11.04.1996

News agency news

Communist press

Reading international news in the New Worker, weekly paper of the New Communist Party, is not always guaranteed to gain the reader an insight into who’s who in the international class struggle. Like the Morning Star, the New Worker is notorious for its neutral reporting. Is this down to simply bad communist journalism or does it reflect a form of opportunism where to take sides might leave them open to criticism?

Often hiding behind the Chinese news agency Xinhua, the New Worker invariably makes for dull and uninformative reading. The back page of the March 29 edition of the New Worker is a good example. The articles on Bangladesh, Mongolia, Nepal, Poland and Italy, are all lifted directly from Xinhua and the reader is no more informed than if they had read the international pages of The Guardian. What do we learn about the significance of the talks between Mongolia and the Peoples’ Republic of China? Absolutely nothing.

The little piece by Steve Lawton, ‘One China priority for Beijing’, is equally bland. The whole matter is wrapped up by two authoritative quotes from none other than the secretary general of the UN and Malaysia’s prime minister Mahathir Mohamad. Once again the reader could get far more investigative journalism from the bourgeois broadsheets.

Its editorial statement ‘Yeltsin’s last stand?’ is a little more daring. Coming off the fence the editorial states,

“Zyuganov is riding on the back of the immense prestige of the Communist Party of the past. But he’s not a communist and his platform is openly reformist and social democratic in nature.”

The statement continues,

“The genuine communists in Russia are divided. The Russian Communist Workers’ Party has thrown its weight behind Zyuganov under the slogan ‘Together we shall win’. The All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks is working for a Bolshevik platform throughout all of the former Soviet Union and is boycotting the polls.”

But what does the New Worker think? Is there a programmatic distinction between these ‘genuine’ communist parties or is there simply a difference of strategy? What makes these two parties genuine communists - we are not told. Instead we are treated to some simple platitudes about how horrible Russian capitalism is. Nothing contentious here. I suppose we will have to wait for Xinhua to work it out. And this from a party which, until recently, did not regard China as socialist.

Julian Jake