Reflections on the World Socialist Web Site

Although I mostly go to the World Socialist Web Site for their movie reviews, I often find other issues covered there worth reading.

For example, they have an informative piece on the tornado that killed 3 people in Massachusetts. It is obviously drawn from the bourgeois press, but it includes enough analysis to let the reader know what side of the barricades they are on:

The small town of Monson, with a population of about 8,000, took a direct hit. Like many towns in the area, Monson was once a thriving mill town but has now fallen on hard times. Remarkably, no one in the town was killed, but homes and businesses sustained severe damage. The steeple was ripped off the church and was lying in the front yard.

So out of curiosity, I checked their Alexa rating to get a handle on how much traffic they are getting:

Site Information for wsws.org

Alexa Traffic Rank: 38,549

United States Flag Traffic Rank in US: 23,233

Sites Linking In: 4,146

This is simply fucking amazing.

For comparison’s sake:

Site Information for counterpunch.org

Alexa Traffic Rank: 33,853

United States Flag Traffic Rank in US: 11,038

Sites Linking In: 6,052

Given the high profile of Alexander Cockburn and the people whose articles appear there on a regular basis such as his brother Patrick et al, it is amazing that the two websites have comparable ratings.

Perhaps I should have realized this since my wife, who teaches at 2 NYC colleges, once told me that her students are always citing wsws.org in their term papers.

I am sure that the key to their success rests on the fact that they are a daily newspaper, except for Sunday. I gather that they discontinued their print version some time back. Also, despite their ultra-sectarian politics, they tend to offer straightforward radical journalism of the sort that you might have seen in the Guardian newsweekly, a radical U.S. publication that folded in the 1980s.

By another standard of comparison, Socialist Worker, the newspaper of the leading socialist group in the U.S.—the ISO—ranks much lower than the Socialist Equality Party, the sect responsible for wsws.org:

Site Information for socialistworker.org

Alexa Traffic Rank: 153,945

United States Flag Traffic Rank in US: 45,178

Sites Linking In: 922

To some extent this might be comparing apples and oranges, since the ISO’s newspaper is primarily designed to be sold as a print publication to students, trade unionists, and participants in the mass movement. It is also a weekly newspaper embodying the traditions of the “vanguard” press going back to Iskra, at least as understood by those following such a tradition. Perhaps given the Internet revolution that is to the 20^th century what the Gutenberg press was to the 17^th century, it is a time to rethink these paradigms.

A few years after the Guardian ceased publication (it was probably 1992 or so, just around the time I was discovering the Internet), I approached Barry Cohen of the Committees of Correspondence (a group I belonged to for five minutes until I realized how embedded in the Democratic Party they were) with a proposal to start something like the Guardian again. Barry had been the editor of the People’s World, the CPUSA newspaper, and knew the business inside and out.

Barry was adamant that economics was making print publishing a thing of the past. The costs were prohibitive, from office space to the printing press itself. He thought that a newspaper was probably needed, but that it should be based on the Internet. With the Internet, you no longer had the problem of laying out a newspaper that had to fit into an even number of pages, etc. Of course, the C of C never went anywhere with this, choosing instead to focus on Portside, a daily aggregation of articles that many people subscribe to (excluding me).

Speaking for myself (who else, obviously), I am leaning strongly in the direction of launching an online daily newspaper after retiring from Columbia University. I think there is a crying need for a publication that has no ideological agenda other than to promote the kind of broad-based socialism that the Guardian newsweekly once stood for. I would hope that such a web-based publication would welcome open debate among Marxists. Our political culture has tended to encourage newspapers, either print or web based, to see themselves as disseminating a “party line” to the exclusion of opposing viewpoints, even in the form of letters. This not only robs the left of having the exchange of clashing viewpoints that are so necessary to drive the dialectic forward.

At this stage of the game, I don’t anticipate that such a newspaper would have any connections to an organization. Frankly, I am too old and too weary for that sort of thing. But given the absence of a newspaper or website that has no ” revolutionary program” to sell, like toothpaste or cereal, I think that most potential readers would find that a refreshing change.

Peter Camejo once told me that a program for the American revolution does not exist and that it can only take shape through the living class struggle where objective conditions and the relationship of class forces will help to clarify what goals should be advanced and what strategy and tactics would be best suited to achieve such goals.

As my retirement draws near, I will try to put flesh on these bones.