Archive: Unity (Socialist Worker, 2005-2010)

Available material
All issues of Unity published 2005-2010.
Missing material
None, the items linked below constitute the entirety of Unity’s run in both forms it was published.

Unity was the last physical periodical produced by Socialist Worker (NZ) before the organisation was folded in 2012, and was published in two forms over a five year period. It was first published briefly as a magazine to replace the previous Socialist Worker magazine, Socialist Worker Monthly Review (which had been published from October 2002 to February 2005). This lasted from March to October 2005, after which Unity was repurposed as a movement journal which would be published quarterly (2005-2006) and then biannually (2007-2010) until June 2010. Unity became the name of the Socialist Worker website which acted as their primary outlet for published works from 2010 until the organisation folded in 2012.

The original Unity magazine came about during a period of flux for the organisation. Generally the organisation was turning toward ‘broad left’ activity, with projects such as the Residents Action Movement in Auckland and the soon to be launched newspaper Workers Charter marking that turn in somewhat grand fashion (considering Socialist Worker’s actual size compared to the ambitions of the two projects). Unity represented an attempt to orient the ‘party’ paper to a wider, less sectarian audience; an attempt that would be superseded by the launch of the Workers Charter newspaper. With the purpose of Unity as a magazine rendered somewhat irrelevant, it would be replaced by a journal of the same name with an emphasis on longer form material than the ‘day to day’ coverage of a regular magazine or paper.

Unity lands in a strange place for Socialist Worker, where the very purpose of an organisation oriented around its publication being in question and the dilemma of the decline in the anti-globalization & anti-war movements to grapple with. It serves as a potentially useful resource for those interested in how the left responded to the divisive 2005 general election (particularly how they positioned themselves between the Greens and the newly founded Māori party as alternatives to Labour). The journal provides a useful insight into where the thinking of some on the left was at in the dying days of the anti-war movement, the heroic era of Unite Union, and the initial shock of the Great Financial Crisis.

Unity (magazine)

Unity (September 2005)

Unity (October 2005)

Unity (journal)

Unity (December 2005)

Unity (February 2006)