I had to laugh at this 1995 Banning Order I discovered over at 4Glengate
It’s the Socialist Workers Party’s line on Trotskyists keeping in touch with each other using the then newly-fangled internetwebthingy.
“The Central Committee has decided that members of the SWP should not use the IS-List”
because
“any sensible socialist should not fall for the immense hyping of the internet by papers like the Guardian, or for the postmodernist arguments that the net represents a radical democratisation of society. Access to the internet, as to any technology, is determined by capitalist relations of production. It is therefore highly unequal, and conditioned by the bosses’ domination of the economy and the state.”
Why, if Trots were allowed to think for themselves who knows what could happen ? Here’s a taste of the anarchy which could break out
“One comrade who dared to challenge the media-promoted mania for the internet that seems to have affected some on the left was subjected to repeated, scurrilous attack, both at the meeting and on the list. The leaderships of the SWP and of other groups were accused of ‘technophobia’ and a desire to suppress debate”
Well, fancy that.