As we enter the summer of 2026, the communist movement worldwide remains fragmented and dispersed. In most countries, it remains marginal, often in the form of groups with a membership ceiling of a few thousand, unable to reproduce their cadre outside a very small section of activity, around social movements, workplace organising, and struggles for elected union positions. More often than not, we see communist forces move to the right, politically liquidating into forms of left-populism, rejecting the necessity of the working class’s political independence in favour of a politics of petit-bourgeois dichotomies, such as establishment versus anti-establishment or “the People” against the “1%”. Others fall into forms of left-abstentionism, rejecting any engagement with high politics – or politics contesting the State’s domination – for localised struggles in defence of their “local community”.
The socialist movement faces the crucial task of both learning from the 20th century and going beyond the political mess it left in its wake. Against the temptation of falling into catastrophism, the second a hindrance occurs, or into an optimism that seeks to find easy solutions to every organisational problem, we take Gramsci’s dictum to “create sober, patient people who do not despair in the face of the worst horrors and who do not become exuberant with every silliness”.1 We are a generation of militants who persisted through both Corbynism and Your Party; drawn into political activity by the cost of living crisis, tenant unionism, and most significantly, the global struggle for a liberated Palestine. We refuse to repeat the mistakes of past communists and unite in a long-term struggle to establish the political institutions necessary to advance class struggle: a Communist party-movement that can merge these various struggles into a political challenge of the bourgeois state itself.
In Britain, we face the growth of a far-right, exemplified by Reform UK and its reactionary offshoots, while some on the left view the Green Party of England and Wales as a potential alternative. As the prospect of a Reform government becomes ever more possible, how does the Marxist left prepare? While we still recover from the shambolic launch of Your Party, what are our next steps? With the increasingly repressive Labour government, particularly in its treatment of Palestine Action, how do we bring back a crucially needed anti-militarist politics into the communist movement? With the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the attacks by the Zionist entity in neighbouring countries such as Lebanon and Iran, what does a communist anti-imperialist politics look like in the 2020s? How do we in Britain orient?
In “Ebb and Prometheus”, we explain the reasons for the merger of Prometheus Journal and Ebb Magazine, as well as articulating the politics that will inform our future direction. Following, in “No Truce With the Furies: Next Steps for the Left in Britain”, Prometheus Magazine Editor Andreas Chari looks at the events surrounding Your Party and argues that the lack of political institutions after last year’s The World Transformed led us into a defensive position. In “Hype? Or Politics?”, Harry Holmes reviews Anton Jäger’s recent book, Hyperpolitics, critiquing both its periodisation and conceptual framework.
In “Reform are Coming”, Vik Chechi-Ribeiro looks at the impact of PREVENT in education, and how rank-and-file organising in education can help the fight against Reform UK. Subsequently, in “The Food Crisis in Britain,” Harry Holmes traces Britain’s role in the global food system over recent decades and explores the possibility of food resistance. Following, Beauty Dhlamini in “The Soweto Uprising 50 years on: Black Consciousness persevering in a revolution half done” reflects on the student movement during and after the 1976 Uprising and the nativism enabled by the post-apartheid government that followed. In “Our Future in Our Past – Interview on the General Strike”, we interviewed Callum Cant and Matthew Lee on their recent book, Our Future in Our Past, discussing the importance of the 1926 General Strike in Britain and its lessons for communists today.
Starting our guest contributions, Fiedia Armoise & Amanda Levi in “The populists and the Workers Party” critically investigate how La France Insoumise (LFI) and other left-populist parties operate, proposing a reimagining of the concept of the Workers’ Party. Then Rida Vaquas in “The Long Road to the Gotha Programme” traces its history and how socialist organisations came to merge, arguing that the programme reflected not only the efforts of programmatic negotiations but also the practical commitment of thousands of workers in the socialist movement itself. Finally, Rhys Machold in “Cutting through Zionist martial supremacy: Ghassan Kanafani and present conjuncture“ takes stock of Israel’s self-proclaimed martial prowess and its relation to the racist foundations of Zionist supremacy, drawing from its recent genocidal attacks and the works of Ghassan Kanafani.
This issue is only the beginning of a wider project to build a revolutionary anti-imperialist current and political culture across Britain, and to cohere it around a communist programme. Upon learning of Zeus’ plan to eradicate humanity, the titan Prometheus saved them with two gifts: fire, which they used to master many arts, and hope. His story teaches us that tyranny and domination are neither unassailable nor eternal. Whether the comrades reading this belong to one of the many socialist groups, take part in the trade union movement, take direct action against the genocide or engage in one of the plethora of radical activity that comprises the existing left, you are a part of this project as much as we are as an editorial board. We hope you read our contributions, draw lessons from them in your praxis and submit your own pieces to develop a party-movement adequate to advance our task: the self-emancipation of the working class. To conclude, I’ll paraphrase the late Lebanese Marxist, Mahdi Amel, we are not defeated so long as we resist.
- Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Volume 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), page 172; Q 1§63, 75 ↩︎
