The reality of many left-wing organizations is sobering: organizational stagnation and a high burden of participation. This system wears down motivated activists to the point of burnout and maintains barriers that prevent broader and more diverse participation. Both the often-high expectations of the activistic mission and the heavy burden of internal political participation keep the threshold for involvement unnecessarily high. Furthermore, valuable organizational achievements must constantly be reinvented because collective knowledge is not adequately recorded or passed on.
These organizational failures do more than cause burnout; they actively sabotage the expansion of our collective power. To break this cycle, we must stop viewing digital infrastructure as a secondary technical concern and recognize it for what it truly is: the substrate upon which modern dual power must be built.
We must utilize digital tools.
Loomio serves decentralized, asynchronous decision-making in groups, and
Decidim enables large-scale participation. Both are tried and tested, free, and open-source platforms. Loomio is reminiscent of forums and team communication apps such as Slack, but with built-in functionality to facilitate democratic decision-making and its documentation. Decidim is more versatile and modular, with the primary goal of involving otherwise passive citizens by gathering ideas from the political base, nurturing them into fully fledged proposals and facilitating a final decision-making process. The immediate practical benefits of these platforms for our grassroots work are as follows:
- Democratizing Participation: These tools break the monopoly on influence held by those with the most free time. By enabling asynchronous decision-making, we dismantle the barriers of the standard working day and domestic care responsibilities. Political agency is no longer reserved for those who can afford to spend hours of their evenings at physical plenary sessions; it is reclaimed by the worker on a bus or the parent at home, allowing participation to be woven into daily life rather than being an exhausting addition to it.
- Transparency: These platforms create an indispensable level of transparency and traceability. Since all discussions, arguments, and final resolutions are openly documented, the decision-making process becomes verifiable and understandable even for members who have joined since.
- Scalability: These systems are built for growth. They serve small, local groups as effectively as they serve thousands of participants—from housing projects to the participatory budgeting of a major city such as Barcelona, where the app was originally developed. They translate the principles of self-management and solidarity directly into a functioning, scalable digital infrastructure.
The Technopolitical Dimension
However, these digital platforms are more than just efficient apps; they have a deeper, technopolitical dimension. They are the infrastructure for building dual power.
To understand their potential, we have to look back to
print capitalism: In his analysis of nation-state formation, sociologist Benedict Anderson described how the printing press catalyzed a profound societal shift in the 18th century. By creating the prerequisite for a
bourgeois public sphere and enabling people to identify as part of a nation through printed media (such as newspapers), it paved the way for the construction of bourgeois subjectivity and power. This mass communication over great distances created the structural basis for a wave of bourgeois-nationalist revolutions. Technology alone did not determine society, but it created the
precondition for new power constellations.
Today, we stand before a similar structural opening, but one that favors a socialist trajectory. We have the chance to harness technologies not towards capitalism, but towards the cultivation of a robust dual power. This is the core insight of
Left Accelerationism:
Whereas the techno-utopians argue for acceleration on the basis that it will automatically overcome social conflict, our position is that technology should be accelerated precisely because it is needed in order to win social conflicts.
Loomio and Decidim are the concrete, practical manifestations of this principle: they enable more structured, accessible, and broader democratic participation, thus providing the necessary tools to decide social conflicts in our favor.
It is high time to integrate these platforms into the core of our organizational strategy. The priority now is the
accumulation of collective capacity: we must master these free infrastructures not just for the sake of digital sovereignty, but to maximize our capacity for mobilization and organization. Mastering these tools is a
critical force multiplier for scaling our movements beyond the limits of local volunteerism. Every organization, from the neighborhood collective to the national alliance, needs to consider experimenting with these platforms.
The path to digital democratization is one of
experimenting, documenting, and disseminating. Share your successes, share your mistakes. Ensure that the infrastructure of solidarity spreads like wildfire!
