A case of magical thinking

The following text appeared on the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) on Dec 5, 2013.

“Today,” Marsden said, “the WSWS is the recognised and authoritative voice of revolutionary Marxism. With a monthly readership in excess of two million, it has more followers than the Left Party in Germany, Syriza in Greece, the New Anti-capitalist Party in France, the Pabloite International Viewpoint, and the two largest pseudo-left tendencies in the UK, the Socialist Workers Party and the Socialist Party, combined.” [1]

The speaker was Chris Marsden,  National Secretary of the Socialist Equality Party of Britain. 

While it is not uncommon for small groups on the left to imagine that their influence extends far beyond their small membership rolls - a belief that contains a grain of truth when it comes to left wing groups – Marsden’s statement must count as a case of magical thinking in a class by itself.  Now there is no question that the World Socialist Web Site has been very successful in building a large readership.  But there is also no evidence that this readership has been translated into a viable movement with significant influence.  Undoubtedly some modest growth has occurred since the economic crisis of the past five years has given a boost to most groups on the left.  But to maintain that the WSWS “has more followers than the Left Party in Germany..or.. Syriza in Greece.. or the New Anti-capitalist Party in France” is to stretch reality to new frontiers altogether. According to the WSWS their group in Germany, the Partei für Soziale Gleichheit (Socialist Equality Party or PSG), received a total of 4,840 votes in the September 2013 Federal elections. [2] The official election returns show that the Left Party of Germany received a total 3,755,699 votes, or about 8.6% of the total cast. [3]  The PSG therefore received a little more than one-tenth of one percent (0.12 %) of the votes cast for the Left Party.  But perhaps this comparison is unfair.  After all the PSG is a small party and did not contest elections in every state while the Left Party did.  Let us then compare the PSG’s result in the state of Berlin, where presumably it has its largest base, to that of the Left Party.  According to the PSG’s own figures they received a total of 976 votes in Berlin. The Left Party of Germany received a total of 333,148 votes, or about 18.7% of the total votes cast in that state. [4] Comparing the results in Berlin, the PSG received a little less than three tenths of one percent - 0.29% of the vote that was obtained by the Left Party.  That’s a bit better than their nationwide percentage, but hardly impressive.  Out of all the parties that were officially contesting seats for the Bundestag in the 2013 elections, the PSG came in dead last, behind such outfits as the Marxist Leninist Party (MLPD) which received  24,219 votes and a group called The Violets for Spiritual Politics which received a total of 8,211 votes. 

Marsden’s use of web site statistics to convince his readers of the unparalleled influence of the WSWS brings to mind a phrase long attributed to the art of interpreting statistics, that there are “Lies, damn lies and statistics.”  If you cherry pick the right numbers, you can make statistics mean anything you wish them to mean.  One wonders therefore why, in assessing the influence of the WSWS, Marsden stopped with the monthly readership of the WSWS.  Why not cite the yearly readership of the WSWS?  If we go by the reported monthly readership of the WSWS being 2 million, then the yearly readership must be approximately 24 million.  That is just about the total number of votes received by the two leading parties contesting the German elections, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Social Democrats (SPD).  Therefore it makes just as much sense to say that the influence of the WSWS is comparable to the influence of both major parties combined.  Those are the kind of absurdities that follow when playing the game of cherry picking your data to fit your agenda.

While Marsden’s strategy of aggregating the monthly statistics is clearly arbitrary – he could have just as easily selected the weekly statistics - he is also guilty of making a false assumption to justify his claim, namely that each “hit” on a web site translates into one distinct individual.  As anyone with any familiarity with web site statistics knows, that is hardly the case.  The number of unique visitors to a site is always far less than the number of  hits over a given period. 

But even if Marsden’s figures were completely accurate and there are indeed two million unique visitors to the WSWS every month, how does he explain the poor showing of the PSG in the 2013 Federal elections?  Granted that votes obtained in a Federal election may not be an accurate gauge of a group’s influence, it is still probably the most important figure available for estimating the relative strength of political parties.  And the PSG itself has cited its election statistics, both in the current election and in past elections as proof of its growing influence.  (See for instance our comments about the PSG’s claims in previous elections.)[5] The PSG and the WSWS in general have a history of denying reality.  When it comes to assessing their election results, every slight uptick is deemed to have great significance whereas every downward trend is simply ignored.  Thus in their article on the significance of the PSG’s intervention into the 2013 election, the author states that,

“.. the party gained a limited but significant support base. The party was able to increase its vote total from 2,957 in 2009 to 4,840 this time.” 

Yet in the same article he also notes that, 

“In Berlin, 976 voted for the PSG, 444 less than in 2009.” [6]

Why is the former fact deemed “significant” while the latter is not? As Julius Caesar said,

“Men willingly believe what they wish.”

He might have added that self-deception is no good for anything, least of all in politics. And a movement that encourages magical thinking is a movement doomed to irrelevance.

Alex Steiner, Dec 15, 2013

  

---

[1]  https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/12/05/meet-d05.html

[2]  http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/09/27/psg-s27.html

[3]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_federal_election,_2013

[4]  http://www.electionresources.org/de/bundestag.php?election=2013&land=BE

[5]  http://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/psg_elections_2011.pdf and 
 http://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/PSG_elections.pdf

[6]  http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/09/27/psg-s27.html

Share:

Read More

The deadweight of sectarianism

By Frank Brenner

Oct. 21, 2009

I want to follow up a previous blog of mine (“The PSG and the EU elections”[1]) by commenting on a recent article by PSG leader Peter Schwarz called “The PSG and the German Left Party”.[2] While Schwarz’s article is an exchange of letters with a reader, it isn’t hard to see that he is also addressing my earlier posting (though without bothering to mention the latter, a practice all too common in the polemical style of the ICFI leadership).[3]

Without repeating material from the previous blog, it needs to be said that the trends analyzed there became more evident in the Sept. 27 German federal election. The Social Democrats (SPD) had their worst result since the end of the Second World War, losing over 11 percent of their vote. The other ‘natural’ governing party, the Christian Democrats (CDU), also had one of its poorest showings ever. Lesser parties – the Free Democrats, the Greens and the Left Party – all made substantial gains. The German political landscape is being altered by the seismic shifts within global capitalism.

From the standpoint of the working class, the key development is the decline of the SPD and the growth of the Left Party. It is clear that many workers and youth, facing increasingly bleak economic prospects, no longer see the SPD as a party of social reform. They identify it – rightly of course – as a pro-business, establishment party. This represents an important shift in the political consciousness of a significant section of the German working class, and that shift has manifested itself in a turn towards the Left Party.

It is this last point, evident to anyone who has followed the German political scene, which Schwarz and the PSG vehemently deny. They are happy to discuss the political decline of the SPD but see no significance, so far as the development of working class consciousness is concerned, in the growing support for the Left Party. To this end, Schwarz marshals a number of arguments, all of which repeat earlier PSG statements and none of which stand up to critical analysis.

Read entire essay here ->>

Auf Deutsch ->>

---

[1] http://www.permanent-revolution.org/polemics/PSG_elections.pdf. In German: http://www.permanent-revolution.org/polemics/PSG_Europawahl.pdf 

[2] “The PSG and the German Left Party: An exchange of letters,” WSWS, Sept. 28, 2009: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/sep2009/left-s28.shtml. The article was originally posted in German: “Die PSG und die Linkspartei”, WSWS, Sept. 26, 2009: http://www.wsws.org/de/2009/sep2009/link-s26.shtml.

[3] It is worth noting that the letter Schwarz is responding to makes no mention of the Left Party. Schwarz, however, spends six-and-a-half pages discussing little else but the PSG’s attitude to the Left Party, which also happens to be one of the main themes of my article. Moreover, while the letter-writer, F.S., demonstrates political confusion when he calls on the PSG to collaborate with various revisionist outfits, he also criticizes the PSG’s EU election campaign very much along the lines of what I had written, a point I’ll come back to later.

Share:

Read More

The PSG and the EU elections

By Frank Brenner

Deutsch: Die PSG und die Europawahl

After the recent European Union elections, the WSWS ran a number of articles assessing the results of these elections, including the performance of the German section of the International Committee, the PSG (Partei fur Soziale Gleichheit). These articles bear some comment.

First, some facts. The PSG received 9,673 votes in the election. This compares to the previous election, in 2004, where the PSG received 25,800 votes. Which is to say that the party’s vote fell by a whopping 62.5 percent. To call this a steep decline is an understatement. Moreover, the PSG scored dead last of the 31 German parties contesting the EU election, including some very obscure and makeshift groups peddling everything from spiritual politics to the merits of internet file-sharing. This result is all the more noteworthy given that these elections were held in the midst of the global financial crisis, which is hitting the German working class hard.

So what accounts for this? Surely that should be a pressing concern for the party. But you won’t find a coherent explanation in the WSWS commentary. Here is how PSG leader Ulrich Rippert handles the issue in his assessment of his party’s campaign:

"The PSG received 9,673 votes. While this total is significantly less than the vote won by the party in the European election five years ago, it would be a mistake to assess the significance of the elections from the narrow viewpoint of how many votes were won."

Now, it is true that Trotskyist parties are not electoralist machines and that votes are not the primary consideration determining our politics. But clearly votes have some significance. Imagine if the PSG vote had increased by 62.5 percent: of course the party would have trumpeted such as a result as indicative of a growing influence in the working class. Indeed this is just what happened in 2004. Then the WSWS was so proud of the PSG vote that it put the vote numbers in the headline: “Socialist Equality Party of Germany receives nearly 26,000 votes”. The article went on to declare: “This increase in votes is of considerable political significance. It shows that a section of workers, intellectuals and youth are beginning to seriously take up political issues and support an international socialist perspective.”

But you can’t have it both ways – you can’t take credit for a good result but dismiss the significance of a bad one. There is – or should be – no question that such a dramatic fall in the party’s vote calls for a critical reappraisal of what the PSG has been doing to reach the working class.

Read entire essay HERE

Share:

Read More