Mark Hoskisson looks at some of the crucial events covered by Workers Power in 300 fighting socialist editions of the paper

Late September 1978, fascists were marching through the Asian community in London’s east end and Ford workers were limbering up for an eight-week strike against the Labour government’s pay policy. The storm clouds that were to eventually break into the “winter of discontent” - mass strikes across the public sector - were gathering.

And Workers Power was preparing the first edition of its newspaper dated October 1978. Using a hired typesetter, scalpels, scotch tape, letraset and glue, our lay-up “artistes” turned the hand-written articles of members into an impressive eight page tabloid that sold out within a week of rolling off the cheapest north London printing press we could find.

Production methods have changed over the years but the consistency of purpose that was always at the heart of our paper stays the same. If we were to sum up that purpose it would fall into three areas:

• Outlining a way forward for the struggles of the working class in Britain and internationally - a strategy that can take them beyond their starting point to challenge to the capitalist system.

• Educating our readers in revolutionary communist politics.

• Organising our supporters around a body of ideas, a set of campaigning priorities and clear tactics for the class struggle - the better to build a revolutionary party through the paper.

This has always been the purpose of all the best revolutionary papers the workers’ movement has produced. It is what the great Russian revolutionary Lenin meant when he described the early Iskra (the paper of the Russian Socialists of the time) as a scaffold that could be used to build the party.

In a review of this size it is impossible to do justice to the vast range of articles in the paper over the years or the enormous amount of effort countless comrades have put into producing it. But there is a place for key examples.

In the early years of the Thatcher government much of the left had given up on the prospect of defeating her. For the SWP the downturn had wrapped itself around the class struggle like a shroud, and doom and gloom was the message from Socialist Worker. For the assorted “Trotskyist” entrists, who had turned towards the Labour Party (under the hoped for leadership of Tony Benn) the struggles against Thatcher were an adjunct to their schema of transforming the reformist party into a vehicle for socialism.

Workers Power by contrast recognised that the struggles of the steel workers, the health workers, the car workers and above all the miners had the potential to become a revolutionary challenge to Thatcher. In the great miners’ strike of 1984-5 our paper alone campaigned for the organisation of the rank and file from day one: “Rank and File must fight for a general strike,” we said in May 1984. And we also warned “Beware the TUC” in September of that year when the miners’ leaders announced to their members that the TUC was now going to help them.

We didn’t leave any of this at merely the level of front-page slogans. Both working class history and contemporary politics were marshalled to explain in detail why the strategy of rank and file independence and a general strike were vital for a miners’ victory. We used clear examples of how to spread the strike, in particular by campaigning for joint action committees of miners and dockers when the latter struck during the summer of 1984.

We campaigned hard with miners, using the paper to convene meetings in pit villages around the country, to build a rank and file organisation. And we were vindicated when a conference of over 100 miners and their wives established a National Rank and File Miners’ Movement, a gain that was swept away in the defeat.

Faced with a second great challenge, the collapse of the Soviet Union, Workers Power was a singular revolutionary voice. Socialist Worker regarded this event as merely the “collapse of state capitalism” and proved incapable of recognising that an unprecedented assault on the workers’ of the former Stalinist states was about to be unleashed by a capitalism restoring itself. They saw a downturn where there wasn’t one and missed one when it hit them full in the face!

Others mourned the death of Stalinism, regarding it as a second best option to genuine socialism. They saw only counter revolution, another “midnight of the century”. They ignored or denounced the mass workers and democratic struggles against Stalinism. Still others joined with the reformists in claiming these events vindicated every critic of the Russian Revolution and blamed the workers for taking the revolutionary road in the first place.

What united each and every one of these trends in world socialism was that, in the face of the collapse of the Soviet Union and of the bourgeois ideological assault on socialism that followed it, they began a journey to the right.

As against this Workers Power dug in and fought the class enemy over every inch of territory they tried to claim. Where they blamed socialism, we explained the twin evils of Stalinism and imperialism. Where they castigated revolution we pointed to the need for a revolutionary struggle against the spread of their system: “At present building a party to fight for that [revolution] in the former USSR, and supporting every partial struggle of the workers against their new masters, is the most vital task for anybody who wants to see real socialism triumph over the ruins of Bush’s new world order.” (Workers Power 150, January 1992)

In fact the new world order started to unravel faster than many expected. The decade that began with the imperialists promising the “end of history” and the class struggle, closed with their World Trade Organisation being closed down by massed ranks of workers and anti-capitalist youth in Seattle, November 1999. A new world movement had risen to challenge their new world order.

Once again Workers Power was at the forefront of charting a way forward for the burgeoning anti-globalisation and anti-capitalist movement. And as this movement developed into a powerful anti-war movement after 9/11, we pressed ahead with a sustained campaign to turn the new internationalism into a new, organised and revolutionary Fifth International.

When the brutality of capitalism revealed itself in Genoa, Italy in 2001 with the police murder of anti-capitalist protester Carlo Giuliani and the repression of protestors, the movement asked itself: where now? The reformists said turn away from street protests, the liberals said turn to lobby politics and our paper that declared in September 2001, issue “After Genoa we need a new revolutionary international.”

As ever this was no mere declaration. Armed with arguments in favour of such an organisation, Workers Power, along with our sister organisations from across the world in the League for a Fifth International, helped build the World and European Social Forums into mass movements. We strove to turn the anti-capitalist youth towards the workers’ movement and the workers’ movement towards anti-capitalism. We explained the need to take steps towards internationally co-ordinated action and we helped fight for the momentous day of international struggle against the imperialist war on Iraq, 15 February, 2003, when millions took to the streets world wide.

Just three examples that illustrate that, while our audience may change, our message remains fundamentally the same: working class revolution is the route out of capitalist chaos and misery. Our paper is above all an organ of working class revolution. It was in 1978. It is in 2005. It will be stay that way for the next 300 issues and way beyond.