AWL

Today one class, the working class, lives by selling its labour power to another, the capitalist class which owns the means of production. Society is shaped by the capitalists' relentless drive to increase their wealth. Capitalism causes poverty, unemployment, the blighting of lives by overwork, imperialism, the destruction of the environment and much else.

Against the accumulated wealth and power of the capitalists, the working class has one weapon: solidarity.

The Alliance for Workers' Liberty aims to build solidarity through struggle so that the working class can overthrow capitalism. We want socialist revolution: collective ownership of industry and services, workers' control and a democracy much fuller than the present, with elected representatives recallable at any time and an end to bureaucrats' and managers' privileges.

We fight for the labour movement to break with "social partnership" and assert working-class interests militantly against the bosses.

Our priority is to work in the workplaces and trade unions, supporting workers' struggles, producing workplace bulletins, helping organise rank-and-file groups.

We stand for:

• Independent working-class representation in politics.
• A workers' government, based on and accountable to the labour movement.
• A workers' charter of trade union rights - to organise, to strike, to picket effectively, and to take solidarity action.
• Taxation of the rich to fund decent public services, homes, education and jobs for all.
• A workers' movement that fights all forms of oppression. Full equality for women and social provision to free women from the burden of housework. Free abortion on request. Full equality for lesbian, gay and bisexual people. Black and white workers' unity against racism.
• Open borders.
• Global solidarity against global capital - workers everywhere have more in common with each other than with their capitalist or Stalinist rulers.
• Democracy at every level of society from the smallest workplace or community to global social organisation.
• Working-class solidarity in international politics: equal rights for all nations, against imperialists and predators big and small.
• Maximum left unity in action, and openness in debate!

If you agree with us, please take some copies of Solidarity to sell - and join us!

AWL update from Newport, IoW

On Sunday 2 August, AWL organised a second film showing in Newport, IoW, for Vestas workers and supporters. This time we showed Rocking the Foundations , a film about the "green bans" imposed by the New South Wales Builders Labourers Federation in the early 1970s. For a Workers' Liberty article about the "green bans", click here . Last Sunday it was With Babies and Banners , about the General Motors Flint (USA) factory occupation in 1936-7. Attendance was a bit down on 2 August, with five non-AWL people there in addition to the AWL members who are camping on the roundabout outside the occupied...

The rules of revolutionary socialism

The AWL’s motto and guideline is what Leon Trotsky called “the rules” for revolutionary socialists: “To face reality squarely; not to seek the line of least resistance; to call things by their right names; to speak the truth to the masses, no matter how bitter it may be; not to fear obstacles; to be true in little things as in big ones; to base one’s program on the logic of the class struggle; to be bold when the hour for action arrives”. We see other would-be revolutionary-socialist groups, like the SWP and the Socialist Party, as abandoning those rules in favour of what we call “Apparatus...

The History of British Trotskyism: An Overview, 1940s to 1960s

In part 4 of his series on “Misunderstandings, misrepresentations, and lies about the AWL” Sean Matgamna gives an overview of the Trotskyist movement from the 1940s to the 1960s. Click here for part 2 of this article . Where does AWL come from? We started as Workers’ Fight, a group that emerged in 1966-7 as a response to the crisis of the British and international Trotskyist movement. In Britain then there were four main revolutionary left groupings. • The Socialist Labour League was far and away the biggest and most active. (It would later rename itself WRP, degenerate hugely, and collapse...

Overview of the Trotskyist movement, 1940s to 1960s (part 2)

Part 2. Click here for part 1 of this article . The Cannonites called themselves “orthodox Trotskyists” (as distinct from the “Pablo revisionists”). That was “orthodox Trotskyism Mark 2”, a subsection of the general post-Trotsky “orthodox Trotskyism”. The “Orthodox Mark 2” side recoiled against the logic (or, anyway, a plausible logical development, made by Pablo) of the ideas they shared with the “Pabloites”. Logically, they should at that point have reviewed the issues of the 13 years since the emergence of two distinct strands within “Trotskyism”, the “orthodox” and the “heterodox” led by...

Misunderstandings, Misrepresentations and Lies: Getting Workers' Liberty wrong Part 3

Continuing a series on misunderstandings, misrepresentations and lies about the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. Click here for the first article in the series . and here for the second article . "The AWL are just wreckers! You push stances at odds with the rest of the left just in order to stir things up, to be 'different'. You always want to find differences. Lenin had an expression which he used more than once: so and so, he would say, had become famous 'in the Herostratus fashion'. Herostratus burned down a temple in ancient Greece in order that he should be remembered. That's the AWL! You...

Workers’ Liberty – For an ecological socialism.

Workers’ Liberty’s environment commission has convened over the last couple of years to address ourselves to the urgent ecological questions posed by capitalist society today. Our aim has been to develop Marxist ecological theory that comprehends the relationship between class society and ecology. Today, more than ever, it is clear that capitalist commodification, exploitation and degradation of nature is much the same as the operations which subjugate the working-class. The alienation of workers from the means of production and property in the populous cities of the world presupposes an...

The "pro-imperialism" of the Alliance for Workers Liberty

Continuing a series on misunderstandings, misrepresentations and lies about the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. Click here for the first article in the series The AWL is pro-imperialist! No, we’re not. If you look at the “imperialist” issues through all the time AWL and its predecessors have existed — back as far as the wars in Indochina of the 1960s and 70s — AWL has been more consistently and comprehensively anti-imperialist than any other organisation with its roots in post-Trotsky “orthodox” Trotskyism (including the SWP, which, despite its view that Stalinist Russia was state-capitalist...

A May Day Message

Would you like to build support for your dispute or campaign? Why not send a message to trade union and socialist activists by placing an May Day Message in Solidarity? On Thursday 23 April we will be producing the May Day issue of our socialist and labour movement paper. Why not get your trade union logo and message printed there, among those of a variety of other trade union and campaigning organisations.... Our prices and instructions: Prices: 1 column (square shape): £15 (10 to 20 words) 2 columns (square shape) £25 (10 to 30 words) 3 columns (square): £40 (Up to 40 words) Please do not...

Challenging Israeli militarism — and “absolute anti-Zionism”

For information about where Tamar spoke, see here . Between 5 and 13 March, I had the privilege of touring round the UK with Tamar Katz, a 19 year-old women from Tel Aviv who was jailed for three months at the end of last year for refusing to serve in the Israeli Defence Force as an act of solidarity with the Palestinians. During that time Tamar spoke thirteen times in nine cities — London, Brighton, Newcastle, Manchester, Bradford, Cambridge, , Sheffield and Edinburgh — I’d guess to a total of about 700 people. In addition to tNottinghamwo events sponsored by the rail union RMT and an...

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