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!

For a united Workers' Europe! Against British nationalism!

Through the European Union (EU), Europe's capitalist states have moved slowly, bureaucratically, and clumsily towards the European unity which democrats and socialists have considered necessary for over a century. This limited European integration is reversible only by regression to economic chaos and war. Socialists should not propose to roll history backwards to the old Europe of walled-off bourgeois states and alliances! We seize the chance to unite the European working class. We propose that the working class set as its goal the creation of a fully democratic Europe, the overthrow of the...

Ireland

Northern Ireland is in chronic communal conflict. For there to be a democratic solution, a wider framework than Northern Ireland is needed. The only programme which accommodates the rights of both communities without infringing on the rights of either is a federal united Ireland with regional autonomy for the mainly Protestant north-east, linked in a voluntary confederation with Britain. That is a programme on which class-conscious Irish workers, Protestant and Catholic, can be united. And only a united working class can win full democracy and the socialist "levelling-up" which makes it viable...

Why is workers' revolution necessary?

For many, the term "revolution" evokes images of a Stalinist-led army descending on them to create a police state. Many revolutions in the twentieth century, such as those in Eastern Europe, China, Cuba and Vietnam, were in fact just like that. Because of that many socialists think it more prudent only to fight for reforms, or (as the title of a recent book puts it) to "change the world without taking power". The AWL also fights for reforms, because mobilising the working class for immediate improvements is the best way to transform the labour movement and prepare the working class to make...

Paris Commune 1871

The Paris Commune was the first successful workers' revolution. It survived from 26 March to 30 May 1871. Following France's defeat in its 1870 war with Prussia (the biggest state in not-yet-united Germany), the bourgeois government allowed Prussian troops to occupy Paris. On 18 March the French government sent its army into Paris to ensure that the workers would not resist the Prussians. The Paris workers refused to give up their weapons. On 26 March, in a wave of popular support, a municipal council composed of workers and soldiers - the Paris Commune - was elected. The Commune abolished...

Iran

Iranian workers briefly showed their power in the late 1970s. The despotic Shah had ruled Iran for decades. His regime was the strongest ally the US had in the region. From October 1977 there were demonstrations against the Shah, culminating in a two million-strong protest in the capital Tehran on 7 September 1978. The Shah imposed martial law and soldiers massacred demonstrators. But a strike by 30,000 oil workers in September 1978 rocked the regime. Strikes in factories, offices, hospitals and universities followed. Workers' committees known as "shoras" were set up, taking control of...

Why is a revolutionary party necessary?

The most crucial lesson from the experience of class struggle over the past two hundred years is the need for a revolutionary workers' party. Workers need a permanent organisation around our general political aims, not just ad hoc coalitions that organise episodic actions and campaigns. And this revolutionary workers' party must be very different from the "revolutionary" parties the Stalinists and their kitsch-Trotskyist imitators built during the twentieth century. In a workers' revolution, politics dominates A workers' revolution is different from other revolutions. Take the capitalist...

Three fronts of the class struggle

In What is to be Done? (1902) Lenin quoted Engels from the Peasant War in Germany (1874) on the significance of theory in the Marxist movement. Lenin wrote: "the role of vanguard fighter can be fulfilled only by a party that is guided by the most advanced theory Engels recognised, not two forms of the great struggle of Social Democracy (political and economic), but three, placing the theoretical struggle on a par with the first two." Engels wrote: "It must be said to the credit of the German workers that they have utilised the advantages of their situation with rare understanding. For the...

Political Islam

Because the political Islamists cry "death to America", articulate popular grievances against Israel and decry "imperialism", many on the left identify them as either wholly progressive, sometimes progressive, or "at heart" progressive. Or, condescendingly, they see the "Islamic" element in their politics as only superficial. Modern "Islamic fundamentalism" ("political Islam" or "Islamism") is essentially a political, not a religious current. It denotes not especial devoutness, but political movements aiming to reshape societies on the model of "Islamic states" which allegedly existed 1,200...

Marxism - what sort of Marxism?

The AWL is Trotskyist: that is, we base ourselves on the ideas and struggles of the loyal Bolsheviks who, after leading the Russian Revolution in 1917, went on to resist the Stalinist counter-revolution. Our touchstone is the political independence of the working class. In some situations this idea can be summarised by the phrase, "the Third Camp", meaning that the workers should pursue their own interests rather than choosing the lesser evil between two reactionary bourgeois or Stalinist camps whose competition dominates "official" politics. Leon Trotsky coined the phrase Third Camp for China...

Who was Louise Michel?

On 18 March 1871, the workers of Paris, which was besieged by the Prussian army, took power. It was the first time workers had taken power anywhere in the world, and lasted for nine weeks. It was called the Paris Commune. Louise Michel, who was a teacher, took part in the Commune and fought on the barricades against the Prussians and the soldiers of the French capitalists. After the defeat of the Commune, Louise Michel was deported to New Caledonia, an island in the Pacific which the French government controlled. After five years there, she was allowed to teach the local people, and helped...

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