Socialist Press: 6½ years fighting for revolutionary leadership

JOHN LISTER has edited Socialist Press since its first publication. Here he points to what has distinguished ours from other papers—the qualities that we want to see carried forward in the new Socialist Organiser.

We didn’t know very much about the technicalities of producing newspapers when we launched Socialist Press as an 8-page fortnightly in February 1975.

But we knew what kind of political approach we wanted to take in relation to the struggles of the working class and the fight for the demands of the Trotskyist Transitional Programme.

None of us had ever seen a typesetting machine before. None of us knew how to rule out columns or paste up artwork. Luckily a friend who had worked on Red Weekly helped out and showed us which end of a T-square to hold.

We may have got lots of lines crooked, with pictures few and far between on those first agonising all-night productions, but we knew what kind of material we wanted to go in the paper.

Most of us had spent the preceding few months engaged in a sharp political struggle inside the Workers Revolutionary Party.

We had argued there for a turn towards popularising and campaigning for workers to act upon the demands of the Transitional Programme—such as cost of living clauses to protect wages against inflation, work sharing on full pay, opening the books of the employers, and occupations to force the nationalisation of particular firms and industries.

We had argued for this approach in opposition to the repetitive abstract propagandist calls for “nationalisation without compensation under workers’ control” which formed the major content of the WRP’s demands in the trade unions.

We argued for a flexible and sensitive approach to the fight to expose the waverings and betrayals of the ‘left’ Labour MPs and left-talking bureaucrats, who command mass support within the workers’ movement.

While the WRP leadership contented itself with merely denouncing them as “corporatists” and traitors, we argued that the best way to expose the weaknesses and inadequacy of these leaders was to encourage workers to place demands on them, demands that they fight the right wing, and mobilise action in defence of jobs and living standards.

Insofar as they do so, we argued, they advance the class struggle and must be given critical support and urged to go further: insofar as they refuse to respond to such demands, they expose their own weakness in the eyes of their supporters.

Foundations

In embracing this approach and attempting to reverse the sterile propagandism and ultimatism of the WRP leadership we were laying the important political foundations for the launching of Socialist Press: we were also making life impossibly difficult for the WRP leaders.

They had set their faces against this, the method of the early Comintern and the Transitional Programme: sooner than change from their sectarian and propagandist stance they expelled us all from the WRP on the eve of the Party conference which was supposedly to discuss our positions.

In launching Socialist Press within six weeks of the formation of the Workers Socialist League, therefore, we were taking up the challenge before us: we were beginning the fight to make the Trotskyist programme a living force in the daily struggles of the working class.

We recognised, too, that while we could immediately begin this fight in the British labour movement—in particular the trade unions—our fight was part of an international struggle for revolutionary leadership in the struggle against imperialism, capitalist exploitation and the repression of the Stalinist bureaucracies in the deformed workers’ states.

From our first issue therefore international news and analysis have played a major role in the development of Socialist Press.

Festering hulk

Our initial cadres emerged from the festering hulk of the WRP as a partial reflection of the growing strength of the international working class in the struggles in Vietnam, Portugal, Ethiopia, Angola and South Africa: and we have acknowledged our responsiblity not simply to observe and applaud these struggles but to analyse and draw lessons from them for the workers’ movement on a world scale.

Independence

Above all we stressed in each arena of struggle the necessity for the political independence and the central revolutionary role of the working class in the struggle against oppression and exploitation.

While recognising the need in many cases for the working class to spearhead the struggles of poor peasants, the urban middle class and other oppressed groups in society we have opposed every form of class collaboration which restricts workers’ independent demands or shackles their struggles.

Socialist Press has therefore developed a distinctive political line and method of approach to struggles. And we have recognised the need not simply to echo and reflect struggles taking place but to offer analysis, perspective, programme and leadership to those struggles, even if we were not directly in a position to implement such policies in practice.

Our paper has never stood by the sidelines simply posing questions to the leaders. We have set out consistently in each issue to take positions on the problems confronting the working class.

As a fortnightly or even as a weekly paper our function has not been so much to present “news” to our readers: in many cases our news is necessarily less up-to-date, less detailed, less immediate than that available in the bourgeois press or larger scale publications.

Our strength has rested in our ability accurately to draw out the political content of issues and struggles, to present clear slogans and conclusions, and to expose the various manoevres and betrayals of the reformist and Stalinist misleaders.

It is as a Marxist paper rather than a newspaper that our readers have turned to Socialist Press.

And with this in mind we have presented as full a picture as we can of the Marxist world view—not simply on industrial, economic and overtly political questions but also on cultural and historical issues.

We have brought into the pages of the paper over our 6½ years a range of theoretical contributions—ranging from a 25-part series on the Russian Revolution, to a ten-part series on the struggle for Irish liberation; series of articles on women’s oppression, on Popular Front governments of the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War, and Fascism.

We have explained basic policies and demands of the Trotskyist programme, explained the origins and politics of Stalinism, and we have explained our disagreements with other political tendencies on the left in Britain and internationally while spelling out our call for the reconstruction of the Fourth International.

Of course we have learned and developed in the last 6½ years—particularly in areas of struggle in which the WRP had no practical involvement.

Socalist Press has markedly strengthened its coverage and analysis of the Irish struggle and the fight for solidarity in the British struggle for revolutionary leadership in the labour movement has taken on a more concrete and practical form with the emergence of powerful leftward currents in the Labour rank and file.

We have developed our grasp of the problems of women’s oppression and the necessity to mobilise working class women and men in the struggle for sexual equality.

And in the last two years we have strengthened our analysis and ability to play a role in the political upheavals now taking place in the Labour Party.

Socialist Press supporters have come to the fore in numerous struggles within the Labour Party. And our initial, formal, understanding of the necessity to “make the lefts fight” in the labour movement.

We have of course made some mistakes in the course of 254 issues. But in general we would argue that the mistakes have been more technical than political: that the record of Socialist Press is one of consistent struggle for a Marxist analysis and for Trotskyist intervention into the struggles of the working class.

Our turn now to support the expansion of Socialist Organiser and to argue in that paper for our politics stems from our conviction that we can carry forward this record into a new, enlarged readership. The last few months have confirmed that the comrades around Socialist Organiser share our political approach, and that cooperation can be of mutual benefit.

The new paper is a further step forward in the struggle to root the Trotskyist programme in the living movement of the working class.

In sponsoring the new weekly, we intend to see that it picks up on the strengths and record of both Socialist Press and Socialist Organiser.

We continue to set ourselves squarely in opposition to barren sectarian sloganising, whila at the same time offering workers a principled alternative to their existing labour movement leadership.

Our history takes a new step forward.

Captions to the facsimile front pages: The first issue - February 6, 1975 We graduate to professional printers Regular 12-page publication - issue 36 First weekly - November 2 1977 Our response to Tory government - May 1979 Issue 250 - June 11 1981