OR many readers this will be the first issue of THE WEEK they have
seen. We are now entering our second year of life, but hitherto we have existed only as a duplicated news service. Thanks to the devotion of our readers, who have taxed themselves unstintingly in our behalf, we are new able to appear in a more readable format. To do this, we try to provide a digest of news from many sources, with the intention of helping the Left to find a convenient focus on events which are often inadequately discussed in the majority of newspapers. We do not think it is our job to preach. But we do want to help socialists to keep abreast of one another, to extend valuable initiatives which may often. be taken in one town, or one union, over the widest possible field, and to keep contact with and render assistance to the world-wide freedom movement of which we think British Labour must become a part. We would like to help tu co-ordinate and unify the left, thus developing its powers to the greatest possible extent.
Since it is fashionable to begin the year with a number o: pledges, we may be forgiven for revealing ours. We are committed to full support for the Labour Government in Britain, and pledged to work for the complete realisation of its programme of social reforms. In the fight for decent liomes and schools, for a real blossoming of welfare and social services, and ior the elimination of poverty wherever it exists, it is impossible to refrain from working for the deepest and most thorough-going structural reform of our broken-down economic system, in a socialist direction. We must do all in our power to help the workers to contain, beat back, and encroach upon the area of capitalist power. The only ‘prerogative of management’ we are happy about is its prerogative to retire. We shall document the constant battle in industry for human rights for the workpeople. Our vision of socialism does not rest on wise plans drawn up by an elite of schemers, but on the verve, wisdom and initiative of the people themselves. For this reason we support the movement for workers’ control and workers’ selfmanagement, whether at the level of workers’ administration of the about-tobe nationalised steel industry, or at the level of the day-to-day conflicts on the shop floor in privately owned factories. We shali provide a constant barrage of facts to support this struggle.
We shall, therefore, aim to provide a service which will be of use to trade unionists in their work. | Our pages are theits. We have no peculiar axe of our own to grind. But their quarrels are ours: their strength and unity, and their sense of direction, are our first concern.
Of course, we cannot hope to premote an effective socialist response to the deep crisis of present-day British capitalism, without in the process supporting all the struggles of our co-thinkers, in the Labour movements of the rest of the world. Our eyes will be on the struggles of the workers in the European countries and the USA. We shall seek out what can be learnt from them. Jointly with them, we shall do what we can to assist the struggle against colonialism, the nuclear alliance, apartheid, and al! the other vile constraints of the evil, brutal world against which we are pitted. Home and abroad were abolished when the Labour Movement was born. Today, the fight for colonial freedom, for instance, begins and ends in our own court, for the oppressors of the Third World are the same people we find bracketed down upon our own necks. Similarly, we cannot ignore developments in the Communist countries. With the fall of the monolith, every sign of the growth of regenerative, democratic forces, every stand for equality, every assertion of genuine internationalist and humanist goals, is an event confirming again the universal necessity of our own socialist movement.
1965 will see huge gains by all these forces of human betterment. We shall, to the limits of our,abilities, help to consolidate and extend them.