Workers' Liberty

By Daniel Randall

Solidarity is published by the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, AWL. The first thing the AWL stands for is the idea of socialists being organised. We believe that individual socialists, no matter how right their politics or good their intentions, can never be as effective as an organised, educated, activist socialist group.

In the last hundred years, at many times, in many countries, the absence or slackness of socialist organisation has meant revolutionary openings missed, and counter-revolutionary outcomes imposed.

The AWL is only one of many socialist groups that exist in Britain today. We believe wholeheartedly in left unity. We did our best to build the Socialist Alliance, a coalition which allowed a measure of unity across the left from 2000 until the biggest force in it, the SWP, shut it down early in 2004. We unite with many other socialist groups day to day, week to week, on issues which arise in workplaces, trade unions, and communities.

But to develop lasting and effective unity, the left needs to rethink and redefine its ideas. To sacrifice everything to unity at all costs would leave us no room to debate out ideas, and anyway would not work.

The 20th century has left us with many experiences and debates to learn from — but with a vast variety of self-styled left and socialist traditions. Some, like Stalinism, discredit the left. An effective socialist organisation needs to redefine the left’s basic political vocabulary, establishing clear definitions for what words like “socialist” mean.

The AWL calls itself Marxist and Trotskyist — not as dogma, but in the same sense that any real scientist is in the tradition of Einstein and Darwin.

By now “Trotskyist” is almost as vague a term as “socialist”. In practice we are closer to some people who don’t call themselves “Trotskyists” than to many who do.

We need to reconnect with some basic ideas. The first is working-class struggle.

The working class which Karl Marx saw as the key agent of progressive social change is today a global class for the first time in history.

By “working class” we mean the class that lives by selling its labour power — not just manual workers or people who call themselves working-class. The working class is defined as a class by its relationship to other classes, the capitalist class that lives by its ownership of property — ultimately, that is, by exploiting labour power — and the petty bourgeoisie of the self-employed, independent professionals, etc. Britain today has more office workers than factory workers. But they are still workers.

The working class is now more than a third of the world’s population, the biggest single class, for the first time. As capitalism has spread across the globe, new working classes and with them new labour movements have sprung up — in South Korea, Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, Brazil. Today there are around 165 million trade unionists worldwide. When Karl Marx published Capital in 1867, there were barely 250,000 in Britain, and very few anywhere else.

One of the big problems of the left in the 20th century, though, is that much of it looked to forces other than working-class struggle to make socialism. It looked to benevolent bureaucrats, Third World nationalists — or sometimes anyone that opposed the Western capitalist status quo.

Stalinism in the USSR was not genuine, working-class socialism, but an anti-socialist counter-revolution made by a bureaucracy against the workers’ revolution of 1917. Other Stalinist states, from Cuba to North Korea, were shaped and created by hierarchical militarised organisations, distant from the working class, from the start.

Stalinism is a version of what Marx called “reactionary socialism”. It is no better, and in some ways worse, than capitalism from a working-class point of view. The effects of Stalinism on the international workers’ movement — first in its rise and apparent “socialist” success, and then in its decay and downfall, when it pushed the workers of Eastern Europe and Russia into embracing Western capitalism as preferable to that fake “socialism” — explain much about why the socialist left is at a historically low ebb today.

There are not many self-proclaimed Stalinists left. But much of even the anti-Stalinist left has had its world view compromised by the anti-democratic, anti-working class politics of Stalinism.

The AWL fights to rework and reinstate a socialist politics based on working-class struggle. In every social or political battle, our perspective is to organise the working-class movement as an independent factor, a “Third Camp” independent of all others. Our main activities are oriented to support and encourage working-class struggle.

What does that mean in practice?
* We focus on trade union work. The great majority of our members are active in the trade union movement; our student members, when they leave college, are encouraged to get jobs in industry. We fight to transform the really existing labour movement, rather than trying to build something outside it as many left groups do.
* Our members in particular industries and workplaces produce regular bulletins and newsletters, like the Tubeworker bulletin on the London Underground.
* Because the class struggle is a political struggle, we advocate a fight for the creation of an independent workers’ party and, ultimately, the establishment of a workers’ government — a government based on and accountable to the labour movement, which pushes through pro-working class policies like free trade unions and universal, high quality public services paid for by taxing the rich.
* We aim to build up working-class solidarity in Britain and all over the world. In international conflicts, we take a position based on international workers’ solidarity, rather than simply believing that our enemy’s enemy — whoever enters into conflict with the British government, or the USA — is our friend.

We have put a lot of work into building No Sweat, which is an activist campaign against sweatshop labour all over the world — from Britain to Cuba and Mexico to Vietnam.

We work to build a left based on working-class struggle. But also a left based on consistent democracy.

The working class, as a class, cannot govern society without democracy. There can’t be collective ownership of social wealth without collective democracy. In Cuba and China, the state owns everything, but because there is no, or very little, or fake democracy, a bureaucracy owns the state.

Under capitalism, a limited amount of political democracy is possible. But democracy is permanently excluded from the fundamental economic basis of society. At work, capital is dictator and crowned king.

Effective workers’ struggle is impossible without winning democracy. More than any other class, the working-class needs democratic rights — to organise itself, to strike, to demonstrate, to publish freely — if it is going to defend and advance its interests.

Unions will be not respond to the needs of their members, will not be effective in struggle, unless they are democratic. The biggest strike movements always throw up rank-and-file committees and councils far more democratic than either the old union structures or parliament-type institutions, making possible the establishment of a new type of democracy throughout society.

We support other struggles for democracy too — the struggles of women, of oppressed minorities, of oppressed nations — both as ends in themselves and as essential part of building an effective workers’ movement.

We are against all nationalism, but also for equal rights for all nations — including the right to national self-determination.

When communities or nations are at war, only a movement which seeks to unite workers on both sides through the struggle for consistently democratic solutions can drain the poison of nationalism and chauvinism. An approach which instead looks for “good peoples” and “bad peoples” will never succeed.

The AWL is for equal rights for both nations in Palestine — two nations, two states, rather than the destruction of Israel and the establishment of a single Arab state as some socialists advocate.

The AWL’s socialism is based on the intertwined ideas of working-class struggle and consistent democracy. These two themes underlie many of our distinctive arguments and activities.

We also differ from much of the left in how we organise. We have policies and decisions and activities decided by majority vote, but also guarantee the rights of minorities in the organisation and hold our major political debates in public. Our website and our press are open for debate, something which is virtually unique on the British left. We believe that without such democratic structures and norms, the unity of the left will be unachievable.

Any interested socialist can easily check us out — attend meetings or study course, discuss with our members, read our publications, join some of our activities in your city or your trade union or on your campus.

What do we do, day to day, week to week? We produce our paper, our industrial bulletins, leaflets, pamphlets, magazines, books, and we go on the streets and into our workplaces and trade union or student organisations to sell and distribute them.

AWL members are organised in branches — four in London, and one in most other major cities — which meet weekly to discuss and organise their activity. Usually they organise open or public meetings monthly.

Our conception of what we are doing — reworking and re-establishing the most basic ideas of socialist politics, on a political terrain poisoned by the after-effects of the decades of Stalinism — makes political self-education central for us. AWL branches organise regular study courses alongside their meetings and debates on current issues.

AWL members in each trade union organise together to discuss how best to build up the union organisation and fight for democracy and militant policies within the union. We work with trade unionists and Labour Party activists who are building the Labour Representation Committee to reinstate the idea of an independent working-class voice in politics and to challenge Blair.

We are an activist organisation. We expect members to be activists, committed to regular attendance and activity each week, not just “paper members” who drop in from time to time. Without that activist orientation, we believe a socialist organisation can neither be effective nor democratic.

Some people prefer to be “sympathisers”, contributing financially to the AWL and working with us in one way or another, but not making the full commitment. We appreciate their contribution.

Think we need to change the world? Think the alternative we fight for must be as far from Stalinism as it is from capitalism? Think we need to organise systematically to make it happen? Then you need to talk to us!