We Stand For Workers' Liberty

Workers against Stalinism - Poland 1980-81

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. Another example of the working class fighting Stalinism was the events in Poland in 1980-81. Poland became a Stalinist state in 1945 like the rest of Eastern Europe after Russian armies drove out the Nazis. Polish workers stood against bureaucracy in 1956 and 1970, in...

Who was Joseph Stalin?

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 working class had been dispersed and battered by the long civil war (1918-21) against counter-revolutionaries backed by forces from no fewer than 14 other states. Stalin's faction defeated the loyal...

What we do - solidarity

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. We supported individuals like the mineworker Vladimir Klebanov, who was shut up in a psychiatric hospital for trying to organise for independent unions in Russia. In 1987 we organised the Campaign for Solidarity with Workers in the Eastern Bloc (CSWEB) to solidarise with workers under...

Who was Che Guevara?

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. In 1965 he left his position in the Cuban government in order to try to lead further peasant-guerrilla-based revolutions in Congo and in Bolivia. He was killed by the Bolivian army, aided by the CIA, in 1967. He was and is...

The socialism we fight for

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. For the AWL, socialism means common ownership and democratic control by the producers - the workers - over what's produced and distributed. That's how it will end poverty, class inequality, exploitation, boom-slump cycles and the trashing of the environment. That's how it will ensure good...

Who was Lenin?

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. Russia was a stifling dictatorship ruled by the Tsar (emperor). Aristocratic landlords had virtual power of life or death over the peasants on their land, even after the legal abolition of serfdom in 1861. Almost all educated young people resented the system, and many became activists. At first they tried to mobilise the peasants, the big majority of the population. They had little success. Some concluded that the only answer was for...

Who was Rosa Luxemburg?

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. In 1889, Luxemburg left Poland to avoid imprisonment, and went to study in Zurich (Switzerland), one of the few universities in Europe which then offered equal opportunities to women. Many other revolutionary-minded Russian and Polish students were in Zurich. In 1893 Luxemburg and three comrades - Leo Jogiches, Julian Marchlewski, and Adolf Warszawski - founded a new Polish Marxist party...

Trotskyist martyrs

We honour the Marxist fighters who died for their commitment to independent working class politics. We take inspiration from Russian Trotskyists, the first victims of Stalin's gulags. We remember other Trotskyists such as Leon Sedov, Rudolf Klement, Moulin, Erwin Wolf and Heinz Epe (Walter Held) murdered by Stalin's agents in Europe during the '30s. We admire Trotskyists, including Martin Monat (Paul Widelin), who organised fraternisation inside the German army during World War Two, produced the paper Arbeiter und Soldat and were murdered for their work. We salute Marcel Hic, Joseph Jakobovic...

Who was Antoinette Konikow?

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). She was also a medical doctor, and well-known as one of the chief campaigners in the USA for women's right to access to contraception and abortion.

Why the working class is the key

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. Waged labour includes anyone who does not own or control the means of production - land, tools, machines and other resources. Waged workers are not the property of individual employers, as serfs were under feudalism, or slaves in the USA before the Civil War. But workers need money to pay for food, housing, clothing...

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