About the Weekly Worker
The Weekly Worker is the paper of the Communist Party of Great Britain.
Just like the Socialist Workers Party publishes Socialist Worker and the Socialist Party in England and Wales publishes The Socialist?
Actually, no. Both the SWP and SPEW consider themselves to be the already existing proto-party. Most of the other groups think of themselves in the same way. Because, they believe, they will provide the core of the future mass party, their task is to outpace their rivals and make them irrelevant. Sooner or later, the masses will be won to the one true line and accept the SWP, SPEW (or whatever) as the working class party.
Naturally their papers reflect this sectarianism. Pick up a copy of Socialist Worker or The Socialist and you will only very rarely find even a mention of their main rival. You will never find recognition of papers like the Weekly Worker. All the other groups are, by and large, regarded as distractions - better to pretend they do not really exist than give them undeserved publicity.
We take the diametrically opposite point of view. There is no proto-party, and the main task facing the working class movement is to construct one in the here and now. Week in, week out, the Weekly Worker hammers home this message - in order for our class to make any kind of advance, let alone become the ruling class, it needs a single, united Marxist party.
But such a formation will not come about through recruiting to one of the existing sects at the expense of the others. It will only come about through overcoming our debilitating divisions on a principled basis. There is no objective reason why comrades across the left cannot come together to forge the beginnings of the party we need.
Because the Weekly Worker sees it as its role to encourage and facilitate such unity, our main focus is on the existing left. Our paper is aimed at its membership and periphery and constantly criticises its failings and inadequacies. Does that make us sectarian? Not at all. The aim is not to do down the others for its own sake, but to point to what ought to be.
To that end the Weekly Worker is a champion of open polemic. We regularly and willingly open up our pages to those with whom we strongly disagree - not just in our extensive letters columns, but in the main body of the paper. Only through rigorous, no-holds-barred debate can ideas be tested and if necessary amended, qualified or corrected.
That is what makes the Weekly Worker different from the rest.
Peter Manson, Weekly Worker editor
What we fight for
- Without organisation the working class is nothing; with the highest form of organisation it is everything.
- There exists no real Communist Party today. There are many so-called ‘parties’ on the left. In reality they are confessional sects. Members who disagree with the prescribed ‘line’ are expected to gag themselves in public. Either that or face expulsion.
- Communists operate according to the principles of democratic centralism. Through ongoing debate we seek to achieve unity in action and a common world outlook. As long as they support agreed actions, members should have the right to speak openly and form temporary or permanent factions.
- Communists oppose all imperialist wars and occupations but constantly strive to bring to the fore the fundamental question - ending war is bound up with ending capitalism.
- Communists are internationalists. Everywhere we strive for the closest unity and agreement of working class and progressive parties of all countries. We oppose every manifestation of national sectionalism. It is an internationalist duty to uphold the principle, ‘One state, one party’.
- The working class must be organised globally. Without a global Communist Party, a Communist International, the struggle against capital is weakened and lacks coordination.
- Communists have no interest apart from the working class as a whole. They differ only in recognising the importance of Marxism as a guide to practice. That theory is no dogma, but must be constantly added to and enriched.
- Capitalism in its ceaseless search for profit puts the future of humanity at risk. Capitalism is synonymous with war, pollution, exploitation and crisis. As a global system capitalism can only be superseded globally.
- The capitalist class will never willingly allow their wealth and power to be taken away by a parliamentary vote.
- We will use the most militant methods objective circumstances allow to achieve a federal republic of England, Scotland and Wales, a united, federal Ireland and a United States of Europe.
- Communists favour industrial unions. Bureaucracy and class compromise must be fought and the trade unions transformed into schools for communism.
- Communists are champions of the oppressed. Women’s oppression, combating racism and chauvinism, and the struggle for peace and ecological sustainability are just as much working class questions as pay, trade union rights and demands for high-quality health, housing and education.
- Socialism represents victory in the battle for democracy. It is the rule of the working class. Socialism is either democratic or, as with Stalin’s Soviet Union, it turns into its opposite.
- Socialism is the first stage of the worldwide transition to communism - a system which knows neither wars, exploitation, money, classes, states nor nations. Communism is general freedom and the real beginning of human history.
