We Stand For Workers' Liberty

How to fight fascism

The fascist British National Party (BNP) is fundamentally an anti-working-class, anti-democratic party. It is also racist, anti-semitic, sexist and homophobic. Everything that the BNP stands for is against the interests of working-class people and the labour movement. Fascism is distinguished from other right-wing groups by the fact that, instead of relying on the ordinary, official, repressive mechanisms of capitalist democracy, it mobilises people on the streets - impoverished middle-class people, the unemployed and demoralised, and sometimes even a few workers - to directly batter...

Who was August Bebel?

August Bebel (1840-1913) was the best-known leader of the German Social-Democratic Party (SPD: "social-democratic" then meant "Marxist") and of the world workers' movement between Engels' death in 1895 and World War One. After his father died young, Bebel had to work to support his family from the age of seven, but managed to train as a wood-turner. He became politically active as a member of the German Workers' Association, led by Ferdinand Lassalle, in 1863. He was won over to Marxism by Wilhelm Liebknecht, a veteran of the revolutionary struggles of 1848-9 who had lived in London between...

Imperialism, nationalism and war

Today, the world is for the first time truly an "empire of capital" - capitalism writ large. Capitalism is more universal than ever before. Marx dated the first beginnings of capitalist production as far back as the 14th century. With the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th century, capitalism became much more widespread and dynamic. But until the late 20th century, in much of the world, capitalist production was still a small foreign-connected enclave within societies mostly organised around pre-capitalist production on the land. Peasants of one sort or another - working...

Lenin on the national question

The history of capitalism is filled with examples of nations conquering nations, taking control of territories, plundering economies, downgrading language and culture and treating the conquered peoples as less than equal. Russia under the Tsar was a "prison-house of nations": the ethnic Russian majority oppressed other nationalities within that country mercilessly. One of Lenin's big contributions to Marxism was consistent democracy on the national question. "We fight against the privileges and violence of the oppressor nation and do not in any way condone strivings for privileges on the part...

Afghanistan

The Afghan Stalinist coup d'état of April 1978 had enormous consequences. It led to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan on 25 December, 1979, and then to a war in which six million Afghans were made refugees, and millions more killed, before the Russians eventually withdrew in disarray and Afghanistan fell prey to Islamist militias. Quite a few working class militants in Britain who wanted to "tear the head off capitalism" supported the Russian army in Afghanistan. That was foolish. We opposed the invasion and called for Russian withdrawal. We supported the self-determination of the peoples of...

Who was Tạ Thu Thâu?

Tạ Thu Thâu (1906-45) was a leader of the once-strong Vietnamese Trotskyist movement. Born into a poor family, he nevertheless managed to gain a university place in Paris. (Vietnam was then ruled by France). He joined the small French Trotskyist movement in 1929. In 1930 the French government deported him back to Vietnam, and in 1931 he helped found the (illegal) Vietnamese Trotskyist movement. In 1933 a joint "workers' list", put together by the Trotskyists and the (then not very numerous) Vietnamese Stalinists won two seats in the elections for the city council in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City)...

Solidarity with Iraqi workers

The AWL opposed the US-led war against Iraq in March-April 2003. We did so because of the record and nature of American and British imperialism. We were opposed to the Ba'thist dictatorship in Iraq, and welcomed the fall of that regime; but we wanted it overthrown by the working class and peoples of Iraq. The AWL helped build the anti-war movement. We intervened in the movement with the slogan "No to war, No to Saddam" and the perspective of a "third camp" - the camp of the working class, opposed both to US/UK invasion and to Saddam's dictatorship. The AWL is for self-determination for the...

Israel-Palestine: two nations, two states!

AWL campaigns for the right of the Palestinian people to set up an independent state of its own, side by side with Israel, and the provision of sufficient aid and compensation to allow the Palestinians to develop their society. In other words: two nations, two states. We argue for a settlement between the Arab world and Israel in which Israel's right to exist within secure borders is recognised by the Arab states and its relationship with them is "normalised". Within both Israeli and Palestinian states we argue, of course, against sectarian discrimination and for equal rights for all citizens...

Who is Yanar Mohammed?

Yanar Mohammed was born in Baghdad in 1960, and trained as an architect there. Resenting the Ba'thist dictatorship, but not yet politically active, she moved to Canada in 1995. There, she became politically active in the Worker-communist Party of Iraq and a campaign called Defence of Iraqi Women's Rights. In 2004, after the US/UK invasion which toppled Saddam Hussein, she re-established the campaign - under the new name Organisation of Women's Freedom in Iraq (OWFI) - in Baghdad. Her fierce opposition to the political Islam of the Iraqi "resistance" as well as to the US/UK occupation - her...

For a united Workers' Europe! Against British nationalism!

Through the European Union (EU), Europe's capitalist states have moved slowly, bureaucratically, and clumsily towards the European unity which democrats and socialists have considered necessary for over a century. This limited European integration is reversible only by regression to economic chaos and war. Socialists should not propose to roll history backwards to the old Europe of walled-off bourgeois states and alliances! We seize the chance to unite the European working class. We propose that the working class set as its goal the creation of a fully democratic Europe, the overthrow of the...

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