Editorial
This special double issue of Workers Power is exclusively concerned with the question of the trade unions. The journal constitutes a comprehensive study of the revolutionary communist analysis of the Trade Unions and the principal tasks facing communists in the Trade Unions today. The first article traces the development of the Marxist analysis of the Trade Unions. The archive reprints of central programmatic documents of the Communist International, and the discussion of the Comintern and CPGB’s programme and strategy for work in the British unions in the 1920s, draw together the vital experience of the revolutionary period of the Communist International, and the immediate effects of its period of degeneration. Lastly our document on the Rank and File Movement today, and the Workers Power “Action Programme” for the Trade Unions, builds on that experience and tradition to draw out the key tasks facing communists
in the trade unions today. The programmatic and organisational tasks posed are of burning and immediate relevance.
The role of the Trade Union bureaucracy as police for incomes policies and ‘austerity programmes’ becomes more and more vital for international capitalism as it faces continued stagnation and crisis. Likewise mass action to defend and improve living standards and conditions—in France and Italy in the late ’60s, in Britain in the early ’70s, in this year’s American Miners’ strike—pits militants not only against the capitalist class but also the bureaucracy of the trade unions. The building of a movement under communist leadership to break the hold of the bureaucrats, to turn the unions into organs of struggle on the road to workers revolution becomes an ever more urgent task of revolutionary communists in the battles of today and tomorrow.
We are pleased to announce that this issue of Workers Power marks its last appearance in its current format. From October Workers Power will appear in a monthly paper form. This will enable us to intervene in, and comment on, the international and national class struggle more immediately and effectively. This does not mean that we will be shirking the theoretical tasks facing us. We shall continue to produce
a theoretical journal, three times yearly, entitled ‘Communist Review’ to appear from January 1979.
This marks an important step forward for the Workers Power group. It is a step that will necessarily strain the material and financial resources of the group. We therefore urge all our regular readers and supporters to aid us financially with donations and subscriptions, so that we can win a wider base and audience for our politics.