World Socialist Web Site

Last updated

World Socialist Web Site
World Socialist Web Site logo.svg
Type of site
Opinion and analysis
Headquarters Oak Park, Michigan
Owner International Committee of the Fourth International
Editor David North (editorial board chairman)
URL wsws.org
CommercialNo (supported by donations)[ citation needed ]
RegistrationNo (Disqus account is required for commenting on articles)
LaunchedFebruary 14, 1998;26 years ago (1998-02-14) [1]
Current statusOnline

The World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) is the website of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). It describes itself as an "online newspaper of the international Trotskyist movement". [2] The WSWS publishes articles and analysis of news and events from around the world, updated daily. The site also includes coverage of the history of working-class political and organized labor movements.

Contents

About

The WSWS was established on February 14, 1998. The site was redesigned on October 22, 2008, [3] [ better source needed ] and then again on October 1, 2020. [4] [ better source needed ]

The WSWS supports and helps campaign for the Socialist Equality Parties in elections. The site has no advertisements, except for material from Mehring Books, the ICFI's publishing arm. David North serves as Chairman of the site's International Editorial Board. [5] [ better source needed ]

Content

The WSWS publishes articles on politics, finance and economics, culture, police violence, racism, war, media and information technology, corporate power, history, and labor issues.[ citation needed ]

The WSWS periodically undertakes focused political campaigns, during which numerous articles, videos, interviews, and perspectives are published on the topic. Campaigns undertaken include defending Julian Assange, [6] Chelsea Manning, [7] and Edward Snowden, [8] civil rights and free speech, [9] [10] and the opposition to utility shutoffs and bankruptcy in Detroit. [11] [12]

The WSWS described the 2014 Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine as a coup backed by the United States and Germany in which the Ukrainian far-right coalition of organizations Right Sector and political party Svoboda would have played a "crucial role". [13] Furthermore, the WSWS criticized the coverage of the Russo-Ukrainian War in 2014 by the majority of German media outlets, describing it was one-sided and "anti-Russian propaganda". Thus, leading outlets such as Der Spiegel and Die Zeit would have been clamouring for military action against Russia and attacking the President of Russia Vladimir Putin, "who is portrayed as a new Hitler and an aggressor". [14]

About the shootdown of the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in 2014, the WSWS stated that "Washington has presented not one shred of evidence that Flight MH17 was brought down by a missile either fired by the anti-Kiev forces or supplied by Moscow". Regarding the assassination of Boris Nemtsov in 2015, David North wrote for the WSWS that he was wondering if the United States was planning a coup to replace Putin with a "Western-friendly oligarch". [15]

Demotion in Google searches

According to Julianne Tvetan writing in In These Times in July 2017, the WSWS drew attention to new Google search algorithms intended to remove fake news, which WSWS believed to be a form of censorship by Google. [16] Using evidence from SEMrush, an analytics suite for search engine optimization, the WSWS alleged that several sites, such as AlterNet and Globalresearch.ca, had received reduced traffic from Google due to changes in its search algorithm. According to the WSWS, between late April 2017 and the beginning of August 2017 its Google search traffic fell by 67%. [2] [16] Google said that it had not deliberately targeted any particular website, [2] and Google vice-president Ben Gomes wrote that Google had "adjusted [its] signals to help surface more authoritative pages and demote low-quality content." [17]

The 1619 Project

In 2019, WSWS received considerable attention for its criticisms of the New York Times' The 1619 Project, which aimed to reframe American history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the center of the country's national narrative. WSWS described the project as "one component of a deliberate effort to inject racial politics into the heart of the 2020 elections and foment divisions among the working class." [18] According to The Washington Post:

On Dec. 16 [2020], Wall Street Journal opinion columnist Elliot Kaufman brought into the mainstream criticisms of the 1619 Project from four historians who had been questioning it for months on the World Socialist website, a fringe news publication founded upon the principles of Trotskyism. Some of what those professors wrote had gained momentum in the Twitterverse and sparked discussion about their analysis of the 1619 Project. [19]

WSWS received considerable praise from both liberal historians who contributed to their analysis and conservative commentators for its criticisms. For example, the National Review described it as "one of the few media outlets examining the 1619 Project in critical detail" and extensively cited contributions by historians Gordon S. Wood and James M. McPherson; [20] the research director of the right-wing American Institute for Economic Research told the Dartmouth Review that there was a "strange alliance" between conservative historians and the Trotskyists of WSWS, who he described as "old-school historians" following the data; [21] and Michael Barone in the conservative New York Post gave positive attention to historian Sean Wilentz's criticisms of the project in WSWS. [22]

Criticism

In an article for the socialist magazine New Politics , the Lebanese Trotskyist academic Gilbert Achcar described the WSWS as "pro-Putin, pro-Assad and 'left-wing' propaganda" combined with "gutter journalism ... run by a 'Trotskyist' cult ... which perpetuates a long worn-out tradition of inter-Trotskyist sectarian quarrels in fulfilling its role as apologist for Putin, Assad, and their friends." [23]

Responding in part to these claims the WSWS noted “Gilbert Achcar, also hailed these “revolutionaries,” in many cases discredited former regime figures. No attempt was made to describe their political programme or to explain why feudal Gulf despots who outlaw all opposition to their rule at home would support a progressive revolution abroad”. [24]

Regarding the claims that the WSWS are “apologists for Putin”, on the same day that the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, February 24 2022, WSWS published an article entitled “Oppose the Putin government’s invasion of Ukraine and US-NATO warmongering! For the unity of Russian and Ukrainian workers!” which opens with “The International Committee of the Fourth International and the World Socialist Web Site denounce the Russian military intervention in Ukraine”. [25] Also in an article published in 2014 warning about the danger of war breaking out between Russia and a NATO backed Ukraine the WSWS stated that “Putin relies on the reactionary mechanisms of military maneuvers and Great Russian chauvinism”. [26]

Reason has said that a 2020 viral false account of New York University agreeing to racially segregated student housing was partially due to an inaccurate report on the World Socialist Website. Reason commented: "As a socialist publication, TWSW sometimes criticizes the progressive left for being preoccupied with issues unrelated to class." [27]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Trotskyism</span> Variety of Marxism developed by Leon Trotsky

Trotskyism is the political ideology and branch of Marxism developed by Russian revolutionary and intellectual Leon Trotsky along with some other members of the Left Opposition and the Fourth International. Trotsky described himself as an orthodox Marxist, a revolutionary Marxist, and a Bolshevik–Leninist as well as a follower of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Karl Liebknecht, and Rosa Luxemburg.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fourth International</span> Revolutionary socialist international organization

The Fourth International (FI) was a political international established in France in 1938 by Leon Trotsky and his supporters, having been expelled from the Soviet Union and the Communist International.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Service (historian)</span> British historian, academic, and author (born 1947)

Robert John Service is a post-revisionist British historian, academic, and author who has written extensively on the history of the Soviet Union, particularly the era from the October Revolution to Stalin's death. He was until 2013 a professor of Russian history at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, and a senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He is best known for his biographies of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Leon Trotsky. He has been a fellow of the British Academy since 1998.

Fascist has been used as a pejorative epithet against a wide range of people, political movements, governments, and institutions since the emergence of fascism in Europe in the 1920s. Political commentators on both the Left and the Right accused their opponents of being fascists, starting in the years before World War II. In 1928, the Communist International labeled their social democratic opponents as social fascists, while the social democrats themselves as well as some parties on the political right accused the Communists of having become fascist under Joseph Stalin's leadership. In light of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, The New York Times declared on 18 September 1939 that "Hitlerism is brown communism, Stalinism is red fascism." Later, in 1944, the anti-fascist and socialist writer George Orwell commented on Tribune that fascism had been rendered almost meaningless by its common use as an insult against various people, and argued that in England the word fascist had become a synonym for bully.

Neo-Stalinism is the promotion of positive views of Joseph Stalin's role in history, the partial re-establishing of Stalin's policies on certain or all issues, and nostalgia for the Stalinist period. Neo-Stalinism overlaps significantly with neo-Sovietism and Soviet nostalgia. Various definitions of the term have been given over the years.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Socialist Equality Party (Australia)</span> Trotskyist political party

The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) is an unregistered Trotskyist political party in Australia. The SEP was established in 2010 as the successor party to the Socialist Labour League, which was founded in 1972 as the Australian section of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Socialist Equality Party (Germany)</span> Trotskyist political party

The Socialist Equality Party is a minor Trotskyist political party in Germany.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joseph Kishore</span> American Trotskyist writer (born 1980)

Joseph Kishore is an American Marxist and writer who has been active in the Trotskyist movement since 1999. He is the National Secretary of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) and a writer for the World Socialist Web Site.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David North (socialist)</span> American Marxist theoretician (born 1950)

David North is an American Marxist, who has been active in the international Trotskyist movement since 1971. He is currently the National Chairman of the Socialist Equality Party in the United States (SEP), formerly the Workers League. He served as the National Secretary of the SEP until the party's congress in 2008.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Socialist Equality Party (United States)</span> Trotskyist political party

The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) is a Trotskyist political party in the United States, one of several Socialist Equality parties around the world affiliated with the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). The ICFI publishes daily news articles, perspectives and commentaries on the World Socialist Web Site and maintains Mehring Books as publishing house.

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The Fourth International (FI), founded in 1938, is a Trotskyist international. In 1963, following a ten-year schism, the majorities of the two public factions of the Fourth International, the International Secretariat (ISFI) and the International Committee (ICFI), reunited, electing a United Secretariat of the Fourth International.

The International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), earlier known as the international Spartacist tendency (iSt) is a Trotskyist international. Its largest constituent party is the Spartacist League (US). There are smaller sections of the ICL (FI) in Mexico, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, South Africa, Australia, Greece and the United Kingdom.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Socialist Equality Party (UK)</span> Trotskyist political party

The Socialist Equality Party is a Trotskyist political party in Britain. It is one of several Socialist Equality Parties affiliated with the International Committee of the Fourth International. The ICFI publishes daily news articles, perspectives and commentaries on the World Socialist Web Site.

Media portrayals of the Russo-Ukrainian War, including skirmishes in eastern Donbas and the 2014 Ukrainian revolution after the Euromaidan protests, the subsequent 2014 annexation of Crimea, incursions into Donbas, and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, have differed widely between Ukrainian, Western and Russian media. Russian, Ukrainian, and Western media have all, to various degrees, been accused of propagandizing, and of waging an information war.

Orthodox Trotskyism is a branch of Trotskyism which aims to adhere more closely to the philosophy, methods and positions of Leon Trotsky and the early Fourth International, Vladimir Lenin and Karl Marx than other avowed Trotskyists.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Russian information war against Ukraine</span>

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Thomas Mackaman is a historian and member of the Socialist Equality Party. He is a professor of history at Kings College in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Mackaman is noted for his writing and interviews with prominent historians challenging the New York Times' 1619 Project, first published on the World Socialist Web Site.

References

  1. ↑ "This Year in Review: 1998". World Socialist Web Site. International Committee of the Fourth International. Archived from the original on May 20, 2016. Retrieved November 26, 2018.
  2. 1 2 3 Wakabayashi, Daisuke (September 26, 2017). "As Google Fights Fake News, Voices on the Margins Raise Alarm". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331. Archived from the original on January 13, 2018. Retrieved January 13, 2018.
  3. ↑ "Welcome the redesigned World Socialist Web Site". World Socialist Web Site. ICFI. October 22, 2008. Archived from the original on November 30, 2008. Retrieved April 18, 2009.
  4. ↑ "Welcome the relaunch of the World Socialist Web Site! - World Socialist Web Site". Wsws.org. October 2, 2020. Retrieved April 13, 2022.
  5. ↑ correspondents, Our (May 16, 2013). "David North speaks in Berlin on the 15th anniversary of the World Socialist Web Site". WSWS. Retrieved May 3, 2021.
  6. ↑ Mazhar, Fatimah, "World's Most Widely Accessed Socialist Website Defends Edward Snowden", Carbonated.TV, archived from the original on March 5, 2016, retrieved February 20, 2016
  7. ↑ Reporter, Ben Rosenfeld Daily Staff. "IYSSE members discuss Manning imprisonment following rally". The Michigan Daily . Retrieved May 14, 2020.
  8. ↑ "WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange rape allegations: What's behind them?". Hot Topics. September 1, 2010. Archived from the original on October 24, 2017. Retrieved October 23, 2017.
  9. ↑ Elliott, Tim (May 5, 2010). "Hunt was up against civil rights arguments". The Sydney Morning Herald. Archived from the original on October 23, 2017. Retrieved October 2, 2017.
  10. ↑ "'Fake news' or free speech: Is Google cracking down on left media?". Salon. October 18, 2017. Archived from the original on October 24, 2017. Retrieved October 23, 2017.
  11. ↑ "IYSSE facilitates campus discussion about socialism". The South End. Archived from the original on October 23, 2017. Retrieved October 23, 2017.
  12. ↑ "Socialists to protest in defense of Detroit's DIA Friday, day after EM Orr tells business leaders he was once 'somewhat of a Socialist' himself". MLive.com. Archived from the original on October 23, 2017. Retrieved October 23, 2017.
  13. ↑ Lawriwsky, Michael (June 19, 2023). "The Worldwide Success of Russian Propaganda". Quadrant .
  14. ↑ Zubaryeva, Mariia A. (2015). "Аналіз інформаційної війни між Росією та Україною в інформаційному суспільстві". Informatsiyne Suspilstvo (in Ukrainian) (21): 6–11.
  15. ↑ Boyd-Barrett, Oliver (2016). Western Mainstream Media and the Ukraine Crisis: A Study in Conflict Propaganda. Media, War and Security. Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315559681. ISBN   9781317196006.
  16. 1 2 Tvetan, Julianne (October 11, 2017). "How the "Fake News" Scare Is Marginalizing the Left". In These Times. Retrieved August 16, 2022.
  17. ↑ Sheffield, Matthew (October 18, 2017). "'Fake news' or free speech: Is Google cracking down on left media?". Salon. Archived from the original on January 13, 2018. Retrieved January 13, 2018.
  18. ↑ Wagner, Laura (October 16, 2020). "New York Times to Staff: You Can Only Trash Colleagues If You Have a Column". Vice. Retrieved August 17, 2022.
  19. ↑ Mettler, Katie (December 22, 2019). "Five professors say the 1619 Project should be amended. 'We disagree,' says the New York Times". The Washington Post. Retrieved August 17, 2022.
  20. ↑ "History According to the 1619 Project". National Review. January 16, 2020. Retrieved August 17, 2022.
  21. ↑ "Debunking 1619: An Interview with Phillip W. Magness". The Dartmouth Review. April 25, 2022. Retrieved August 17, 2022. You also had people from the far left jumping in. Some of the heaviest criticisms came from a website called the World Socialist Website, which has a Trotskyist Marxist perspective, but they're old school historians. These are people that bring a left-wing perspective to history, but they use a methodology that's rooted in evidence. That's rooted in factual analysis, following the data and following the facts and the archives to where they lead. So they give a spin on it that's very different from my own, but their evidentiary approach is very similar. So I'm in the middle of a very strange coalition. And there's also conservative historians that jumped in, but a very strange coalition across the political spectrum that looked at this thing and said, "There are defects."
  22. ↑ Barone, Michael (January 25, 2020). "Scholars are eviscerating The New York Times' 1619 Project". New York Post. Retrieved August 17, 2022.
  23. ↑ Achcar, Gilbert (October 10, 2019). "On Gutter Journalism and Purported "Anti-Imperialism"". New Politics.
  24. ↑ https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/03/15/syri-m15.html
  25. ↑ https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/02/25/pers-f25.html
  26. ↑ https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/03/07/pers-m07.html
  27. ↑ Soave, Robby (August 24, 2020). "Yes, Black NYU Students Demanded Segregated Housing. No, the University Didn't Agree to It". Reason.com. Retrieved August 17, 2022.
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