FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!
	International Communist Workers Party
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Begging the Question

There were a number of good articles on the terrorist attack in France in the last Red Flag. They all beg the question, “How would a communist society react to terrorism?”
Certainly, the ICWP would organize mass marches, but not under the slogans of “justice, freedom, equality and fraternity.”
The fraternity we seek would be class unity, not national unity. We would not celebrate the uniqueness of French (or any nation’s) history or character, but the universal needs of the working class. We would march to end nations and borders.
Rather than equality, we’d march for communist collectivity.
We would not march for the right to insult any group of workers under the banner of free speech.  “Freedom” for our class requires capitalist tyranny’s end and as well as the wage slavery that accompanies it. We would have speeches and literature to build communist culture and determination.

We would use these mobilizations to build a bold communist campaign to root out racism. The bosses would be the butt of our jokes. Satire, humor and political cartoons would be used to instill class hatred of the capitalists, not other workers. Racism is no joke!
We certainly would not expand the powers of the justice system, as French president Hollande (and capitalist leaders all around the world) is doing. The USSR had to deal with a lot of sabotage from capitalist agents immediately after their socialist revolution. They also
seemed to have relied too much on specialized security agencies to ferret out these enemies.
We would mobilize the masses. We would call on the international working class to struggle with friends and deal with enemies, be they big or small.
Of course, our enemies would represent the world’s imperialists. We would not let our
marches be duped into supporting one imperialist or another.
There would be no united front against the “main enemy.” For example, the United Front against Fascism was one of the old communist movement’s biggest mistakes.
The idea was that fascism was so threatening that communists had to unite with the “liberal” and “democratic” bosses to defeat it. This latest version has the potential to be just as dangerous ideologically as well as practically.
United Front politics meant dropping the fight for communism and replacing it with the fight for democracy. This meant adding yet one more stage (preceding socialism) and postponing communism many years into the indefinite future.
The United Front was announced in 1935 and tried out in 1936. In France, a mass strike wave led to millions of workers occupying factories that year. This was a revolutionary situation but the communists wasted it by joining with their Popular Front allies in bribing the rebel workers with paid vacations. They didn’t want to risk the United Front (with liberal, often bourgeoisie elements) against Nazi Germany.
Since the working class would be the “masters of the factories,” we would empty the plants to mobilize the masses for communism worldwide.
“You think like my brother-in-law,” commented a Boeing friend, who was raised in France, after we discussed these different approaches. We’re going to send his sister’s husband translated versions of these Red Flag articles since he still lives and works there.
My co-worker assures me his relative is not the only one. I’d like to hear their and your ideas. In particular, I’m sure there were many examples of workers responding in a communist fashion to similar provocations even after socialist revolutions.  That history would be helpful.
--A Boeing worker who’s trying to learn about the world

Red Flag Responds: This letter raises important questions about dealing with violent attacks on working-class state power.  We should write more about this.  The Charlie Hebdo killers, however, did not attack working-class state power. 
The letter reflects an unstated false assumption when it refers to this violent attack as “terrorist” and correlates it with the Nazi fascists.  The previous edition of Red Flag also made that mistake, referring to the murderers of the Charlie Hebdo staff as “Muslim terrorists.”
The bosses have used the term “terrorist” as a racist code word for “Muslim” especially since 9/11/2001. We must be careful not to fall into verbal traps like this that the bosses set for us. 
Nobody calls the Ku Klux Klan “Christian terrorists.”  The term “Islamofascist,” popularized by racist neo-conservative David Horowitz, was invented to drum up support for the US war in Iraq—the “War on Terror.”   The casual use of such concepts contributes to the racist devaluing of the lives of the people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and Pakistan who have been killed by US weapons, including drones. 

Charlie Hebdo: Kept up the Fight
As a faithful reader of Charlie Hebdo for 20 years I am certain Charlie fought the good fight.
Cavana, a cartoonist and writer deported as a youth by the Vichy government to a labor camp in Germany founded Charlie. He experienced fascism first hand. He and the other cartoonists were popular figures in France and Charlie, although often criticized and controversial, was part of the French media. «Laïcité» (secularism) is a hard won victory cherished by many French for good reasons.
Charlie is much more than the cartoons. It is a very informative and political newspaper, that fights also--quite alone--against racism, the fascist party (Le Front National), homophobia, the abuses of the police, and the rapacious greed of international companies like Total.
They regularly lend their pages to various international causes.
Charlie is a satirical newspaper which prints between 60 000 and 140 000 copies. So why suddenly does everybody become Charlie?
For hypocritical international leaders it is a very effective distraction from the real causes of the present situation solely created by the racism inflicted on Arabs in France. Their situation is not that much different than the one of blacks in the U.S.A. They suffer disproportionate unemployment, police harassment and are parked in ghettos riddled with drugs and fear of gangs. Poverty and increased insecurity inflicted on all French working class people are also responsible.
At the same time, the French colonialist and imperialist interventions never really stopped. Under the pretext of fighting terrorism, France has bombed Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and now Mali and the Islamic State.
The war and cruel injustices inflicted worldwide on Arab and Muslim people is indeed outrageous, much more than religious cartoons seen by few people.
Religion should not be political and it is not the way to fight exploitation. People of the world need to unite and fight in an organized party dedicated to overthrowing capitalism.
Charlie Hebdo persevered in claiming the right to be outrageous and to laugh about anything. As a political party, we might not always understand or agree with that.
But Charlie is also anti-nationalist, deeply pacifist and humanist. The funeral of Charb, its editor, started with the International and many present raised their fists. The cartoonists killed would have kept writing and drawing, mocking Hollande and his warmongering gang who are using their deaths for their own murderous ends. They believe in a better world. They’ll keep up the fight, so shall we.
--Red Flag reader

Racism: No Joke
After the Charlie Hebdo shootings, I attended a forum given by the French department at my university on humor in French society.
I shared my research into Charlie Hebdo and the leftist cartoons and articles they had published. One cartoon, criticizing racial profiling by the French police against immigrants from North Africa and people of African descent, is on this page.
I also shared a 2013 letter by Olivier Cyran, a former writer for Charlie Hebdo. He cited the magazine’s “distressing transformation… after the events of September 11, 2001.” Cyran argues that by “racializing Muslims, constantly depicting them as grotesque or hideous creatures” the bi-weekly has contributed to the rising phenomenon of violent attacks on Muslims, especially on veiled women. This anti-Muslim racism is used to justify the wars in the Middle East and the cruel injustices inflicted worldwide on Arab and Muslim people.
Satire as a tool to attack the rich and powerful is one thing. But racist satire used to attack the working class, to marginalize and demonize one section of our class, serves the interests of the capitalists. Communists have always been among the most principled fighters against racism. In the US, for example, the militantly multi-racial Communist Party led the fight against the legal lynching of nine black young men in the famous Scottsboro case.
The Iraqi Communist Party, like others in the Middle East, included Arabs and Kurds, Jews, Christians, Shiites and Sunnis.
Fighting the good fight requires fighting racism in all its forms, and fighting for the highest unity of the working class: unity as communists.
--Red student

Last Saturday, fifteen more workers were killed in a factory in Bangladesh that produces plastics. They are among many hundreds who have died in factories that are death traps. They were left disfigured and unrecognizable.
That day seemed like any other day:  you have to get up to go produce commodities that some boss needs for the market. You are in the factory when, all of a sudden, a gas tank explodes. Some die instantly from the explosion without knowing what happened. Those still alive suffered the desperation of feeling injured and not being able to do anything.  Others didn’t know that they were gravely injured and that, at that instant, no one would be able to save them.
The tears of the relatives and the pain of those who remain alive cannot be described.  Words cannot describe the pain that people feel for their lost loved ones.
In all factories insecurity reigns, even more so when the owners make huge profits.  In Bangladesh, garment workers produce 80% of the country’s $24 billion annual exports. This factory where the tragic murders occurred is one of many thousands that contribute to these profits. About 100 workers work there.
Moments after the explosion there were thousands of rescuers, and not just firemen. In these conditions of wage slavery, workers are used to being rescuers by the necessity imposed by the system that robs the fruits of their labor and which cannot resolve the insecurity that goes along with it.
What happened is a common occurrence under capitalism. Our lives as workers are only important to the bosses for how they can take advantage of our labor power. They don’t worry about how they will end our lives with accidents or illness. There is not just one guilty person; the whole system is guilty.
In Los Angeles the conditions in garment factories are similar disasters waiting to happen.  The buildings are time bombs which weaken as the years pass.  With the fractures that they have suffered in past earthquakes, they could collapse in the next one.
The government and the bosses know about these conditions, but since their profits always come first before our lives, they won’t do anything to resolve the problem.
Only the workers organized in the International Communist Workers’ Party (ICWP) can build and spread communist ideas of a world without the exploitation and money that maintains wage slavery.
We workers will maintain the slogan that if there is not security in the activity that we perform, it is not human activity that can be carried out. Long live the international working class!
--Los Angeles Garment Worker

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