Workers Press, the daily paper of the Workers Revolutionary Party, has ceased publication. The closing down of a working class daily is to be regretted as weakening the already inadequate resources of propagandd ana reportage avaldoe to une workers movement. Unfortunately the political characterStics or workers ress make is loss much less oi a crippling blow than would have been the case with an autnentic revolutionary dailv in the Lenin Ist tradition LOGIC OF A SECT The demise of Workers Press is directly attrib utable to the politics and practice of the WRP itself. The WRP, with the logic of a sect, has always counterposed building the party to the need to develop mass independent working class action. Its failure to understano me inter relationsnio derween nese two essential tasks prevented the paper trom ever becoming an autnentic voice of revolutione Marx ism and the working class vanguard.
In its nationalist and sectarian politics, Workers Press failed to speak out for and champion the causa of proletarian solidarity on many of the great sues or ne past years. vnen Ine forces becan to mobilise in support of the Vietnamese revolution the Socialist Labour League (forerunner of the WRP) failed lamentably in its international duty.
The central task then was to win the largest possible forces internationally to support the strugfight for anti-imperialist politics. PROPAGANDISM •ole or the vietnamese neople and to deteat the plans of American imperialism. But instead of allying itself with the broad movement, the WRP denounced the Vietnam Solidarity Committee, concentrated its attacks on the revolutionary left, and or the day of the 100,000 demonstration in London produced a leaner neaded wny we are not marching This policy mean that the SLL was already tarning its back on the most important task facing revolutionaries on a world scale and had failed to take up the The issue of Vietnam was no isolated example. The coup in Chile was seen by the SLL/WRP as an excellent opportunitv to denounce Stalinism and the politics of Allende. This was a not unimportant task, but the equal need to build a Chlean sondarity movement was ignored by the SLL/WRP. Indeed, on the day that the WRP was founded the massdemonstration in support of the Chilean workers was denounced by the WRP as a diversion because it cut across 'building the revolutionary party".
Later, for almost a year, the Workers Press res tricted its opposition to the jailing of the Shrewsbury pickets to propagandism. It never campaigned for the building of Shrewsbury Defence Committees, and by failing to place itself firmly behind the camPaign against the lett bureaucrats and the Communist Party who were acting as an obstacle to developing strike action, they objectively aided the very forces whom they were denouncing in print. Workers Press only 'discovered" Shrewsbury when it could initiate a campaign which was controlled by the Wigan Action Committee - a WRP-dominated body.
OWN INTERESTS On issues like Ireland, women's oppression and the struggle in Portugal and Spain. Workers Pres: has never deviated from its practice of putting the interests and recruiting campaigns of its own organ isation above the needs of the working class. Such policies have been politically disastrous, including for building the WRP, but have also ensured that Workers Press could never break out of its own self-imposed isolation. Yet by placing itself as the fore most spokesperson on such issues and by opening its pages to a debate on the best way forward to win support for them, it could have rendered a real service to the class struggle as well as gaining a real base in the working class vanguard. struggle.
ALTERNATIVE daily ter to iskra). last major effort was an expensive smear campaign against tne rouren international, culminating in a squalid attempt to portray some of its leading mem bers as accomplices of the Stalinist secret police. To 'prove' their assertions they quoted "impeccable sources suci. as the American Federal Bureau of Investigation, the US State Department and ex Trotskyist Grace Carlson, who left the revolutiondry movement to emorace goo ano ne cataolic Church. To the Workers Press the smearing of other revolutionaries was far more important than the great events of the international and British class In contrast to the way that the WRP tried to build Workers Press, the LCR (French Section of the FI) is launching its paper Rouge as a daily or 15 March on the basis that it will be an authentic voice or the pollica vanguare or terrench work ing class. In addition to printing material from all workers in struggle, Rouge has invited regular con tributions from members of other revolutionary groups - it has for instance, offered a space to Lutte Ouvriere which has welcomed the Trotskyist Roude sees its task as to organise the whole van guard in France which is breaking from reformism and aims through intensive political struggle to build the revolutionary party. It adopts fully Lenin's advice to Iskra: We must not only hospitably throw open the columns of the party organ for exchanges of opinion, but must afford those groups - or croupiets as the autnor cans tem - waich tron inconsistency support some of the dogmas of revisionism, or for one reason or another insist upon their separate and individual existence as groups, the opportunity of systematically setting forth their differences, however slight these might be! (LetThis, and the great traditions of proletarian struggle not the sectarian posturing of Workers Press, ine Leninist mode or a newspaper
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