24.11.2005

Socialist Worker: is it doing its job?

Dave Crouch expresses disquiet over the relaunched SWP paper

Last October’s relaunch of Socialist Worker is part of the continuing battle to lever the party into the movement, and vice versa. The fact that Socialist Worker frequently publishes people outside our tradition encourages us to engage with those ideas and with the people who hold them.

Socialist Worker is positioned to become a paper with a much wider readership. However, its response to the two big crises of the summer shows there are political risks involved.

The July 7 bombings

The bombings put socialists on the de­fensive. It was vital to rally the move­ment in the face of racist hysteria. Moreover, the party was moving offices a week later and Socialist Worker would have to miss an issue, so the post-bombing issue was going to have to last for two weeks of intense political debate.

Seven days after the bombs, SW’s front page addressed the key issue: “This is about Iraq, Mr Blair.” But page two dropped this central argument to talk about how tube workers were mistreated after the bombs and how cuts had un­dermined healthworkers’ response. The third page two article was headlined: “How Auntie turned into Big Brother”, an anecdotal report by an Socialist Worker journalist on the No30 bus.

After page three - a transcript of a Gal­loway speech and a brief piece on the media - Socialist Worker dropped all mention of the bombings. Articles on the G8 protests made no mention, although it was the G8 against which they had clearly been “aimed”.

The centre-page spread on Afghanistan also made no mention! A huge banner headline on the reviews page excruciat­ingly declared: “Monsters can help us take on the capitalist vampires”; many suffered genuine nightmares after the London carnage, yet this article began: “I’m a fan of horror.” The paper only re­turned to the bombings on page 12 with Salma Yaqoob and Tariq Ali.

Page two was a mistake: the central argu­ment was why the bombs had happened, not why the emergency response was in­adequate. Salma tackled the causes of in­dividual terrorism, but her piece needed to be early in the paper.

Articles about the situation in Iraq, about the London terror warnings given to Blair ages ago, about what happened in Madrid, were essential. The paper needed to attack Blair’s ‘security’ laws, which was an immediate aspect of the government’s response.

It was open warfare on muslims: a brief opinion piece on page two said muslims should not apologise for July 7, but the paper needed to explain why religion was not to blame, arming us with the facts.

Within days of the bombings specula­tion was rife that this had been a suicide mission, but it was a month after the bombs (August 6 issue) before the paper had anything about suicide bombers. The “Auntie turns into Big Brother” headline was simply frivolous - the piece should have been part of the page three arti­cle on the media. Tim’s excellent cartoon, which captured the situation perfectly, was hidden away on the page. You had to wade through a lot of the paper to get to Tariq’s page 13 article. The directionless headlines on his and Salma’s articles - “Politics and the bombs” and “Let us remember” - further weakened the paper’s voice. “Before I start talking about the subject of this evening’s meeting” was a strange way indeed to begin Tariq’s article. At the very least, all the bomb-related material needed to be brought together to form a coherent whole within the paper.

Hurricane Katrina

In contrast to the London bombings, the hurricane laid US society bare. America, lost a city the size of Portsmouth or Bris­tol. The Bush regime’s failure presented a fantastic opportunity for Socialist Worker to go on the offensive.

Ten days after the hurricane hit New Orleans, the paper stuck to the new format: pages one to three on the hurricane, back to it on the centre pages, then nothing but a brief leader.

But the pages one to three articles were all opin­ion pieces and all highly repetitive, reit­erating over and over that the US is divided by race and class. Beyond that, there was a series of key reasons for the tragedy, each of them a damning con­demnation of capitalism and each de­manding attention from Socialist Worker:

l Tax cuts meant the levees hadn’t been reinforced

l Privatisation meant emergency services were inadequate

l The Iraq war took resources away from New Orleans

l Poverty meant people couldn’t evacuate

l The US ruling class and its media lackeys believe if you are poor you deserve it

l Racism meant the victims were blamed for their plight

l The profit motive meant private busi­ness made only token contributions to the relief effort - in fact there was large-scale profiteering

l The Democrats are a spineless opposition

l Global warming has raised the hurricane risk

l Bush fiddled while New Orleans drowned.

Opening the paper so wide to non-party voices meant there was repetition and bluster, but insufficient structured argu­ment and fact.

Moreover, the non-party voices in the paper were of a particular type. No one condemned Bush so powerfully as the New Orleans black and poor, yet only one article in the paper quoted just one such person - on page eight.

When capitalism fails so utterly and so disgustingly, Socialist Worker needs to put the case for socialist revolution. Jonathan Neale was the perfect person to do it - instead he wrote about the anger, but not about how to channel it. We also needed to hear from the US anti-war movement, which was building for September 24 - a concrete link from the hurricane to the struggle here.

But instead we had a large piece by Dahr Jamail on the media in Iraq, which on its own was abstract. The main ques­tion the anti-war movement faced was: what’s the point of demonstrations when Blair just ignores them? In the run-up to September 24, Socialist Worker was silent on this issue.

Finally, why was the reviews page de­voted to Manet (under a colossal head­line again), rather than the importance of New Orleans in black American her­itage? This is more evidence that suggests Socialist Worker’s focus on diversity of opinions and voices can be at the expense of its role as a weapon in the struggle. The result, as I have tried to show, is that the paper can be disjointed and incoherent.

Conclusions

Socialist Worker is far and away the best socialist paper in Britain. However, last year’s changes threaten to dilute its leadership role. The paper needs to provide the detailed ar­guments activists need in their day-to­day political tasks; instead, there are too many discursive or superficial comment pieces. From cover to cover Socialist Worker should be a guidebook to getting involved in political activity.

Some suggestions:

l Bring back the ‘What we think’ column at the front of the paper - the sharp cutting edge of our politics needs to be more prominent. We all know what it can be like when a public meeting has no SWP speaker on the platform: the meeting is worthy but flat.

l Non-party writers need to be commis­sioned more clearly and must expect their material to be edited - what people write in the paper is more impor­tant than who they are.

l The search for non-party voices cannot be allowed to slow the paper down - if it needs a specific article that very week then Socialist Worker journalists need to write it themselves.

l The format needs to be flexible - page order and layout need to change in response to major events.

l Redesign the reviews page and put it somewhere else.

l Get more SWP comrades (especially women) writing for the paper.