The Future of Ebb and Prometheus
After discussions prompted by recent national moves towards left regroupment, along with considerations around publishing capacity and the generative potentialities of collaboration, the editorial boards of Ebb and Prometheus are merging. Managed by the combined boards, Prometheus Journal will become Prometheus Magazine, a regular physical magazine and online publication, while Ebb will continue as Ebb Books, the combined project’s book-publishing arm. This statement outlines the reasons for the merger and the shared politics that will inform its direction as a unified project.
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Both post-2019 creations that spoke to distinct but overlapping strains of revolutionary politics, Prometheus Journal and Ebb Magazine attempted to navigate the wilderness years of the British left in the early 2020s. Part of a generation of militants inoculated against illusions in Labour, energised by the Covid strike wave, tenant unionism, militant anti-racist street protest, feminist abolitionism and trans liberation, and most significantly the global struggle for a liberated Palestine, they likewise share in the frustration with the existing sect forms of the left as well as the organisations emerging from the collapse of Corbynism.
Ebb Magazine, created in 2019, articulated a non-dogmatic communist, anti-imperialist politics that refused to sideline social oppressions, particularly transphobia. Its positioning within the imperial core was central to its considerations, and the magazine was eager to resist the interventionist tropes of ‘anti-anti-imperialism’ marshalled by sections of the British left to demobilise resistance to the wars in Libya and Syria. In the context of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, Ebb sought to give voice to activists – in encampments, smashing up arms factories, or joining their local BDS struggle – who failed to find their anti-imperialism represented elsewhere on the left, while also drawing upon deeper, oft-obscured traditions of anti-imperialism and national liberation socialism within Britain and abroad.
Prometheus Journal, created a year later in 2020, spoke to a layer of people who were despondent at the limited interrogations of Corbynism, the sheer number of sects in existence and chauvinistic politics in many of these groups. The journal joined a critical rediscovery of the rich Marxist traditions inspired by the revolutionary strategy of the Second International prior to the 1914 split into mutually hostile orthodoxies. It tried to raise the strategic level of the British left and open a conversation about what kind of organisation and programme might break its impasse, as it recentred the struggle against the British state as a priority and highlighted the necessity of the party in the face of it, as well as the need for a politics of programmatic unity, Marxist republicanism and anti-militarism.
By uniting these currents, we hope to accelerate a process of renewing communist politics in the 2020s to counter the severe disorganisation of the Marxist left internationally but particularly in Britain. While we see the growth of a reactionary international, none of the forces of revolution are politically and organisationally equipped to defeat this authoritarian wave. With the merger of both editorial boards, we aim to intervene at this moment and break the left from its presuppositions to produce a revolutionary publication that facilitates strategic and programmatic development within the British left and labour movement through analysis, critical reportage, and comradely debate.
We don’t seek to return to any pristine orthodoxy, but we see a need to revive the Marxist concern with the critique of political economy and the concentration of capitalist power in the state, and a need to centre the devastation wrought by imperialism that makes that concentration possible. Our combined editorial board is interested in the ways in which the Marxist tradition has been enriched by Black Radicalism, (Trans-)Feminism, Eco-Socialism, and more recent Abolitionist politics, as well as the theorisations of class consciousness and cultural hegemony by the British New Left. We see a pressing need for a revolutionary outlet to articulate, debate and promote counter-hegemonic ideas and projects that confront our current organisational fragmentation which produces a variety of anti-political, anti-intellectual, and ultra-sectarian tendencies.
As a combined project, Prometheus Magazine embraces the premise that the revolutionary party has and continues to represent the most important – though not the sole – institution of the revolutionary movement. Since the epochal socialist defeats of the 1980s, the left in Britain has tried and failed again and again to cohere a political subject into a significant and unified entity. Now, the fractured afterlives of Corbynism have produced a new set of tendencies among the British left that we must engage and address.
Some find themselves in the Green Party, hoping to rebuild a progressive alternative within the familiar mould of populist electoralism. Others have opted for the promise of Your Party, have faced a return of the worst forms of Labourism, patronage and votebank politics, as well as those merely using it as merely a recruiting ground. Wounded by defeat, a form of left ‘community organising’ has prevailed – eschewing aspirations for national transformation in favour of localised, defensive struggles for survival. Socialist sects continue to proliferate, as Reform waits in the wings.
In turn, left media in Britain mirrors the scattered ideological and organisational trends inscribed in these models. Rather than serving their historical function as laboratories of proletarian intellectuality, the socialist media landscape today offers stale sect newspapers preoccupied with reiterating a ‘party line’, broad left magazines like Tribune that rarely venture beyond sentimental social-democracy, or digital journalism platforms like Novara that subordinate politics to the market economy of social media platforms. An overarching focus of Prometheus Magazine will be renewing communist politics in Britain through critique, and pursuing questions of how to rebuild a hegemonic apparatus – a party-movement – capable of bringing together the various struggles among the working class and the oppressed to challenge not only neoliberal and bourgeois ideology but the bourgeois state itself. In our present era of severe class and political disorganisation, our task is to build a clear revolutionary and anti-imperialist current and political culture across the broad left-wing forces in Britain, and to assist these forces in cohering around a radical programme.
Attempts to cohere these forces must remain critical, however. As socialist and communist organisations have become increasingly incapable and unwilling to interrogate the current class relations of society, many have substituted Marxist class analysis for a shallower politics only capable of thinking in petit-bourgeois dichotomies of establishment and anti-establishment. In the worst cases, organisations readily renege hard-won truths around oppression and class struggle.
This failure to capably navigate the question of ‘identity’ politics on the British left has not only obscured the role of struggles by oppressed communities in generating principled and creative strains of socialism in Britain, but it has also failed to realise how people can come to class consciousness – through the recognition of oppression within society and through solidarity struggles. Without understanding how the processes and realities of sexism, transphobia, racism, bordering, and disablement both divide and weaken the political unity of the exploited and oppressed, we will not build a fighting working class. We must renew an analysis of the ways oppression manifests itself in the twenty-first century, paying particular importance to tackling the widespread transphobia prevalent amongst historic organisations and trade union bureaucracy in Britain and emphasising how colonialism and racism have produced a particular terrain of struggle. At this current moment, attention must be paid to the role that Islamophobia has in oppressing the working class in Britain, expanding ruling class power over the class through fuelling domestic racialised ‘red scares’, just as bordering policies have long served to reconfigure class power in favour of the state and employers.
In a period of rising national rivalries, NATO rearmament and the drive toward world war we foreground the necessity of opposing our own state’s militaristic, economic and diplomatic assaults on the global working class. We also seek a rooted anti-imperialist politics, that is attuned to the global flows of capital and labour linking the fates of workers in Britain and globally. As a magazine, this means we place an emphasis on the intellectual and political traditions born out of the resistance to British imperialism, including among colonised exiles and emigres here. Britain’s exploitation of colonies and formerly colonised nations as pools of readily-exploitable workers had the unintended consequences of new struggles bringing with them living connections to liberation politics of the Global South. The Zionist genocide in Gaza has reaffirmed the old truism that Britain’s support for colonialism abroad heightens the state’s political repression back home, and highlights the necessity of challenging and expanding the horizons of the British left and labour movement – as has been done by the Fifth Pan-African Congress, Claudia Jones’ West Indian Gazette, the Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi Workers Associations, Black Radicalism, and the more recent organisation of Latin American migrant workers in United Voices of the World. Sections of the British left are today prepared to embrace the anti-migrant politics of alleged “white working class” aggrievement, but we turn our attention to the reality of how these struggles have enriched our national class traditions and our understanding of imperialism and class.
Over the coming weeks and months we’ll announce the details of our first physical magazine edition as well as further publishing projects, events, and series. If you are interested in contributing to us, please contact us using the details on this site. We are particularly keen to encourage new working-class writers embedded in the struggles of recent years.
But today, the day The Communist Manifesto was published 178 years ago, though Marx and Engels wrote that ‘The proletariat has nothing to lose but their chains’, we also recognise and look to their critiques of petit-bourgeois socialism and of those who ‘By degrees … fall into the category of the reactionary conservative Socialists’. The intervening history has demonstrated that the path to communism is fraught with danger and reaction, externally and internally, and that we can never expect that history will come to us, to the working class. But still, we have a world to win – and we must win.