Capitalism and socialism
Workers Power is a revolutionary socialist organisation that fights to end exploitation and oppression through working-class power and socialism. Capitalism cannot be reformed in the interests of working people. Whoever governs, it remains a system organised around profit, exploitation and crisis, in which a minority controls wealth and power while the great majority are forced to sell their labour to live.
Marxism is not just a criticism of injustice, but a theory of revolutionary change rooted in class struggle. Capitalism has created immense productive power, but it subordinates everything to competition, profit and the blind movement of the market. We fight not for a fairer management of this system, but for its overthrow and replacement by common ownership, democratic planning and the self-government of the working class.
Reformism and class independence
Labour governments administer capitalism on behalf of the bosses. The working class needs its own politics, its own organisation and its own strategy, not subordination to politicians and officials who want to divert struggle into safe channels and back behind the limits of the system. We fight for class independence against every attempt to tie workers to Labour, liberalism or any wing of the ruling class.
Reformism does not offer a road beyond capitalism, but a politics of adaptation to it. It channels anger back into parliament, official leaderships and the hope that the system can be managed in the interests of the majority. We fight instead for independent working-class politics rooted in struggle, organisation from below and the fight for socialism.
Trade unions and rank and file
Trade unions remain basic organisations of working-class defence, but they are held back by a bureaucracy whose role is to mediate between workers and bosses, not to lead a fight for power. We fight for rank-and-file control: elected and recallable representatives, democratic strike committees, workplace committees and organisation from below.
We fight to turn the unions into fighting organisations of the class, not service bodies tied to compromise and legal routine. We also fight to build the forms of struggle through which workers can act directly for themselves — from picket line stewards’ groups and strike committees to councils of action and wider organs of workers’ control. In every serious struggle, the question is whether workers remain dependent on officials or begin to impose their own leadership and their own methods.
The state and revolution
The capitalist state cannot be taken over and used in the interests of the majority. Its courts, police, army, prisons and bureaucracy exist to defend property, hierarchy and class rule. Real democracy for the working class means more than parliament: it means breaking the power of the capitalist state and replacing it with organs of workers’ rule based on delegates, councils and democracy from below.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 showed that workers can take power and begin to reorganise society in their own interests. Stalinism was not the fulfilment of that revolution but its bureaucratic defeat: the destruction of workers’ democracy by a ruling caste. We fight for socialism from below — workers’ power, democratic planning and the self-emancipation of the working class — not rule over the class by officials, generals or a party elite.
Social oppression and liberation
We oppose racism, sexism, anti-migrant chauvinism and the oppression of women and LGBT+ people. These forms of oppression are not secondary to capitalism, but part of how it rules, divides and reproduces itself. Working-class unity cannot be built by ignoring oppression, but only by fighting it in practice.
We fight every divide-and-rule strategy used against our class: from racist scapegoating and border controls to attacks on bodily autonomy, queer life and the right to organise freely. We fight fascism and the far right wherever they appear. Liberation cannot be handed down from above or separated from class struggle: it has to be won through mass struggle, collective organisation and the overthrow of the system that sustains oppression.
Climate and planning
The climate crisis shows the bankruptcy of production for profit. Capitalism cannot plan rationally because profit comes first, and every government tied to capital places competition, growth and corporate power above the needs of the planet. Greenwashing, carbon markets and appeals to the same ruling classes that created the crisis will not solve it.
Only democratic planning under workers’ control can reorganise the economy at the speed the crisis demands, shifting production from private gain to social need. That means transforming energy, transport, housing and industry on a world scale. The fight for climate justice is therefore inseparable from the fight for socialism.
Imperialism and national liberation
Capitalism is a world system of domination, war and uneven development. Imperialist powers carve up the globe through occupation, debt, military force and political subordination, while weaker ruling classes police their own populations in partnership with global capital. We oppose imperialist war, occupation and every form of national oppression, and we support the right of oppressed peoples to resist and to determine their own future.
But liberation cannot be completed by relying on local ruling classes, liberal diplomacy or rival imperialist camps. In countries shaped by colonialism, dependency and uneven development, the democratic and national tasks can only be carried through consistently by the working class leading all the oppressed. That struggle does not stop at national independence: it passes over into the fight for workers’ power and must spread internationally.
From protest to power
We fight on every immediate issue — pay, housing, healthcare, jobs, war and cuts — but we do not separate today’s struggles from the fight for power. Reforms matter, but under capitalism they are always partial and always reversible. Revolutionaries need a programme that starts from the real needs of the class, sharpens struggle and points beyond the limits of the system.
That means fighting for the broadest unity in action on concrete aims, while maintaining full political independence from reformist leaders and every wing of the ruling class. It means linking defensive struggles to demands for workers’ control, workers’ government and ultimately workers’ power. Lasting change does not come through parliament or better managers of capitalism, but through the organised force of the working class breaking the resistance of the ruling class and taking power for itself.
A party for struggle
We fight for a revolutionary workers’ party: a mass working-class party with an anti-capitalist programme, organised not as an electoral machine but as a party of struggle rooted in workplaces, communities and every front of class conflict. The working class needs more than broad anger, loose networks or left parliamentarians. It needs organisation, leadership and strategy equal to the tasks of the struggle.
That also means building a revolutionary leadership within the working class: militants trained in programme, tested in struggle and committed to democracy, militancy and working-class power. The central crisis in the workers’ movement is not the absence of grievances, but the absence of leadership capable of turning struggle into victory. Workers Power fights to help build that leadership.
Internationalism and the International
The struggle for socialism cannot be completed in one country. Capitalism is a world system, and the working class needs not only parties in each country but an international revolutionary organisation. We stand in the tradition of revolutionary Marxism and of the struggle of the first four Internationals to unite workers across borders in a common fight against capitalism, imperialism and war.
But the task today is not to revive old forms by proclamation or nostalgia. It is to help build a new international revolutionary leadership rooted in the struggles of the present and capable of carrying the fight for socialism forward. Internationalism is not an optional moral principle: it is a strategic necessity for any serious revolutionary politics.