Communist School for Winning the World
SOUTH AFRICA—“When I came to the Communist School, I thought it would be boring,” said a young comrade. Her experience proved the opposite. She audio recorded the entire event and enthusiastically told her friends how much she learned about communism.
This new comrade is rather reserved but the tools she learned from the Communist school helped her convince four of her friends to come to the next meeting. “We can’t wait to come,” the friends replied.
Our struggle to win a communist world requires us to instil such confidence in the working class and soldiers. When the masses grasp the universal laws of change, they becomes a potent force for communist revolution that will violently overthrow the capitalist bosses.
Following the May Day mobilisation with our new comrade, we had the communist school where we learned about the philosophy and science of building a mass communist party. It lasted for two and half days.
In the discussions, comrades talked at length about the need to understand dialectical materialism and the philosophy of change. We talked about the unity and struggle of opposites, how internal contradictions are primary and how they influence change in any system or object. This brought us to talk about the internal contradictions within the collective and within the comrades themselves.
We identified our internal contradictions, chief among them being the lack of collective struggle about the political line of the party. Most comrades agreed that prioritising the unity among comrades and ignoring the struggle is not helpful for the collective and the party as whole. When we ignore the struggle, we are indeed practicing liberalism.
Comrades talked about the need for collective struggle to put the party’s communist line in everything we do. Some comrades were not confident enough in the political line. This caused them to be apprehensive in trying to recruit in the work places. Comrades tended to put the external obstacles as the ones standing in our way of recruiting more workers to the party.
In learning about change and dialectical contradictions, we were able to understand that it is not the external factors that are primary but the internal ones. We identified that the lack of confidence in our line didn’t come from the obstacles the bosses put in our way but came from the lack of practice, struggle and learning of our line.
The comrades decided they would conduct the communist school (studying our philosophy and science) and hold regular discussions of the Red Flag. We also identified the need to be more committed to put communism at the forefront of our lives. This putting forward communism every day in our lives yields results; quantity leads to qualitative change.
In the discussions we talked about the need to fight sexism, by recruiting more female members and encouraging their development. There were more female members in the meeting than we have ever had. The party has recruited more than five females with three of them at the frontline of the party’s activities over the past few weeks.
We also talked about the need of more females taking more of a practical leadership role in the collective. In doing so, we are not only “talking” about fighting sexism, but we are also practicing it. Recruiting more female members then means intensifying our struggles, providing a room for constructive criticism and overcoming our obstacles. Male comrades need to encourage female comrades and friends with full confidence that they will give communist leadership to our class.. Learning dialectical materialism provides us with the theoretical tools we need to develop and understand our situations better.
The communist school was of great help. It provided us with the platform to reflect, learn and accelerate our efforts in fighting for a communist future. Another female comrade put it sharply, “I learned a lot in the communism school. I think we should have more of those than regular meetings if possible.” We believe our entire international party should organize communist schools around the world at our concentrations. We propose that we prepare a draft on dialectical materialism to be used at the communist schools. This will lead us to producing a pamphlet on Dialectical Materialism.
We have a world to win!
Struggle is Primary: How Comrade DK Joined the Movement
I was friends with comrade DK before I joined the movement. We continued being friends after I had joined the movement and he was yet to join. I was a communist and a committed member of ICWP, he wasn’t. Initially unity between us was all I cared about. The struggle wasn’t primary in our relationship. As a result he was a non communist.
It was when we started to struggle about our different views that comrade DK started warming up to the idea of communism. That was not only as a result of one conversation/discussion but a series of discussions, even from the rest of the collective, because we were all friends. From these series of conversations, talking about communism in every conversation we had, it led to a qualitative change in the sense that DK joined the movement and has managed to help it grow and take a lead in activities.
These experiences have shown us that putting communism 24/7 and making the struggle primary only helps us to be better communists, to recruit more members. DK has emerged as a leader recruiting many from the auto industry and others in the area where he lives.
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