I just donated $100 to the Counterpunch fund-drive (http://store.counterpunch.org/) and strongly urge you to do so as well. At the risk of sounding like one of those annoying NPR or PBS people during their fund-drive, let me show you how little this would cost you in comparison to the reward: keeping the most important “hard left” website afloat.
$100 per year comes to about 28 cents a day, the amount of small change that you would barely notice if it fell out of your pocket behind a sofa cushion. I pay $2.50 per day to read the N.Y. Times but if I had a choice between Counterpunch and the Gray Lady, I would not hesitate. You could always switch to the Washington Post but there is only one Counterpunch.
On the Counterpunch home page, the editors remind us that it’s celebrating its 20th anniversary. Although most people associate Counterpunch with the web and the editorial team of Alexander Cockburn and Jeff St. Clair, it actually was launched in 1994 by Ken Silverstein as a print newsletter in the same format as Doug Henwood’s LBO. I took out a sub to Counterpunch just as soon as I learned of it from an ad in the back pages of the Nation Magazine. In the first year of Counterpunch, there’s an article based on an interview Ken did with me about the mass layoffs of IT managers at Goldman-Sachs.
After Counterpunch devolved into the capable hands of Alexander Cockburn, Ken went on to a series of jobs with different newspapers and magazines, and is now ensconced at Harper’s, a magazine that I have been subbed to since the early 80s. In fact, my staples—periodicals that I rely on—are Harper’s, Counterpunch, LBO and the NY Times.
Harper’s has a real connection to the fundraising appeal I am making here. As you probably know, the publisher John MacArthur hates the Internet, viewing it as a threat to journalism and to humanity in general. Like Evgeny Morozov and Jaron Lanier, he views it as a plot by people like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg to turn us into slaves of the Big Machine a la Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. When I put a Harper’s article (a Terry Eagleton review of Sperber’s Karl Marx biography) on the Marxmail website, I got email from Harper’s demanding that I take it down. It probably did not occur to them that the people who read the article might have been enticed to take out a subscription to the magazine on the basis of the theft of their precious intellectual property.
MacArthur’s big complaint is that the Internet will destroy serious journalism by removing it from the commodity chain. While it is true that an article on the Louisiana oil company depredations by Ken Silverstein requires a serious outlay in terms of transportation and housing costs, not to speak of his salary, there are articles in Counterpunch that are just as vital as Ken’s. They, however, are not behind a paywall.
That is where you come in, dear readers. We need a mainstream liberal magazine like Harper’s but we need Counterpunch even more. Where else are you going to get quality articles written by a wide range of authors five days a week? The content of the Counterpunch archives are an amazing resource for any leftie doing research on some topic. For example, if you Google “fracking” using the Counterpunch domain, you will get 6,100 hits—all of them relevant to the research project of exposing the corporate polluters. This is certainly worth 28 cents a day.
Finally, I want to deal with the question of some of the static Counterpunch has generated this year, particularly with the ISO attack on “sexism”. It is very important to understand that Counterpunch—at least the way I see it—is not a party newspaper like the ISO’s. Jeff and Joshua Frank do not sit down and plot out an agenda for 2014 with the aim of establishing cells of disciplined cadre everywhere determined to win the masses to the St. Clair/Frank programme for communist revolution.
In fact it is the very undisciplined character of Counterpunch that makes it unique. What better symbol of that was the Cockburn—St. Clair partnership that persisted even when they were miles apart on global warming? I began writing for Counterpunch on the invitation of Jeff St. Clair after he read my tirade about an article supporting the jailing of Pussy Riot that had appeared on Counterpunch. Also, you may have noticed the publication of a piece about Syria I had written recently. It went against what regularly appears on Counterpunch. If the vanguard party newspapers were 1/100th as inclusive as Counterpunch, we’d all be a lot better off. If you study the real history of the Russian revolutionary movement, you will learn that Counterpunch has much more in common with Iskra or Pravda than any of these “party line” newspapers.
At any rate, in a period of deepening social and economic crisis, a publication like Counterpunch is more necessary than ever. I created the Marxism mailing list in order to allow revolutionary socialists worldwide to communicate. Not more than a day or so goes by without me linking to a Counterpunch article, totaling 3,490 at this point. That speaks volumes for its importance. I urge you to donate $100 like me or $50, or whatever you can afford. As they say, “from each according to their ability…” Then, of course, everybody needs Counterpunch equally.