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Save the Socialist Worker Seller from Extinction! Turn Anger into Action! Ordinary rank-and-file members of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in Scotland are in danger of being sold out by full-time SWP bureaucrats, desperate to cut a back-room deal with the leaders of the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP). By Stan Crooke.
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For years the rank-and-file of the SWP have toiled to increase the circulation of the party paper, Socialist Worker. For many SWP members, selling the paper has been their main - and, not infrequently, their only - form of political activity. No demonstration, no picket line, and no student union bar on a Friday evening would be complete without deadly serious fresh-faced members of the SWP turning up with their weekly quota of papers to sell. This was a truly r-r-r-revolutionary activity.
But now SWP bureaucrats are gearing up to throw all this away. They want to sign a deal with the SSP leadership which would scrap the right of SWP members to sell their papers in public. These people have sold out to Bickerstaffism hook, line and sinker! One solution - revolution!
At SWP mass meetings - attended by as many as 120 of their members in Scotland - the minority who wants to fight has tried to stop the sell-out. But they are no match for the full-timers who can draw on the SWP party machine to foist their line on a politically uneducated membership.
Just eleven members of the SWP in Scotland voted against the sell-out at an SWP aggregate meeting held in Glasgow last month. The rest were brow-beaten into submission by the wily Chris Bambery. (Chris Bambery - wily? Surely shome mishtake? Ed.)
'It beggars belief,' said SWP rank-and-file grassroots veteran shopfloor militant activist (and Scotland on Sunday theatre critic) Mark, 'we wuz robbed. It's no coincidence that Bambery rhymes with treachery! They say 'sell out', we say 'sell'! General Strike now to defend Socialist Worker and smash Israel!'
What can you do to help save the Socialist Worker seller from extinction in Scotland?
Boycott Socialist Worker! If the SWP membership don't think it's worth selling, we all have the perfect excuse not to buy the rag.
Make a large donation to Workers' Liberty. If the SWP membership can't be bothered to sell their paper, give us your money instead. (We've got a better line on Scotland anyway.)
Move resolutions in your local Friends of the Earth and World Wildlife Fund branch. Flora and fauna and friendly furry creatures are disappearing at too fast a rate to allow yet another species to go the way of the dodo.
Sign our petition: 'Seattle! Prague! Belgrade! Socialist Worker! The paper-sellers - united - willneverbedefeated!'
Join the Labour Party. If the SWP is the alternative to Labour but is now liquidating itself into the SSP, then, logically, there is no alternative to the Labour Party!
Organise a general strike, overthrow capitalism, build the revolutionary party without a revolutionary paper!
* For further information, contact: 'Save the Socialist Worker Seller from Extinction', c/o Campaign Hon. President, S. Milosevic, down-town Belgrade, Yugoslavia.