FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!
International Communist Workers Party
|
|
FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM! |
International Communist Workers Party | |
| |
| |
|
| |
| |
| |
LOS ANGELES, USA, June 18—“What are the lessons of the mass shooting in Orlando?” asked a comrade in our study group of teachers and friends after a gunman killed fifty people in a gay nightclub in Florida. “What have people been saying—at school, and among your friends and family members?”
“I’ve noticed that it’s another excuse to build fascism,” said a retired teacher. “They’re using it to spread more racism against Muslims.”
“And the ruling class will use it to expand the ‘no-fly’ list, and to increase surveillance on all of us,” added a math teacher.
“Its way more complicated than that,” said a recent college graduate. “It’s not just the racist types that are using this to their own advantage. Picture this: a ribbon in remembrance of the Orlando victims has been circulating on Facebook. It has the US flag on one side and the rainbow flag on the other. They’re using the deaths of gay men and women to build patriotism. It’s sick.”
“For sure,” added another young comrade. “The system condemns the LGBT community all the time, but now in this context, ‘it’s ok to be gay’ for political purposes. That’s so messed up.”
“It is,” said a middle-school teacher. “And compare the self-serving response of the ruling class with the heroic response of workers in Orlando. People from the neighborhood came out immediately and starting carrying victims down the street to the hospital. The next day people were lined up for blocks to give blood while others brought them water. People are donating money to help the families of the victims however they can.”
“That always happens when there’s a disaster,” added the retired teacher. “In New York, years ago, when the electricity went out, people came out to help their neighbors—in New Orleans during Katrina as well. That’s how we know communism can work. Freed from capitalist wage slavery that pits us against each other in the fight for survival, we will cooperate to help each other.”
“People didn’t wait for the ‘experts’ either,” continued the middle-school teacher. “When the paramedics came, they told the people from the neighborhood to stand aside. Capitalism needs to take all initiative out of the hands of the working class, and tell us that we have to rely on the experts. Communism will rely on working-class solidarity—not a few ‘experts.’”
“One of the big lies about Orlando was when Obama said that is was the worst mass shooting in US history,” said a history teacher. “What about the murder of more than a hundred Native American men, women and children in Sand Creek Colorado by the Colorado militia in 1865? Or the killing of hundreds of black residents of Elaine, Arkansas, in 1919, and hundreds more African Americans in dozens of US towns and cities during the ‘Red Summer of 1919?’ Or the My Lai massacre of 500 civilians in Vietnam in 1970? That’s not to diminish in any way the horrific nature of the murders in Orlando—every one of these deaths is a tragedy—but why overlook these others?”
“It’s their own assassins who killed all these people,” said a soccer coach. “Of course they’re not going to mention that.”
“And now they’re talking about the semi-automatic AR-15s,” said the history teacher. “Guns of the AR-15 class are civilian versions of the M-16 that was used in My Lai.”
“And by US imperialism and their puppets around the world,” added the soccer coach.
“When the ruling class murders people they call it an ‘appropriate use’ of the weapon. They don’t want it in civilian hands, but they are happy to have soldiers use M-16s and worse to kill our class brothers and sisters around the world,” continued the history teacher.
“When soldiers have communist ideas in their heads and guns in their hands,” said the soccer coach, “we can wipe out the bosses and build a communist society. I think that’s an ‘appropriate use’ of the weapon.”
We didn’t have all the answers in our study group. We went on to talk about how to deepen our understanding of dialectical materialism and how we can teach what we do understand. We should have tried to apply what we know about dialectical materialism to the murders in Orlando and the response by workers and rulers to it. We’ll discuss that the next time.
PASADENA, CA, USA, June 7 – A multi-racial crowd of hundreds rallied outside the courthouse where Black Lives Matter activist Jasmine Richards Abdullah was being sentenced to 90 days in jail for “attempted lynching.” This outrageous charge stemmed from an incident where Jasmine and others defended a young woman from racist cops. The loudest chants included “You can’t jail the revolution.” But organizers preached reliance on God, voting, and “American values.” Dozens of protesters, mostly young, took copies of the ICWP “End Racism by Mobilizing the Masses for Communism” pamphlets. We should have brought more!