Rupert, Bear With Me

I sometimes wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the day at the thought of Rupert Murdoch deleting my Socialist Standard MySpace page.

The fear's not so much from losing the page itself. These things happen, and I'd either start the page again or channel my energy into something more productive . . . maybe counting the cracks in the sidewalk outside our apartment building.

No, the real tragedy would be that there are some real gem-like articles that I have both cut-and-pasted and transcribed onto the page in the past two years, and if the page was to disappear into the cyber-aether one morning that'd be a lot of one finger typing that would have gone to waste.

With that in mind, I set up Socialist Standard@MySpace as a back-up blog a few months back, but with over 600 articles, book reviews and other ephemera to cut and paste it's taking longer than I thought to fully back up the page. The good news is that I'm about 2/3's of the way there in transferring the material, and that when it's all up to date it will be a good extra resource for impossibilism on the net.

Other plusses are that the label system that blogger provides means that it will be easier to access - say - all the Pathfinder columns from the Socialist Standard, and the exhaustiveness of blogger's search facility. For all the visibility that MySpace can provide, it's a pain for burying away archived articles. Once an article disappears off your main page, it's nigh on impossible to locate it again. The back up blog will allow me - and others - to find old articles, and I will now also be able to locate the original article on MySpace via the hyperlink provided. (Just click on the title of any post.)

As I've stated, it's a rather slow and laborious process transferring over from one site to the other, so I'm having to do it in stages. Being the contrary swine that I am, I'm picking months at random and I've just finished backing up the month of December 2006. Linked below are a few articles from that month that deserve a wider audience:

From the LibCom website: The Actor and the King by Ret Marut - a short story

A Jim Plant article from the SLP newspaper, The People: Luxemburg in China?

A 1974 paper from the old Aberdeen group of the SPGB: Marx v Lenin - What Kind of Revolution

From the WSPUS MySpace page: Class Politics in the USA - Interview with WSPUS and Union Activist

A Steve Coleman talk from the SPGB's 1998 Summer School: Is The Socialist Party Marxist?

Book Review from the July 1925 issue of the Socialist Standard. Jack Fitzgerald reviews Karl Kautsky's 'Foundations of Christianity': The Origins of Christianity

From the WSM Website: Shelley: a socialist poet

Editorial from the October 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard: Professional Revolutionaries

You'll notice that the articles cherry picked are not from the Socialist Standard from that particular month. Nothing against the December 2006 issue. It's a fine issue: I've been known to carry spare copies around with me.

No, it's just that articles from current Standards are easy enough to access and the purpose of the back-up blog is to ensure that the older, quirkier stuff is saved (and cited) for posterity.

More months to follow. Watch this space.