Since the Socialist Alliance conference in December 2001 there has been a muttering, spluttering discussion on the idea of launching a new paper within the Socialist Alliance. The latest development in this is an exchange between the Alliance for Workers' Liberty and the CPGB (Weekly Worker) which can be read in full on the web.
At the conference a motion for the Socialist Alliance officially to launch a paper of its own was defeated, but won a big minority vote. At a fringe meeting straight afterwards, Jack Conrad from the CPGB and myself from the AWL proposed that the minority - or, as big a part of it as was willing - should launch a new unofficial paper.
It would give Socialist Alliance groups and activists who chose to use it a campaigning tool, a regular source of information on Alliance activities, and a vehicle for discussion - in short, it would help greatly to raise the Alliance's level of political life.
The AWL and the CPGB put out a joint leaflet, arguing the case for a new paper and pledging to put resources into it, to the conference of Socialist Alliance "independents" on 19 January this year.
No vote was taken at that conference, and the discussion on the paper was rushed, but most speakers were against it. It was too ambitious - it was better to start with local newsletters - it was undemocratic, once the conference had voted down the idea of an official paper - those were some of the objections (though the conference had also voted to recognise the right of different groupings within the SA to produce and circulate their own papers - Solidarity, Weekly Worker, Socialist Worker - why not a new one, too?)
A significant minority was for a new paper, and indicators such as the Socialist Alliance "independents" email list show that there is a wider circle of people, round the country, who would be glad to see a new paper emerge and would consider circulating it or writing for it. The AWL and the CPGB met to discuss the idea further.
At those discussions we saw two problems. First, there was a shortage of people outside the AWL and CPGB who would be regularly, centrally involved in a new paper, rather than just being willing to consider supporting it once it comes out. In practice, we were down to a merger of Solidarity and the CPGB's Weekly Worker, with a few extra people on the edges.
That first problem was not necessarily a decisive one. Such a merger, done properly, could draw in a fair number of new people over time. But it raised a second problem: what basis of agreement could we find with the CPGB on the nature and orientation of a new paper?
For two political currents with vastly different backgrounds and histories to merge their regular, staple publications into one is no small affair - not something to be done casually, without preparation, or half-cock.
Despite what you might think from its name, and from its avowed aim of "reforging" the (old) Communist Party of Great Britain, the Weekly Worker CPGB is anti-Stalinist. It has moved a long way politically from its Stalinist roots, and by now has much political common ground with the AWL.
But its bizarre self-naming is not an accident. The group still, in our view, carries some Stalinist debris. It opposes the call for a workers' government, arguing instead that at this stage we should not go beyond a "minimum programme" of a federal republic; it opposes transitional demands and permanent revolution; it has recently restated the view that the seizure of power by the Stalinist PDPA in Afghanistan in April 1978 was a genuine social revolution. It has an odd (in our view) concept of "partyism", which translates for them into saying that a new paper should deal with issues such as trade-union battles primarily through the angle of what the Socialist Alliance (as the closest thing we have to a "party") should do about them.
At the Socialist Alliance conference a year ago discussing policy for the general election, they argued that the Alliance's priority policies for the general election should be exclusively demands about formal democracy, and should reject any mention of wages, the health service, jobs, etc. as "economistic".
On all these issues, progress is possible through discussion. It is not necessary to have complete agreement before a new joint paper can be launched, because both the AWL and the CPGB have a commitment to open and democratic debate.
But it is necessary to have some level of agreement on what sort of paper we would be producing, and the broad lines of its orientation and emphasis. Therefore, we need preliminary discussion - and of underlying basic political issues, not just of technicalities.
The AWL wrote to the CPGB saying so. The CPGB replied saying that our letter was "disappointing" and that they would press ahead with a new paper "with the AWL if possible; without it if we must". We have written back asking if that means they intend to "declare" the Weekly Worker to be the Socialist Alliance Weekly in the same way as they have "declared" themselves to be "the Communist Party" - which we think would set things back rather than taking them forward - and urging them instead to take up our proposal of serious discussions.
