Socialist Worker Dec 18th 2004

Lenin's Tomb (Dec 15th) praised the new end-of-year Socialist Worker. Well, the cynical response is 'he would, wouldn't he', and conversely when comrades don't praise their party paper does that mean they are disappointed and depressed about it. I'm a Full Spectrum Resistance reader myself and still prefer to see the real thing rather than the web version (which is now an excellent web-site, but lacking in any facility for horizontalist communication) and still think the real test of the paper is in its ability to communicate revolutionary and socialist ideas and provide that scaffolding for a revolutionary organisation that the real Lenin and the SWP used to go on about. Anyway, still got to say that SW is by far and away the best socialist paper. The Socialist still seems as tedious as Militant ever was. I do have a hankering after the old Socialist Challenge, but that just dates me.

Well Lenin has pointed out the short piece about democratic resistance in Saudi Arabia, so I'll just point to Alex Callinicos's column as always being essential reading. Callinicos is ruminating on the prospects for the world economy in the light of current concerns about th falling value of the dollar. Interesting, but compare to the more detailed discussion by Eva Cheng in the latest Green Left Weekly.