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So, only a day to go until what most observers agree may be the most consequential election of the modern era. The nation is faced with a clear choice; Labour, offering a modest package of tax rises and state spending that would just about bring the UK into line with the social democratic model of most European countries, or the Conservatives, who promise a fantasy of national renewal and prosperity through the dark magic of Brexit and unregulated free markets.

On the face of it there should be no doubting a Labour victory, but, as they were last time around, the Tories are strong favourites. If the opinion polls are to be believed – and the pollsters claim to have fixed the flaws that derailed their predictions in 2017 – then huge numbers of working class voters, particularly in the north of England are going to vote directly against their own economic interests, and usher Boris Johnson back into Downing Street.

This is, of course, a conundrum that has troubled the left since the days of Marx – the problem of false consciousness. One might think that, in the prevailing economic landscape of low wages and precarious employment, not to mention ecological crisis, progressive socialist ideas would be more popular, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Economics, as Gramsci noted nearly a century ago, isn’t everything. Culture, and who is in control of it, is equally, if not more, important, and modern life, in post-industrial societies like the UK at least, is increasingly mediated by online experience.

The last few years have seen a rise in critical interest directed towards the way in which the internet, especially social media, influences electoral politics. A lot of anxiety has been generated by the role it plays in propagating the outright falsehoods that seem to make up the greater part of political discourse these days, but I think this misses a bigger point. The main problem is that these new forms of communication – and the old ones they are supplanting for that matter – are dominated by the corporations that are the contemporary embodiment of capitalism, and, as such, are central to generating the sort of hegemonic “common sense” that Gramsci would recognise, perpetuating our current system of rampant inequality.

Can these immensely powerful tools be subverted to further the cause of raising class consciousness? I was sceptical about that at the start of the decade, and have only become more so in the time since then. Perhaps we need to throw away our smartphones and start talking to one another again, if we are to rebuild the proletarian solidarity we need to take on the ruling class.

In the meantime I’m hoping that things are not as far gone as they seem, and that the residual anti-Tory traditions of working class life will derail Johnson’s plans, and put us back on the track of, if not revolution, at least some modest reform.

Once more on Wikileaks

It’s nearly seven years since we last posted about Julian Assange and Wikileaks; our take at that time was that freedom of information was a good thing, but that promoting it didn’t give anyone a pass for sexual assault.

Now that Assange’s falling-out with the Ecuadorian government has brought the issue back into the news, should we reconsider our position? Since 2012 the waters have been significantly muddied by the role played by Wikileaks in the 2016 US election, but I see no reason to think differently; we would oppose his extradition to the US on hacking charges, but think he should answer the rape accusations in Sweden.

More broadly, I think the last decade has seen a change in the way that the ruling class tries to control information. Keeping secrets by throwing people like Assange (or Chelsea Manning, who is much more deserving of support) in jail seems old-fashioned; it’s more effective to undermine the whole concept of objective truth by flooding the internet with conspiracy theories, so that any real scandal that leaks out can be plausibly dismissed as fake news. Social media, which promised to democratise information flow, has instead concentrated control in the hand of a few secretive corporations, with links to government that we can only speculate about.

We’ve known since the days of Marx that workers’ control of the economic levers of society is a precondition for progressive change, but economics is not everything; Gramsci illuminated the importance of cultural hegemony in maintaining the dominance of capital. Today our culture is more than ever mediated through the control of information; transferring that control from the bourgeoisie to the masses is perhaps the most pressing task facing revolutionaries in this era. The lesson of the Wikileaks story is that such work is too important to be left to fallible individuals; it must be a collective, democratic enterprise.