EDITORIAL

We do not set ourselves up as a competitor to any existing theoretical journal nor do we consider ourselves just another academic journal of labour history. Rather we aim to inform and educate the many thousands of young people influenced by Trotskyism and its heritage in the Marxist movement. We believe that the revolutionary groups, even the largest, faced with the enormous disproportion between the human and material resources available to them and the immensity of the tasks that they have set themselves, are unable to carry out more than a fraction of the historical work that they would ideally wish to do. Our Editorial Board has representatives on it of half a dozen different tendencies and we would welcome others which derive from, or relate to, a Trotskyist background. We hope to find our readers from a broad spectrum of views within this milieu, to arouse interest and to invite comment. By these means we hope to carry on a genuine debate. Thus we hope that this will provide a real educational service, and will spread around the left in general an awareness and understanding above the level of abuse and one-sided polemic.

The Board of Socialist Platform Ltd has agreed to support the magazine during this initial period but if it establishes itself it will hopefully take on a life entirely of its own and will become completely self-regulating and financing.

As far as our editorial policy is concerned this magazine will not reproduce material already openly available in English. It will concentrate upon rare and hitherto unpublished material, upon translations from foreign languages, upon internal documents of broad political importance and will publish papers on historical subjects from a Marxist standpoint commissioned or submitted. Although we do not wish to deal with current political concerns we are very willing to service the needs of the movement if a deeper knowledge of the past is required to clarify and respond to the debate about the present.

Finally, we wish warmly to thank all the individuals and political tendencies which have helped us in our efforts, to apologise for the delays which have occurred in the appearance of the first issue and to appeal for information about material, for money and for help in any other way that our readers are capable.

EDITORIAL BOARD
Revolutionary History