Internet, Global Resistance
And MeghbartaBy Anu Muhammad
05 October, 2005
Countercurrents.org‘Let Our Resistance Be As Transnational As Capital’
- A slogan of protesters’ website N30Internet is a cumulative arrival of continuous, though obstructed, scientific and technological progress of human civilization. Although it is still mostly used by global monopoly corporate bodies to grab resources, expand market and maximize profit, nevertheless it opens up the opportunity to interact in a global scale. It has also provided a space to build up a communication network against capital-intensive mis/disinformation hegemony organized by global-local corporate interest.
The internet patrika, webzine, www.meghbarta.org , the first of its kind in Bangladesh, is a response to that. We came together to work for Meghbarta as a part of our responsibility and our ongoing struggle to build up counter hegemony in every sphere.
On October 4, 2005, meghbarta enters into its seventh year. The journey in the last six years had been with both joy and pain: of achievement, new discovery, struggles, solidarity, odds, frustration, disappointment and so on. One thing we did never accept: defeat.
It was a big ambition indeed. In mid 1999, when we sat together to discuss on the potential of internet technology and our course of intervention, many of us were not clear about its scale and power. At the time of first uploading of meghbarta on October 4 the same year, we had the feelings and excitement of creating online forum to gather real news, demystify reality and to fight the global and local evils, to resist dominant repressive power against humanity everywhere. Dreaming of this potential, living in a country where only 50 thousand out of 140 million could afford to get connected to enter the domain, could be viewed as highly imaginary or elitist. But we could see the future.
Our confidence and courage originated from our reading of technology, capitalist dynamics as well as its dialectics of development. We could read the technology, we could felt that this technology would have the ability to strengthen voice of the oppressed, to make voice of the people heard and to connect people and to build up solidarity all around the world.
Within two months of uploading the first issue, Seattle happened. We could feel the heat of Seattle, could read its message well. Thousands and thousands of women and men gathered there to show a new beginning of history by rejecting the notion that the history had ended. From Seattle in 1999, Afghanistan in 2001, Cancun in 2003, to Iraq, Venezuela, Nepal in 2003-5, from Martyr Gialini in Genoa to Martyr Lee in Cancun to daily resistance in Iraq, blood and passion of freedom; in all these cases, the global scale mobilization, coordination and dissemination could happen in necessary speed through internet. The unclear became clear. People could see the real things, ugly repression and bright resistance, going beyond corporate media.In Bangladesh, despite its very weak infrastructure and despite the fact that less than 30 per cent of its people still have the ‘luxury’ of ‘enjoying’ electricity, computer and IT business grew fast, not surprising, it will expand faster. Capital, for its inner logic, expand and connect people for business. In the same process, people find the way to connect themselves as a means to unchain them along with unchaining technology. We find that Capital for its own expansion keeps busy to expand internet network and takes it to the mass level. On the contrary, people started seeing the demons through their tools, to see reality beyond embedded corporate media, the consent-manufacturing machine.
Yet, we are not illusioned by the power of the internet. It does not have the divine power to bring changes in human lives by itself. It has problems too, language hegemony, access constraints, cost of operations etc. We need to address these too. We are aware of the fact that people make history not in the web but in the real world, they make it through disillusionment, organization, mobilization in its own land. Internet would be instrumental in coordinating and building solidarity here and also there, around the globe.
Poverty, inequality, class-gender-racial-religious discrimination, war and hatred all these things are matter of local as well as global. The emergence of global institutions and multinational corporations has brought global planning and operation in practice. In another way, this phenomenon has contributed to growing potential to pull people together against common global body or process that put people and resources in danger. Projects of mass destruction engineered by the World Bank et al, grabbing operations by oil companies like UNOCAL or NIKO or SHELL etc all create destruction of human lives and in environment in the name of development and reform. These have been happening in Bangladesh, happening in many countries in the world. We need to expose these in Bangladesh and get its parallel in other parts of the world as well. In the last few years, meghbarta has tried to do this.With globalizing capitalism, and with increasing imperialist aggression, worldwide global resistance has also been taking shape. Enemies of the people are local and global. In fact, we are responding to the need of time and also we are trying to change the time. We are trying to bring global to local and take local to global, to create an online forum for activism here and everywhere.
We have problems. We have vision and we have the strength of commitment but not sufficient resources to materialize our plans. We have always been against surrendering to honey-money flow from international agencies of global capitalism for ‘poverty alleviation’ ‘empowerment’ ‘rights’ etc projects or for pseudo opposition to global institutions. We suffer and we gain.
We hope free persons, organizations and activists in Bangladesh and all over the world will come closer to keep alive and strengthen forums like meghbarta. Let struggle for emancipation create, sustain and develop its own languages and instruments.
