We Stand For Workers' Liberty

Ireland

Northern Ireland is in chronic communal conflict. For there to be a democratic solution, a wider framework than Northern Ireland is needed. The only programme which accommodates the rights of both communities without infringing on the rights of either is a federal united Ireland with regional autonomy for the mainly Protestant north-east, linked in a voluntary confederation with Britain. That is a programme on which class-conscious Irish workers, Protestant and Catholic, can be united. And only a united working class can win full democracy and the socialist "levelling-up" which makes it viable...

Why is workers' revolution necessary?

For many, the term "revolution" evokes images of a Stalinist-led army descending on them to create a police state. Many revolutions in the twentieth century, such as those in Eastern Europe, China, Cuba and Vietnam, were in fact just like that. Because of that many socialists think it more prudent only to fight for reforms, or (as the title of a recent book puts it) to "change the world without taking power". The AWL also fights for reforms, because mobilising the working class for immediate improvements is the best way to transform the labour movement and prepare the working class to make...

Who was Clara Zetkin?

Clara Zetkin (1857-1933) pioneered the idea of a working class-based women's movement. In 1891 she became editor of the German Social-Democratic Party (SPD) newspaper for women Die Gleichheit ( Equality ) which she produced for 25 years (circulation 112,000 in 1912). Zetkin also edited the women's supplement in the leftwing Leipziger Volkszeitung . She became secretary of the International Socialist Women in 1910 and was one of the founders of International Women's Day, which is still observed around the world. The followers of Ferdinand Lassalle, the main ideological rivals of the Marxists in...

Paris Commune 1871

The Paris Commune was the first successful workers' revolution. It survived from 26 March to 30 May 1871. Following France's defeat in its 1870 war with Prussia (the biggest state in not-yet-united Germany), the bourgeois government allowed Prussian troops to occupy Paris. On 18 March the French government sent its army into Paris to ensure that the workers would not resist the Prussians. The Paris workers refused to give up their weapons. On 26 March, in a wave of popular support, a municipal council composed of workers and soldiers - the Paris Commune - was elected. The Commune abolished...

Iran

Iranian workers briefly showed their power in the late 1970s. The despotic Shah had ruled Iran for decades. His regime was the strongest ally the US had in the region. From October 1977 there were demonstrations against the Shah, culminating in a two million-strong protest in the capital Tehran on 7 September 1978. The Shah imposed martial law and soldiers massacred demonstrators. But a strike by 30,000 oil workers in September 1978 rocked the regime. Strikes in factories, offices, hospitals and universities followed. Workers' committees known as "shoras" were set up, taking control of...

Why is a revolutionary party necessary?

The most crucial lesson from the experience of class struggle over the past two hundred years is the need for a revolutionary workers' party. Workers need a permanent organisation around our general political aims, not just ad hoc coalitions that organise episodic actions and campaigns. And this revolutionary workers' party must be very different from the "revolutionary" parties the Stalinists and their kitsch-Trotskyist imitators built during the twentieth century. In a workers' revolution, politics dominates A workers' revolution is different from other revolutions. Take the capitalist...

Three fronts of the class struggle

In What is to be Done? (1902) Lenin quoted Engels from the Peasant War in Germany (1874) on the significance of theory in the Marxist movement. Lenin wrote: "the role of vanguard fighter can be fulfilled only by a party that is guided by the most advanced theory Engels recognised, not two forms of the great struggle of Social Democracy (political and economic), but three, placing the theoretical struggle on a par with the first two." Engels wrote: "It must be said to the credit of the German workers that they have utilised the advantages of their situation with rare understanding. For the...

Political Islam

Because the political Islamists cry "death to America", articulate popular grievances against Israel and decry "imperialism", many on the left identify them as either wholly progressive, sometimes progressive, or "at heart" progressive. Or, condescendingly, they see the "Islamic" element in their politics as only superficial. Modern "Islamic fundamentalism" ("political Islam" or "Islamism") is essentially a political, not a religious current. It denotes not especial devoutness, but political movements aiming to reshape societies on the model of "Islamic states" which allegedly existed 1,200...

Marxism - what sort of Marxism?

The AWL is Trotskyist: that is, we base ourselves on the ideas and struggles of the loyal Bolsheviks who, after leading the Russian Revolution in 1917, went on to resist the Stalinist counter-revolution. Our touchstone is the political independence of the working class. In some situations this idea can be summarised by the phrase, "the Third Camp", meaning that the workers should pursue their own interests rather than choosing the lesser evil between two reactionary bourgeois or Stalinist camps whose competition dominates "official" politics. Leon Trotsky coined the phrase Third Camp for China...

Who was Louise Michel?

On 18 March 1871, the workers of Paris, which was besieged by the Prussian army, took power. It was the first time workers had taken power anywhere in the world, and lasted for nine weeks. It was called the Paris Commune. Louise Michel, who was a teacher, took part in the Commune and fought on the barricades against the Prussians and the soldiers of the French capitalists. After the defeat of the Commune, Louise Michel was deported to New Caledonia, an island in the Pacific which the French government controlled. After five years there, she was allowed to teach the local people, and helped...

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