The Communist Workers’ Organisation (CWO), today the UK affiliate of the Internationalist Communist Tendency (ICT), was originally formed from the merger of two groups, named for their publications – Workers’ Voice and Revolutionary Perspectives – at a meeting in Liverpool in September 1975 – fifty years ago.

Our changing perspectives in that time – our revolutionary perspectives, even – have been described in a recent article Fifty Years of the CWO: Perspectives for 2025 and Beyond. The early history of the CWO has been covered extensively by the article On the Forty-Fifth Anniversary of the Founding of the CWO which we published five years ago; we’d refer readers to that article if they want to know about our history. Here we seek to bring the CWO’s, and the ICT’s, timeline up to date.

So what has happened in the past 5 years? When On the Forty-Fifth Anniversary… was written, we were six months or so into the global Covid-19 pandemic. The CWO, like much of society, was forced to exist very much in an online space. Physical meetings were difficult to organise, and it was not indeed until a year later, on 11 September 2021, that we were able to hold our first public meeting post-lockdown. This was to launch a new book, Russia: Revolution and Counter-Revolution, 1905-1924 - A View from the Communist Left by Jock Dominie, looking at the lessons of the October Revolution.

Since then, we have held public meetings and had stalls at bookfairs in Birmingham, Cambridge, Cardiff (our first public meeting in Wales), Derry (our first bookfair stall in Northern Ireland, followed up the next year at the radical bookfair in Belfast), Glasgow, Hull, Liverpool, London, Manchester, Newcastle, Peterborough and Sheffield, and have taken our banners, publications and our perspectives to protests, marches and other events in Bristol, Derby, Durham, Leicester, Nottingham, Swansea and beyond.

In February 2022, Russia launched major military operations in Ukraine. We had been predicting for some years that Ukraine would be an important flashpoint in coming inter-imperialist rivalry. As well as publishing a host of articles about the war, and what we consider to be the responsibilities of revolutionaries in such a situation, we held our first online public meeting, on the question of the war.

We have been involved in a variety of initiatives around the opposition to capitalism’s drive to war. The ICT took the lead in founding “No War but the Class War” (NWBCW) committees wherever we found other internationalists willing to work together to bring the issues of austerity and its connection to militarisation to the working class. Many of these (such as Liverpool, Glasgow and Newcastle, as well as cities in the US, Canada, France and Italy) were in places where the ICT already had militants, but the initiative has also found echoes in places where we did not, such as in South Korea, Turkey and very recently in South Asia.

The pandemic and the war in Ukraine disrupted global supply chains causing massive inflation. This resulted in quite a sudden fall in real incomes and a rise in the cost-of-living. In some countries, among them the UK, workers responded with industrial action and street protests. Wherever possible, CWO members took an active part in what became known as the “strike wave”, both in their own workplaces as well as supporting workers in other sectors. To picket lines, we brought the message that we need a real alternative, which for us means both the self-organisation of the struggle and a new international political reference point for workers questioning the system. Unfortunately, the movement was tightly controlled by the trade unions, which ultimately kept workers isolated across sectors and workplaces, and meant that many strikes settled on concessions which did not even meet their stated aims. And so the “strike wave” ended not with a bang but with a whimper.

In October 2023, Hamas launched its attack on Israel which has precipitated the Israeli government’s two-year campaign of death and destruction on Gaza. Our perspective is that this is another aspect of capitalism’s drive to generalised war – the ‘war’ between Israel and Hamas has spilled out of Gaza and across the region from Yemen to Lebanon – and we have been trying to organise with other internationalists to bring the message to the working class that the drive to war is bound up with austerity at home, and that capitalism needs to be overthrown to end this insanity. To this end, militants from the CWO and other affiliates of the ICT have also taken part in meetings and conferences seeking to bring together internationalists, such as in Brussels in 2023, Prague in 2024 and Arezzo the same year. Some of our younger comrades, inspired by the NWBCW initiative, have started internationalist societies at their universities.

The ICT was happy to announce the formation of a new group in France, the Groupe révolutionnaire internationaliste (GRI) and its affiliation to the ICT, in 2023. The creation of GRI was very much due to the dedication of our comrade Olivier, who died in July 2024.

The ICT has also seen sympathising groups emerge in Sweden (Kompass-gruppen), Turkey (Enternasyonalist Notlar) and South Korea (Communism or Barbarism) – we hope that the evolution of these groups will see them as full affiliates of the ICT soon.

Throughout this period we have continued to publish our analyses of world events and to link them to the theoretical understandings we have inherited from the revolutionary movements of the past. For the CWO this means Aurora and Revolutionary Perspectives. We have also published numerous leaflets for strikes and demonstrations (such as this leaflet distributed at demonstrations around the scapegoating of refugees and migrants).

We are a small organisation, but we try to punch above our weight. And we know that we are, for the most part, swimming against the tide. Workers’ struggles at the moment are sporadic, flaring up and dying down, rarely going on for long, even more rarely attempting to break out from particular sectors. But we think that the scope, intensity and duration of these struggles will increase, as the ruling class runs out of manoeuvres and the working class runs out of patience. Capitalism will not end itself, unless it ends human life with it through apocalyptic war or massive environmental destruction – neither of which seems inconceivable, given what we are witnessing around the world. The working class needs to overthrow it, before it is too late, and for that to happen, we think the working class needs a revolutionary organisation. We seek to build an organisation that will be a tool the working class can use when it comes to the realisation that capitalism needs to be overthrown – an organisation of revolutionaries. The CWO is not that organisation; nor is the ICT; but we hope that we can be part of the process in that revolutionary organisation coming into being.

If you agree with our basic analysis, please, talk to us, or even join us. You can email the CWO, reach us on social media or write to us at CWO, BM CWO, London, WC1N 3XX. We have nothing to lose but our chains. We have a world to win.