Ebb was created in 2019, at a time when mild forms of social democracy found themselves unable to confront either the limits of parliamentarianism or their complicity with imperialism. Socialists in Britain had overestimated the promise of social democracy and underestimated the depths to which the British state would sink in undermining their quest for basic reforms – finding themselves under increasingly vicious attacks from the British bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie. Absent from all this was the communist left who, with fractured exceptions, conceded the organised and progressive elements of the working class to the unions and found themselves in increasingly contrarian positions that assured their descent into chauvinism.

Building on the successes and failures of class struggles, Ebb moves beyond mechanistic applications of Lenin’s thought that are beginning to re-emerge in the Global North, facilitating constructive exchanges beyond empty polemic – promoting dialogue between theoretical applications of Marxism and practical anti-imperialist and class struggles. As the brittle UK state turns to authoritarianism, with moral panics fuelling racism and transphobia, opposition persists in old and novel forms as the task remains to cohere these forces around a radical programme. As an intellectual tendency, Ebb aims to contribute to this coherence and sharpness as a progressive force. It does so as part of an emerging class consciousness animated by frustrations with a social democracy at its limits, and brought together by the unprecedented challenges for Marxists and the working class in twenty-first century Britain.