Workers Power is a revolutionary communist organisation. These principles set out the political foundations of our organisation: the basis on which we act, argue for our ideas and seek unity with other revolutionaries. They are not a substitute for a full programme, but a declaration of the essential positions that guide our struggle for workers’ power and international socialism.
1. Capitalism, exploitation and class struggle
Capitalism has created a world economy and developed humanity’s productive powers on an immense scale. But production is organised for profit and controlled by a small class that owns the major industries, banks, land and infrastructure. The great majority must sell their capacity to work in return for a wage. Workers produce more value than they receive; the unpaid portion is the source of capitalist profit and accumulation.
The contradiction between social production and private ownership drives competition, economic crises, inequality, imperialist war and ecological destruction. These are not accidental results of bad policy. They arise from the system itself.
Capitalism also creates the force capable of replacing it. Workers are brought together through collective labour and can halt production and profit. Because the working class does not need to exploit another class, it can liberate itself only by abolishing class rule altogether. The emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself.
2. Socialism and communism
Socialism means taking the decisive resources of society out of capitalist hands and placing them under collective ownership and workers’ control. The major banks, industries, utilities, transport networks and landowners must be expropriated without compensation and integrated through a democratically determined plan of production.
Such planning would make it possible to direct society’s resources towards human need: decent housing, healthcare and education; useful and secure work; equality and liberation; restoration of the natural environment; and the abolition of poverty and hunger throughout the world. Decisions about investment and production would be made by workers and consumers through elected and recallable representatives, not by corporate executives, markets or an unaccountable state bureaucracy.
Socialism is the transition towards communism: a worldwide classless society in which exploitation has ended, abundance replaces scarcity, and the state as an instrument of class rule becomes unnecessary. It cannot be bestowed by parliament or carried out on workers’ behalf. It begins with the working class taking political power.
3. From protest to workers’ power
We fight for every improvement in the lives of workers and the oppressed. Victories over pay, housing, public services, democratic rights or discrimination matter in themselves. They build organisation and confidence. But reforms won under capitalism remain limited and can be taken back whenever the balance of forces changes.
Our demands therefore begin with what people need, not with what employers and governments say the system can afford. We seek to develop struggles in ways that increase working-class power: extending and coordinating action, opening the capitalists’ books, imposing workers’ control and challenging private ownership. This is the transitional method—a bridge from present struggles to the fight for socialist revolution.
We work for the broadest unity in action around concrete objectives, including with organisations and leaders whose politics we oppose. At the same time, we preserve complete freedom to criticise them, advance our programme and warn against retreat. This is the method of the united front. Common action must strengthen the political independence of the working class, not subordinate it to reformist leaders or capitalist parties.
4. The state and revolution
The capitalist state is not a neutral instrument. Parliament and elected government sit within a permanent apparatus—the courts, police, prisons, armed forces, senior civil service and intelligence agencies—built to defend capitalist property and class rule. Behind them stand the economic power of big business and finance. This machinery cannot simply be taken over and used to introduce socialism.
The ruling class will resist any serious attempt to dispossess it through economic sabotage, the state and, when necessary, violence. A socialist revolution therefore requires the working class to break up the capitalist state and replace it with its own institutions of power, created through struggle: workers’ councils and assemblies based on elected, accountable and recallable delegates. In a revolutionary crisis, we fight for a workers’ government based on such organisations and committed to breaking capitalist power.
Such a workers’ state would extend democracy into economic and social life while preventing the former ruling class from restoring its domination. This is what Marxists mean by the dictatorship of the proletariat: the rule of the working-class majority, not the dictatorship of a party or bureaucracy. Stalinism destroyed workers’ democracy and represented a bureaucratic defeat of socialism, not its fulfilment.
5. Reformism and working-class independence
Reformism promises to improve capitalism through elections, legislation and negotiation. It reflects the outlook of a labour bureaucracy whose position depends on mediating between workers, employers and the state. Even when reformist parties enact gains under pressure, they preserve capitalist ownership and the state—and administer the system when crisis demands attacks on the working class.
The Labour Party is a bourgeois workers’ party. Its trade-union affiliations and electoral support connect it to the organised working class, while its leadership, programme and parliamentary representatives bind it to the management of British capitalism. This contradiction explains both Labour’s persistent hold over sections of the working class and its repeated betrayals in office.
Communists fight alongside Labour supporters and other reformist workers whenever their interests are at stake, while arguing openly for a break with Labourism. Parliament can be used as a platform for class struggle, but it offers no parliamentary road to socialism. New left or green electoral projects cannot escape this problem if their strategy remains the reform of capitalism through its existing institutions.
6. Trade unions and rank-and-file power
Trade unions are the basic defensive organisations of the working class. We support their struggles and believe every socialist should be active in them wherever possible. We oppose every legal restriction on organising, striking and picketing and fight for the complete independence of the unions from employers and the state.
Union bureaucracies tend to contain struggles within the limits of negotiation and the law. Workers need organisations through which they can control their own disputes: sovereign mass meetings, elected and recallable strike committees, effective picketing, workplace organisation and direct links across unions and industries. Officials should be elected, recallable and paid no more than the members they represent.
At high points of struggle, councils of action and delegate assemblies can unite workplaces with tenants, students and communities. A general strike raises the question of who runs society. These forms of rank-and-file democracy enable workers to coordinate action, challenge the authority of the bosses and acquire the experience needed to exercise political power.
7. Against racism, borders and fascism
Racism is more than individual prejudice. It was shaped by slavery, colonialism and imperialism and is reproduced through borders, policing, housing, employment and the political scapegoating of migrants and minorities. It divides the working class, makes sections of it more vulnerable to exploitation and binds workers to the nationalism of their rulers.
We oppose all immigration controls and demand equal political, social and workplace rights for everyone, regardless of nationality or immigration status. We fight antisemitism, Islamophobia and every form of national and racial oppression. We support the right of oppressed groups to organise within the labour movement so they can combat discrimination and compel the movement to champion their demands.
Fascism is a mass counter-revolutionary movement whose purpose is to destroy working-class organisation and terrorise the oppressed. It must be confronted by mass working-class mobilisation, united action and organised self-defence—not reliance on bans, the police or the capitalist state. Fascists must be denied the platforms and public spaces they use to organise violence.
8. Women’s and LGBT+ liberation
Women’s oppression arose with class society and is maintained under capitalism through the family, unequal responsibility for care and domestic labour, discrimination at work, restrictions on reproductive freedom and violence against women. Capitalism draws women into social production while continuing to depend on a vast burden of unpaid labour in the home.
We fight for equal pay, free universal childcare, properly funded services, reproductive freedom including abortion on demand, and the socialisation of domestic and caring work. We oppose male chauvinism and violence wherever they occur, especially inside the workers’ movement. We fight for a mass working-class women’s movement and support women’s right to organise autonomously within broader organisations.
The oppression of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people is tied to the enforcement of sexual and gender norms that sustain the family as an economic institution. We defend full equality, bodily autonomy and freedom of gender expression, and oppose every attempt to set women’s and trans liberation against one another. The working class can unite only by fighting oppression, and it can win socialism only by placing the liberation of all the oppressed at the centre of its struggle.
9. Climate breakdown and democratic planning
Capitalism treats land, energy, raw materials and the atmosphere as inputs for profit and dumps the social and environmental costs onto the majority. Competition between companies and states prevents the rapid, coordinated action required to halt climate breakdown. Carbon markets, corporate pledges and appeals to individual consumption leave the source of the crisis untouched.
We fight to bring energy, transport, construction, agriculture and the major industries into public ownership under workers’ control. A democratically planned transition must eliminate fossil-fuel dependence, expand renewable energy and public transport, transform housing and production, and restore damaged ecosystems. Workers in affected industries must be guaranteed retraining, jobs and incomes; the transition cannot be imposed on working-class communities.
The imperialist countries that accumulated wealth through colonial plunder and fossil-fuel development owe resources and technology to the countries suffering the worst consequences. Climate justice requires international planning and the abolition of the capitalist system that places profit before a habitable planet.
10. Imperialism and national liberation
Imperialism is the organisation of the world economy through the domination and rivalry of powerful capitalist states, financial institutions and multinational corporations. They use investment, debt, sanctions, military alliances, occupation and war to divide markets and subordinate weaker countries. The struggle for resources and strategic advantage repeatedly threatens regional and world war.
We oppose British imperialism, Nato and the wars, bases and sanctions through which they enforce their interests. At the same time, we give no political support to rival capitalist powers. Workers do not have to choose between competing ruling classes. Our principle is the political independence and international solidarity of the working class.
We defend the right of oppressed nations to self-determination and support their resistance to imperialist domination. Where nationalist or other non-working-class forces genuinely fight imperialism, revolutionaries can support that struggle without endorsing their politics or abandoning criticism. In countries subordinated by imperialism, the local capitalist class cannot consistently complete the tasks of democracy, land reform and national liberation. The working class must lead the oppressed, carry those struggles into a fight for socialist power and extend the revolution internationally. This is the strategy of permanent revolution.
11. The revolutionary party
Working-class struggle does not automatically produce a strategy for victory. The lessons of one battle can be lost before the next; struggles can remain isolated or be diverted by leaders committed to compromise. The fundamental crisis of the working-class movement is a crisis of revolutionary leadership.
A revolutionary party unites the most conscious and determined militants around a common programme. It must be rooted in workplaces and struggles, learn from the class and fight within its organisations for the policies needed to win. Its role is not to substitute itself for working-class action, but to help the class generalise its experience, overcome divisions and take power.
Such a party must combine democracy with unity in action. Its members need full rights to debate, criticise, organise around differences and elect their leadership. Once a decision has been reached, the party acts collectively to carry it out and tests it against experience. This is democratic centralism. A mass revolutionary party cannot be improvised when a revolutionary crisis begins; its foundations must be built now through political education, common action and principled regroupment.
12. Internationalism and the revolutionary International
Capitalism is a world system, and the struggle for socialism is international. A workers’ revolution may begin in one country, but it cannot complete the transition to socialism in isolation. Its survival and development depend on spreading the revolution and uniting workers across borders.
We stand in the revolutionary tradition of Marx and Engels, the Bolsheviks and the first four Internationals, and Trotsky’s struggle against Stalinism. Today no existing organisation constitutes the revolutionary International the working class needs. It cannot be created by proclamation or by declaring one national tradition infallible. It must be built through participation in living struggles, honest political debate and agreement on a revolutionary programme.
Workers Power is part of the International Socialist League. Through common organisation and action, political clarification and principled debate, we seek to build revolutionary parties in every country and a world party of socialist revolution.
Organise with us
These principles are the foundation of Workers Power’s politics. We apply them to changing conditions through our programme, our publications and our activity in the class struggle. We welcome serious discussion with organisations and individuals who share these aims, including honest disagreement over how they should be carried into practice.
If you broadly agree with these principles, do not remain isolated. Learn, debate and organise with us. Help build the revolutionary party and International the working class needs.
- Read more about where we stand and our programme for working-class action.
- Read the programme of the International Socialist League.
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