"The bosses don't value our work," reported maquila workers at a recent International Communist Workers' Party conference. "Salaries are only $6.50 for a 10-11 hour day."
The capitalists can never give us the value of our work. Their business of exploitation means keeping as much as they can of the value we produce as their profits. Only communist revolution can return the value of our work to the world's workers.
These six women and men, the only ones able to get off work, spoke for the rest of the newlyrecruited ICWP garment workers' club in El Salvador.
They were among thirty comrades from four countries who debated the question of the day: How do we build on the opportunities for mobilizing the masses for communism that confront us today, especially among industrial workers?

Building One International Communist Workers' Party
Groups of industrial workers are starting to join our party. Besides the maquila club in El Salvador, another group has formed among metalworkers in South Africa. Our transit club in Los Angeles is growing.
Elsewhere ones and twos are joining. Individuals and groups are circulating our communist literature from Brazil to Bangladesh. Soon more will join from more places and areas of work. Plans must be made and money must be raised to advance this international work.
We celebrate each and every new member. However, we must learn to work in a new way, building a communist party of a new type, as we begin to recruit groups. We must write for Red Flag to steel ourselves for the struggle to advance communist consciousness in every fight. Red Flag must become a communist newspaper of a new type, its pages full of political debates that will sharpen the Party's line.

Understanding the World We Live In
The conference started with a report and conversation on the international situation. The bosses are attempting to survive their system's continuing crisis of overproduction. We outlined our enemy's survival plan: war and escalating attacks on our living conditions. Equally, we examined the response of masses in motion against these attacks. Perhaps our biggest weakness has been underestimating the effect of the masses around the world on our own particular situations.
New and old comrades vowed to read and write for Red Flag, keeping in mind how the international situation affects our coworkers and how our local struggles can affect the party's concentrations all over the word.
An inspiring report relayed from soldier comrades started a lively debate about the military work our Party needs.

Teaching and Learning Communism
A discussion on communist education opened with a PowerPoint presentation by a student comrade in Mexico about the history of education in class societies. Her example showed how we all can be both teachers and learners. Our line of Mobilizing the Masses for Communism means that we must all teach communist ideas to others at the same time we're learning them ourselves.
For our forthcoming pamphlet on education, a student will work with ex-guerrillas on a piece about how (and what) they taught and learned during the struggle in El Salvador. The maquila collective will write about ending the division between mental and manual labor in the production of garments.
Mexican comrades gave a vivid presentation that showed why capitalism is the cause of world hunger, and how communism will organize to produce enough nutritious food for everyone. On the last day, the conference broke into groups to prepare Red Flag articles that seize on particular debates resulting from our local class struggles.
A youth group wrestled with turning the back page cultural section into a more international effort. Another discussed contaminated water and sexist abuse in the maquilas as starting points for articles that promote communist solutions. In the third group, a teacher helped another comrade write a letter, learning that this is an important contribution she can continue to make.

Our Tasks for 2014 and Beyond
We must write and circulate Red Flag articles that relate the local to the global, workers' immediate grievances to the need for communism.
This is no walk in the park. The bosses are deadly serious about stopping us. They have no illusions about the potential of these communist ideas. We must have no illusions either, and be even more serious about advancing.
We must find more ways to increase the circulation of Red Flag. For example, we're talking with twenty workers from another maquila factory. Using internal and outside forces, can we distribute the paper massively in this area? We must consolidate new members and groups of workers and students through practice. Not just any practice, but practice mobilizing our fellow workers in struggle for communism.