AWL

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.

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...

Socialism can only be the act of the working class, conscious of its own interests. Working class struggle is collective struggle. Its power of numbers gives the working class huge economic and political strength. But without organisation, collective action is impossible. Without organisation workers will remain wage-slaves, raw material for exploitation. The history of working class struggle is, mostly, a history of the fight to organise - in committees, unions, councils and political parties. Workers have built strong, stable, permanent organisation to wage our struggles - in the first place...

Respect was set up in 2004 as a coalition consisting of George Galloway, some mosque leaders, the Socialist Workers Party, and its friends, including some people from the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB). For ten years George Galloway was the "MP for Baghdad Central", the closest friend in Britain for Iraq under Saddam's totalitarian Ba'th regime. Galloway (on his own account) travelled to Baghdad every month or so to meet top officials, acting as a fixer for the regime in its relations with UK business people and the media. Galloway proposed to the British government that he become a go...

A strike wave began in Durban in 1973 involving nearly 100,000 workers. It shook the racist apartheid regime (where only the white minority could vote). Students played an important role, assisting and doing research for workers. From the early 80s, there was a massive upsurge in working class struggle. On 1 May 1986, 1.5 million workers "stayed away" from work to demand an official May Day holiday - the largest strike in South African history. The strike wave swiftly made organisational gains. The COSATU trade union federation, formed in 1985, claimed 795,000 workers in 23 unions with over 12...