22.08.1996

Socialist News

Party notes

Socialist News, the new eight-page monthly paper of the Socialist Labour Party, is scheduled for launch in September. Characteristically, there has been little or no debate about the nature of this important initiative for the party as a whole. Instead, the membership of the SLP were informed of the format and orientation of the paper.

Nevertheless, the appearance of SN is to be welcomed. It at least offers the opportunity for the organisation to cohere activity of some sort. Reports from the branches suggest the ‘post-natal depression’ of the party not only continues, but in many areas is actually getting worse. SLP comrades write to me of non-existent levels of activity and lazy schedules of tediously apolitical monthly meetings - particularly in London, where the influence of the leadership and its acolytes is the strongest.

Even where SLP branches are conducting some sort of systematic public work, it has to be behind the back of the leadership, given the paranoid bans on working with other organisations the NEC has attempted to impose.

Comrades have suggested that at least the appearance of the new paper will give the branches something to do.

The paper of an organisation should be rather more integral, of course. As Lenin wrote, “A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator. It is also a collective organiser” (Collected Works Vol 5, p22). In other words, it is the concentrated expression of the political life of an organisation - which does pose a very concrete problem for SN, of course.

The SLP currently exists as a small, extremely heterogeneous organisation, still on the fringes of the workers’ movement. Despite the efforts of some on the left of the party to ‘talk up’ the central role of the organisation in the movement and the undoubted potential of the SLP in the future, the party remains an odd amalgam of political forces. The leadership of the organisation seem intent however that only one strand of politics will have expression in the pages of SN, that it will be an eclectic noticeboard for various trade union struggles and worthy campaigns. Leading members have made it quite clear that there will be no discussion or debate in its pages: after all, one of them is reported as saying, “We don’t want a Weekly Worker, do we?”

The fact that the SLP is going to have a newspaper at all can be considered a defeat for the Fourth International Supporters Caucus and ex-Socialist Outlook types in the party. These people believe that the more ‘mass’ the party, the less it has to do. The years of flogging pretty uninteresting left rags have convinced them that party papers are essentially ‘black holes’, swallowing up money, effort and time. These comrades are unlikely to fight to build the circulation of SN, still less to make it a genuine expression of the different elements that constitute the SLP.

The left must battle to have its views represented in SN.

Articles and letters must be submitted and branches should demand that different viewpoints are represented fairly in the party press. The leadership may not want “a Weekly Worker”- their lack of political taste is their affair. The membership must organise to ensure that they are not lumbered with a monthly Morning Star.Heaven forbid.

Mark Fischer
national organiser