25.03.2004

Pursuing the truth

Just imagine, if you can, a world without the Weekly Worker. Say you wanted to know the political forces that make up the European Social Forum or Respect. How would you find out? Well, you could content yourself with the occasional titbits that appear in the mainstream press - not to mention internet tittle-tattle or, if you are a bit more low-tech, pub gossip. Perhaps you turn instead to Socialist Worker? No luck there, unless you enjoy living on a dull diet of skimpy reportage and uncritical cheerleading. What next?

Obviously, without the Weekly Worker you would not really have much of a clue as to what was going on, or why. Like Oliver Twist, you would just receive your allotted dollop of ‘truth’ from the patriarchs and why should you ask for more? After all, you are only a humble foot-soldier in a much grander battle.

This brings us to the ESF. According to some of its leading figures, the Weekly Worker’s coverage is full of (always unspecified) “inaccuracies”. Indeed, we have even been told that the “misleading information” put out by the Weekly Worker has “threatened” and “endangered” the ESF project itself.

Of course, this is all a load of twaddle. What these critics are really objecting to is the painful accuracies of the Weekly Worker’s reporting. The manipulative and underhand behaviour of the furtive Socialist Action group, the control-freakery of the Socialist Workers Party, and all the rest of it, is meant to remain an official secret. Presumably, the danger that the ESF could be turned into a Ken Livingstone/Greater London Authority jamboree should be left unsaid. No doubt, to comrades trained in conspiracy school politics our honest style of journalism is a constant affront.

Unfortunately, this morbid aversion to openness is not confined to certain groups and individuals within the ESF. It is an unfortunate fact of our movement that the predominant culture on the left could be summed up by the old saying, ‘Never wash your dirty linen in public’. However, such a sentiment is deeply antithetical to the values of Marxism and authentic communism. Though it might comes as a shock to some comrades, the journalistic style of the Weekly Worker is not the result of an obsessive desire by its writers to embarrass or humiliate our comrades on the left, least of all by a prurient urge to expose their private lives to the full gaze of public scrutiny. Rather it springs from our understanding that a real communist newspaper is one that unflinchingly fights for extreme democracy - which in practice means the open circulation and clash of different and contending views.

By contrast, much of the Machiavellian wheeling and dealing that has surrounded the ESF - and Respect as well - makes clear that for some comrades their self-professed love for democracy and ‘pluralism’ is, when push comes to shove, quite Platonic. Annoyed at the Weekly Worker for supposedly scaring away NGOs, Maureen O’Mara of Natfhe told the February 29 ESF organising committee meeting: “It’s not good enough to say, ‘We can apologise later.’ You shouldn’t do it in the first place” (Weekly Worker March 4).

The Weekly Worker should not do what exactly? Fearlessly report the truth, as we see it?

It is instructive to briefly examine the general approach taken by Karl Marx to open reporting and the freedom of the press in general, as it reverberates with contemporary relevance. Of course, as Marx stressed, journalistic openness is “not a perfect thing itself” - it is not the “all-in-all” of the matter. In other words, the Weekly Worker cannot guarantee ‘freedom’ - ie, freedom from all inaccuracies, mistakes and distortions. But by dragging the political debates, arguments and in-fighting of the ESF into the limelight, the Weekly Worker is struggling to make democracy itself “a real, living spirit, as opposed to a ghostly presence”, as Marx put it (H Draper Marx’s theory of revolution Vol 1, New York 1977, p31).

Openness, and the fight for it, activates and enhances what Marx called the “public mind”. The function of the Weekly Worker, and surely any socialist paper worthy of the name, is to hold a mirror up to the ESF, Socialist Alliance, Respect, etc - to make them accountable for their actions and words. No wonder the Weekly Worker is loathed in some quarters - and avidly read in others. In turn the Weekly Worker itself is open to scrutiny and criticism, and hence to correction or amendment. This is an inherently educative - and political - process.

Our open reporting is, of course, in stark contrast to the rest of the left press, with its anodyne formulations and ideological monolithicism, specifically designed to preclude an honest and frank political discussion. Have you read Socialist Worker or The Socialist recently? An unsettling fear of politics seems to permeate these dispiriting publications - and all those who take such umbrage at the Weekly Worker’s frank reporting of political meetings and debates. But, as Marx always emphasised, without a free, open and courageous press how can you ever know what is true and what is false? The Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s 1984 was well aware of this. So too were the bureaucrats in Stalin’s Soviet Union - and still are in Castro’s Cuba or Kim Il-Jong’s North Korea. The history of official or mainstream Trotskyism also demonstrates what the lack of an open press and democratic culture can to do to a political movement.

It is a deeply regrettable but obvious fact that the majority of the left today is fixated on producing an ‘authorised’ version of the truth - whether it be that Respect is on the verge of making a major electoral breakthrough come ‘super-Thursday’, or that the ESF is just a ‘natural’ coming together of popular movements and individuals with no specific party/group affiliation. At times you cannot help but think that those who would like to stifle the Weekly Worker are hankering for the rules laid down by Wilhelm IV of 19th century Prussia which Marx so bitterly fought. The bureaucrats’ regulations only allowed for what they considered a “serious and restrained pursuit of truth” - only opinions and views which were “well intentioned in tendency” were to be permitted. “The jurisdiction of suspicion” ruled supreme, as Marx said.

He pointed to how the Napoleonic Code in France also guaranteed freedom of speech ... but only for those printing the truth and not ‘lies’. What they - the bureaucracy - decreed was the truth, that is. You can bet that many comrades in the ESF, and elsewhere, also long for a “restrained” and “well intentioned” Weekly Worker. We shall leave that role to Socialist Worker, seeing as it has excelled at it for so long.

Especially pertinent to our discussion, Marx regularly noted that the aristocratic and bourgeois deputies in the Prussian parliament, the Diet, strongly objected to the regular publishing of their proceedings. They obviously regarded the Diet as their own private property and not something which the common people should know anything about.

Given this, Marx would have been all too familiar with the haughty attitude of the British war cabinet, which in 1944 argued against the radio broadcasting of parliamentary debates on the grounds that the “proceedings in parliament were too technical to be understood by the ordinary listener, who would be liable to get a quite false impression of the business transacted”. Instead it favoured professional journalists as ‘expert’ mediators between public and politics - keep the plebs out. Winston Churchill regarded the very idea as “a red conspiracy”, because it would allow “undifferentiated” mass access to parliamentary procedures. Parliament must remain a private club for the privileged. Similarly, the televising of parliament was bitterly opposed for decades.

Sadly this elitist spirit lives on within our movement. You sometimes get the impression that all too many comrades regard political polemic and theory as “too technical”. God forbid that the working class should discover that there are different political groups, with different programmatic outlooks, with different tactics and strategy - it would only confuse the poor things.

Marx’s comments on the Paris Commune therefore serve as an acute and very timely rejoinder to the left’s phobia about openness: “The Commune did not pretend to infallibility, the invariable attribute of all governments of the old stamp. It published its doings and sayings, it initiated the public into all its shortcomings” (K Marx The civil war in France Peking 1966, p80). The role of a communist publication, and organisation, is not to “pretend to infallibility”, but to highlight all the “shortcomings” of the workers’ movement as best it can: the Weekly Worker ethos in a nutshell. (Yes, we admit it, the Weekly Worker is not infallible - well, not always).

This of course can be downright infuriating at times. Who positively wants to have their “shortcomings” paraded on the front, middle or back page of a left newspaper? But the long-term interests of the workers’ movement demand it. As Marx rather floridly observed, “Keep in mind that you could not enjoy the advantages of a free press without tolerating its inconveniences. You could not pluck the rose without its thorns! And what do you lose in losing a free press? A free press is the omnipresent open eye of the popular spirit ... It is the merciless confessional that a people makes to itself, and it is well known that confession has the power to redeem. It is the intellectual mirror in which a people beholds itself, and self-examination is the first condition of wisdom” (K Marx CW Vol 1, p405, pp60-61).

The “merciless confessional” of an open communist press is the only means to build a healthy and strong workers’ movement which can reflect upon itself, learn from its mistakes and develop. The ESF, Respect, SA, etc should not be treated as private forums for the enlightened few, but as the collective property of the working class.