We Stand For Workers' Liberty

Capitalism is destroying our planet

Capitalism creates economic crises. It also creates ecological degradation. Capitalism is a system that reshapes and reconstructs nature - and destroys the environment while doing so. The thirst for profit makes environmental damage inevitable. Capitalist firms pollute water, air and soil. Their farming methods have little regard for nature. They introduce chemicals without adequately assessing their impact on the environment, on humans and on other animals. They introduce drugs into the food chain and create disease-resistant organisms. The culture of the car drains non-renewable fossil fuels...

What we do in the workplaces and unions

The hope of changing the labour movement lies with its rank-and-file members. We concentrate our efforts not just on calling for resolutions to be passed and rule changes to be made, but fundamentally on helping and encouraging workers to organise, to stand up for themselves collectively, to develop a collective class identity, and to fight for control in the workplace. We work to rebuild the unions from the ground up. As the American Marxist Hal Draper put it: "Other socialist groups have oriented themselves to the intellectuals and intelligentsia, and still others to the working class. They...

Can the labour movement be transformed?

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...

What we do - the Labour Representation Committee

The Labour Representation Committee (LRC) is a movement formed by trade unionists and socialists to fight for the principle of labour representation within the Labour Party, the unions and parliament. As of 2005, four unions - the post and telecom workers' CWU, the railworkers' RMT, the firefighters' FBU, and the bakers - are affiliated. Workers' Liberty had been arguing and campaigning for a new Labour Representation Committee since 1998, so when the present LRC was formed in July 2004 we naturally gave it full support. Individuals, trade union branches, CLPs and other organisations can join...

Respect - a terrible blind alley

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...

South Africa - workers defeat apartheid

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...

Who was Eleanor Marx?

Karl Marx's daughter Eleanor (1855-1898) was an important figure in her own right. Active in Britain, she joined the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) in the early 1880s. When it split in 1884, Eleanor Marx, with William Morris and others, formed the Socialist League. At that time socialist ideas were very marginal in Britain - mostly the property of veterans from the old Chartist movement or of political exiles. Twenty years' speaking, leafleting, and paper-selling by the SDF and the Socialist League created the basis on which the Labour Party was able to emerge by 1900. Eleanor Marx...

Fight for a workers' government

We work to reorganise and reorient the labour movement around a fight for the objective of a workers' government, a government based on, accountable to, and serving the organised working class. We work to rally all trade unions and working-class organisations to fight for - and to back election candidates committed to: • liberation of unions from the shackles riveted on by Tory laws. Re-instate the right to take essential trade union action, such as solidarity strikes • restoration of the National Health Service and the welfare state as public services, publicly-owned, publicly-controlled • a...

Festival of the oppressed

Why does Workers' Liberty always talk about class? Are people not oppressed in other ways too? By sexism, racism, homophobia and other prejudices? Yes, they are - which is why we see the fight for equality as an inseparable part of our socialism. Look around the world and back through history, and you will see that the fortunes of the working class and of oppressed groups rise and fall together. From Iran under the Ayatollahs to apartheid South Africa to Stalin's Russia, regimes which crush workers enforce other oppressions too. We cannot win full equality and liberation under capitalism. But...

Women's Fightback

During the 1980s our women activists issued a paper aimed at building the women's movement on the basis of class politics. Women's Fightback was launched at a conference of 500 women in 1980. During the miners' strike of 1984-5 Women's Fightback produced strike bulletins created and circulated by women in pit villages across the country. It played a role in "Women against Pit Closures". Women's Fightback petered out in the late 1980s, as the Labour Party women's sections and the feminist movement declined, but our commitment to socialist-feminist organisation remains.

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