AWL conferences

Excerpts from debate in Workers’ Liberty for our conference on 27-28 April One We advocate US socialists support a vote for Biden to stop Trump, in the context of a political perspective emphasising the need to build a working-class political pole independent of the Democrats, and to build labour and socialist organisation and struggle to fight the policies of a Biden government and organise resistance to Trumpism. US socialists who pursue a “no vote for Biden” intervention in the election, or rally behind West, are wrong. Two In the 2024 presidential election, Biden represents a substantial...

From discussion in Workers’ Liberty Discussions will continue among us on transformation of land-use and agriculture, growth and limits, and other issues, but we reaffirm the following points. The working class is the agent with the capability and interest in transforming society: through immediate reforms as well as in the battle for democratic, rational control of the economy and society as a whole. Beyond global warming, there are several major independent environmental threats. All major industries should be socialised — taken into public ownership, under democratic control of workers — to...

At a conference in Brisbane on 29-30 July, Workers’ Liberty Australia decided to turn more to environmental activist groups. Trade union activity, our “traditional” focus, remains important, but right now our small group has fewer openings there, with some of our comrades retired and the union movement at a low ebb. Some activity in the Australian Labor Party links with environmental action, through the Labor Environment Action Network, but Australia’s big cities also have dozen of ad hoc or local environmental groups. Australia had some of the world’s biggest school student climate strikes in...

At ‘After Corbynism: building a new left’ we will discuss the politics of how we can rebuild a workers’ movement which fights for a world based on solidarity, real democracy, and equality. The dayschool is a hybrid event. It will be held on 27 November from 11.30-5.30pm at Camden School for Girls, Sandall Road, London NW5 2DB and you will also be able to attend online. Tickets are £2-20. Online tickets just £5. All tickets can be purchased here in advance. They can also be purchased on the door and on the day. The Covid pandemic has highlighted, and exacerbated, deep inequalities in our...

We have decided to put our Workers’ Liberty conference planned for 27-28 November back to April 2022. We had our last conference, on 24-25 April , online. We managed well, considering, but decided to schedule a next conference in-person sooner than we otherwise would, in November 2021. The success of the vaccine drive made that seem workable. The Delta variant has upset our calculations. It can spread even with high vaccination, though that vaccination keeps death tolls much lower than before. The two weeks since schools restarted have seen, contrary to predictions, a slight fall in cases...

Workers’ Liberty’s annual conference will be on 24-25 April 2021, online. First draft versions of the main policy documents and reports are being circulated among our people this week. Together with alternative documents, amendments, etc. they will be sifted and discussed at three further committee meetings and nine wider online meetings (in three groups: 20-22 February, 20-25 March, 14-16 April) so that the final discussions and decisions on 24-25 April are well-informed. The conference will also elect new committees. Even the best online conference falls short of an in-person event, so our...

We oppose Brexit. We oppose it in the name of the rights of the three million EU migrants currently in Britain, our workmates, our neighbours, our friends, our fellow trade-unionists. To defend their right to reunite their families. To sustain the right of others across Europe to come to work and live in Britain, and the right of British-born people to go to work and live in Europe. We want more open borders, less fences and barbed-wire and barriers between countries. The technologies and productive capacities of today indict the division of continents into walled-off nation-states. Socialists...

Why revolutionaries organise The working class has the potential to become a great power in society, but can make that potential a reality, even on the most limited scale, only by organisation. That fact follows from two facts about the working class in developed capitalist society. It is the basic productive class. It is simultaneously a wage-slave class. Its members are relegated to relative poverty, cultural and educational restrictions, insecurity, and exhausting work burdens of parcellised tasks. Individual workers, without collective organisation, are merely troops under capitalist...

At the 2017 AWL conference there was a debate on two opposing resolutions on the second round of the 2017 French Presidential elections. We present the speeches made in the debate by Martin Thomas and Daniel Randall. Both resolutions can be found here Against passivity and indifference, for active politics By Martin Thomas We have three points of agreement in this debate. First, that, unlike in the majority of bourgeois run-offs, there was a real difference in France on 7 May. For the fascist Marine Le Pen even though as yet she lacks the base of a developed fascist party to be elected to the...

Opening the AWL’s annual conference on 25-26 November, and moving the document “Nine years on: the new left, neoliberalism, and the new right”, Martin Thomas outlined the situation the political left finds itself in: “The global credit crash of 2008 and the ensuing travails have produced delayed political effects. A shift to more right-wing, nationalist, and ’identity’ politics may move neoliberalism sharply to the right, or even explode it from within. The economic turmoil has also produced new life on the left, as yet on a low wattage.” In Britain that “new life on the left” has come...