Weekly Worker 512 Thursday January 22 2004

Around the web

Web breakfast

At home, breakfast telly has become as an essential part of my morning routine, alongside my cup of tea and bowl of cereal. Usually I tend to go for the BBC or, if I am feeling particularly masochistic, Murdoch’s Orwellian channel, Fox ‘News’.

Both offer variations on a theme. Fox and the BBC only feature news items that they define as important, such as mainstream party politics, international issues, economic news, etc. Such mouthpieces of the ruling class exist to produce news for themselves; therefore it is pretty uncontroversial to say that Marxists should view the bourgeois media through a critical lens. That is, not only do the media distort what is reported, but also leave a lot of things unsaid. Out of sight, out of mind.

Therefore the comrades responsible for the Labour Start website are to be congratulated for putting together a genuinely useful tool. Whereas most left groups use the internet in a strictly instrumental fashion (ie, just sticking up a website carrying their party’s partisan positions and contact details), Labour Start brings together hundreds of stories every week culled from little-circulated union releases, as well as obscure corners of the bourgeois media. It is pretty similar to a cyberspace version of Socialist Worker’s ‘News and reports’ feature, with a bit more detail and the occasional imprimatur of ‘respectable’ news organisations.

These items occupy the main field under the heading, ‘This week’s top stories’, and link to reports by the media outlets concerned. For example, leaders at the time of writing concern the three-month-old Californian grocery worker’s strike (LA Times), more Enron-style disclosures from unions representing Parmalat’s workforce (New York Times), and the formation of Bahrain’s federation of unions (Gulf News). This is followed by a special section on the Sars virus (which appears to be broken), before a (very large) round-up of today’s news from the international frontline of the class struggle. There is no mistaking its impressive scope, but no items from the left press get a look in. Do Labour Start comrades believe such reports to be crude position pieces, or are the left’s questionable journalistic standards to blame?

An investigation of the navigation panel turns up a lot of interesting additional material. It is headed with January’s ‘Job of the month’ - an organiser vacancy for Teamsters for a Democratic Union in Detroit, USA. This is followed by the site search engine, which covers recently featured stories plus an archive stretching back five years. Next follows a number of urgent stories asking the viewer to act - usually by sending a standard email of protest helpfully provided by these pages. Following yet another search engine (allowing for a search of the archives for stories particular to individual countries) we have the option to vote for the labour website of 2003. Naturally the Labour Start web team fancy the accolade, but unfortunately the voting link does not work! Still, at least you can take a look at the previous winners.

The option to show appreciation financially is available via its donation pages. This can be done online through PayPal or by snail mail, care of a London address. The jobs page rounds up some union vacancies ranging from regional organiser for the PCSU to a part-time clerical position at Usdaw. As might be expected, the overwhelming majority of vacancies are concentrated in the US-UK-Australia axis. The newswire page is aimed at those with their own websites and contains the techie info needed to set up a Labour Start feed (it was so simple, even I could follow it). The ‘About’ page offers a quick guide to the project, including links to its network of volunteers, mailing list, and frequently asked questions. The forums link offers a variety of boards of varying degrees of participation on a number of topics. Most seem union-specific (even down to branch level), and therefore strictly on-topic, and appear well behaved. The war on terror forums describe themselves as “a place to exchange news and information - not to shout at each other”. It is a pity that too few internet-using socialists take heed of this advice.

There is a lot more to Labour Start that this brief overview has covered, and is well worth exploring in more depth. Comrades visiting the site should take the home page legend seriously. It reads: “Where trade unionists start their day on the net”. A pity Labour Start does not do breakfast TV. It would be just the tonic to relieve my BBC-induced indigestion.

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