New Youth ICWP Study Group Prepares Future Communist Leaders
ICWP's youth in Los Angeles have taken it upon ourselves to organize a study group. The study group consists of high school students, college students, and young people who have entered the work force. The purpose of this new group is to struggle with our comrades and mobilize a mass party in which we all are prepared to fight for communism.
Group discussions are held weekly where we read and study Red Flag. We discuss society and popular culture, and world events. We focus on these issues in order to understand that capitalism plays a role in all of our everyday lives. We have realized that capitalists push their ideas on us through popular culture and that trying to survive under capitalism is becoming more difficult with the world situation and world war on the horizon.
Although our group is small, we urge all readers of Red Flag to organize similar study groups so that we may mobilize our friends, families and co-workers for communism. As youth it is our destiny to inherit the struggle for a better tomorrow and lead this and the next generation of communists, both young and old, to victory over the plague of capitalism. We as the future leaders of this party are preparing ourselves to do so. Long live communism and the ICWP!
—Los Angeles comrades

Marx and Engels Live On!
Recently my buddy and I were in Berlin as tourists. We visited places with historical lessons we'll write about later, but what got me the most was visiting the park with the twelve-foottall statue of Marx and Engels. People arrived constantly throughout the day, staring at the statue for a long time with passion and amazement. Most people, old and young, were taking their pictures standing next to Marx and Engels. One man was taking pictures from every angle, walking around and staring at the statue for a long time. Of course there were random tourists who didn't have a clue about these two great leaders and fighters for the working class. But most people who were there to see the statue seemed to know why they were there.
My buddy asked a gentleman who was looking at the statue to take our pictures with Marx and Engels. The man said, "If you don't know who these men were, I won't take your picture." My buddy rolled her eyes, and he agreed to take our picture. While he was taking our picture we raised our fists in the air.
He got it, and said, "Make sure it came out. If not, I'll try again."
Later, three men and two women were looking at the statue with great emotion. One of the women held Marx's hand with admiration, and then saluted him while her friend took her picture. Then she took his picture while he held his fist in the air. My buddy offered to take the picture of the whole group, and they were happy to let her. She took their pictures with the cameras of everyone in the group. "We are from China," said one of the women. "Shanghai. You know?"
"I know," responded my buddy. These tourists looked old enough to have taken part in the Shanghai People's Commune, a monumental Leftist movement of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. It was inspiring to me to see the number of people coming to see the statue of these great teachers of the working class. Communism is still alive and kicking.
—Red Tourist

Transit Workers Respond to Call to Double Red Flag Readership
We distributed Red Flag at several transit divisions in Los Angeles last week, together with a leaflet about the mass struggle in Brazil and another about the BART strike in the Bay Area. The leaflets called for communist solidarity. We asked workers to take an extra copy or two of Red Flag for co-workers, explaining that we have a campaign to double the number of transit workers who read Red Flag. By doubling the number of workers who read the paper regularly from about 800 to 1600, a growing number of workers will think and act on communist ideas to unite together against capitalism. On hearing this, many workers responded by saying things like "Okay, let's do it," and took one or two more papers. A couple of workers said, "I'm not sure if my friends will want it, but I'll see if they do." In this way, the number of papers distributed at several divisions increased between 25% and 90%. Workers who have been reading Red Flag welcomed being part of a campaign to help spread it. This campaign is part of taking a mass approach to mobilizing for communism. We urge all Red Flag distributors and readers to do the same in all our concentrations.
—LA comrade

Fighting Sexism:We Are One Class, We're The Working Class
In a get-together with Red Flag readers, we had prepared a delicious meal, and someone commented to the comrade who had made the paella, "The food is great. Now you can get married." Of course the food was great, but nevertheless, the comment focused on the idea that if a woman can cook, then she can get married.
In the capitalist system, this kind of sexist teaching tells us that women can only carry out "certain kinds of tasks" like cooking, ironing, washing clothes and raising children. On the other hand, men carry out the role of bringing money into the house and doing jobs that women supposedly can't or don't know how to do.
Capitalist teachings are based on dividing the working class to keep wages low. Women are mistreated and super-exploited to the point that in some factories (for example, in El Salvador) women are docked for the time they go to the restroom. Accepting this disrespect for women leads us inevitably to the destruction of the organization of revolutionary communist struggle. The best way to destroy this form of division is teaching workers that our struggle is not against the opposite sex, but against our class enemy: imperialism and capitalism. Every day we see ordinary disputes in families because the wife hasn't prepared the food in time for the husband to go to work or simply because "it's women's work." Communists have to fight against this capitalist idea, first of all bringing this political struggle into their homes. Communists must raise children so that they understand that housework must be shared and that there are no gender-based tasks. We were talking once with a comrade about raising children, wondering why in clothing stores baby clothes are divided by color, and she said that, in a communist system, color won't represent a boy or a girl. They're just colors and they have no role in bringing up a baby.
If we raise children without the sexist idea that the woman (or the man) is the weaker sex, they will be true stalwarts for the revolutionary communist struggle. They will consider their partners as comrades, fighting against the true class enemy: the capitalist system.
The International Communist Workers' Party carries out this revolutionary communist political struggle to destroy the sexist ideas that can become problems for comrades and hurt the good functioning of the party. We fight alongside and on behalf of men and women workers, regardless of gender, with one goal: to build a communist world.
We who form this Red Army must be clear, and fight sexist ideas with communist dialectics. This will always tell us that the main thing is the working class struggle—without painting our comrades one color or another. We are one class, we're the working class! We fight to overthrow capitalism and build a communist world.
—Comrade in Spain

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