FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!
	International Communist Workers Party
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This article is taken from leaflets distributed to aerospace and transit workers and high school students.
 Even though the United Steel Workers is “targeting” Shell, Tesoro, and BP, the workers are fighting against five US oil companies, including Exxon Mobil and Chevron, the world’s biggest and richest publicly owned corporations.
Last year these oil majors, together with ConocoPhillips, reported profits of $90 billions or about $177,000 per minute. Workers’ labor worldwide has made the owners of these corporations rich and powerful.
But they are not unique. The rulers of oil producing countries – Saudi Arabia, Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, and Nigeria, among others – have also become fabulously rich.

For the international working class, however, capitalist competition to produce oil for profit is a disaster. These capitalist-imperialists’ voracious appetite for maximum profits has claimed the lives of untold numbers of workers forced to slave long hours under unsafe conditions from the US to Nigeria to Iran to Mexico.
Millions more have been, are being, and will be killed, maimed and displaced in past, present and future oil wars raging in the Middle East and Africa.

All these attacks are intensifying, leading to present and future grave threats facing the working class: global warming and World War III.
The main culprits of global warming are carbon emissions, caused by oil consumption imposed on us by and for the benefit of the world’s capitalists-imperialists.
World War III will be to decide which imperialist power will dominate the world. Oil is at the center of this bosses’ dog fight. It is crucial to industrial production and military power. Control of the world’s major oil regions and markets propelled the US as the world’s dominant imperialist power after WWII. Now, rising imperialist powers – China, Russia, India, the European Union, and Japan – covet that position. Their eventual clash is inevitable.
To prepare for this and to compete economically more effectively, workers’ standards of living and working conditions are being cut drastically. This is what these oil workers are against, and it is not only their fight but that of the whole international working class.
It can’t be resolved in our favor by fighting for reforms as the union is demanding.
Inherent to capitalism are dangerous conditions and also forced overtime for some workers while others who desperately need jobs cannot get them. These things can only be eradicated by eradicating capitalism. Only a communist revolution that puts the working class in power can do this.

Trade unions cannot solve our problems. Unions only negotiate the terms of our exploitation; they do not aim to end it. As one worker once said, “The bosses have to take our blood. All the union does is negotiate the size of the syringe and the amount of blood to be taken.”

Trade union ideology leads to class collaboration: If you can’t beat them, join them!                  
That is the mentality of trade unionism, hiding the fact that we have everything in common with our class brothers and sisters worldwide and nothing in common with “our” bosses, as the union leaders do.
USW President Leo Gerard is a member of Obama’s Advanced Manufacturing Partnership where he serves with the CEOs of billionaire companies including weapons makers Dow Chemical Company, Northrop Grumman, and Honeywell.
Their goal? To strengthen “US competitiveness” in advanced manufacturing, meaning to drive down wages and working conditions for US workers in order to produce more cheaply than do workers in China, India, Nigeria, etc. to strengthen US imperialism.

We Need Communist Ideology
We need a system that eliminates competition of any kind by eliminating capitalism, the bosses, money, borders, racism and sexism.
We need a system that produces only for human needs: A communist system where we contribute to society according to ability and commitment and receive according to need. A system based on cooperation and collectivity.
Only such a system can eliminate global warming by using safe, clean renewable sources of energy. Only a communist revolution can put an end forever to capitalism’s wars for profits and empire.
This struggle of these refinery workers is an opportunity to build ICWP. We urge all workers to join us!

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