Forget pensions and retirement, they want the new norm to be "Work 'til you drop!" Pensions are being cut around the world. Together with the attacks on healthcare and other "safety nets" they are, in fact, part of a systematic attack on old age. In Greece, Spain, France and Britain workers have responded with mass demonstrations and general strikes. Yet still pensions are being cut.
The failure of these fight-backs points to a weakness in our world view, or culture of resistance. Red Flag is alone in arguing that our number-one need is to develop a new mass revolutionary communist culture, the likes of which the world has never seen before.
A deeper look into our pensions reveals the weakness of our current world view and why the communist revolutionary world we are building will abolish money and wage slavery completely.
Pensions are taken directly out of wages. They are the deferred pay of workers. In 2011 The Guardian, a UK newspaper, reported that "the combined value of the 13 world's largest pension markets is around $US26.5 trillion." Amazing, isn't it?

Money, Capital and State Power
That means that one by one, week by week, workers have combined to create "fortunes" that dwarf the individual wealth of super-capitalists like Carlos Slim or Warren Buffet. If "money talks," as they say, then this one section of the vast army that makes up the world's workers (those that get pensions) must wield immense power. Yet, they don't. Why?
There are a couple of reasons. For one, the $26 trillion isn't really money in the way our wages are money: it has become capital.
As capital, our pension funds helped corporate raiders amass the money they needed to take over companies, merge or downsize them and lay-off millions of our brothers and sisters. Used by hedge-fund operators, they helped swell the subprime crisis that left thousands of families homeless. And since 2000 they have joined in the speculation on basic food prices which attacks the survival of the more than 1 billion who survive in chronic hunger. As capital, our pension funds have been used to grow their profits at the expense of our livelihoods.

The Role of Red Flag
In fact the $26 trillion was never really ours. We don't create fortunes, the bosses do. We create use values that the bosses turn into money (exchange values) to build their fortunes, or capital. Imagine the use values we create being controlled by the international working class to distribute according to need. That's a snapshot of the communist world Red Flag is organizing to build! Don't you like it?
Money, on the other hand, is a social relation between the producers of wealth (workers) and its private appropriation (by capitalists). It's forced on us because the bosses have state power. They steal the products of our labor at the point of production and steal 'our' pensions to attack our class because they have state power! They will continue to do this until our class sees the need to organize ICWP and make a revolution for communist state power.
Our class generally doesn't have a communist outlook yet or confidence that communism can work, that we can live without money, greed, racism or sexism. As yet our class doesn't understand that these are products of capitalism, that we need to organize ICWP. As yet, our class generally doesn't understand that getting rid of capitalism will eliminate the poisonous ideologies that arose from it. Changing this understanding is one of the primary tasks of Red Flag.

Red Flag with its revolutionary communist culture is vital. Communism is not just some distant revolution. It's an organizing attitude that determines not just how we fight back but what we fight for. It says we can run the world. It uncovers the central role of the working class as the class that creates all value. It shows that the capitalists steal that value with their profits (and our pension funds). It reminds us both of the gigantic size and unlimited potential of our class.

Communism: A Lifetime of Contributing What We Can and Receiving What We Need

Workers look forward to retirement with a pension in capitalist society because they no longer have to submit to exploitation and wage slavery. Since the capitalist system doesn't provide workers with a way to survive, they want pensions.
In a communist society, everyone will contribute throughout our whole lives to building collectives to meet our class' needs. Our roles will change but, receiving what we need, not having to depend on a check to survive, we won't retire from participating collectively in mobilizing for the good of our class!