The motion below has been submitted to the 15 November conference of the Labour Representation Committee by the AWL, and is also being proposed in other organisations affiliated to the LRC.
The LRC notes the following decision by the 2008 AGM of the rail union RMT, affiliate of the LRC:
"This union notes the disastrous results for the Labour Party in the May 1st elections. We believe that working class voters have deserted the Labour Party because it has abandoned working-class people through its policies of cuts, privatisation, war and lining the pockets of the rich at the expense of the poor and low paid.
"We are also appalled at the advances made by the fascist BNP in these elections.
"The union must respond to this by reasserting our socialist politics and by fighting for working-class political representation.
"To that end we resolve to:
* Convene a national conference on the crisis in working class political representation similar to those organised previously
* Encourage our regional councils to organise similar conferences on a regional basis
* Initiate and support the setting-up of local Workers’ Representation Committees which can identify and promote candidates in elections who deserve workers’ support".
We resolve to join with the RMT in this drive to set up local Workers' Representation Committees, especially through Trades Councils, and to support the national conference now called by the RMT for 10 January.
We further note the resolution passed by LRC conference 2007, which evaluated the ban on political motions to Labour Party conference adopted at Bournemouth in 2007 as follows:
"We cannot pretend that it is business as usual. As currently constituted the Labour Party is no longer a vehicle for promoting progressive or socialist ideas. We need to re-found Labour as a party of radical change.
"The Labour Representation Committee is best placed to take this work forward because it has the capacity to bring together different agents of social change. To do this the LRC must become a campaigning organisation that can reach beyond the Labour Party Left and create the basis of a mass Labour Party..."
We further note, in recent months:
1. The huge public discrediting, through the current capitalist crisis and the consequent government measures of "bankers' socialism", of the dogma that "the markets" must and should rule economic life.
2. The need to pose working-class socialist alternatives both to the discredited market orthodoxy and to "bankers' socialism". Such a comprehensive vision is necessary to give direction and coherence to the fight back against the coming job cuts, evictions, and cuts in real wages.
3. The risk, if that is not done sufficiently, that the crisis will redound to the political benefit of the BNP and the far right.
4. That no union leadership has challenged the 2007 Bournemouth decision to ban political motions to Labour conference, and that therefore for now the fact that the organised working class cannot express itself politically through the official Labour structures must be considered an accomplished fact.
6. The duty of the LRC to play a leading role in breaking through this barrier to working-class political representation, especially in the situation of political emergency created by the capitalist crisis.
This conference resolves:
1. The LRC should start to work as a Workers' Representation Committee - a broad organisation committed to creating a political voice for the working class.
2. To mandate the incoming National Committee to discuss and prepare, for the next LRC AGM, constitutional amendments reflecting these priorities.
3. To mandate the incoming National Committee to formulate and campaign for a workers' plan of socialist measures in the crisis.
The independent political representation of the working class must be the work of the organised working class itself. There is no substitute or short-cut. The LRC's specific priority must remain the revitalisation, reorganisation, and reorientation of the organised working-class movement in order to achieve accountable, responsive, principled independent political representation of the working class.
Conference resolves to campaign with the RMT and others to rebuild and reinvigorate Trades Councils, and win them to help build, or to become, local workers' representation committees - active campaigning bodies which draw together socialists, trade unionists, social movements and working class communities, and which affiliate to the LRC.
As noted in last year's LRC conference decision, the LRC must "reach beyond the Labour Party Left". This means that in elections the LRC must be ready to support not only official Labour candidates who are loyal to the labour movement, but also non-Labour socialist candidates adopted with the support of local workers' representation committees or other substantial bodies of the local labour movement.