Maybe I am colour blind, but frankly I cannot tell these paper apart. Hearing of the split I rushed out to get the first copy of Mole and the first issue of Dwarf after the split in order to compare them and take a position, but was disaypointed to find it was the mixture as before. Mole's editorial board is dominated by the IMG while Dwarf keeps Barnett, Chand, Fred Halliday, Hoyland etc.
But if there are political issues behind the split they could not be discerned in the papers which are Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Both lead off with statements claiming to be fighting revolutionary Marxists papers, the only difference being that Red Mole calls on you to set up Red Circles to sell the paper. Both report and editorialise on the student files issue. Both have pieces by anti-Zionist Jews, both have items on the anti-militarist struggle in the French Army, both have reports on the Womens Conference at Ruskin. A solid report in Dwarf on the repression in Italy can be compared with a reprint of an agitational piece from Belgium in Red Mole. One man does not appear to have realised there has been a split - one Percy Ingrams writes under the heading City Dwarf in one and City Mole in the other paper.
As a paper Dwarf perhaps has the edge this time with an important scoop interview with Eldridge Cleaver. It is well worth reading and pondering this piece to realise at what a rate the Negro struggle has devdoped in the last ten years. We have gone from Christian forgiveness to a Marxist Leninist Party. The latter, being so aew still has plenty of rough edges, as Cleaver frankly admits - but I am 100% in agreement with his confidence in the future of his party compared with traditional outfits like the C.P. He correctly points out that his group is the first to try to grasp the specificities of America in Marxist terms, rather than repeat formulae that fail to come to terms with reality. Unfortunately however in his healthy reaction against blanket schematising Cleaver perhaps goes too far the other way in taking up Kim Il Sung's doctrine of national Marxism. He points out that the Koreans were forced into this position by the overbearing behaviour of Russia and China — but he does not realise that while this may be an explanation it is not necessarily a justification.
The revolution today is a world revolution and the long struggle to build a real international revolutionary movement cannot be avoided by appeals to "local conditions" etc.
Both Red Mole and Black Dwarf are overwhelmingly concerned with reports from abroad and the student struggle - the only exception being one little article on aunion struggle in Mole. To put it another way - there is nothing in these papers that deal with the problems facing the British working class today. This is a truly remarkable lacuna - and mirrors the dreadful weakness of the British revolutionary movement which has yet to break out of its student/teacher ghetto. The struggle to create a paper that will be useful to the British work is a long hard business - it is only too easy to make a commercial venture of a paper tilling the lush pasture of the universities.
B.Biro