Fighting global capitalism

Occupy the Democratic Party? No Way! Dan La Botz, November 22, 2011 At a moment when Occupy faces severe police repression and cold weather, and as we are both extending our movement to the streets and rethinking our future, various pressures are beginning to build with the objective of taking our movement into the Democratic Party. While our movement so far has remained politically independent and non-partisan, newspaper articles and commentaries suggest that the Occupy movement should give up its "utopian" demands for a different and better society and its "amorphous" participatory democracy...

Originally published in Workers' Liberty magazine, January 2001 Why should Marxists want to narrow our appeal to 'the workers', enrolling people from other classes only to the extent that they rally behind the working class? Why not seek a broader unity of 'ordinary people'? The pivot of Marx's critique of political economy is the concept of abstract labour, or universal social labour - labour as the expenditure under standard conditions of a quotient of average labour-power. Abstract labour, according to Marx, is the substance of value. Abstract labour becomes a 'practical fact' in 'a form of...

A collection of articles from Workers' Liberty No.8. * Conservative Party invitation to French Fascist and leader of the French National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen. * 1987 TUC conference and the Union leaderships' response to declining union membership. * An analysis of the Australian Labor Party's 1987 Australian general election victory. * Child sex abuse, incest and UK law. * The rise of working-class struggle in South Korea * General Secretary Jimmy Knapp's sell-out of the members of the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR) Click here to download pdf .

Ideas for Freedom 2010, Workers' Liberty's weekend "summerschool" of socialist discussion and debate, took place on 9-11 July in Archway, North London. * We will put up transcripts of the sessions as we type them up. - "How do we stop the Tories' plans for schools?" - "Israel-Palestine: what should the left say?" Debate with Workers Power * Position the cursor over the pictures for descriptions. * Our suggested background reading for individual sessions can be found at www.workersliberty.org/iff-read . GETTING READY FOR CLASS STRUGGLE: A REPORT OF IDEAS FOR FREEDOM 2010 180 people attended...

Liverpool TUC's Secretary: Mark Hoskisson President: Denis Dunphy Treasurer: John Farmer Dear Brothers and sisters Join Liverpool TUC's "Time to fight back" march, 13 September 2009 Assemble 12.30pm at the Pier Head, Liverpool Liverpool Trades Union Council has agreed to welcome the presence of the national TUC Congress in our city by calling on all workers to join us in a demonstration. We warmly welcome all delegates at the TUC to our city. We believe there is an urgent need for the trade union movement to unite and start acting in defence of jobs for all, for trade union rights, against the...

On Sunday 26 July, up to 20,000 according to press reports, marched against the threatened closure of the Diageo bottling plant in Kilmarnock. It was a massive display of opposition to the company’s plans. Diageo is the world’s biggest drinks company, with a worldwide workforce of 22,000. Its brands include Johnnie Walker, Guinness, Smirnoff and Captain Morgan. Its profits over the last decade have averaged £2 billion a year. In the twelve months to July of this year, its pre-tax profits amounted to £2.093 billion. Diageo’s Chief Executive, Paul Walsh, was paid a total package of over £3.6...

Good local support boosted numbers at the demonstration called at Lindsey Oil Refinery this morning adding to the solid core of sacked workers at the site. Building from a slow start at 0630 the picket swelled to over 1500 by 0830. The picket line itself was very quiet, most of the sacked workers having already heard the news that Total had agreed to talks. Yesterdays dramatic burning of their letters informing them of the sack was matched today by a further defiant gesture as the picket moved off in an impromptu march along the road outside the refinery up towards the nearby motorway junction...

1 May is an important date in the history of the workers’ movement. This article is the collective account of how some of our activists in London spent their May Day. Willis cleaners The day kicked off with a picket at multinational insurance brokers the Willis Group in the City of London. In mid-2007 cleaners at Willis began to organise under the umbrella of Unite’s Justice for Cleaners campaign for the ‘living wage’. The living wage was won but the company immediately hit back by putting the cleaners on unworkable night shifts. When they refused to work the shifts, those involved in...

1 April: The London Evening Standard reports today that "more than 7,000 police and security staff [have] turned London into a fortress city for the G20 summit... The Met describes [it] as the biggest security operation it has ever mounted". Cycling through the City, I saw hardware shops, newsagents, and camera shops shuttered or boarded up for the day, though McDonalds and Starbucks were still open. Visibly many workers had responded to the media coverage about likely violence by taking the day off. There are two protests today - the Climate Camp at Bishopsgate, and a Stop The War protest at...