The World Socialist Web Site was established on February 14, 1998, as an online purveyor of socialist news and analysis. The site was launched as a means of turning the official organ of the Workers League, the newspaper The Bulletin, into an online newspaper. The site was redesigned on October 22, 2008. The WSWS supports and helps campaign for the Socialist Equality Parties in elections. The site has no advertisements, except for material from Mehring Books, the ICFI's publishing arm. Instead, it sustains itself through the donations of readers and supporters. David North serves as Chairman of the site's International Editorial Board. WSWS articles are often collated by the Asian Tribune and AllAfrica.com regional news sites, and its articles are also regularly cited in newspapers in Asia. Writers for the WSWS deliver lectures on a variety of topics to meetings of the International Youth and Students for Social Equality and other events, including Marxist theory, history, art, and war.
Content
The WSWS publishes articles on politics, finance and economics, culture, police violence, and labor issues. The WSWS periodically undertakes focused political campaigns, during which numerous articles, videos, interviews, and perspectives are published on the topic. Campaigns undertaken include defending Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden, civil rights and free speech, and the opposition to utility shutoffs and bankruptcy in Detroit. The WSWS has raised left-wing criticism of the New York Times' 1619 Project.
Sections
The daily 'Perspective' article presents the position of the WSWS on a range of political, theoretical, and historical issues.
News articles which cover the day's significant international political and economic developments
Arts Review – under the editorship of Marxist arts critics David Walsh and Joanne Laurier, critiquing films, film festivals, music selections, theatre productions, and books, and writing lectures concerning Art and Socialism
Workers' Struggles, reporting from picket lines across the world, and inviting workers to write in about their experiences
History lectures and interviews
Philosophy lectures which defend philosophical materialism and oppose idealism
"This Week in History", providing brief synopses of important historical events occurring 25, 50, 75, and 100 years ago
ICFI/Marxist Library – the Historical and International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party is archived, along with original translations of classic Marxist literature, with works by James P. Cannon, Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Lenin, and Karl Marx
The WSWS commemorated the Russian Revolution of 1917. The site published a weekly chronology entitled 'This Week in the Russian Revolution', which brought forward global events, Russian events, culture, and political questions each week throughout 1917. Writers of the WSWS participated in a lecture series concerning questions surrounding the Russian Revolutions of February and October. The WSWS also published new, original translations of documents published by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky during 1917.
In July 2017, the WSWS began to oppose new Google search algorithms, which it believes is a form of Google censorship, and claims that the changes are intended to remove "fake news". The WSWS has used evidence from SEMrush, an analytics suite for search engine optimization, that showed that several socialist and anti-war news sites had received reduced traffic from Google due to changes in its search algorithm; according to the WSWS, between late April 2017 and the beginning of August 2017, wsws.org Google search traffic fell by 67%. Google said that it had not deliberately targeted any particular website; Google VP Ben Gomes wrote that Google had "adjusted signals to help surface more authoritative pages and demote low-quality content." The documentary film-maker John Pilger has offered his support for the website in its response to Google.
