The Indian Marxists had once committed the blunder of viewing computers as an evil capitalist machine capable of producing mass unemployment and thus obliterating the working class. The CPI(M)’s youth outfit DYFI does not want to repeat that blunder.
Faced with a perceptible reluctance on the part of members for serious organisational work, the DYFI is considering using social networking sites to attract modern youth to it. The organisational report for the 12th Kerala State conference of the DYFI, currently on in Alappuzha, mentions the need of using sites like Facebook and Twitter for revolutionary work.
like its parent body — the CPI(M) — had done in the formative years of the IT revolution in the country, the DYFI as an organisation has so far been keeping away from tools like Facebook due to some timidity generated by a feeling that these are implements for the lavish Gen-Y bourgeois to exchange trivialities among themselves.
But the inspiring role the social networking sites had played during the Arab Spring and the way they were put to use during the agitation in Delhi and elsewhere over the December gang-rape have served as eye-openers for the young Marxists. “It could be a capitalist implement but we should use their weapon against themselves,” said a DYFI leader in Alappuzha.
DYFI leaders said that thousands of activists and several CPI(M) leaders were using social networking sites presently but this was not on the organisational level. “Usage of Facebook and Twitter by DYFI activists is only as a response forum right now. We will discuss this matter in detail in the conference,” said the youth leader.
Meanwhile, the organisational report for the conference speaks of some of the serious infirmities — akin to those of the CPI(M) — the DYFI is presently in. Prominent among them are the functional lethargy that has affected almost half the area committees of the organisation in the State and the withering away of close to 200,000 members from the outfit in the past three years.
The organisational report, showing obvious indications of the need of introspection, says that the DYFI could not take up serious issues in the required manner and successfully agitate over them. Without referring the CPI(M) by name, the report complains that there has been a tendency to install people at the helm of affairs of the outfit.