Our reasons taking this decision have nothing to do with any alleged fear of technological innovation. But we do not make a fetish of new technology. In particular, 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.
Most comrades have access to the internet through their job.
Their employers will therefore be able to read their messages. There is, in any case, no way of protecting communication via the internet from surveillance by the state. Moreover, though each new subscriber to the IS-List must be proposed by a current one, there seems to be no mechanism for removing people who leave an IS group from the list. Hostile left organisations can therefore easily penetrate the list and take part in discussions that do not concern them. Consequently discussions take place on the IS-List from which most comrades are excluded.