AWL

Wednesday 2 to Sunday 6 January 2019, Forest of Dean Click here for pdf . This week school will help students equip themselves to inspire and lead Capital reading groups, using Otto Rühle's abridgement, in the months to come. The writer Edmund Wilson, never a Marxist but for a time a socialist and a fascinated admirer of Trotsky, called Marx the "Poet of Commodities", and wrote: "there went into the creation of Das Kapital as much of art as of science. The book is a welding-together of several quite diverse points of view, of several quite distinct techniques of thought. It contains a treatise...

This ABC of socialist politics brings together a list of short texts which can you can print off and read or give to a friend or workmate to read; or read online. Often longer, more in-depth, articles on the topics covered can be found by using the search function or scanning our sitemap .

In Defence of Bolshevism, the new book from Workers' Liberty, had its launch at a lively meeting in central London on 12 October. Edited by Sean Matgamna, the collection of texts by American Trotskyist Max Shachtman represents one of the greatest polemics in the Marxist tradition. It is the defence of a revolutionary socialist consciousness being developed in the working class as the irreplaceable pre-condition for the self- emancipation of the working class. Crucially, it describes the only type of party fit for the purpose of seeding, nurturing and growing this consciousness in the working...

Workers’ Liberty branches around the country have in the last month been organising meetings on left antisemitism, discussing what this phenomenon is and how to fight it. Meetings have taken place in Sheffield, Lewisham, King’s Cross, Oxford, Bristol, Northampton, Brixton, Newcastle, and Durham. The attitude from some in the Momentum and Labour leaderships has been to treat the question as one of embarrassing public relations optics, perhaps to be dealt with by expelling a few of the worst offenders; serious discussion and debate of the issues, involving proper historical analysis, has not, on...

One of the most positively transformative events in my life was joining the AWL in January 2016. Although I had long considered myself a socialist of some form or other, when I first encountered the AWL in the autumn of 2015, my politics were very ill-defined. Years of seeing Labour under Blair, Brown, and Miliband had made me view the left as a lost cause in British politics, to the point that I was sceptical of even attempting activism. This is why, to my shame, I distanced myself at age 18 from the then-ongoing 2010 student protests. I had simply become so resigned to the fact that...

Workers’ Liberty students have been busy running stalls at Freshers Fairs across the country in the last month. We are organising campus meetings on left antisemitism as well as weekly reading groups, some on our new book In Defence of Bolshevism. Alongside other student activists who attended last month’s Student Activist Weekender, we are busy campaigning for a yes vote in the UCU pay ballot. Email us if you’d like a copy of the National Student Left Bulletin, produced by attendees of the Student Activist Weekender. On November 17-18, student activists from across the country will come...

Shachtman’s polemic against Ernest Erber, which Workers’ Liberty have reprinted, is one of the classics Marxist movement, like Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy or Engels’ Anti-Dühring . Erber considered himself a socialist of sorts until his death, quite recently, at the age of 96. Mostly he gave his energies to the career he made after quitting, as a town planner, and to domestic life. He wrote occasionally for the reform-socialist journal Dissent. There were lots of people slipping away from the revolutionary socialist movement around that time. In fact, in the USA the process had started with a...

The terms "communism" and "socialism", when they first became current in the labour movement and left in the 19th century, pretty much signified the same thing, but with variable shades of nuance. Since then they have, at various times, acquired different meanings. Generally AWL prefers to use the word "socialism", because it is widely understood that there are many versions of "socialism". We then further explain that our idea is working-class socialism, which implies also that it is democratic socialism and revolutionary socialism. We consider ourselves "communists" in the sense in which...

Just under 200 people attended Ideas for Freedom 2018, a weekend socialist summer school organised by Workers’ Liberty on 23-24 June in London. The title of the school this year was “Socialism Makes Sense”, and sessions aimed to make the basic case for a revolutionary socialist transformation of capitalist society. Another main theme was “challenges of a Labour government”, looking at the difficulties likely to be faced by a left-Labour government, for example in confronting the state, and the challenges for class-struggle socialists in relating to such a government and attempting to...

The socialist writer and activist Robert Fine died on 9 June 2018, at the age of 72. We publish tributes from Workers' Liberty people and from others who knew and worked with him. Photo: Robert Fine with Jean Lane (in the clearing in the middle of the photo, slightly right of centre, holding Workers' Action newspapers) at the anti-fascist march in Lewisham, 13 August 1977. For some of the writings by Robert Fine on this website, and a review of his latest book, click here or scroll down. Clive Bradley I learned a great deal from Bob Fine (in those days he went by "Bob"; I think later he...