LETTERS, CRITICISM AND SUGGESTIONS
Communist Relationships—Key to Fight Individualism and Build Communism
I think this editorial is one of the most important documents that I have read so far because this side of the struggle, the emotional side, is often neglected. It is important for us when we recruit to go the extra mile. We must make the effort of knowing the person, befriending them, building close relationships with them.
Four or five years ago, I didn’t know Comrade C or Comrade P, but if you look at us now, you would think we had known each other almost all our lives. So these relationships help. They strengthen the movement. At the same time they make struggle possible because you know they can sustain the struggle. I didn’t only read this in the document. I have experienced it first hand. So I can really relate to the document.
I also like that it showed that once we build these communist relationships we will be able to fight one of the major things that will prevent us from actually building this Communist society we want: individualism. If we build these close communist relationships, this comradeship, we will be able to fight against these individualistic tendencies.
For example, in a household there is practically no individualism, because everyone is doing their part so the house can be clean, there’s food and all that needs to be done. So from the parent to the child, everyone is contributing.
Even when a child has done something wrong, it’s not like the capitalists, you don’t simply send the child to prison. You try to reason with them and make them understand that what they’ve done is wrong, that there are consequences for their actions. So you come up with ways of making them realize that there are actions and consequences. But at the very same time, you want them to have the wisdom to not repeat the same mistakes. You need a balance.
It is important even within our collective, if a comrade has done something wrong, we don’t have to condemn them to the outside. We must understand that his or her problems are a direct result of capitalism. So we mustn’t condemn comrades, just like you won’t send your own child to prison because they have done something wrong. But we must struggle with them. And for that struggle to be possible, we must have this close communist relationship.
—Comrades in South Africa
Learning Communism Through Practice
My experiences and things I discover when I’m mobilizing show that you get more understanding of the line this way. Some people ask, “Is it possible to live without money?” Yes, we can really abolish the current system. To my understanding of the line, you will be given according to the need, not want, comrades.
The current system is what we are changing—slowly because it won’t happen over night. The way people, comrades, are so indoctrinated; they even have excuses to promote capitalism while they are being exploited, while they are being taken advantage of by the current system.
As an example, when I was mobilizing I met this other comrade. He fell from the top of the truck straight down to the concrete brick. He fell on his head and collapsed. The bosses never called an ambulance, comrades. Imagine!
They just did first aid on him and he was taken to the hospital and there at the hospital they were told to take this comrade to IOD (Injury on Duty—like workers’ comp) to be treated and compensated. Instead they took him to Livingstone (a local city hospital known for horrific services) and dumped him there. The system, it is so cruel, comrades.
When I was in Rustenburg, some other workers there work very hard. They never get paid. Immigrants are working hard. They are being paid peanuts because they don’t have proper identification.
There was this woman here in my location. There is a place there where she was supposed to be given that KFC franchise. But comrades, the way the system played her! She was ended, shot and killed.
So comrades, we need to mobilize the masses for communism.
ALUTA, comrades.
—A Comrade in South Africa
Communism Means LIFE
I am an autoworker and I am a new member of ICWP. Joining the party has made a huge difference in me personally and mentally, it has changed the way I used to think and do things.
As we know, ignorance is the most dangerous thing that people are unaware of. People tend to take things lightly and not bother themselves about what’s happening around the world. The poor think poverty is normal and that’s how they are destined to live. I too used to think like that.
But joining the ICWP, reading the Red Flags and attending Communist school meetings opened my mind. Now I watch news and read newspapers and I’m updated with most things that are happening in the world. Even the way I interact with people is very different now because I know that the most important race of all these races is the Human Race. And I do, however, have a clear vision of how people are supposed to live LIFE, not this thing we are living of which I am scared to even call it LIFE! We will never live a normal LIFE or see the value of LIFE under this Capitalist Society. The only way that we will live LIFE is through a Communist Society where everyone is equal, valued, appreciated with their different skills, where there will be no class and where everyone will see life as a GIFT.
All I’m saying is that there is a lot of change in me ever since I joined ICWP, because now I know how things change and where all good ideas come from. Even when I speak to people, they all have interest in listening because I speak about things that make sense and things that are hidden from them.
—Autoworker in South Africa
PASADENA (CA), USA, June 18 – Forty protesters rally outside the Westin Hotel, demanding the ouster of a manager who refused to defend two black guests from a racist who verbally assaulted them in the pool area.
Can’t Vote Out Fascism
As one of the lead articles in the last Red Flag (Volume 9 Number 7) pointed out, many thousands of workers worldwide are strongly denouncing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)’s separating children from their families at the US-Mexico border. This has included worldwide protests. Protests against ICE’s compliance with orders from their fascist masters now also include brave, militant actions. In at least 8 cities across the US, workers and youth are blocking the entrances and exits of ICE headquarters.
The outcry against ICE’s latest fascist attacks is inspiring. However, our outrage against the fascists and their minions who are now occupying the White House can easily lead us to believe that we can win by voting the Trump gang out.
This is a mistake. We need to remember that President Obama deported more people than any previous administration had. While we must fight against ICE’s present actions, we need to remember the terrified screams of children in Afghanistan who had seen death and destruction from the drones Obama ordered.
Capitalism requires xenophobia and racist terror in order to survive. Capitalists in every country must turn to open fascism when their economy is in crisis…and that is right now. The only real solution to fascism is a revolution that smashes capitalism and establishes real communism worldwide. We in ICWP should continue to join those protesting ICE and also take this opportunity to build our party—a party that can lead the way to building a better world.
—Veteran Comrade
Communists Must Mobilize Resistance to Wage Slavery
I circulate Red Flag with the proviso we’re a work in progress. Our strength, I argue, also highlights our weakness.
Our strength lies in introducing serious debate about communism among industrial workers at the point of production. We take up day to day issues and discuss how they would be handled in a future communist society. Work like this has never been done. It’s an advance.
We then conclude something to the effect ”only communism can end the wage system,” while aiming to increase the circulation of the paper. In short, one of our main jobs as revolutionaries – promoting the ideas of communism – ends up being our only job. This is a weakness that devalues the main job that we do. We end up making communism an a-historical power, something that will come into existence sometime in the future.
“Ideas,” Marx argued, “cannot carry out anything at all. In order to carry out ideas men (and women) are needed who can exert political force.”
In our case these men and women are communists. They are revolutionaries who alter the existing order of things. At MTA, for example, the existing order of social relations are dominated by the needs of capitalists. They set the drivers’ needs in opposition to the riders’ needs. They divide the working class.
We could set about altering that existing order of things. We could follow up and do more with what we started in the article “Communism Will Get Us All Moving.” We could get wheel-chair riders and drivers to write letters to Red Flag (or get reports from them) about the issues, widening our discussions about communism, disability, oppression and exploitation but primarily learning how to exert ourselves as a political force and practicing the skills we’ll need after the revolution.
“Wage slavery robs our humanity,” Red Flag wrote. But it never robs all of us of all our humanity! It’s the job of communists today to mobilize that resistance to wage slavery that resides in all of us. With our small forces we can’t launch a revolution today but we can fight partial battles against day to day attacks of capitalism. We can fight them as communists, not as reformists. As we uncover the stories of the disabled, of drivers and their frustrations with wheelchair lifts, we can document the will of drivers and passengers to act as ‘humans’ and break the dictatorship of money (MTA budgets, the discipline of wages etc) over our lives. It’s true that “…MTA and its capitalist masters are not interested in this,” but communists and their co-workers are.
When our forces aren’t big enough to form a Red Army and attack capitalism head on, we can build a guerrilla army and attack the outskirts of capital authority. “Smash the Dictatorship of Capital! Fight for Wheel chair lifts that work! Fight as Communists!” Work like that has never been done.
—A comrade
The “Lesser’ of Two Evils: Federal Prisons!
Forces loyal to the Democratic Party organized a rally of a few hundred to protest the forced separation of families at the U.S.-Mexico border. The featured speaker was leftist congresswoman Pramila Jayapal.
Even among this crowd Red Flag was welcomed. We urged the demonstrators to “Read about building a communist world without borders.”
The most often asked question was “What is the difference between socialism and communism?” We answered that socialism maintains capitalist relations and wage slavery, while communism ends all that. Communism makes eliminating borders and nations possible.
The difference was made even more clear by Jayapal’s speech.
She started off by recounting one atrocity after another committed at the border and the local ICE jail. Almost 300 mothers were transferred to this area from Texas after their children were taken from them. It was preaching to choir with this crowd.
Then she got to the point of the speech: her political solution. If only U.S. President Trump and U.S. Attorney General Sessions followed the law and were less cruel everything would be alright.
She visited with dozens of immigrants at the local private ICE jail and the federal prison. Those transferred to the federal prison felt like human beings for the first time she claimed. The federal prisons had rules and regulations that followed the law, while the private jails did not.
The answer she told the crowd was to send these immigrants to federal prison, not private jails. These are the same federal prisons where about 80,000 inmates are in solitary confinement on any given day. These are the prisons one inmate described as “a clear vision of hell.” The prisons where thousands descend into madness or are killed at the hands of racist Nazis. (New York Times, 3/26/15).
But don’t worry about all that. They are governed by regulations and laws!
Federal prisons are what capitalism has to offer our brothers and sisters. Prisons are primarily there to scare people into obeying the bosses. We won’t need them for that purpose. A communist society will mobilize masses to deal with any anti-social behavior. Such behavior will become less frequent when we end dog-eat-dog capitalism’s culture.
That alone should motive us to fight for a communist world.
—Comrades in Seattle, USA
June 25 – Bus operators of Line 60 in Buenos Aires join one-day general strike. An estimated one million workers shut down Argentina to protest the austerity policies of the government and the International Monetary Fund. Political strikes like these must put forward communism as the solution!
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, USA—June 23 to 26. Comrades participate in mass protests against racist attacks on migrants and their families.
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