Workers Solidarity Alliance (WSA) is a United States political activist group whose politics are rooted in anarcho-syndicalism and class struggle. WSA is not a trade union or proto-union.
Workers Solidarity Alliance (WSA) was created out of a pre-existing network, including the Libertarian Workers' Group, in 1984. The journal Ideas and Action, which had begun publishing in 1982, was published by WSA from 1984 to 1997. Following the slogan of Flora Tristan, that "the emancipation of the working class is the work of the workers themselves", WSA believes that the working class needs to create its own mass organizations that it directly controls in order to have a movement that can liberate the working class from subordination to dominating classes.
WSA thus advocates the development of self-managed solidarity unionism, through either reform of existing unions or creation of new self-managed mass organizations in workplace struggles. WSA also advocates the development of self-managed mass organizations in struggles that arise outside the workplace. WSA holds that struggles against gender inequality, structural racism, and oppression of LGBTQ people are also part of the larger fight for social liberation and self-management.
WSA believes that both Capitalism and State socialism are based on the subjugation and exploitation of the working class. Workers' liberation would require that the working class gain control of the industries where it works, dismantling the top-down corporate hierarchies, but also requires the creation of new institutions of popular power, based in participatory democracy of assemblies in neighborhoods and workplaces, dismantling the top-down hierarchies of the state, so that the mass of the people gain control over public affairs.
The WSA was formerly an affiliate of the International Workers Association (IWA) and continues to be in solidarity with the Aims and Principles of the IWA.
On May 1, 2010 the WSA relaunched its Ideas & Action journal in webzine format.
Famous quotes containing the words workers, solidarity and/or alliance:
“It is ... pathetic to observe the complete lack of imagination on the part of certain employers and men and women of the upper-income levels, equally devoid of experience, equally glib with their criticism ... directed against workers, labor leaders, and other villains and personal devils who are the objects of their dart-throwing. Who doesn’t know the wealthy woman who fulminates against the “idle” workers who just won’t get out and hunt jobs?”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“It is not in how one soul approaches another but in how it withdraws that I know its affinity and solidarity with the other.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“In short, no association or alliance can be happy or stable without me. People can’t long tolerate a ruler, nor can a master his servant, a maid her mistress, a teacher his pupil, a friend his friend nor a wife her husband, a landlord his tenant, a soldier his comrade nor a party-goer his companion, unless they sometimes have illusions about each other, make use of flattery, and have the sense to turn a blind eye and sweeten life for themselves with the honey of folly.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)