AWL conferences

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...

“...The slogan of the United States of Europe will in all cases retain a colossal meaning as the political formula of the struggle of the European proletariat for power. In this program is expressed the fact that the national state has outlived itself — as a framework for the development of the productive forces, as a basis for the class struggle, and thereby also as a state form of proletarian dictatorship.” Trotsky wrote about the United States of Europe in 1915, refining his ideas in 1917, after the February Russian Revolution, in the midst of the First World War. Almost a century later, a...

On average workers' real wages fell 8.2% between 2008 and 2013. The median (middling) worker lost £2000 a year. But for many workers it has been much worse. For the 18-25 age range, the average drop was 14%; for 25- 29, it was 12%. Public sector wages have fallen by 15%. Overall price inflation over the last five years has been 19.0% (RPI); 16.4% (CPI). But the income required for a defined minimum living standard has risen, during the period of tiny or zero pay rises since 2008, by amounts ranging from 33% for a couple with an infant child through 28% for a single person to 17% or 18% for...

Scottish postal workers' strike For a Labour government in '96! The arms merchant rules – ok? Scargills 'Socialist Labour Party' – a stillborn stalinist sect Organising the socialists Download PDF

The life and death of Yitzhak Rabin Workers' Liberty conference The state of socialism Download PDF

A background document for the 2013 annual conference of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (26-27 October), by Paul Hampton and Martin Thomas. See below for a critical comment from Barry Finger 1. The AWL has pioneered a distinctive assessment of the development of global capitalism over recent decades, which underpins our orientation, concrete slogans and differences with much of the left. We have argued that since 1945, global capitalism has experienced an epoch of the “imperialism of free trade”, in which it has been successively restructured into an aggregate of politically independent...