07.03.2002
All that is required?
Socialist Workers Party - Socialist Worker: fighting to change the world - London 2002, pp46, £1.50
The first question to ask about this pamphlet is - why? It consists of eight newly edited versions of articles spanning the period from the mid-1970s up to late 1990s. There are general pieces from 1984 on the importance of a revolutionary press in providing, in Lenin's words, "the scaffolding" around which a revolutionary party is built (p6). More recently, Hazel Croft's 1999 warning from Socialist Worker against the pitfalls of economism and the need to present workers "with a total picture of the world we live in" is reprinted (p10). Other essays give us sketches of such landmarks of proletarian publishing as Pravda and the Daily Worker. Seamlessly, we then move into the history of the International Socialists and Socialist Worker with contributions from Chris Harman and Chris Bambery from 1993 and 1995 respectively. Finally, a Tony Cliff article, originally from a 1974 IS internal bulletin, explains to us 'The use of Socialist Worker as an organiser'. All very worthy, if a little dull (for example, do today's readers really need to be appraised on page 40 of a detailed paper-selling calendar of two west London IS branches from 1974?). Indeed, the feel of the whole publication is curiously distant from present-day politics, centrally from the growing calls for a Socialist Alliance paper. Contemporary polemics or even passing references to other publications of the present-day left are glaringly absent. So what is the point of it? Clearly, it is a publication intended primarily for the 'education' of SWPers and those around the party. This accounts for its insularity. The pamphlet tells these people that Socialist Worker is the contemporary manifestation of Pravda, Iskra, Nasha Slovo and the Daily Worker (minus the Stalinism, of course). True, it is conceded that when the IS crawled out of the primeval swamp in the 1960s, it was not the only one competing for the ecological niche opened up by the upsurge in struggle. But, in contrast to these competitors, "Socialist Worker's stance was quite different. It asserted from the beginning that revolutionary students could only have an impact if they rebuilt a revolutionary workers' movement. In that it differed radically from other papers established in 1968, like Black Dwarf, edited by Tariq Ali" (p32). So, in time, SWPers are told, these less successful life forms became extinct: we rule now. And just to guide you by the nose to the conclusions you are meant to have reached from this slim little pamphlet, there are a serious of questions at the back, presumably either for collective discussion in your branch or individual musing in the bath - "What makes a successful socialist newspaper? What makes Socialist Worker different from the Sun and Mirror? Can we learn anything from them?" and so on. This pamphlet is therefore part of a pack to be read along with Paul Foot's short piece in January's issue of Socialist Review (see my reply Weekly Worker February 7). Comrade Foot explained to us why a party is indispensable to the winning of socialism and why - rather more controversially - the SWP is it. Fighting to change the world tells us that the broad history of genuinely popular struggles, as well as the specific history of the workers' movement, teaches that a political paper is an absolute necessity. SWPers are thus intended to be insulated from SA individuals and trends pushing for a new workers' party and a regular socialist paper - they already exist. Why re-invent the wheel? Of course, any objective comparison of today's SW to the traditions of papers such as Pravda or Iskra starkly underlines the gulf between this dull, sectarian and arid journal and what is actually required by our movement. Chris Harman blusters in the very first essay of the pamphlet that, "It is amazing the number of times you find people making references to What is to be done? without mentioning the fact that more than half of it is devoted to pressing the case of the revolutionary paper!" (p6). Rather more "amazing" is the fact that Harman feels confident enough to cite this seminal pamphlet of Lenin's in the first place. It embodied the authoritative statement of Iskraism. Iskra openly struggled for programmatic and theoretical clarity in the Russian revolutionary movement as a precondition of genuine unity. So comrade Croft is right when she says that for Lenin "the most important tool for revolutionary socialists in the battle to win people to socialism was the revolutionary newspaper" (p10) - but what sort of newspaper? When SW was launched as a weekly in September 1968, its then editors wrote that they intended to tell "the truth about your fight, the workers' fight ... We hope you like our paper. We hope you'll grow to think of it as your paper. Write to us. Your ideas, comments and suggestions will help us produce a better paper" (p36). In other words, differing views and perspectives for the struggle would need to be openly expressed and fought over in the pages of a genuine workers' newspaper. This chimes with Cliff's own vision of the party itself, outlined in interview from 1970 reprinted by the SWP at the time of the man's death on April 9 2000. A real workers' party, he thought, "must be genuinely democratic, because the only way you can reflect the mass of people is by having a great deal of internal democracy. It is not true that the working class has one cohesive point of view. The revolutionary party would reflect that lack of cohesion, of course. And therefore, if you speak in terms of dialogue with the class, the class itself has different views, and therefore this democracy is necessary ... "There is no question about it: if the majority decides, the minority of course has to obey it. The minority of course has to have the complete guarantee that it will have at all time the opportunity to express its views and influence the views of the majority - and not in secrecy, but in open debate in front of the class" - including in the pages of the party's newspaper, we presume (Socialist Review May 2000). The contrast with today's regime in the SWP and how that sterile, bureaucratic atmosphere finds expression in the lifeless pages of Socialist Worker could not be starker. So, the SWP's attempts to present itself and its newspaper as the embodiments of the healthy traditions of the revolutionary workers' movement are deeply unconvincing. Only cutting off the rank and file from contact with others has allowed the trick to work for so long. Let's hope that prolonged engagement with other revolutionary trends in the Socialist Alliance will start a healthy process of doubt and questioning. Mark Fischer
Worker