Workers' Liberty

In the four years from July 1970, British capitalism “lost” more than five million working days to combined industrial action against a new Industrial Relations Act and government incomes policy.

“Sit-down strikes,” wrote the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky not long after huge waves of factory occupations in France and the US (1930s), “go beyond the limits of ‘normal’ capitalist procedure. Independently of the demands of the strikers, the temporary seizure of factories deals a blow to the idol, capitalist property. Every sit-down strike poses in a practical manner the question of who is the boss in the factory: the capitalist or the workers?”

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THE BLUE ROSE OF FORGETFULNESS
The Kinnock Rose is blooming now
In Thatcher's shade it learned to grow:
It signifies apostacy,

Capitalist development is a fact of the last fifty years. World GDP increased nearly seven-fold from 1950 to 1998, with an average growth rate of nearly 4% a year, according to OECD figures.

Workers' Liberty 3/17 examines the facts about world trade, the arguments about fair trade, the lessons to be learned from the writings of Marx and Engels, and the outlines of a socialist policy. Download pdf here, or read online.

Part 1 here | Part 2 here

Despite the Grundrisse being 150 years old, such ideas in it are, essentially, new for the left even today. The huge manuscript remained almost unknown for over a century.

Part 1 here | Part 3 here

The response is never automatic; the process is never linear.

The working class is the revolutionary class. It is the gravedigger of capitalism and the architect of socialism. Everyone who has even heard of Karl Marx knows that those were central ideas.

Even sympathetic, socialist-minded people often tell us: "Yes, but the working class which you talk about is dwindling. Or, at any rate, fewer and fewer people see themselves as working-class". It's not true.

“Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement” — Vladimir Lenin

According to the classic account by Lewis H Morgan, “barbarism” is in human history the stage between savagery and civilisation; between the stage of “savage” peoples who are hunters and casual gatherers on one side, and on the other “civilised” people who have developed cities.

Paul Hampton reviews Live working or die fighting: How the working class went global, by Paul Mason, (Harvill Secker £12.99)

Part One

... And Argentine nationalism?
Argentina suffered British and French intervention some 140 years ago. Modern Argentina, however, has essentially taken shape over the last 100 years. Argentina had no war of liberation. Its population is, to within one per cent, of European immigrant origin — most from immigration within the last 100 years. Its mass popular nationalism dates from the 1920s. This nationalism was, especially in its labour movement manifestations, shaped and consolidated by Peronism.

At the AWL summer school in July 2006, John McDonnell MP, Maria Exall and Sean Matgamna debated "Blair, new Labour's crisis and the fight for working class representation". Hear John McDonnell's speech by downloading this MP3 file.

The IWW was a trade-union organisation, a revolutionary trade-union organisation, founded in 1905 in the USA, whose heyday was between 1905 and 1914.

We surveyed the IWW's distinctive organising approaches:

1. Fastest-growing categories of employment: USA

Henwood gives a list for the USA. None of the 30 top categories is a factory operative/ machine minder category. That does not mean that those workers are disappearing. There are as many car workers in the USA today as in the 1970s. But the fastest growing categories are elsewhere.

• Marx argues that class struggle and working-class combination (trade unions) is endemic in capitalism, at all stages. "The contest between the capitalist and wage-labourer dates back to the very origin of capital..." (Ch.15.5). Workers' "struggles for the standards of wages are incidents inseparable from the whole wages system" (WPP); the basic "activity of the trade unions... cannot be dispensed with so long as the present system of production lasts" (TUPPF).
  
  

Discussion group on Working class and trade unions: Marx and today.

Three key excerpts.

The AWL held the second of our new series of political day schools on 22 October (in London) and 29 October (in Sheffield).

On Saturday 22 October, from 14:00 at Sebbon St Community Centre, London N1, and re-run on Saturday 29 October, from 13:30 at the Swarthmore Centre, Woodhouse Square, Leeds. Click here for reading.

An interview with Beverly Silver about her book Forces Of Labor, which we studied in the Brisbane Workers' Liberty study group of 2005, and which we will be studying at the AWL day schools in London and Sheffield on 1 October 2005.

Reading material, discussion points, and activity notes for AWL day school on "Globalisation and imperialism".

Reading material, discussion points, and activity notes for AWL day school on "Trade Unions and Socialism".

Workers' movements and globalisation since 1870 - discussion of the research presented in Beverly Silver's new book Forces of Labor.

Review by Martin Thomas of Beverly J Silver, Forces of Labor: Workers' Movements and Globalization since 1870, Cambridge University Press.

The notes and discussion points are classified under three headings:

• Auto workers and textile workers (Silver's ch.2 and ch.3 to p.97)

• Overall trends (Silver's ch.4 and ch.1)
• The future (Silver's ch.3 from p.97 onwards, ch.5, and ch.1.

The notes were prepared for a Brisbane Workers' Liberty discussion series in August/ September 2005.

An interview with Houzan Mahmood, recorded by delegate Traven Leyshon at the end of the 2005 AFL-CIO Convention in Chicago can be downloaded as an mp3 here (25mins/22MB).

By Chris Reynolds

Why should Marxists want to narrow our appeal to “the workers”, enrolling people from other classes only to the extent that they rally behind the working class? Why not seek a broader unity of “ordinary people”? These questions are live among “anti-capitalist” activists, and on the left generally.