crux of the matter is whether the leadership and party staff are self-absorbed and self-reproducing or whether they serve members and deliver on their demands.

The manifold devices and services that epitomise such revolution are all digital in a very simple sense: because they operate on the basis of digital rather than analogue coding of information.

These days, instead, the world’s top companies by market valuation are almost entirely digital companies, with Apple worth over a trillion dollars and Amazon coming in the second place, before Google and Facebook. Thus, digital companies have displaced from the top corporate rankings, the oil and car companies – General Motors, Ford, Exxon, Shell and so on – that were the emblematic firms of the industrial era. This certainly does not mean that material production has disappeared. Cars continue to be produced, oil to be extracted, and the devices that make possible complex informational processes possible are hardwired in the mining of specific materials, such as silicon and rare earth minerals. Yet, these processes of production are pushed down the value chain, making the companies that produce them subordinated to the power of digital companies; that by now appear to have surpassed even banks in the echelons of global capitalism, and are in fact trying to become banks themselves, hoping to turn the millions of user accounts they have into credit accounts.95

As Karl Marx argued in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, technology is a ‘world-fact’, a condition that defines the very plane on which society and the economy operates.142 It not only determines the mode of production, but within the mode of production it mediates social relationships among different actors, whether they be relations of domination, as the one of the feudal lord over the serf or of the capitalist over the proletarian worker, or relationships of cooperation, as those among the members of a guild or a trade union.

Such openness goes hand in hand, paradoxically, with the closed or ‘enclosed’ character of such systems, fencing in users and their data as a means of leveraging ‘network effects’.146 Hence the talking about these platforms as ‘digital enclosures’ which, while open to users, end up progressively trapping them.

The discussion adopts a ‘harmonic weighting’ system aimed at the fair representation of minorities in order to avoid that minority ideas are too quickly brushed over.

One of the innovative features of LiquidFeedback is the mechanism of delegated, or proxy, voting, which it derives from the philosophy of ‘liquid democracy’, whose initial concept was proposed in 2000 by an anonymous internet user going under the name of Sayke. This means that users can delegate their votes on various issues to a person they trust on that area of expertise, as explained by Andreas Nitsche, one of the developers of the platform: The basic idea: voters can delegate their vote to a trustee (technically a transitive proxy). The vote can be further delegated to the proxy’s proxy thus building a network of trust. All delegations can be done, altered and revoked by topic; e.g. I myself vote in environmental questions, Anne represents me in foreign affairs, Mike represents me in all other areas – but I can change my mind at any time. A dynamic scheme of representation takes place. Anyone can select their own way ranging from direct democracy to representative democracy. Basically, one participates in what one is interested (or expert) in but for all other areas gives their vote to somebody acting in their interest. One may make a bad choice once in a while but can change their mind at any time.

Their contributions were organised around seven thematic axes: the sixth republic, distribution of wealth, ecological planning, the exit from European treaties, an independent and alterglobalist France for peace, human progress and the new frontiers of humanity.

Such development needs to be understood as a manifestation of a more systemic return of strong leadership in contemporary society, after a time at which prevalent processes of leadership took a technocratic and anti-charismatic form. Since the economic crisis, and amidst a condition of growing political and geo-political turmoil, we have instead been witnesses to the growth of strong leaders across the left/right divide. Think for example about politicians such as Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Pablo Iglesias and Matteo Salvini, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. Whatever you may think politically of these politicians, what is apparent is that they can hardly be considered as weak non-leaders, facilitators or distributed leaders. Hyperleaders are one specific manifestation of this return of strong charismatic leadership in our times, that also plays a crucial role in the functioning of platform parties.

At the height of the economic crisis, the idea was most famously expressed by Occupy Wall Street’s claim to be a ‘leaderless’ movement. It was believed that the internet, empowering individuals and providing them with many-to-many channels of communication, would eliminate the presence of informational monopolies and therefore also the necessity for hierarchical and top-down command and coordination.

Although anarchists like to contend that leadership and any form of authority is in fact just an imposition that is irrational and can be eliminated, by glancing at the history of politics and political parties, it appears clear that it instead constitutes a fundamental necessity of political party, a necessary evil one may say, rooted in the impossibility of the masses to self-organise. For Weber an organisation can exist only if it subordinates itself to a leader and an organisational staff that represents it in the public arena. In other words, one cannot speak of organisation without some form of leadership, given that by its nature organisation involves a separation between the leaders and the led.

The moments when personal leadership is necessary are, as Gramsci goes on to explain, those periods of re-organisation of the political arena, such as after great crises that upset well-rehashed political balances of forces. But is not the moment we are currently traversing precisely a moment of profound transformation and therefore one in which personal leadership does have a place and a function?

The key strategic question is whether this organisational refoundation is actually carried out, whether the charisma of the leader is eventually ‘routinised’ in a more stable organisational structure that is not completely wed to the leader’s ebbs and flows. The risk, evidently, is that if this does not take place, the party will end up perishing once the leader’s charisma starts becoming opaque and when the love of the superbase for its spokesperson turns into suspicion and resentment.

Some argue that platform parties do not propose a real solution to political disaffection because they are ultimately reproducing and exacerbating the individualising tendencies of contemporary society, in which people are connected at the same time as they are isolated from one another. This problem raises the question of ‘social integration’, a task which, as argued by Sigmund Neumann,289 constituted one of the main strengths of mass parties, concerned as they were with the construction of community as much as with its mobilisation for electoral purposes.

Rather than a participatory democracy, the reality of platform parties is more of a ‘reactive democracy’, in which the power of the membership mainly consists of a veto power which is used very infrequently – the power to like or not to like.

The platformisation of the party means that decisions are taken collectively, but from the standpoint of physically isolated individuals, and this focus on online interactions runs the risks of exacerbating all those idiosyncrasies and psychopathologies that characterise online interactions, including trolling, flames and loneliness. This situation calls for a serious reflection about the sustainability of the organisational format at both the collective and individual levels.

The extreme degree of individualisation, social heterogeneity and sheer loneliness that we find in our societies call for a heavy investment in integrative processes, in moments of dialogue, in forms of popular education and in all sorts of activities allowing citizens to come together and form bonds of reciprocity and solidarity. However, attending to this task of social integration would require perforce significantly revising the organisational philosophy of these movements, and would entail access to economic resources which at the moment are well beyond their capacity.

However, this obsession with process can easily turn into ‘proceduralism’, the excessive concern for process over content, which reflects the neoliberal enmity towards grand-narrative and systemic visions of the world, and a faith in the individual and his will as the ultimate normative criteria.

Platform parties claim that they are going to solve the problem of democracy by changes to their own internal structure, much as the people who believe they are going to stop climate change by eating a more vegetarian diet.