27.06.2012

A site to be proud of

June 30 sees the launch of both the CPGB's Summer Offensive fundraising drive and our new website - Mark Fischer discusses the broader challenges of the next two months

A venerable and entertainingly curmudgeon Socialist Workers Party veteran put me straight about the future of the Weekly Worker outside the Unite the Resistance conference on June 23. He waved away the copy of the paper I was pressing on him, but not for the usual dull-wittedly sectarian reasons.

“I keep telling my own comrades that the papers are dead - it’s all about the web now,” he said - or that was gist of it, at least. This comrade used to be a pretty regular punter for the physical version of the paper and never evidenced any shyness about buying it in front of disapproving SWP hacks, so this is clearly a sincerely held view. And remarkable, really - this from an SWPer! By implication, he is downgrading the importance of the Saturday morning sales round that at times seem to be the SWP’s sole reason for existence - the weekly chance to impersonate a ‘mass’ organisation by turning out its ill-educated membership to adapt to (rather than critically engage with) the consciousness of Saturday morning town-centre shoppers. What iconoclastic madness was this!

But, although I disagree with our SWP comrade, his observation has at least a germ of truth to it. The internet is undoubtedly a huge challenge for all newspapers, proletarian and bourgeois alike. For instance, we have noticed a gently rising curve of people who instead of subscribing have turned to reading us on their Kindles. An appreciable number of them send encouraging and supportive messages, some telling us they will continue to pay for the privilege of reading the Weekly Worker online. So it is not a general political disengagement we are seeing. It is more a matter of convenience for some; the pressure of finances for others. The general trend that we have previously highlighted - that the sympathising periphery of the paper and the politics it champions has actually considerably expanded over the past decade or so - continues as far as we can see.

Apocalyptic assessments about the ‘death’ of this or that form of human cultural forms are generally overplayed. As it turned out, films did not kill off theatre; TV did not do for cinema; CDs did not trash-can vinyl; Michael Sheen seems to have breathed fresh life into passion plays with his epic Port Talbot effort, etc.

Back to the Unite the Resistance event. Fortunately, quickly following my unsettling exchange with my ‘print is dead’ comrade, my world was set back on its feet when a sour-faced SWP full-timer peeled away a new recruit who had been casually chatting to me. I caught her opening line of “Don’t talk to that man because …”, but traffic drowned out the rest of her thought-police spiel, so I can’t enlighten readers why you too should perhaps think twice before engaging with me. From past experience of the SWP school of falsification, perhaps it’s my Islamophobia. Then again there’s my entrenched racism, my complex web of financial relations with MI5, my unreconstructed Stalinism or my organisation’s repeated attempts to stage physical confrontations at SWP events via blatant provocations such as, er, turning up, giving out leaflets, organising stalls or even intervening with critical comments in the time allocated for discussion. However, I did catch her concluding instructions to this hapless young comrade - “Just concentrate on selling the paper,” she told him. ‘Don’t think: flog,’ she might have just as well have said.

Clearly then, we are not going to see the demise of Socialist Worker any time soon. For the SWP, the print version of their paper is key. For us too, despite the fact that we are on the cusp of launching our new CPGB website, the paper remains key - but for very different reasons from those of the SWP, I think.

Website launch

I am indeed very happy to tell readers that we are now bearing down on the deadline for the launch of our much heralded, long delayed new website.

Before I discuss this in a little more detail, a massive ‘thank you’ has to go out to all the comrades who have contributed to this project. There’s the final team of ‘closers’ that have force-marched it to completion, but then there are those comrades who worked might and main to dredge the site up after it was attacked in June 2009. The organisation owes thanks to all those comrades - including sympathisers in other organisations and those in other countries - who have contributed useful criticisms as well as practical work on the e-coal face. Ditto the comrades who have nagged and badgered about the inadequacies of the existing site. They have kept the issue live when the pressures of day-to-day political tasks might have pushed it far lower on our agenda. Not that they were greatly appreciated at the time, obviously. ‘Moaners’ was a word I seem to recall using in my less generous moments …

It is very appropriate that the launch coincides with that of our 27th Summer Offensive, our annual fundraising drive - again set this year at a target of £25,000. Regular readers may recall that last year we placed the Weekly Worker at the very centre of the campaign. The discipline of physically producing and distributing the publication structures the core of the organisation and made the success of the SO 2011 - we raised not far off £30,000 - over £4k more than our target. A real achievement for what remains a very small organisation, numerically.

Returning to the paper/website discussion, we are very clear that this SO success reflected the esteem - sometimes grudging, as with our professionally grumpy SWPer cited at the beginning of this piece - that our paper commands. In turn, the paper has driven the content of our interim site and accounts for its relative success in terms of visitors - the web version of our paper attracts massively more attention than its paper twin.

Obviously this will not change with the new site, but it has been clear for some time that our existing web presence was totally inadequate. For instance, following the way arguments and ideas have unfolded in this paper has been made almost impossible by the fiddly way comrades have to access them. Poor search facilities have exacerbated this. Material has been presented in a format that - while it did not lock comrades out - has made it hard for visitors to the site to get a quick handle on the CPGB; what makes it distinctive on the left (and let’s face it, we are); or where they go, quickly and time-efficiently, to learn something from us that might be useful to them as Marxists, whatever organisation they are in.

What comrades will be presented with in the next week or so will be far from perfect. It is still very much a work in progress. There are all sorts of ‘bells and whistles’ to come from the dedicated amateurs that have put it together. For instance, when I was first told about potentially “sticky features”, it brought to mind a rather different sort of website. Thankfully, this is actually about what might be called the ‘Amazon effect’ - ie, the capacity of the site to automatically recommend articles based on past browsing history. It will also feature study guide buttons, which will group - hopefully in a clear, explanatory and useful way - articles, books and videos on particular key themes. We want to create facilities for comrades to post comments and responses to what they read/view on the site (with the appropriate troll guards in place. The left is still to evolve an appropriate etiquette for itself in terms of the web and we have no intention of policing a facility like this 24/7).

The CPGB - the organisation that publishes the Weekly Worker - has set itself the target of raising £25,000 over the next two months. If you think the left in this country - internationally, actually - is a better place with the Weekly Worker rather than without it, let’s hear from you, comrades. And your comments and criticisms on our new website would be very welcome too.

Click here to find out how you can support the organisation financially.