Workers Solidarity Alliance
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.