FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!
International Communist Workers Party
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FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM! |
International Communist Workers Party | |
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In the last 50 years capitalism has uprooted hundreds of millions of money-poor farmers. Taking them from remote villages, in continent after continent, it has channeled them into massive factories around mega-cities. In this way it has assembled gigantic armies of industrial workers. For the first time in history the majority of humankind depend on a wage (or salary) to survive. Capitalism as a world system is dynamic, triumphant and ... in trouble.
It is in trouble because according to the International Labor Organization (ILO) it has built a labor pool of 3 billion wage workers. Far from liberating them this wage system has trapped them. The vast majority (75%) work as casual, part-time, temporary or “off-the-books.” Over 200 million (and rising) are unemployed but to talk to the casual worker of pensions, sick leave or unemployment benefits is to talk fantasy.
Capitalism is in trouble because these new, uprooted relations of production have created a massive and expanding material basis for the central slogan of our fledgling Party: “Smash the wage system -Fight for Communism!” And by communism we mean that collective way of living where we rely on the skills and commitments of one another for our day-to-day survival rather than a (non-existent) bank account or a (way-too-small) paycheck.
Capitalism is in trouble because it is exactly that culture - the culture of cooperation - we are all learning. Of course, the way we do it varies from continent to continent. In China, you read stories of the bed the night shift sleeps on becoming the bed the day shift sleeps on. In the US, the car the day shift worker needs to get to work becomes the car the night shift worker needs to get to work. It takes different forms but it is the same co-operative culture being practiced day in day out by workers dealing with the crisis in the wage system the world over.
These are the cultural building blocks of communism. We are practicing them in small personal collectives. As yet they have not come together as a mass conscious political aim - Fight for Communism! -but when they do, capitalism will be in even deeper trouble. The movers and shakers of the capitalist world- those whose personal fortunes top $50 million - number just 123,800 or about one out of every fifty thousand people in the world. The odds are in our favor. We are the many; they are the few.
The odds might be in our favor but that doesn’t mean we’ll win because capitalism too has a material basis - even in the lives of those it exploits. Our deep seated sense of collectivity, for example, is always being limited. Capitalist forces limit this sense of collectivity to nationalism, using language, history, “race” or religion. Or they use more individual ideas like “family first and foremost.” Our biggest obstacle is reformism, trying to improve the conditions of our wage slavery rather than seeing ourselves as its gravediggers.
It is here that we can see the necessity for a revolutionary party based among the working class. Our job is to build a force that understands the commonality of our exploitation, its basis in the wage system and the need to build a movement that consciously champions a system of production that relies only on people and their needs, not wages and a system of profits. That is the movement the ICWP is building. Join us.