The Socialist Project on Social Media Platforms: Anticapitalist Organization in Platform Capitalism

Abstract

This article is a self-reflexive case study of the Socialist Project's (SP) tactical uses of Meta's Facebook and Google's YouTube platforms. Formed in early 2003 by Leo Panitch (1945–2020), Greg Albo, Sam Gindin, Herman Rosenfeld, and others, the SP is a small Toronto-based democratic socialist organization that for nearly two decades has contributed to wider efforts to build and sustain an anticapitalist “infrastructure of dissent” and “radical imagination.” While Facebook's and YouTube's ownership structures, business models, and datafication and commodification mechanisms limit the SP's tactical uses of these platforms, the SP's agency to use these to try to make history in digital conditions not of its own choosing is significant. This article argues that the SP's tactical use of social media platforms exists between structure and agency, at the interface of top-down platform capitalist business models, mechanisms, and logics and bottom-up anticapitalist organization building, public pedagogy, and alternative media making.