Reducing Workers Hammer frequency

Subscribers to Workers Hammer received only two issues in 2019, not four as they have since 1999. In December, the Central Committee of the Spartacist League/Britain voted to reduce the frequency of our press, aiming to produce two issues per year. The subscription price will remain £3 for four issues. Subscribers will continue to receive leaflets which we publish to intersect unfolding events, for example the Grenfell Tower fire atrocity and, in Ireland, the 2018 abortion referendum and 2019 nurses strike.

We do not lightly take this step, but retrenchment is necessary to bring our practice into line with our current capacity. Our press is central to our work as a propaganda group, providing the basis for us to intervene in the world with the potential to impact consciousness as events unfold. But, with our small and aging forces, the SL/B cannot at this time produce a quarterly newspaper of politically high quality while continuing the other tasks necessary to maintain our organisation. In particular, comrades in the SL/B play an important role in the work of our International.

Compared with the 1970s when the SL/B was founded, our members are not just older but far fewer, a consequence of the historical trough we are living through. Capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union and Eastern and Central Europe between 1989 and 1992 defined this period of sweeping reaction internationally. In Britain, the difficult conditions under which workers struggle today are also the legacy of the defeated miners strike of 1984-85. Following the strike Margaret Thatcher gutted the coal-mining industry, whose workforce had been the militant backbone of the proletariat. The miners fought heroically but were betrayed by the Labour and TUC leaders, in particular by the “left” Labour MPs and union bureaucrats who left the miners union to fight alone against the full might of the capitalist state.

Today the idea that workers revolution can sweep away capitalism and lay the basis for unprecedented human progress is considered utopian, at best. As communist fighters, we stand in sharp contrast to the other leftist organisations in Britain, which purport to be Marxists but are really social democrats. They peddle their own versions of the “death of communism” and promote illusions in the election of a Labour government. When in power, Labour has perpetrated horrendous crimes against working people and the oppressed in the service of British imperialism.

The gulf between our revolutionary purpose and the existing level of political consciousness is very large. There is seething anger in society against relentless capitalist attacks and injustices. This anger will inevitably give rise to struggles against the capitalist exploiters. Our perspective is to forge a Leninist vanguard party, a tribune of the people, in the course of these struggles. Such a party, formed by splitting Labour’s base from its pro-capitalist leadership, is necessary for the working class to become conscious of the need to overthrow the capitalist system.

Our proletarian, revolutionary and internationalist programme, based on the historic lessons of the workers movement, allows us the possibility of being a factor for human progress. During the period of reaction following the defeat of the 1905 Russian Revolution, Lenin described the Bolshevik party’s tasks as combating the illusions prevalent in a period of political retrogression while “proclaiming the inevitability of revolution, while systematically and steadily accumulating inflammatory material in every way, while, for this purpose, carefully guarding the revolutionary traditions of our revolution’s best epoch, cultivating them and purging them of liberal parasites” (“Against boycott”, June 1907). It’s good advice today. We are committed to maintaining an angular, polemical Marxist press, with the perspective of increasing the frequency of our paper when we can.