Workers' Liberty

Images from Germany, France and elsewhere
Austrian factory bulletin

By Sandra Marsh

Tubeworker, on the London Underground, is the longest-running of the bulletins produced by Workers’ Liberty. It has been running for fifteen years now.

Workers' Liberty 3/3 (March 2006) reproduces many communist factory bulletins from the 1920s, and discussion from that era about how they should be produced. "Workers cannot write newspapers? Really? Just tell us some news about your factory". It also includes information on workplace bulletins produced by the AWL. Download pdf below ("attachment").

This article was based on the experience of Workers Fight, from which AWL has developed and which worked inside the International Socialists (predecessor of the SWP) at the time. It was part of a drive to turn IS towards production of factory bulletins at the end of the 1960s. It has been abridged.

Pieces from communists involved in producing factory newspapers. Taken from the Funke, the paper of the party workers of the Berlin-Brandenburg district of the German Communist Party. 6 August 1925

Leon Trotsky discussed factory bulletins, and their place in the overall work of a revolutionary organisation, in a letter to his French comrades of January 1938.

Factory Inspection

(called the Murder Commission)

When there was a factory inspection a few weeks ago the foreman Figge surpassed himself. No work was allowed to be done from morning to midday, in order that there should be no smell of poison gas or any sign of dirt.

This leaflet was written by Vladimir Lenin after November 7(19) 1895, in connection with a strike of about 500 weavers against bad conditions and new measures introduced by the factory management.

Abridged from Inprecor, the bulletin of the Communist International, February 1925

Factory newspapers are an innovation in the life of the Communist Parties of the West. They had their origin on the revolutionary soil of the Soviet Union in the form of wall newspapers.