Embarrassed?

"Keep up the good, open, honest debate, printing articles against your own positions," writes comrade BH in a note renewing his subscription.

It is of course that very openness and honesty that leads many like him to do likewise. But we do not publish opposing viewpoints out of a sense of fair play. Our aim is to establish the truth, to defeat wrong ideas in the workers' movement in order to achieve what is necessary for working class emancipation: a single, democratic centralist Communist Party.

It is my own utter conviction of the essential nature of this task that allows me, without any trace of embarrassment or reticence, to ask - to demand - that comrades back their paper with hard cash. That is what many readers do already, and yet every month it seems to be touch and go whether we will make the £400 target necessary to keep publishing.

So it is again in February. Our total has crept up to just £154 with over half the month gone. Time to show your appreciation, comrades.

Thanks this week to comrades HG, LP, NM and RD for their gifts.

Robbie Rix

Ask for a bankers order form, or send cheques, payable to Weekly Worker, BCM Box 928, London WC1N 3XX

Number 371

Thursday February 15 2001

SNP first, then us   —   Marcus Larsen reports on the recent SSP conference

SWP unity bid falters   —   Marcus Larsen continues his report on the recent SSP conference

Letters   —   Local sacrifice; Healy acolyte; Menshevik Lenin

LSA jolts Labour in Lewisham     Raising our sights in Cambridgeshire   —   Peter Manson and Darrell Goodliffe highlight SA activity

Animal 'rights' and human wrongs   —   Mary Godwin asserts that human beings come first and last

Viva Verdi!   —   Harry Paterson reviews the two-disk Verdi Messa de Requiem - quattro pezzi sacri

Programme: the test of 1917   —   Jack Conrad separates fact from faction

For high politics   —   Robert Grace wants demands that challenge the basis of bourgeois rule

Link the struggles   —   Derek Goodliffe welcomes the decision of the Birmingham RMT conference