A postal worker explains the vital role a newspaper can play in organising the rank and file and assesses how well the Post Worker bulletin fulfils this role

Lenin famously called the revolutionary newspaper the “scaffolding” on which the communist party is built, getting out the message and organising its members and, through them, wider layers of workers. The same is true for a rank and file movement in the unions. It needs a regular bulletin or paper, controlled by its members, in order to argue its tactics to its readership and become a factor in the key debates taking place in the union.

A rank and file paper, if it is to fulfil these tasks, needs to be open to the membership and activists. While maintaining an editorial line developed in democratic conferences of the rank and file, it should become a genuine mouthpiece and sounding board of the membership, full of letters but also opening up its pages to take on the arguments from the leadership or others in the union, the better to win them decisively. It should report the news that members might not otherwise hear, reports from the workplaces and union branches on strikes, victimisations, protest actions and organising efforts, both the victories and the defeats.

Such a paper would not just be a debating society for the militants of the union, it would become an important tool to cohere the membership of the union around its left wing and to win wider layers to taking up its tactics and supporting its campaigns.

Post Worker is the most consistently produced bulletin from the Socialist Workers Party in recent years. How does it measure up as a rank and file bulletin?

Post Worker is a well produced bulletin, with a good coverage of current disputes in the union, from tackling what we need out of technical agreements like the new Industrial Relations Framework, to how to build workplace organisation and political issues, like the opening up of the post to competition in 2006, and privatisation of Royal Mail.

It has a range of writers, mostly SWP members, but some pro-Labour, with a good spread from around the country. When there is a real debate going on in the union, such as the 2003 election battle for Deputy General Secretary (Postal) between John Keggie and Dave Ward, the full page of letters shows that Post Worker is read and workers respond to it.

Neither does it just take on the issues, but it also reports the action, and always reports on protests and the anti-war movement. This year it had limited debates about whether to vote Labour or Respect. Its format and balance of coverage is excellent.

What is frustrating about Post Worker is that five years on it remains a bulletin, not a movement. The most “organisation” it has is electing an editorial board at a fringe meeting at the CWU's annual conference. It has no conference of its own to debate its policy and generate campaigns, no members to agitate for it and no meetings to organise the rank and file. It has called no conferences for militants in the CWU, nor organised any campaigns within the union itself. Constant articles on the BNP never once argue for posties to boycott their leaflets or offer ways to organise such action.

Since it has never gone beyond being a newspaper, its impact on the union has remained minimal, despite reported orders of up to 5,000 copies.

Why has the potential of Post Worker never been realised?

In a nutshell: the SWP's control of the editorial board of Post Worker. While they may want to encourage debate, they don't want anyone to challenge their control. Throwing the editorial line open to democratically decided positions by the rank and file members or enabling rank and file activists to take initiatives not sanctioned by their central committee is not an option for the SWP.

The SWP's orientation towards the leadership of the union also limits their willingness to allow criticism of the bureaucracy. The SWP wants to avoid alienating the left wing of the CWU bureaucracy. This approach becomes clear from the content of the articles in Post Worker . Despite sharp criticism of leaders such as Billy Hayes' sell-out over the privatisation of the postal engineering section ROMEC, this is the exception rather than the rule. This year Billy Hayes had columns in two issues, just like he does in the CWU's own magazine Voice! In fact Post Worker ducks consistent criticism of the last five years of sell-outs and inadequate action by the leadership.

Post Worker has never debated or adopted a political programme. The SWP defends this fact, by saying they don't want to “impose” their politics. Fine, let's have a democratic debate then and then decide on policy, that is how the workers movement sorts out internal differences.

Their failure to fight for politics which could build a rank and file organisation in the post leads to the SWP tailing the left bureaucrats. In fact, Jane Loftus, the party's member on the national executive, explained that she voted for “Major Change” a management package that involved job cuts, in order to “maintain the unity of the left”: unity of the graveyard, more like!

Post Worker floats on the radicalism of the rank and file - and adjusts its policies accordingly. What it doesn’t do is map out a way to channel that radicalism into a wholesale transformation of the union. And isn’t this just what the left leaders of the unions always do too?

Post Worker does have successes here and there, but overall it fails to seriously challenge the CWU bureaucracy or reorient the union. Either the SWP changes tack and transforms the bulletin into the nucleus of a rank and file movement, or Post Worker will not merit more than a footnote in the history of the CWU.