Workers' Liberty

By John O'Mahony

For most of the 20th century, the common image of "socialism" was the USSR and the other states modelled on it, China, Cuba, and so on.

We stand for workers' liberty - An activist's guide to changing the world.
Read it online.

The Alliance for Workers' Liberty are socialists. We organise our daily activity mainly around two big ideas:

1. workers' struggles;

2. consistent democracy.

Karl Marx (1818-83) was born into a middle-class family in Germany. At university he was one of many radically-minded philosophers. In his mid-20s, partly under the influence of workers' socialist groups he met during a stay in Paris, he decided to throw in his lot with the working class then emerging as a social force in Europe.

When they finally started to push back the militant trade unionism of
the 1970s, the Tory governments of the 80s tried to screw down the
lid by bringing in laws that fundamentally undermined trade unions'
right to organise and take action.

"The emancipation of the proletariat is not a labour of small account
and of little people: only they who can keep their heart strong and
their will as sharp as a sword when the general disillusionment is at
its worst can be regarded as fighters for the working class or called
revolutionaries"

Antonio Gramsci.

Becoming a revolutionary in his teens, Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) led
the Soviet (workers' council) in St Petersburg during Russia's 1905
revolution. From 1903 through to 1917 he was active in the Russian
socialist movement (mostly from exile), but outside the two main
factions, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.

Events in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 showed the anti-working class character of Stalinism. But, more importantly, it demonstrated workers' ability to oppose Stalinism. In Hungary in 1956, workers set up factory councils and district-based revolutionary councils to maintain the general strike.

Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) was a revolutionary in his teens and until
after the Russian Revolution of 1917. In the early 1920s he became
the key leader of that section of the Bolshevik Party who, under
pressure of isolation, exhaustion, and the extreme poverty of Russia,
were abandoning their socialist ideals and joining up with the state
bureaucrats inherited from the old regime.

The AWL and its predecessors campaigned for solidarity with workers'
movements in the Eastern Bloc. We've always backed workers against
bureaucrats - for example in the early 1980s we made solidarity with
Polish workers and supported their call for a boycott of Polish goods
when others on the left hesitated.

Ernesto "Che" Guevara (1928-67) was born into a well-off family in
Argentina, became a medical student, and then, after travelling round
Latin America, committed himself to a revolutionary group working to
overthrow the corrupt Batista dictatorship in Cuba, which at the time
was backed by the USA. He became a leader of the guerrilla movement
that took power in Cuba in 1959.

Socialism is probably the most misunderstood word in history. Many
describe the murderous Stalinist regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe
that collapsed in 1989-91 as socialist. Others describe the tyrants
now ruling China, North Korea and Cuba as socialist. But those states
have nothing to do with socialism.

Vladimir Lenin (1869-1924) was one of many thousands of young
students in Russia who joined revolutionary movements there in the
later years of the 19th century.

Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) became a revolutionary activist while
still a schoolgirl in Warsaw. At that time Poland was divided into
three parts, ruled by Russia, Germany, and Austria. Warsaw was
Russian-ruled.

We honour the Marxist fighters who died for their commitment to
independent working class politics.

By Mick Duncan

No Sweat, the British anti-sweatshop campaign, became a national
network in 2001. Since then the organisation has extended the breadth
of its work, which includes drives to pinpoint against sweatshop
bosses in the UK and overseas.

Antoinette Konikow (1869-1946) was a founder of the communist
movement in the USA, and of the Trotskyist movement too (she led a
group in Boston which was expelled before Cannon and Shachtman, and
soon joined up with them).

Capitalism is a system of exploitation
Capitalism is defined by the production of
commodities for profit. Employment levels and
living standards depend on the profitability of
private firms.
Businesses and capitalists make profit by
paying workers less than the value they produce.

Capitalism creates economic crises. It also creates ecological
degradation. Capitalism is a system that reshapes and reconstructs
nature - and destroys the environment while doing so. The thirst for
profit makes environmental damage inevitable.

The hope of changing the labour movement lies with its rank-and-file
members. We concentrate our efforts not just on calling for
resolutions to be passed and rule changes to be made, but
fundamentally on helping and encouraging workers to organise, to
stand up for themselves collectively, to develop a collective class
identity, and to fight for control in the workplace. We work to
rebuild the unions from the ground up.

Socialism can only be the act of the working class, conscious of its
own interests. Working class struggle is collective struggle. Its
power of numbers gives the working class huge economic and political
strength.

The Labour Representation Committee (LRC) is a movement formed by trade unionists and socialists to fight for the principle of labour representation within the Labour Party, the unions and parliament. As of 2005, four unions - the post and telecom workers' CWU, the railworkers' RMT, the firefighters' FBU, and the bakers - are affiliated.

Respect was set up in 2004 as a coalition
consisting of George Galloway, some mosque
leaders, the Socialist Workers Party, and its
friends, including some people from the Muslim
Association of Britain (MAB).

A strike wave began in Durban in 1973 involving nearly 100,000
workers. It shook the racist apartheid regime (where only the white
minority could vote). Students played an important role, assisting
and doing research for workers.

Karl Marx's daughter Eleanor (1855-1898) was an important figure in
her own right. Active in Britain, she joined the Social Democratic
Federation (SDF) in the early 1880s. When it split in 1884, Eleanor
Marx, with William Morris and others, formed the Socialist League.

We work to reorganise and reorient the labour movement around a fight
for the objective of a workers' government, a government based on,
accountable to, and serving the organised working class.

Why does Workers' Liberty always talk about class? Are people not oppressed in other ways too? By sexism, racism, homophobia and other prejudices?

During the 1980s our women activists issued a paper aimed at building
the women's movement on the basis of class politics. Women's
Fightback was launched at a conference of 500 women in 1980.

The fascist British National Party (BNP) is fundamentally an
anti-working-class, anti-democratic party. It is also racist,
anti-semitic, sexist and homophobic. Everything that the BNP stands
for is against the interests of working-class people and the labour
movement.

August Bebel (1840-1913) was the best-known
leader of the German Social-Democratic Party
(SPD: "social-democratic" then meant "Marxist")
and of the world workers' movement between
Engels' death in 1895 and World War One.