The Workers' Weekly was the official newspaper of the Communist Party of Great Britain, established in February 1923.
[1] The Communist began on 5 August 1920, just four days after the completion of the conference (the Congress of London) which founded the CPGB.
[3] Sales continued to rise throughout the year, touching the 60,000 mark at the time of the raid on party offices in May 1921.
[4] Towards the end of April 1921, Member of Parliament J. H. Thomas successfully sued The Communist for libel, naming its editors, printer, and publisher in the action.
The pressure of this legal action and subsequent raid of party offices by the police had the effect of making production of the paper extraordinarily difficult.
The Independent Labour Party's printing house abruptly stopped production of an issue of the paper in midstream after coming to an agreement with the Director of Public Prosecutions not to produce any more Communist material.
"[6]The governing Executive Committee of the CPGB had decided to replace The Communist with a new publication called the Workers' Weekly.
In his article in the monthly theoretical magazine of the CPGB announcing the switch, Andrew Rothstein declared that the revamped publication was to mark a move away from being "a weekly journal for the orthodox Communist household" and towards becoming "a live reporter and interpreter of the working class life and struggle.
[13] Trouble lay ahead, however, as at the end of January 1927 a successful legal action for libel forced the publication into bankruptcy.
[13] A new party paper was established at that time called Workers' Life, a publication which attained a circulation of 60,000 copies a week by that summer.