An Invitation to All Red Flag Readers

Seattle ICWP Summer Project, 2012

Are you interested in spending a week of your summer in the beautiful Pacific Northwest? You will be meeting locals who have considerable experience in class struggle, as well as some young enthusiastic volunteers who will be traveling here.

Starting July 20th, we will be collectively distributing our paper and the new Party industrial  pamphlet to workers at three Boeing plants in the area, and to soldiers at Ft. Lewis/McChord. Our friends on the inside will be circulating the same literature at the same time.

We will visit these workers and soldiers and their families several evenings during that week. We'll get to hear first-hand their reaction and to discuss the ideas of the ICWP. 

We will hold more formal study groups, targeting specific questions, history of international workers struggles, as well as the more personal struggles we all face every day on our jobs, in our schools, and with our friends and families.

And this year, we would like to do some writing also, taking what we are learning about workers' and soldiers' lives under capitalism and contrast that with what life could be like in a real communist world! Several Boeing workers have already volunteered to be interviewed.

Hopefully, we will all be reading these side by side stories in future issues of Red Flag. Anybody interested in illustrating this "Two Lives" story, perhaps in cartoon form?

But we won't limit ourselves to the local work. We have set aside time to communicate with African industrial workers and youth via the Internet. These industrial workers and others in other countries will also be giving this literature to their fellow workers this summer. We want to get this new pamphlet in the hands of 10,000. Workers of the world are uniting.

Finally, we will bring all this together at our closing barbeque on Sunday, July 27th. We will share what we have learned during the project with old friends and people we have met during the week. Hopefully, some volunteers can present what they have completed in the "Two Lives" project. This is always a great chance to commit …or recommit ourselves to mobilize the masses for communism. We invite you to join us!

Contact us at  icwp@anonymousspeech.com  or call 310-487-7674.

Making a Revolution Against Capitalism Gives Meaning to My Life

Our community in South Africa is the victim of the capitalist system. Most people are unemployed and the few people that are employed are working hard, long hours each and everyday for a minimum wage that can't at all meet the requirements of the normal person.

This South African country is bullshit and unfair and favors rich people. There's no such thing as equal rights. Equal rights is just an illusion. In 2001, which was 13 years ago, I graduated on top of my class with a cum laude which means I graduated with honors.

There are many graduates and people who deserve certain jobs but they won't get them. Instead jobs are given to unqualified and incompetent candidates because they have connections and are friends with the employers. The unemployment rate is sky-high and so is poverty. If you are friends of the ruling party then you will benefit from this crooked country.

The solution is that this government must be removed from power and the power must be given back to the people, we need to revolutionize the system not fix the system. Fixing a broken glass is useless. You must replace a broken glass with an unbroken glass. So how can you starve and bring poverty to the people that are the core reason you have bread? That's what our government is doing to us. As long as these parties are in power there won't be a better life for people. This government must be demolished, people (community).

The way things are is  that all these South African parties, especially the ANC, have promised us a lot of things since it came to power more than two decades ago which are: end of poverty, equal rights, employment for everyone, housing for everyone, free education.

Three new members that just joined us motivate me to read. I must confess I was lazy. But now I am better than before because of the new members. I was surprised to see them after so many years and surprisingly they are on the same path.

Do not cut the weeds with a pair of scissors because they will grow again so rather remove it with its roots so it does not grow again. This means to make this world a better place for all we must destroy capitalism with all its elements t revolution.

Comrade S is a big help because he teaches us and helps us understand how capitalism operates. Yes. Comrade S is rock solid in his determination to end capitalism with communism. And what he knows he makes sure that we know too, and its vital knowledge and information.

I am new in politics and ICWP but now I feel like I have a great responsibility which is making a revolution against capitalism and it gives meaning in my life.

What I promise is even if I die before revolution, I will die having recruited a lot of people to join us.

—Comrade in South Africa

Contradictions Among Friends

I agree with the comments in the letter in Red Flag (Vol 5, #8) that all contradictions are internal to some system or process, but the original article from Mexico discussed an important issue I want to ask about. 

I think the motivation behind the distinction that the Mexican comrades made between external and internal contradictions may be that contradictions within the same class, as in friends disagreeing on ideas or plans, are supposed to be constructive for both friends; while contradictions between classes lead to one side eating up the other.

I have this concern too. I would like there to be a distinction between contradictions among friends and contradictions among enemies, but whatever distinction we make should still preserve the idea that all contradictions are internal.

Red Flag columns have argued in the past that internal contradictions are resolved through increased intensity until one side beats out the other. I think that for contradictions among friends, we should think of the two sides of the contradiction as ideas or policies, not people. Friends don't have to try to defeat each other. They can try to defeat wrong ideas by everyone learning that they are wrong.

I'm wondering if the authors agree with that point. In the Soviet Union, Soviet philosophers proposed a kind of "non-antagonistic" contradiction, which were supposed to be contradictions that are resolved without increasing their intensity. I think this position is not true to a materialistic dialectics. It was used in Russia and China to argue that socialism can transform into communism, and we can see how wrong that idea was.

—Military Reader

Garment Workers Share Red Flag with Other Garment Workers

LOS ANGELES—4:50 AM, the alarm sounds, I wake from a deep sleep, but the excitement of going to distribute Red Flag to the men and women garment workers makes me get up to bring them our communist ideas and give them the solution to all the exploitation and poverty that we live everyday in capitalism. We are

headed to a building of garment shops with about 1,300 workers.

As we got on the freeway, the sunrise lit up the sky of East Los Angeles. This began an exciting conversation with my comrade with whom I distribute Red Flag. We imagined how life will be when the revolution wins and we live in communism, where we workers will lead the world. This makes us eager to keep fighting for this world that we desire so much.

When we arrive, excitedly we began to distribute the newspaper. My comrade shouted "Red Flag! Workers' Struggles!" Hearing this, many people stopped to take a paper and others to patiently wait their turn.

When I saw someone come running, doing morning exercise with his dog, I offered him the newspaper, but he didn't want it. After a few minutes he came back for Red Flag. I thought it was strange to see him, but with the new city projects to build luxury apartments downtown, it will be more common to see people running and walking their dogs.

I saw that many workers who took the newspaper were reading it. It gives me great joy  to see how open the workers are to communist ideas. Even though the bosses want to lower our morale by saying that when workers go into the building they throw the newspaper away, we answer, "even if one worker reads it, that means a lot to us."

I wanted to share these experiences with you, my class brothers and sisters. We finished happily, and went to our jobs. That day we distributed 530 Red Flags. Sooner rather than later the potential of all these workers will become realized and they will be among those who will help build a new communist society.

—Immigrant woman garment worker.

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