What's All This About?

The article below was written for the first issue of Class War's theoretical magazine, Touch of Class. You can order the magazine for £2 from Class War here.

What's All This About?

So, you have in your hands a new magazine, A Touch of Class, published by the Class War Federation. Having parted with your hard earned cash, you probably want to know what it is all about, and also what it is we are aiming to do with this magazine.

Firstly, we are publishing it because we feel we have something different to say. If you want stale old leftist positions, identity politics masquerading as socialism or anarchism reproduced as a fixed ideology
bordering on the religious, there are (sadly) plenty of vehicles for that already in the UK. There is none
of that drivel here.

The second reason for producing this magazine is a recognition that working class communities, both here and abroad are changing rapidly, indeed faster than ever before. The last time Class War produced a magazine, some thirteen years ago, new Labour was barely off the drawing board, ASBOs were unheard of, council estates were run by the council, bombs that exploded in London were marked "made in Belfast" rather than "made in Leeds", Oldham Athletic were in the Premiership, and the numer of Polish builders in the UK could be counted on one hand.

We want somewhere to discuss these changes - the good, the bad and the ugly. We need to debate how they effect the working class, how they effect this society and how they effect the world. And most importantly we want to not only respond to those changes, but to set our own agenda.

Importantly for us, this magazine is also an attempt, tentatively at first, to reposition Class War. Doing
anything else, given the changes mentioned above, would be silly. Many of Class War's current membership cut their political teeth in some of the overt class struggles of the 1980s and early 1990s - times that have, if we are all honest, long gone. Whilst we will all be there dancing on Margaret Thatcher's grave when she dies, we are conscious also of the teenager London CW met at an event in Hackney who asked us, in all seriousness, who Margaret Thatcher was. We need to fight the next battle, not the last.

Can a magazine play a role in setting a political group's development? The simple answer is yes. This is something the British National Party did very succesfully with Tony Lecomber's Patriot magazine in the late 90s - indeed if you re-read it now you can see them planning for much of their recent political activity. From stealing the Front National's political clothes, understanding the Internet and new technology, seeing a threat from Islam rather than trying to flog old anti-Jewish conspirary theories, right down to them predicting they would win significant numbers of seats in a "old northern mill town abandoned by the Labour party", it was all there. They were thinking strategically, whilst the left anarchist movement was simply bumbling along from one paper sale or demonstration to the next. Unpleasant as the BNP are, there is method in their madness.

Class War itself has not always done strategic thinking well. One example is the strategy discussion
at our October 2005 conference, where discussion rapidly moved onto commemorating the 1926 general strike and the 1916 Easter Rising. Fine ideas if we had 100,000 members and an active history society, of less use to an organisation with a fraction of those members attempting to work politically in the present day.

We need to forge new directions, and work around the here and now, not the ever decreasing circles of the past. We hope you will join us, either as a Federation, or perhaps by committing some of your thoughts to this magazine, and any similar publications that emerge.

Onwards and upwards!