Socialist Worker - A Review

national | arts and media | opinion/analysis Monday January 05, 2004 19:59 by Adrian Alienation

The Irish activist scene produces a range of newspapers, magazines and periodicals. Over the next few months I will post reviews of a single issue of many of these publications in the hope of eventually putting together a useful guide to the plethora of activist journals. I start with Socialist Worker.

Socialist Worker sellers are a common sight on demonstrations in Ireland, particularly in Dublin. The paper comes in for a lot of hostility, not so much from ordinary members of the public as from within the activist community. This review aims to take a "fair and balanced" as Fox News might say look at the latest issue (1 January 2004).

First the basics. Socialist Worker (from here on SW) is the fortnightly newspaper of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). It is currently 12 pages long, after an unsuccessful experiment with a weekly 8 page edition. It is produced in black and white, with occasional bursts of red.

The format is that of a tabloid, with very large headlines and type. That the intention is to produce a tabloid goes further than just layout is hammered home by the very short articles and the irksome habit of pulling random words from sentences to form paragraph headings. SW is emphatically not intended to be a difficult read.

SW, as with most of the journals I will be profiling, is not distributed through the usual shop networks. Instead its main sales come through SWP members hawking it on street stalls and demonstrations. It can also be found in the small number of bookshops that stock left periodicals but such sales make up only a tiny proportion of the total circulation of perhaps 1,500.

Such on-street paper selling is a central feature of the political activity of the SWP. Their newspaper is seen as having an organisational role. It is, at least since the demise of the short-lived magazine "Resistance", the only regular publication the SWP produce. SW is in every sense of the word a partisan publication.

It has an editorial page, but the other content normally contains a hefty dose of editorialising. It reports not just from a generally left or socialist angle but from the particular point of view held by the SWP within that political range.

The latest issue of SW has more content than normal, and less in the way of empty space and large pictures than regular readers will have become accustomed to. That content focuses heavily on the occupation of Iraq and on Irish politics, to the exclusion of all other overseas news.

There is a slightly scanty page of industrial news, concentrating on the NIPSA strike in the north and the Oxygen strike in the South. Oddly, just as much space is given to book and music reviews (more if you count the summary of a new book by British SWP guru Alex Callinicos on the centre pages as a review). The reviews seem a little out of place and are in any case little more than cheerleading sessions. The SWP likes Fintan O'Tooles new book, Damien Dempsey's album and John Le Carre's latest offering a great deal if anyone is interested.

The coverage of the occupation of Iraq is straightforward enough. Bush is bad. War is bad. Profiteering is bad. The anti-war movement is good. There is little to take exception to or to be excited by if you are already of a leftist disposition. The short little articles relentlessly hyper tone can begin to grate however, particularly when combined with the kind of tendentious reporting that informs the reader that George "Bush is afraid of the Irish Anti-War Movement".

The Irish reporting is a more dubious affair. Here we find plenty more of the hyper little two paragraph articles, this time telling us that Bertie is bad, the rich are corrupt, racism is bad and the like.

Intermingled with these are slightly (but only slightly) meatier pieces that in some cases seem designed more to mislead than to inform. The analysis of the recent Assembly elections is a case in point.

SW solemnly informs us that attempts to portray Eamonn McCann's respectable vote as personal in nature or Catholic in origin are designed to downplay the significance of the Socialist Environmental Alliance. It's use of the 130 votes (0.3%) achieved by the other SEA candidate as evidence of the wider support enjoyed by the SEA leaves the reader wondering about standards of numeracy in the SWP's offices, or perhaps about the ready availability of Crystal Meth there.

The above appears to be the result of honest delusion rather than dishonesty. The same can't be said for the reporting of the ongoing anti-bin tax struggle in Dublin. A perusal of SW over the last few months would leave you with the general impression that Dun Laoghaire and Ballyfermot have been the suburbs at the centre of the anti-bin tax storm. From this it is clear to the alert reader that these are the only two suburbs where the SWP is in the driving seat of the campaign.

This issues' report of the recent all-Dublin activist meeting of the anti-bin tax campaigns is scandalous. The central thrust of the article comes from its only quote, from the mouth of Richard Boyd Barrett, billed as coming from the Dun Laoghaire campaign. Boyd Barrett, in this official-sounding capacity, calls for a big demonstration and an electoral alliance to stand in the forthcoming local elections. The article then echoes these demands.

The problem here is not that SW puts forward its point of view. The problem is that this is done in a way that would give a reader outside of the campaign the entirely misleading impression that the SWP's views and proposals were those of the campaign. No account is given of any other point of view expressed at the conference. No mention is made of any of the other official reports from the campaigns. No mention is made of the fact that nobody outside of the SWP at the conference saw the elections and a march as the priority.

The use of a quote from Boyd Barret, a central leader of the SWP, without mentioning his political affiliations is an all too common feature of SW's reportage. At least two other articles in this issue alone contain words from SWP members identified as representatives of some other body.

In a similar vein, the SWP's establishment of a body, with the vacuous sounding name "Another Europe is Possible", is reported in a way intended to give a misleading impression of what this body, intended by the SWP to coordinate protest against the Irish EU presidency, currently represents. We are informed that participants at the launch meeting came from "a variety of social movements including Dublin Bin Tax Campaign, Irish Anti-War Movement, Oxigen strikers, trade unions and members of Labour, the Green Party, Sinn Fein, the Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party".

We are not told two things. We are not told that the SWP called this meeting. More importantly we are not told that none, not one, of the bodies listed above has decided to support the new SWP creation. No trade unions have affiliated. No social movements. No other political parties. Again the problem here is not that the SWP took an initiative or that SW reported on that. The problem is the lack of honesty.

The main editorial is very peculiar indeed. It seems to be a warning to a socialist trend in the Labour Party that Fine Gael would be just as bad as coalition partners as Fianna Fail. Who exactly is this aimed at? There is no longer a substantial anti-coalition wing of the Labour Party as there was in previous decades. Some socialists remain in the Labour Party but they aren't an organised trend and in any case they hardly need to be reminded that Fine Gael are as bad as Fianna Fail. The problem they face isn't that they have illusions in Fine Gael, it's that they have comprehensively lost the war over coalition in the first place. It is all very well using an editorial to point out to Labour members that Enda Kenny supports the privatization of public services, but wouldn’t the space be better spent pointing out to the same people that Pat Rabbitte does too? The editorial offers fantasy-land advice to socialists in the Labour Party that they should "pressurise Rabbitte into ruling out a coalition with the right wing FG". This is hardly less divorced from reality than advising them to invent faster than light space travel and escape the confines of our solar system.

Two remaining parts of the paper are of note. By far the best part of the issue is its centre page spread. This consists of two basic theoretical articles, explaining why the working class is central to socialist change and that workers produce the wealth in society. These pieces, one imported from Britain, go alongside an interesting summary of the above mentioned Callinicos book. None of these three articles are flawless, but they are worth reading.

The other notable section is the full page advertisement for members. The call is so simplistic as to stretch belief.

"Are you against Ireland giving any support to Bush's war in Iraq?
Are you against a system where Bill Gates and fellow billionaires own more than Sub-Saharan Africa?
Do you think that there is one law for the rich and another for bin tax protestors?
Then join the SWP"

There is no mention here of socialism. No mention of the working class. There is nothing here in fact that any half-way left inclined person couldn't sign up to. You could be forgiven for thinking that you were signing up to Trocaire.

When reading Socialist Worker, I was struck by a number of things. I couldn't help but notice the evangelical push for recruits, both in the appeal and in the multiple join forms that litter the pages of the paper. It was equally noticeable just how much the paper fits an international template. Most of the left groups orbiting the British SWP produce tabloid newspapers called Socialist Worker, with a style that is as close to that of the British party as resources allow. Thirdly only six people sign articles in the paper, including at least one culled from the British paper. The inference has to be that the paper is produced by a tiny number of people.

Finally I was struck by how well meaning most of it is, even in the midst of some quite extraordinary cynicism. SW is regularly misleading. It's patronising to its audience, insisting on the most simplistic of styles. Yet its earnestness is somehow endearing.

As a parting note, if you are planning to comment, on this review or on Socialist Worker, I look forward to reading your thoughts. If you are planning to write some vicious little bit of trolling about how the SWP eat babies or worse still about how Labour/Socialist Party/Sinn Fein/anarchists are the real villains, please keep it to yourself.