Agenda at Ideas for Freedom 2026.
There may be some changes in timings listed below.
Saturday 21 November
11-11.30am: Registration
11.30-12.30: Plenary: Class struggle socialism in 2026
We open Ideas for Freedom with contributions from three speakers. An activist from the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste — Révolutionnaire will discuss the student revolt in France. Stuart Jordan, NHS worker and Unite rep, will discuss the struggle against cuts in the health sector. Kelly Rogers, from the Women’s Fightback editorial board, will make the case for class-struggle socialism as the politics that can change the world.
12.30-1.30: Lunch
1.35-2.50 Sessions
With Ukraine against Russia, with Ukrainian workers against their bosses
Ukraine’s workers face a dual struggle, against Russia’s colonial invasion and attempt to suppress Ukrainian self-determination, and against the neoliberal policies of the Ukrainian government. How are Ukrainian socialists and trade unionists confronting these struggles, and how can we support them?
Speakers: Dominika Szarek, Workers’ Liberty activist who recently visited Ukraine, plus include Ukrainian socialist activists
Building co-resistance in Israel-Palestine after Israel’s elections
An election on 27 October could oust Israel’s far-right regime. Any likely replacement will hardly be any better on the question of Palestinian rights, but ousting the current government could create openings for anti-occupation forces to grow. This session will survey the struggles of Israel’s binational left and its efforts to build co-resistance between Palestinians and Israeli Jews, towards a horizon of equality.
Speakers: Uri Weltmann, co-founder of Standing Together and organiser with new political party A Place for Us All (personal capacity); more speakers TBC
Chinese workers’ struggles at home and abroad
This session tells the story of several strikes involving Chinese workers: the 1925-6 Canton-Hong Kong general strike, a Chinese seamen’s strike in 1942, and strikes by migrant Chinese workers in the catering sector in the 1980s.
Speakers: Jabez Lam, Chinese community organiser, and Chan Ying, Workers’ Liberty
Where is Iran going?
This session will discuss the current state of Iranian society, following successive bombardments by Israel and the US, and ongoing repression from the clerical regime. How does the regime see itself in terms of regional and global politics? What are the key struggles facing the Iranian people?
Speakers: Arash Azizi, Iranian academic and author of What Iranians Want, in conversation with Mark Osborn, Workers’ Liberty.
2.55-4.05: Sessions
Class-struggle socialist-feminism: Red Rag, Women’s Fightback, and more
In the 1970s and 80s, socialist-feminist activists from a variety of left organisations developed a vibrant political and literary culture. Activists inside the Communist Party linked up with activists from non- and anti-Stalinist organisations to publish the journal Red Rag, while women in Workers’ Fight, a predecessor of Workers’ Liberty, launched Women’s Fightback, which we continue to publish today.
Amy Todd, a researcher and activist, will present the history of Red Rag, while Jean Lane will discuss Women’s Fightback.
Class Struggle in the Covid Pandemic
With all that has happened since the outbreak of the pandemic in 2020, it can feel like distant history. The issues it exposed, especially around workplace safety in sectors such as healthcare, remain significant. This session reflects on workers’ struggles during the pandemic, and the lessons they offer for efforts to develop struggles for safer, more equal workplaces today.
Speakers include: Stuart Jordan, health worker and Unite health and safety rep (pc)
Class Struggle in a Warming World
What is driving the climate crisis, and how can workers and the labour movement confront it? This session will discuss demands for workplace and community climate adaptations as an immediate horizon for struggles, as well as looking at how such struggles link to the fight for wider social transformation. Speakers include railway workers and RMT union activists.
Revolutionary Socialists and Trade Unions
Workers’ Liberty sees existing trade unions, though flawed in many ways, as bedrock self-defence organisations of the working class, making them a key terrain for socialist organising and agitation. Some Marxists from other currents argue that unions can become instruments in the hands of the ruling class, and a brake on workers’ struggles. How should revolutionary socialists relate to trade unions? This session will see Workers’ Liberty debate Lotta Comunista, a Marxist organisation mainly active in Italy.
4.10-4.35pm: Break and fund appeal
4.40-5.55pm: Sessions
Modes of capitalism
How is the world capitalist economy changing? What was “neoliberalism”, and is it still a useful way of understanding global capitalism? How do political and ideological factors, including the global far-right surge and the rise of various forms of nativism and ethno-chauvinism across the world, affect economic life? And, crucially, how can the labour movement and left organise to assert an alternative?
Martin Thomas, editor of Crisis and Sequels: Capitalism and the New Economic Turmoil since 2007, will present a picture of the contemporary situation.
The revolt in France
Since mid-late September, students in France have been in revolt, demanding increased funding and better provisions. Some workers and unions are joining the struggle. We will hear from an activist from the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste — Révolutionnaire about the struggle, as well as efforts to confront the rise of the far right.
Transforming our unions
Workers’ Liberty believes that trade unions, the bedrock self-defence organisations of the working class, are an essential agency for any project of social transformation. But our unions are often bureaucratic, undemocratic, and hindered by restrictive anti-union laws. How can we organise alongside workmates to transform our unions, to make them more combative and responsive to shop-floor struggles?
With speakers including workplace reps active in PCS Independent Left, a grassroots network in the Public and Commercial Services union; Time for Real Change, a left network in the public sector union UNISON; and Democratic Prospects, a grassroots network fighting for reform inside Prospect (all in a personal capacity).
Solidarity with workers, women, and youth in Iran
The people of Iran, suffering under years of clerical-fascist dictatorship, have been battered by US and Israeli bombing. Nevertheless, working-class and democratic resistance has continued. This session will survey prospects for that resistance, and discuss how the international left can develop a politics of solidarity that rejects apologism for the Iranian regime in the name of “anti-imperialism”.
Speakers: Morad Shirin, Sharokh Zamani Action Campaign and Iranian Revolutionary Marxists Tendency; Vicki Morris, Workers’ Liberty.
6-7.15pm: Sessions
The origins of the Workers’ Liberty tendency
2026 marks the 60th anniversary of the founding of the political tendency to which Workers’ Liberty traces its origins. Our origin story lies in the publication of a pamphlet, “What We Are and What We Must Become”, published by several dissident activists inside the Revolutionary Socialist League (aka the Militant), an ancestor of today’s Socialist Party and Revolutionary Communist Party. The pamphlet criticised the way the RSL, and the revolutionary left in general, saw itself in relation to the wider working-class and labour movement, and made the case for a different kind of revolutionary organisation.
Paul Hampton, editor of a new republication of “What We Are and What We Must Become”, will explain that critique, and discuss its relevance for today.
Why the working class?
Workers’ Liberty stresses working-class agency as the core of the socialist project, and sees workers’ struggle — rather than more nebulous forms of social collectivity, such as “the people”, or “the many” — as the basis for our politics. Why? What gives working-class organisation its special character under capitalism, and how does it intersect with other forms of oppression and domination, such as those based on gender and race?
Speaker: Alice Hazel, Workers’ Liberty
Is capitalism making us poorer? Income inequality and how to fight it
At a global level, the labour share of income, the portion of economic output paid to workers as wages and other benefits, has been in steady decline for decades. Why? Why is wage inequality in the UK so high, and continuing to widen? How have groups of workers who have won real-terms increases in pay done so? And what are the basic mechanics of the wage relation: is there such a thing as “fair” pay?
Speakers: Alex Guschanski, Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Greenwich (personal capacity), and Sam Greenwood, branch secretary of Wakefield Unison, whose members at the National Coal Mining Museum recently won a 10.5% pay increase.
Artificial Intelligence, Automation, and Class Struggle
How are different forms of artificial intelligence and other automating technologies reshaping the way we work? Are they simply a threat to workers’ jobs and conditions, or could they be harnessed to eliminate drudgery and increase free time? What about the political economy of the technology sector itself — how can tech workers organise over their immediate conditions, and the social impacts of their labour?
With speakers including Alistair Crabtree, an academic researcher and software engineer, and University and College Union (UCU) activist (pc)
7.15-8pm: Dinner followed by a social at a nearby venue
Sunday 22 November
10.30am: Registration for Sunday-only attendees
11-12pm: Sessions
Struggles under the Trump regime
Elections are due to take place in the USA on 3 November. How might they challenge, or consolidate, Trump’s power? How can union and community struggles against Trump’s policies develop? Speakers include US socialist and trade union activist Traven Leyshon, Vermont AFL-CIO (pc), and Shireen Akram-Boshar, an activist with the Tempest collective.
Why do we call ourselves “Marxists”?
Who was Karl Marx? What was the focus of his life and work, and how did his ideas evolve over time? This session will provide an introduction to Marx’s own thought, and trace the historical development of a Marxist political tradition. It will also explain why Workers’ Liberty calls itself a Marxist organisation, whilst acknowledging the limitations of political labels attached to the name of an individual.
Speakers include Martin Thomas, Workers’ Liberty, and Cece Standring, Workers’ Liberty and Women’s Fightback editorial board
For self-determination for all: Workers’ Liberty and the national question
Since our foundation, Workers’ Liberty and our predecessor organisations have grappled with how Marxists should relate to questions of national oppression and national rights. Through a reconsideration of the way the Marxist left narrated the histories of Ireland and Israel-Palestine, we have sought a reconnection with the idea of consistent democracy: self-determination as a universal democratic right to which all peoples are entitled, rather than something contingent or relative.
Patrick Murphy, Workers’ Liberty, will discuss the history of our thinking on the national question, through the lenses of Ireland and Israel-Palestine.
What next for the UK left - a panel discussion. Details to follow
12.20-1.05pm: Lunch
1.05-2.25: Sessions
Red Vienna: how a socialist municipal government revolutionised housing
From 1918 to 1934, the municipal government in the Austrian capital, Vienna, was controlled by the left-wing Social Democratic Workers’ Party. They implemented a range of radical reforms, including transforming the provision of social housing. This session examines the history, looking at what we can learn from this experience, including some of the limitations of “municipal socialism”.
Speakers: Robert Bau, Workers’ Liberty
Resisting the Milei regime in Argentina
2026 has seen Argentinian workers launch general strikes against reforms to labour law pushed by Javier Milei’s far-right regime. Women continue to struggle against Milei’s attacks on women’s rights, including reproductive freedom. This session will hear from comrades from Socialismo o Barbarie, a revolutionary socialist current based in Argentina, about struggles on the ground.
Strategies for fighting the far right: a panel discussion
Far-right organisations are growing across the world. In the UK, we have seen the growth of an electoral far right, in the shape of Reform UK, alongside an often violent far-right street movement, in the milieu around Tommy Robinson. Newer far-right parties such as Restore explicitly seek to be a bridge between street movements and official politics. This panel will discuss how the socialist left should respond: what forms of organisation, and what political perspectives, are necessary to counter the far right?
Speakers: Cathy Nugent, Workers’ Liberty; A.J.A. Woods, author of The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy and member of Anti*Capitalist Resistance; and David Renton, author of Fascism: History and Theory
The 1926 General Strike
100 years ago this year, almost two million workers took part in an insurgency that brought the country to a standstill and shook the foundations of capitalist class rule. Why did the strike happen, why did it ultimately fail, and how might things have been different?
Speakers: Edd Mustill, author of Britain’s Revolutionary Summer: The General Strike of 1926
2.25-2.40pm: Break
2.45-4pm: Sessions
Motherhood, Childcare, and Class Struggle
Elinor Cleghorn’s new book A Woman’s Work: Reclaiming the Radical History of Mothering looks at the ways in which the forms of physical and emotional labour involved in motherhood and childcare have been exploited, marginalised, and suppressed in a sexist society.
We are delighted to welcome Elinor Cleghorn to Ideas for Freedom, where she will discuss her new book alongside Kelly Rogers, from the Women’s Fightback editorial board.
Is Zionism racism? A debate
A recent Green Party resolution declares that Zionism is racism, and proposes a single state in the whole of historic Palestine as the only way forward in the region. It has been welcomed by many on the left. Workers’ Liberty argues that a Palestinian state alongside, not in place of, Israel is a better starting point for peace, and that treating Zionism as a singular, uniquely malign force has antisemitic implications. This session will debate the issues.
Speakers: Stephen John, Workers’ Liberty supporter in the Green Party, and Yannis Gourstiannis, Green Party member in London and NHS doctor
The role of protective presence in resisting the occupation
Recent years have seen a dramatic spike in violence by armed settlers towards Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. But there has also been resistance and solidarity. Activists from beyond Palestine, including from inside Israel, have mobilised to provide a “protective presence”, standing with Palestinian communities to resist violence.
Speakers: Workers’ Liberty supporters due to travel to the West Bank in October as part of the Protect The Harvest mobilisation; a UK Friends of Standing Together supporters also attending Protect The Harvest; and Finn Joughin, a British activist recently deported from occupied Palestine by the Israeli state.
Capitalism and Loneliness
One of the features of capitalism that caused Marxists to view it as progressive relative to previous societies was its tendency to bring workers together in large numbers, in large workplaces and cities, creating potentials for collective organisation to resist the exploitation that accompanied these processes. It can sometimes feel like this is now in reverse, with many of us feeling increasingly lonely and atomised. What are the causes of the epidemic of loneliness, and what is the cure?
Speaker: Ruth Cashman, Workers’ Liberty