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!

Festival of the oppressed

Why does Workers' Liberty always talk about class? Are people not oppressed in other ways too? By sexism, racism, homophobia and other prejudices? Yes, they are - which is why we see the fight for equality as an inseparable part of our socialism. Look around the world and back through history, and you will see that the fortunes of the working class and of oppressed groups rise and fall together. From Iran under the Ayatollahs to apartheid South Africa to Stalin's Russia, regimes which crush workers enforce other oppressions too. We cannot win full equality and liberation under capitalism. But...

Women's Fightback

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. During the miners' strike of 1984-5 Women's Fightback produced strike bulletins created and circulated by women in pit villages across the country. It played a role in "Women against Pit Closures". Women's Fightback petered out in the late 1980s, as the Labour Party women's sections and the feminist movement declined, but our commitment to socialist-feminist organisation remains.

How to fight fascism

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. Fascism is distinguished from other right-wing groups by the fact that, instead of relying on the ordinary, official, repressive mechanisms of capitalist democracy, it mobilises people on the streets - impoverished middle-class people, the unemployed and demoralised, and sometimes even a few workers - to directly batter...

Who was August Bebel?

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. After his father died young, Bebel had to work to support his family from the age of seven, but managed to train as a wood-turner. He became politically active as a member of the German Workers' Association, led by Ferdinand Lassalle, in 1863. He was won over to Marxism by Wilhelm Liebknecht, a veteran of the revolutionary struggles of 1848-9 who had lived in London between...

Imperialism, nationalism and war

Today, the world is for the first time truly an "empire of capital" - capitalism writ large. Capitalism is more universal than ever before. Marx dated the first beginnings of capitalist production as far back as the 14th century. With the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th century, capitalism became much more widespread and dynamic. But until the late 20th century, in much of the world, capitalist production was still a small foreign-connected enclave within societies mostly organised around pre-capitalist production on the land. Peasants of one sort or another - working...

Afghanistan

The Afghan Stalinist coup d'état of April 1978 had enormous consequences. It led to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan on 25 December, 1979, and then to a war in which six million Afghans were made refugees, and millions more killed, before the Russians eventually withdrew in disarray and Afghanistan fell prey to Islamist militias. Quite a few working class militants in Britain who wanted to "tear the head off capitalism" supported the Russian army in Afghanistan. That was foolish. We opposed the invasion and called for Russian withdrawal. We supported the self-determination of the peoples of...

Who was Tạ Thu Thâu?

Tạ Thu Thâu (1906-45) was a leader of the once-strong Vietnamese Trotskyist movement. Born into a poor family, he nevertheless managed to gain a university place in Paris. (Vietnam was then ruled by France). He joined the small French Trotskyist movement in 1929. In 1930 the French government deported him back to Vietnam, and in 1931 he helped found the (illegal) Vietnamese Trotskyist movement. In 1933 a joint "workers' list", put together by the Trotskyists and the (then not very numerous) Vietnamese Stalinists won two seats in the elections for the city council in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City)...

Solidarity with Iraqi workers

The AWL opposed the US-led war against Iraq in March-April 2003. We did so because of the record and nature of American and British imperialism. We were opposed to the Ba'thist dictatorship in Iraq, and welcomed the fall of that regime; but we wanted it overthrown by the working class and peoples of Iraq. The AWL helped build the anti-war movement. We intervened in the movement with the slogan "No to war, No to Saddam" and the perspective of a "third camp" - the camp of the working class, opposed both to US/UK invasion and to Saddam's dictatorship. The AWL is for self-determination for the...

Israel-Palestine: two nations, two states!

AWL campaigns for the right of the Palestinian people to set up an independent state of its own, side by side with Israel, and the provision of sufficient aid and compensation to allow the Palestinians to develop their society. In other words: two nations, two states. We argue for a settlement between the Arab world and Israel in which Israel's right to exist within secure borders is recognised by the Arab states and its relationship with them is "normalised". Within both Israeli and Palestinian states we argue, of course, against sectarian discrimination and for equal rights for all citizens...

Who is Yanar Mohammed?

Yanar Mohammed was born in Baghdad in 1960, and trained as an architect there. Resenting the Ba'thist dictatorship, but not yet politically active, she moved to Canada in 1995. There, she became politically active in the Worker-communist Party of Iraq and a campaign called Defence of Iraqi Women's Rights. In 2004, after the US/UK invasion which toppled Saddam Hussein, she re-established the campaign - under the new name Organisation of Women's Freedom in Iraq (OWFI) - in Baghdad. Her fierce opposition to the political Islam of the Iraqi "resistance" as well as to the US/UK occupation - her...

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