Workers' Liberty

“Harriet Harman puts class at heart of election battle,” shouted the Guardian front page on 20 January, while the 21 January Telegraph proclaimed “Harriet Harman reopens class war with speech on inequality”. What prompted all this?

This interview on the 1978-9 "Socialist Campaign for Labour Victory" appeared in International Communist magazine, number 9, August 1978.

Of course the Tory commentators make the most of what they can rake up. But for now they can rake up a lot.

On 6 January Blairite ex-ministers Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt called for a secret ballot of Labour MPs about replacing Gordon Brown as Labour Party leader.

A rolling wave of right-wing politics threatens to engulf Britain in the period immediately ahead. The first thing we have to do is tell ourselves the truth about it.

Demand the Labour Government concede to the postal workers and sack Mandelson. Download pdf (see "attachment").

A Labour Party activist long centrally involved in battles for democracy in the party spoke to Martin Thomas about the vote at Labour Party conference this year to have OMOV (direct election) for the constituency places on the National Policy Forum.

Gordon Brown used the opportunity of Labour Party conference to pick on a group of people who are poor, powerless and not much older than children.

By their friends shall ye know them: the decision of the Sun (or, rather, Mr Rupert Murdoch) to back New Labour at the General Election should come as no great surprise.

A long-time Labour Party activist reports on some of the things at Labour Party conference which didn't reach the newspapers or the TV coverage.

As the Labour Party approaches its annual conference (Brighton, from 27 September), tensions within the party are increasing.

[At each stage in the transformation of the Labour Party by the Blair-Brown coup, Workers Liberty has analysed what that meant for working class politics.

An article from Workers' Action (a forerunner of Solidarity: no.153, 22 September 1979) on the prospects, as we saw them, from the big upheavals then underway in the Labour Party.

Introduction to the December 1980 pamphlet published by Socialist Organiser, "Labour democracy and the fight for a workers' government".

Val Graham was a delegate to Unison Labour Link Forum on 6-7 July and was surprised by the speech which Unison general secretary Dave Prentis made there. Unison Labour Link Forum is the special conference, made up of regional delegates from Unison members who are also Labour Party members, which is supposed to decide Unison policy in relation to the Labour Party. Val spoke to Solidarity about the conference.

Janine Booth’s recently published book “Guilty and Proud Of It!” is a story about how a group of socialist Labour councillors in Poplar, East London, refused to bow to the “norms” of capital

The government’s White Paper, “Low Carbon Transition Plan” sets out the first legally binding carbon targets and a plan for a transition to a low carbon economy.

At the recent Unison Labour Link conference, UNISON General Secretary Dave Prentis said that the union would push for the restoration of unions and local Labour Parties' right to put motions to Labour Party conference.

• 1. How the new facts change the prospects

• 2. What the dispute is not about, and what it is about
• 3. Why argue now for a union fight in the Labour structures?
• 4. Instead, build an alternative "pole" by disaffiliations?
• 5. Does disgust with New Labour rule out revival?
• 6. The lessons of history
• 7. AWL and the imaginary "pole"
• 8. Trotsky: "It is impossible to leap over the problem. It must be solved"

This is an excerpt from the founding document of the AWL tendency, "What We Are And What We Must Become", written in 1966 by Rachel Lever, Sean Matgamna, and Phil Semp.

This discussion article on Marxists and the Labour Party was written by Sean Matgamna in September 1976, at the end of a big political battle in the International-Communist League, forerunner of the AWL, in which attitudes to the Labour Party figured as one of the issues.

These are the main sections of the resolution on "Workers' Representation after Bournemouth" passed at the AWL conference in May 2008.

Historical references can never settle a question; but we can learn from history, for example from how Trotsky responded in previous circumstances when it was argued that social democratic parties had become so dead that the sheer weight of political disengagement and unresponsive leadership ruled out revival.

One of the dangers AWL faces - and into which some on the other side of this dispute have fallen - is that we conflate things that should be kept distinct.

Apart from a small few people AWL is agreed that in a general election we will say: "Vote Labour as fallback where there is no acceptable socialist candidate". Why? The Democrats in the USA are the choice of most unions. Despite that, we do not advocate a Democratic vote, and we do advocate a Labour vote.

Our procedure is based on the idea that Marxists develop and redevelop their expectations of what will or can happen within the frame of the big shaping objective events. When the economic, social, and political framework shifts, then we must reassess everything, including, here, the prospects for change in the union-Labour relationship.

After the defeat at the Bournemouth Labour Party conference of September 2007, which banned political motions to future conferences from unions and local Labour Parties, AWL began to propose a fallback option in addition to our basic line of pushing for the unions to fight within the Labour structures.