FROM AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION TO COMMUNIST REVOLUTION
EL SALVADOR- We were part of the social base of the fmln during its armed conflict with the Salvadoran armed forces in 1987. A friend and I (who are both today comrades in the ICWP) asked a liberal priest, "What is communism?" We had heard and read that communism was bad for the world and that it took everything away, even a person's soul. He answered, "Communism isn't something made in Russia or China and sent from there, but it's something that grows and must be cultivated. The revolutionary process must be followed to consolidate communism here." When I went around the social base of the fmln, I thought the revolutionary process was communist; when I heard from a rebel radio station that the goal was socialism, I thought this wasn't what we wanted. From then on the question arose in me: why weren't we fighting directly for communism? In 1997, years after the war ended, a friend from the area gave me a copy of the old newspaper. Today, through reading and understanding the political-ideological line of the newspaper Red Flag, we are on the road to organizing with the communist ideas of the International Communist Workers' Party— ICWP. We are putting ICWP's revolutionary ideas into practice. We have built collectives to produce corn, beans and vegetables on the land of co-workers. In these agricultural collectives we work together, men and women, young and less young, with the goal of sowing the seeds of revolutionary consciousness and to produce food security, which this capitalist system does not guarantee us. We farm workers often suffer hunger, along with racism, since most people think we are ignorant. Since we produce what we need and not for profit, we struggle to counter capitalist exploitation. Our ideal is to grow with this way of producing and have co-workers join us. Not all of us in the collectives are fully convinced about the communist ideas of the project; the rest of us are members of the ICWP or Red Flag readers. We are sure that this is a revolutionary school for communism and that when we obtain results and are able to help them fully understand that only through solidarity and collectivity can we move forward, they will take quantitative and qualitative steps to join our struggle for the system of the working class: communism.

---Comrade in El Salvador

AC Driver Likes Red Flag
Some of us comrades distributed Red Flag and an ICWP leaflet to A/C Transit workers and passengers the day before they voted on the contract. I talked with a driver from Nicaragua who said that he had read other editions of Red Flag. He asked me where I came from. I told him, "I come from Mexico. I participated in building the Party there and now here also."
He said, "So you came to stir up the waters here?""Yes," I told him.
The driver said that he participated in the Sandinista movement and in the end the leaders of the movement kept the power and the wealth for themselves. He asked, "Why do we have to believe in socialism if it hasn't worked?"
I explained to him that socialism and communism are different. The main difference is that in communism there won't be money. The attempts at socialism in China and Cuba maintained money and wage differences, keeping class differences. This has been state capitalism. This won't exist in communism.
The driver had to go back to work, but he took the newspaper and the leaflet. He said he would read this edition and he wished me good luck.

--A comrade

Child Miner Revolutionaries Will Bury the Bosses
MEXICO-August—The sun has not yet risen and hundreds of children are already preparing to go to work in some little mine to extract coal. They work 8 to 12 hours a day, for a third an adult's wages. The small shafts are small tunnels in which an adult can't usually fit. In Mexico, it has been identified that 3.5 million children work, of whom 600,000 carry out high risk jobs like mining, agriculture and construction. In the coal sector alone, it is estimated that children work in 18% of the mines.
The murder occurred in mine 3 Ferber of the Binsa company on February 19, 2006 in Sabinas, Coahuila where among the dead were found the bodies of several children. The government claimed that only one child, named Jesus Fernando, worked there. The pain of their families and friends makes them remember these children, and they formed an organization called Pasta de Conchos Family. More than 7 years have passed and there have been more deaths in vertical shafts where 80% of the accidents occur.
Even in most "normal and legal" mines, they don't have drinking water, nor bathrooms and they deny permission to leave. Workers can spend 3 to 4 days without receiving food. The existence of "clandestine" coal mines that are not registered with Social Security means savings for the subcontractor companies and millions in profits for the companies that don't take responsibility for this production, like Grupo Mexico.
Grupo Mexico has the concession for the largest sale of copper in the country and uses a system of contracting in the Buenavista Copper Mine (previously called Cananea) in which miners work without benefits, or with temporary contracts. The government controls the contract with the Federal Electricity Commission for the purchase of coal through the Promoter for Mining Development of Coahuila, which decides who gets the contracts. This creates a competition to the death to be able to get the coal to market and this determines what is happening in every mine and in all mining nationwide.
In a communist world, work will always be necessary, but what will not exist are schools or dangerous factories or mines like today. Children will not have to perform risky jobs. In the production collectives, the parents, friends, and comrades will work, learn and have fun. The most important thing is there will not be shifts of dangerous, repetitive work for many hours. Work schedules could vary, depending on the situation. Children won't have to spend several hours sitting and learning, without seeing any relationship between what they are learning and the world around them. It will be a world of work and learning, making the most of every human being for the benefit of the whole society. Let's organize ICWP so that there is no child or adult having the life sucked from them by some boss.

--Red Dad

Not then, not now, not ever by Truus Menger.
The most well known story of a young Dutch girl during World War II, the Diary of Anne Frank, has been translated into over fifty-five languages and is assigned to students around the world. In her diary, Anne Frank writes about her experiences as a young Jewish teenager, hiding for two years in an attic from the Nazis.
Almost unknown is the story of Dutch young women, Truus and Freddie Oversteegen and Hannie Schaft, who were part of the Communist resistance to the Nazis during the same period. Truus and Freddie, daughters of a single mother, grew up in a Communist household in Haarlem, a suburb of the Dutch capital, Amsterdam. When the Nazis occupied Holland, they were only fourteen and sixteen years old, but they joined a Communist resistance cell. They smuggled illegal Communist literature, carried out acts of sabotage, assassinated Nazis and Dutch collaborators, and helped rescue Jewish children on the way to the gas chambers. In 1943, Hannie Schaft, a law student from Amsterdam, joined the group. She became known as "the girl with the red hair" after someone saw her bicycling away from an assassination. After that she dyed her hair black and wore fake spectacles.
In March, 1945, Hannie was caught in a checkpoint with illegal literature and a gun. In jail, the Nazis discovered that she was "the girl with the red hair," and on April 17, 1945, three weeks before the end of the war, she was taken out to the beach, shot, and buried in a shallow grave.
Truus and Freddie survived the war, and in 1982 Truus wrote a book about their experiences. Hannie's story is also included in other books about women in the resistance. This book is a helpful antidote to the passivity that the ruling class pushes with the Diary of Anne Frank. But you don't really get much of a view of why these young people were Communists.
There is one passage where a young working-class comrade talks vaguely about the world he hoped to see after the war, as well as a critique of the corruption and opportunism of the resistance groups tied to the Dutch ruling class. But these young Communists, like some "communists" today, were won to a policy of uniting with "lesser evil" bosses against racism and fascism and hiding, postponing, and eventually discarding their communist politics.
After the war, capitalism in Holland went on just the same. We have to learn from this mistake to always keep our goal of a Communist society primary. But we can also learn from and emulate the courage and dedication of the young women Communists who fought against fascism.

--Red Reader

First Article