Red Flag Newspaper
International Communist Workers Party
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Red Flag NewspaperInternational Communist Workers Party |
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On December 17, a 26-year-old Dalit student Rohith Vemula at the University of Hyderabad committed suicide. In response to this tragic death, thousands of students walked out and completely shut down the university. In Delhi, the outraged students fought pitched battles with police. “Long live revolution,” “Red salute to comrade Rohith”, “Crush the fascists” and many more slogans reverberated as police tried in vain to stop the students with water cannons and violence.
Millions of workers and poor people in India consider this a racist murder. Rohith and four other friends were expelled from the University for fighting anti-Muslim racism. They were physically and verbally harassed by a fascist student organization affiliated with the ruling BJP.
The present ruling party BJP in India came to power after decades of terror and mass murders it carried out against Muslims. These racist attacks were organized to divide poor Dalit Hindu workers from Muslim workers. Millions of Dalits face severe discrimination, police brutality, murders and eviction from their dilapidated shacks.
A friend reported on the conditions of Dalit students: “Forced into ghettoes in the hostel, discriminated against by teachers, denied access to sporting and cultural activities, Dalit students in India’s premier educational institutions walk into an environment that’s virulently hostile to them. Not surprisingly, according to one estimate, in the last four years 18 Dalit students chose to end their lives rather than continue to battle on in these dens of caste prejudice and social exclusion.”
These racist attacks have exposed capitalism and its need to intensify attacks on all workers. The Indian ruling class is building world-class industrial parks for joint collaboration between Tata and Lockheed Martin, Boeing and other high-tech companies like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook. To construct these projects, the government is forcing many poor and Dalits off their land.
Many workers and students in India and around the world are open to communism as the only solution to end centuries-old oppression and exploitation. In recent weeks we have significantly increased the readers of Red Flag in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal. We have patiently explained to our friends and readers that any fight against racism must be a fight for communism lead by the International Communist Workers Party.
Some of these readers are serious about organizing for communist revolution. We have a reader at the University of Hyderabad who is participating in demonstrations and discussing the ideas of Red Flag. This student has promised to organize a very large number of students, workers and professionals to meet with us and talk about ICWP. We urge all our readers to join ICWP and distribute Red Flag.
Here is a poem our Red Flag reader sent about the fallen Rohith Vemula.
No Death to Rohith Vemula!!
That ain't that soon yet..
Organize
all colors to uprise.
Unite the masses,
against the ruling classes.
Neutralize
their agents and spies.
Man the passes,
to hung the hunters,
and kill the killas.
Flip their script …
from gorilla to guerillas.
A subliminal message, to teach our kind
that capitalism’s the greatest
gorilla killa of all time.
So we best fold and bend,
or face mass hysteria
to bury the
beast within.
Fear and hate
whipped up by media spin.
So bow down, do as the Romans do,
stay in line.
But we still here,
biding our time.
Ain’t dead yet!
Done fell and got back up a thousand times.
Survived every hardship
their murderous minds could design.
And we still clinging to the walls,
beating our chest,
still rebellin’ yet!
And we might be ’bout to get –
Wise
All Power to you @rohit !!
Who are the Dalits?
The origin of Dalits goes back to ancient Hinduism when slavery was practiced. The upper caste, so- called Brahmins, were priests who had the ideological control over slave society. The Dalits were assigned the most difficult tasks in society and were considered the lowest. The caste system was based on inheritance of caste by birth. This system was modified under feudalism. However, in the colonial period when the British ruled India for five centuries, capitalism institutionalized racism against the Dalits and used it to divide workers. Today the Dalits perform tasks such as cleaning toilets and open sewers, dangerous jobs in mining and construction. In India there are over 250 million super exploited Dalits. By uniting with the working class, they can be leaders for communist revolution.
India’s caste system divides people into 4 main castes from priests and intellectuals to tradesmen and servants. On top of that there is a fifth division, the Dalits (who used to be called ‘untouchables’). Socially outcast and marginalized to this day, they make up about 16% of the population.
For some years now they have been organizing resistance to the house burnings, gang rapes and murders that right-wing political parties sporadically launch against them (carried out with the tacit support of the local police and politicians).
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LOS ANGELES—On November 6, 2015, Balwinder Jit Singh, an MTA bus operator for 17 years, working out of Division 18, was viciously attacked and beaten by a rabid racist.
Mr. Singh is a Sikh, a religion that originated in India in 1469, and he wears a turban. The racist called him a “terrorist”, a “suicide bomber” and accused him of hijacking the bus.
While suffering this cowardly fascist attack – which has left him with an eye infection and blurred vision – he kept his foot on the brakes of the running bus, safeguarding his passengers and pedestrians on the street.
The US and European rulers’ racist hysteria against Middle Easterners, particularly Muslims, is creating a dangerous fascist movement. In the US, racist attacks against Sikhs have been on the rise. On December 28, an elderly Sikh man was brutally assaulted by two people in Fresno, California. On New Year’s Eve, Gurcharan Singh Gill, a 68-year-old Sikh man was stabbed to death while at work at a convenience store, also in Fresno.
The MTA operator just went public with his story last week saying, “I know that sharing my story sheds further light on the bigotry and hatred faced by communities across the nation. These crimes cannot be tolerated.”
Racism of any kind can’t be tolerated. It is lethal for the working class.
We in the International Communist Workers’ Party echo his call, but call for the abolition of capitalism as the only way to have a society where racism, sexism or any anti-working class phobia will not be tolerated.
All these evils are inherent in capitalism’s exploitive mode of production. Its wage slavery requires racism to super exploit certain sectors of our class, while dividing us and preventing us from uniting to destroy their inhumane system with a communist revolution. In times of economic crisis and war, capitalism must intensify its racist attacks on our class.
Communism will abolish capitalism, its wage slavery and other evils
ICWP fights for a world without wage slavery and money – a world where nothing will be bought or sold, where everything will be distributed according to need. We will do away with capitalism’s inequality.
There won’t be any privileges for anyone. Everyone will do mental and manual work, including the leaders. Only the best of everything will be produced for everyone, thus no one will feel they are better than others.
We will also wage a relentless struggle against all ideological traces of racism by integrating all aspects of production and our social lives in a world without borders or nations. This will further set the material basis for abolishing the concept of “races.” There is only one human race and in a communist world it will only be composed of working people.
ICWP members and Red Flag readers must lead the way
From where we are to where we want to go, there is a long struggle. ICWP members and Red Flag readers – especially in the army and industrial concentrations like MTA – have a very important role to play in the fight for a communist world.
Violence against bus operators nationwide has been on the rise. According to the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the number of attacks against LA MTA operators has risen from 79 in 2012, to 105 in 2013, to 141 in 2014 and 155 up to November 2015.
These are also racist attacks. Racist attacks – no matter who commits them and against whom are committed – should be met with political strikes against capitalism and for communism, the system that will destroy racism forever.
A political strike by MTA workers against acts of racist terror could galvanize masses of workers, soldiers and youth to act as a class against racist capitalism and to see that we have the power and organizational ability to get rid of this system and build the communist world we need.
We need to start taking our future into our hands. We have many loyal Red Flag readers at LAMTA. They need to start looking at themselves as organizers. Those who take more than one paper to distribute among friends and family already do. They need to join ICWP, participate in our Party’s activities and recruit their readers to distribute Red Flag and join ICWP.
Masses of workers, soldiers and youth can only be put in motion by masses of leader-organizers. Those leader-organizers will come from our ranks. You can make a difference by becoming one by joining us. Make this your New Years’ resolution!
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