Paper starts publication late April. All magazine subscriptions transferred to new paper.
The first issue of the new-style Socialist Outlook fortnightly comes out on 1 May. Until now,. Socialist Outlook has appeared as a monthly journal. Why are we making this change? Aren't there enough left-wing papers already?
The first answer is that a newspaper can reach a far wider audience than a monthly journal. During the Gulf war we produced several newspaper-style broadsheets which sold well. We gained new supporters and subscriptions as a result of the sale of the broadsheets. That experience confirmed that at a demonstration or a labour movement meeting a newspaper could sell better than a fl journal.
In fact, since Socialist Outlook was launched our editorial board never had the view that a magazine was enough. For several years our supporters sold the fortnightly paper Labour Briefing, until last autumn we parted company with Briefing over what we thought was its too-narrow Labour Party orientation. We needed a new paper which could reach out to labour movement and campaign activists, and especially young people. And our experience selling newspaper-style broadsheets showed we were right.
Some readers have expressed the fear that Socialist Outlook will lose it ability to analyse issues in depth with the format change. We promise you it won't. Every few issues there will be a special 4 or 8 page theoretical supIntroductory offer (5 issues): £2.50 O Europe: 1 year: £18 Q Six months: £10.0 I include a donation of £.
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Tel... plement - "Theory and Practice', which will usually contain one, or at most two long theoretical articles. In addition, in our paper we will maintain our commitment to having some longer analytical articles in each issue.
But of course the decisive test of any political paper or journal is not the format, but whether it has something worthwhile to say. We are publishing a new paper because we think none of the existing far left papers, or the political projects they represent, are adequate to the tasks which socialists face today. How do we see ourselves as different?
First our commitment to internationalism. This is not just a matter of having regular international coverage, but of being directly linked to the work of other revolutionary socialists world-wide. Through our links with the Fourth International, we will regularly publish articles from its supporters in more than 40 countries.
Our second concern, as opposed to many left papers, is the need to build unity in action of the left in the labour movement and left campaigns. We think that Marxist ideas have to be Rest of the World: 1 year: £22 O Six months: £10• Please return to: Socialist Outlook PO Box 1109, London N4 2UU porters to read it and sell it. specially oppressed.. Published by Socialist Outlook, PO Box 1109, London N4 2UU; Printed by Eastway (TU) London E9 Not just another left paper: Socialist Outlook will be something special! fought for; but not at the expense of the kind of strident sectarianism and self-imposed isolation characteristic of so much of the far left. Socialist Outlook supports the Socialist Movement and its constituent organisations - Women for Socialism, Labour Party Socialists and the Socialist Movement Trade Union Committee. We welcome the decision to publish their new paper Socialist. We are not in competition with this paper, which serves a very different purpose to our own. We shall encourage our supThird, we think that the struggles and movements of the specially oppressed - of women, black people, lesbians and gay men - are part of the struggle for socialism and not a 'diversion' from it. Our paper will champion the self-organisation of the Most of all our paper will fight for Marxist ideas, and the central Marxist conception that the international working class movement is the key to socialist change. The near-collapse of international Stalinism, and the weakening of the Soviet Union have shaken the illusions that the socialist cess.
too embarrassing for the USA to tolerate. ary goals in the Gulf. from the Gulf.
camp' was the instrument for socialist transformation on a world scale. Socialist Outlook will be a paper which reports in detail the developments in the workers movement internationalOur first issue will be published at a time of enormous change in the world situation and in British politics. It is a time when traditional political ideas are shaken up and people's ideas can change rapidly. There are enormous opportunities for winning new people to the ideas of Marxism. Our project is an ambitious one. We have already mobilised a lot of resources to make it a success. New computers, fax machines, and design and layout equipment have been bought. We have recruited a team of full-time and part-time workers. An enormous effort is going into the design and production of the paper to make it as professional as possible. But all that will count for little without the help of our supporters and readers. We think our paper can help to break the stranglehold of the right wing on the Labour Party and trade unions. We think it can help to build a new kind of left. But to do that we need you to read and sell our paper, and to help finance it. In particular it will help us enormously if our regular readers subscribe to the paper. It will help us if you take a few copies to sell to friends. Most of all it will help us if you send us a donation, no matter how small, to make this project a sucBush Backs Saddam -from front page short almost anything they wanted to, short of chemical weapons which Bush has hinted might be regarded as just The US and British governments, having shown in the run-up to the war just how they can manipulate and bribe their way through the United Nations, have now agreed -with the USSR and China in compliance - to hide behind the limitations of the UN mandate to wage war. They just ¡ hope Saddam will get on quickly with the suppression of the Kurds, to rid them of a public embarrassment and pave the way for 'business as usual' with the Baathists.
Socialists must combat the illusions of those who still believe that somehow the US troops or the United Nations can now be used to benefit those fighting Saddam Hussein. In fact they are an extra obstacle to those fighting for national liberation or for democratic and socialist revolutionThis situation calls for a fight in Britain for the maximum solidarity with the Kurds in struggle against Saddam, against the brutal Turkish regime, and against the repression of the Iranian government: but a vital part of this must be the demand for the withdrawal of imperialist troops