Red Flag Newspaper
International Communist Workers Party
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Red Flag NewspaperInternational Communist Workers Party |
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Students in India are running with the ideas in Red Flag. The call of mobilizing the masses for communism to smash exploitation, racism and the caste system is what inspired a Red Flag reader to mobilize over 100 students to discuss communism. The student promised to build a huge chapter of ICWP by intensifying ideological struggle and taking the ideas to the industrial working class.
INDIA Feb. 16—Tens of thousands of students at eighteen major universities in India are holding demonstrations. At Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi, the students were joined by a large number of professors. As we have reported in Red Flag, the student demonstrations started in Hyderabad where a Dalit (formerly called “untouchables”) student facing severe racism committed suicide. This student was accused by the ruling BJP of carrying out “anti-national” activities because he organized a protest against the racist treatment of Muslim workers and students by the fascist BJP government.
Today’s huge demonstrations are taking place because the student president of JNU was again accused of being “anti-national” by the student wing of the BJP. The Delhi police, in an unprecedented move, entered the JNU campus and arrested the student president Kumar and seven others charging them under the colonial era law of “sedition” – being anti-national.
Since coming to power the BJP has systematically started major purges in Universities to install administrations that support pro-Hindu fascist ideology against Dalit and Muslim workers and students. Muslims are considered anti-nationals, supporting Pakistan. The BJP use the Hindu religion of the Dalits themselves to divide them from Muslim workers.
In an ideology that the BJP learned from Nazi Germany, they are writing history books that glorify the ancient Hindu religion. These books are required reading in all schools.
The student demonstrations are giving us an opportunity to advance the line of communist revolution by uniting workers and students around the world. At the same time, we face danger. These demonstrations are led by thousands of angry students, angry at the blatant murders and fascism of BJP. However, the leadership is in the hands of various political forces like CPM, CPI, Congress, AAP. They want to channel the anger of workers and students into “true” nationalism that would include Hindus, Muslims, Dalits and others.
In reality, there is no difference between the BJP and other political parties that are trying to counter the BJP brand of fascism. They all want Indian workers and students to be won to patriotism. Since coming to power, the BJP has accelerated the purchase of advanced weapons from Russia, US, France and Israel. They make a case for a patriotic “Made in India” policy to produce weapons in India. Boeing, Lockheed, Rafale of France, Sukhoi of Russia and many others are partnering with Indian multinationals like Reliance and Tata to produce state-of-the-art weapons.
The Indian rulers are preparing for a major world war as the worldwide crisis of overproduction intensifies. There are about 600 million Indians earning less than dollar a day. Most of them are Dalits and Muslims in rural areas. Due to racist attacks on this population, the cities are flooded with millions of workers looking for employment for extremely low wages and no benefits. There are already 150 million industrial workers in the cities who are considered “migrants” working in horrific conditions. Almost all of them are Dalits and Muslims.
International Communist Workers’ Party (ICWP) is building a communist movement to end horrific racism and exploitation once and for all. Communist society will be organized to meet the needs of the working class. This will be achieved by mobilizing millions of workers for communism and against the pro-capitalist ideologies of racism, religion, nationalism and sexism. Centuries-old segregation based on caste, race, and religion will be eliminated as the system of profit which created it will end.
Education and learning will be a lifelong activity integrated with work. A new system of communist education will emerge as hundreds of millions of super exploited workers will take leadership in building communist society. Communist culture, art, literature will combat selfish capitalist ideas and replace them with building a new culture of egalitarian communist society.
Building this society is not a task of a few individuals. It is not an easy task as we face a blood-thirsty enemy with a viciously racist and selfish culture and ideology. The bosses’ dogfight for profit will inevitably lead to world war and the intensification of racism. This desperation of the bosses reflects their inability to control the masses. As they resort to open fascism and war, it also opens the opportunity for workers, students and soldiers to build for communist revolution.
Fighting for communism is the only goal worth fighting for. It means that readers and distributors of Red Flag should join ICWP today. Joining ICWP is a commitment to struggle for communist ideas among the masses. It means being in a collective of the party and also contributing financially according to ability. At various universities in India we are distributing ICWP’s pamphlet, Communist Education for Classless Society
(http://icwpredflag.org/EDU/EdPamE.pdf) and Mobilize the Masses for Communism (http://icwpredflag.org/MMC/MMCE.pdf) pamphlets along with Red Flag.
India – Sixty thousand sanitation workers in East and North Delhi went on strike for 16 days in 2015 over wage and benefit demands. In communism lots of us will help dispose of garbage and nobody will have to do it all day, every day. And there won’t be wages to argue over: we’ll all receive the goods and services we need.
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LOS ANGELES, CA—“I’m glad I was fired. Being in that factory was unbearable. The harassment on the job had become a hell for me. Being outside I feel liberated from this stress,” said an ex-worker from New Fashion, a garment factory.
This worker told, with a lot of anger at the bosses and supervisors and sometimes sobbing, how she worked there for more than twenty years. She said that in every recent year there have been waves of layoffs, supposedly to get rid of those who produce less and the “problem workers.”
But one of the things that most affected this worker was that many of the same workers isolated her. Some supported the supervisors in their personal and work-related attacks. The nature of capitalist exploitation and the pressure to pay rent, food and other expenses, frequently make workers themselves turn on each other for miserable wages.
Because of competition among bosses in their system of commodity production and wage slavery, factories become battlefields. Workers become soldiers who are pushed to produce more to defeat other bosses.
The lack of communist consciousness makes us easy prey to capitalist ideology. It leads us to believe that, individually or by allying with the bosses, we can survive the exploitation. But we must see that we workers, united, are an unstoppable force. There are many examples of garment factories where workers have united and faced the bosses’ attacks more effectively.
Another worker in this factory commented, “Recently the bosses gathered the ‘best’ workers and told us that there would be a lot of work; that we have to get out a lot of production. But that they had to get rid of the “bad” workers who do not help the factory.”
The bosses use personal competition and piecework (by the piece or by work group) to divide the workers. They create an environment in which to survive we must eliminate the other. This is the basis of capitalism: competition to the death between the bosses for maximum profit. And it’s the basis of exploitation in the factories. This ideology is transmitted to the workers through capitalist education.
Collective Communist Consciousness
Hundreds of garment workers, women and men, receive Red Flag. They must help to build communist consciousness by discussing communist ideas and practices and distributing the newspaper. They need to organize in the centers of production and reject the capitalist ideas that divide us. An attack on any worker is an attack on our whole class. The future of our class is to build a communist society.
In communist production centers, there won’t be speed-up for the production of commodities and the bosses’ profits. There will not be harassment, or lackeys using the whip to get out more production.
We will produce based on the needs of humanity. In cases of emergency and natural disasters the workers in other areas will have to produce faster or for a longer time to help their class brothers and sisters. In these centers there will be mass discussions about production and social behavior to improve the relations among the workers. Obviously there won’t be layoffs, nor will the threat exist that some will eat and some will die of hunger.
The new communist production relations will make us feel and be humans, because they will benefit our whole class, who in turn will all be producing other aspects that will help our own lives.
Only communist consciousness can fight and defeat capitalism and its harmful ideologies like individualism, nationalism, racism and sexism. This consciousness will build strength and courage among the working class to make a revolution, take power and build a new world without exploitation or divisions.
Communist consciousness defines the bosses as one class and the women and men workers as a different class. But the bosses don’t want us to see ourselves as class brothers and sisters. They use a thousand and one tricks to divide us. Our liberation is in uniting as one single force. We must create the confidence that we can build a communist society in which we will produce for the wellbeing of our class and not for the bosses’ class.
Communist consciousness teaches us to respect ourselves and to see ourselves as class brothers and sisters, and not as enemies. We should develop a sharp struggle to change these relations among workers, starting today. Unfortunately the old communist movement and its socialism failed to change these conditions. To win our struggle for a communist world, we must win these workers in these factories and soldiers to become communist leaders. Join our struggle for a communist world.
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