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A slimmed-down version of my piece on Tom Wintringham has been published in the latest issue of the Weekly Worker. With a readership of around 13,000, the Weekly Worker is reputedly the most popular paper of the British far left; for my money, it is also the most entertaining and informative. The Weekly Worker is published by a relatively small group whose aim is to regroup British socialists into a new party which is both unashamedly anti-capitalist and stringently democratic. I don't agree with all of their ideas, and like Southpaw Punch I have a problem with the continued use of language and symbolism tarnished by Stalinism, but I do like the way the Weekly Worker eschews the 'party line' and dumbed down agitprop beloved of too many leftist rags in favour of mutiple perspectives, detailed analysis , often from important scholars like Boris Kagarlitsky, Hillel Ticktin, or Michael Leibowitz, and robust debate. The paper's letters page can be considered a sort of ongoing experiment in the possibility of comradely debate.
If you want to explore the hundreds of back issues of the Weekly Worker, a good place to start is the paper's thematic archive.
posted by maps at 1/19/2007 10:57:00 am
1 Comments:
A good, and welcome, example of how Weekly Worker eschews the conventional left line is in today's issue where they castigate the SWP(UK) for picketing a venue where a ballerina was performing who has recently been 'outed' as a member of the far right British National Party. The picket called for her to be sacked.
I agree with the WW line that it is madness to do this, if anyone would be in danger if it became completley open season on sacking people for their political views (and, of course it happens now - it happened to me), it would be lefts.
I'd go further and just argue it's wrong to sack someone from being a ballerina simply because she's a bigot (and incidentally married to a Cuban-Chinese guy).
Sadly the members of the SWP that I spoke to somehow see this criticism , in their confusion, by WW (and me) of their picket as supporting the far-right, racist bigots of the BNP.
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