Red Flag Newspaper
International Communist Workers Party
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Red Flag NewspaperInternational Communist Workers Party |
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BANGALORE, INDIA, April 20—A wildcat strike of more than one hundred thousand garment workers, mostly women, blocked a key highway for more than six hours on Monday. The fascist cops attacked them viciously. The workers were protesting new rules preventing them from withdrawing money from the government-controlled Provident Fund until age 58. Workers can use this money, stolen from their labor, for subsistence when they are unemployed or retired. On Tuesday, more than a thousand people reacted angrily to this attack by invading a nearby police station and burning police cars. The bosses have imposed a 3-day prohibition on the “right” of assembly. The rules change has been postponed—but only communism will guarantee that the working class enjoys all the fruits of our labor.
LOS ANGELES, USA—“In 1986, I worked for McDonalds for the minimum wage. Back then bus operators made 4 times the minimum wage,” commented a Metropolitan Transit Authority operator.
“In Area One, we make $5 more than today’s minimum wage. For our new contract, we are demanding equal pay for all three Areas, and a wage increase to be $5 ahead of 2020’s minimum wage,” explained a janitor.
Today, Los Angeles MTA full time tier-one operators only make 2.7 times California’s minimum wage. Janitors make 1.5 times today’s minimum wage. The wage increase they are fighting for will reduce that ratio to 1.3 times 2020’s minimum wage.
The capitalist slave masters decide our wages, not us
Under capitalism the “freedom to bargain for our wages” is a myth. Wages are the chains that tie us to the capitalists. Their system’s survival demands they be kept as low as possible.
Under capitalism, we will forever be wage slaves chasing an illusory “good paying job,” or fighting for a “good union contract.” Our take- home pay may appear to “increase” but our buying power decreases constantly.
Only communism can end capitalism’s unending need to pay us a wage that “relieves” our needs, but never “cures” them, a wage that guarantees our continual enslavement.
Communism will eliminate money and wage slavery. Nothing will ever be sold or bought. We will contribute to society according to our commitment and will receive according to need.
Capitalists defined the limits of our wages centuries ago
In 1683, in England, they calculated the exact wage that would provide a small family with a level of maintenance that “guaranteed continual working.”(The London Hanged, page 55).
We communists define it as a subsistence wage. It varies from country to country depending on the intensity of the class struggle and the local and international conditions of capitalism-imperialism at a given time.
It can never, however, exceed the limits capitalism imposes to guarantee our “continual working,” and the rearing of the next generation of wage slaves.
Historically, workers organized trade unions to try to expand those limits through collective bargaining and strikes. The capitalists, however, use their state power—their media, courts, cops and army, when necessary—to keep us within those limits.
Workers never exceed those limits permanently no matter what gains they make. These gains are always temporary.
Thus, in spite of decades of union contract struggles that won these workers wage increases, full-time tier-one MTA operators, and janitors are making less than they were making more than thirty years ago!
Their wages, like all US workers’ wages, are being driven down closer to the US bosses’ new subsistence level of $15/hour. In most of the world, workers’ wages are at or below a subsistence level set lower than in the US and Europe. This racist capitalist-imperialist super-exploitation is imposed by fascist governments.
Without wage slavery, what will motivate us to work in communism?
Capitalism uses wages as “incentives.” If we don’t work we starve. Communism will eliminate this capitalist curse.
Shortly after the revolution, things won’t be easy. Everyone will have to contribute to build communism. But, we don’t use material incentives now and we won’t use them in the future. We will rely on ideology and comradely struggle to win everyone to cooperate and share.
For tens of thousands of years, we lived without money, cooperating and sharing. Humanity owes its existence to that collectivity. The individual worked for the collective; the collective worked for the individual. Those unable to work did not go wanting. Raising children was the collective’s responsibility.
In Brazil, from 1605 to 1694, Quilombo dos Palmares, a society built by runaway African slaves, lived without money. They collectively shared the products of their collective labor.
More recently, workers in revolutionary struggles from Russia to China to Vietnam to El Salvador lived, fought and produced collectively without money. Known as “war communism,” this was seen as a temporary emergency measure. As soon as the emergency was over, money was reinstituted.
We will eliminate money; this time for good. It is the only way forward for humanity. Pre-class communism was our beginning; scientific communism is our future.
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A group of us is very eagerly reading Red Flag and learning from it. Red Flag is very good as its ideas of communism as the solution to the brutal capitalist system are very clear. Many people around us want to join ICWP and are asking us how to join.
Many people are used to the old revisionist communist movement where joining the party was a formal and exclusive process limited to a few selected workers and intellectuals. We agree with the mass line of organizing ICWP.
Joining ICWP is a commitment to overthrow the capitalist system and build a communist society based on the need of the international working class and not the need of an individual. Joining ICWP, as we explain to the masses, means that we have to build small collective groups that carry on the ideological struggle around the ideas of Red Flag and its distribution.
We also need to financially support the party and write articles and letters.
We have a group of over 50 comrades. We are planning to carry out ICWP activities on May Day and distribute our literature. Many comrades are also reading Red Flag online. We see our party growing rapidly in two states in India where we have many contacts.
—A Comrade
Where does racism come from? Why did it carry on even after slavery/Jim Crow/Apartheid had been crushed? Why has it spread all over the world? To answer these questions we have to look into the history of racism and its historical development. But as Marx said, “philosophers have tried to understand the world; the point, however is to change it.” How will we change the world to end racism? With communism. But how? And why hasn’t this happened yet, one century after the first communist revolution in Russia? To answer these questions we have to look at the history of communism and its historical development. But it would be a mistake to try to answer both sets of questions separately. Instead we must take an integrated, communist approach. Two things stand out from this integrated history. The first is that modern communism and racism can both be traced back to the dawn of capitalism, about five hundred years ago. The second is that communists seriously underestimated racism’s poisonous effect on the revolutionary movement. Usually they either ignored it or (perhaps worse) prescribed the poison of nationalism as an “antidote.” Sometimes the fight to abolish racism was undermined by socialism, which still used a wage system. Some communists thought the elimination of the wage system, of its own, would end racism. If we know our history, we don’t have to repeat these mistakes. That’s why we have just published a new pamphlet To End Racism: Mobilize the Masses for Communism. It’s why we have collected previous articles about racism on that same page on our website here. It’s why we’re starting a new series of articles on this topic. The whole point is to make sure we not only understand racism, but also that, with communism, we will be able to end it forever.