I have never been in a revolutionary socialist party before and I don't think I was serious about socialism until very recently.
I had a comfortable middle class upbringing where religion was the focus of our lives and the economic system we live in was seen as inevitable.
I worked for a religious liberal charity for a year and then went to an extremely middle class university where I don't think I was challenged – I was already far to the left of many of my peers, but for the first two years still actually a liberal social democrat. I was radicalised by comrades in the student movement and I slowly began to realise the scale and nature of the forces that were in opposition to human liberation. I became a proper anti-capitalist socialist but without firm or developed ideas – essentially, I went around doing what I thought was sensible without any sort of 'plan'.
I saw groups on the organised left, but I didn't think they had much of a 'plan', either. The groups I came into contact with were mainly in the business of opposing the status quo without offering real alternatives – and I think this is partly where Workers' Liberty's disagreements arise with other British revolutionary socialists with regard to imperialism and the third camp. And I recognised and identified a 'rainbow coalition' approach without knowing that term. A bit of radical feminism here, a bit of Chomsky there, and that seemed to be satisfactory for some, but it wasn't good enough, I thought, because it didn't add up to a 'plan' for revolutionary change led by the working class. Everything was about building for the next demo, but what were our ideas? Where were we going? What were we proposing as alternatives?
The pamphlet The Case for Socialist Feminism changed my life. I'd been a committed feminist for years and years, but I didn't understand how it fitted into class politics. This pamphlet answered so many of the questions I had. And it made me more interested in studying socialism. Comrades in the AWL were the first people to really force me to think about socialism. No one before then had been bold enough to just tell me I was wrong or question me. Some people find this kind of thing incredibly uncomfortable. It is an uncomfortable process to realise just how wrong you are and how little you know. But it is absolutely necessary, and I would rather know how much I don't know than plough on in darkness. Being challenged is a very, very good thing, and something revolutionary socialists must get used to.
I still couldn't really be bothered to join though, I basically just couldn't be bothered to commit to the project of Workers' Liberty. But after university, I went through a small personal hell which I won't go into, and also ended up unemployed at my parents' house without the means to support myself. Being unemployed, even for a short amount of time and even in the grand comfort my parents' house, was horribly demoralising, depressing and vile. And after signing onto a government programme to apply for 20 jobs a week, I eventually got a part-time job through nepotism and luck.
Working for a small business, and out of study, I started to understand labour alienation. I'd had jobs before but they were short-term, and there was always more education to go into afterwards. This, now, was my life, at least until I got a new job. Being a proletarian made me into a better revolutionary, because things I understood vaguely in theory now became real things in my life. From the abstract, something that happens to 'other people', it was happening to me. I was marketing my labour power, selling my labour and taking home a wage that had no relationship to the amount of profit I was making for the business.
I eventually got a job in London. I was working long, long hours, sleeping on my friends' sofa, and being consistently treated like shit by my boss. This deepened my desire to become educated, it made me understand further the role of the working class in revolution and socialism and that, essentially, is why I joined when I did.
I am very glad I joined. Being in the group has provided me with a structure that makes me more useful, a systematic educational process, opportunities to develop my ideas and learn. At the same time as learning, though, I'm still an activist and still impart things I know about to others.
I joined because I broadly agreed with Workers' Liberty's politics, the project they (we) propose, and because I was serious about making that happen. I would urge comrades who are close to us to think about this and become members.