Red Flag Letters

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While I was in my home village, I saw that a classless, communist society is possible. Most of the people in that area don’t use money, don’t have money. They depend on agriculture and livestock. While I was there I learned to heal a cow that was sick because of the drought. There was no rain, so they were sick because even the grass was too dry for the cattle to eat. So we had to make some plans.
I also learned from my village. I didn’t know how to take care of livestock like chickens, sheep, goats, cattle and all that. I also learned how to do agricultural work. The people are very nice. They work collectively; they help each other. If one house has a problem, they call a meeting of all the men in the area. They come up with a resolution to help the other family. To me it sounds like communism. I believe that communism is possible by the way the people live in that village.
I also went to another village where I met a guy who knew what Marxism is. I was shocked; but I managed to recruit him. Now he’s one of us. It was easy to recruit him because he knows about Marxism. He was visiting from a big city.
A lot of workers from the area work in mines. I managed to talk to some of them. They say it would be good if ICWP mobilized mine workers. I only had 6 or 7 Red Flags which I gave them.
Now I’m back home and they’ve been calling me and telling me that I have to give them more pamphlets, more Red Flags and more MMC’s. I told them that since ICWP works collectively, I will discuss this in a meeting and maybe we will come up with a strategy of how to distribute Red Flags to them and how to mobilize workers on that side of the country. Because many mineworkers want Communism, not socialism because they understand that it is state capitalism.
—Comrade in South Africa

January 16 marked 24 years since the signing of the infamous Peace Accords between the Salvadoran government and the fmln (Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front). These agreements were reached after twelve years of civil war between the government of this country and the guerilla fighters of the fmln.
Communist movements of that time accused the FMLN of betraying the working class. They defended themselves, saying that it was necessary to seek peace (the end of the conflict), to initiate a “struggle of ideas.”
As the International Communist Workers’ Party we have denounced the actions of the FMLN and of other parties of the left and right, for being part of the apparatus of repression. They deceive the working class in saying that they, in this case the FMLN, with the signing of the Peace Accords on January 16 1992 in Mexico, would struggle to transform the capitalist system from within.
It is impossible to transform the capitalist system as an economic, political and social superstructure from within. Its goal is the accumulation of capital and wealth in the hands of the bourgeoisie based on the robbery of the value of the products made by the working class.
They make the “battle of ideas” a mockery to the dignity of the working class because we cannot struggle against capitalism peacefully; struggling within the limits that the same system imposes on us, we cannot do anything different. It is only through a communist organization in ICWP, political strikes, and establishing a dialectical connection between what we say and what we do (practice-theory-practice) that we can make the change we need.
We do not recognize the cult of personality because it is part of the repression that the electoral political parties establish, like the FMLN with Shafik Handal for example. These parties need an all-powerful leader, presented as a politically correct person who unites his followers and maintains an image of closeness with the masses, while at the same time preventing constructive criticism of the leaders of the organization. And they want what they say done.
We as communists organized in ICWP continue fighting and will continue to do so until the end of our days for a better system for the working class under the leadership of the International Communist Workers’ Party. We are convinced of the transformative power of the world’s working class.
Therefore our communist clubs daily do political work to invite more workers to the struggle for a communist system, building, discussing and analyzing our newspaper Red Flag so that the death of the eighty thousand people who died in the civil war will not be in vain. Their sacrifice is our inspiration and strength. Those men and women opened spaces and opportunities for more workers to realize the situation and divest themselves of their chains. We should take maximum advantage of these opportunities to honor their deaths.
—Comrade in El Salvador

The Struggle For a Communist World Unites Us

EL SALVADOR—Last year I met Oliver. We became friends during struggles against evictions and making sure that the police didn’t take him during a direct action. Since then, we have been very close friends. He included me in his community audiovisual collective and I involved him in the distribution of ICWP’s communist literature.
He, like me, is the son of a veteran of the FMLN war. His father was an urban commando during the civil war. He created urban youth organizations that supported the regular forces of the FMLN and the workers’ movement. His father, like thousands, risked his life for a better world. Now, far from the whole fmln electoral circus, he has been left behind and forgotten like thousands of veterans.
Elias, Oliver’s father, has been fighting for a while against Myelodysplastic syndrome. Many times his health has been affected by negligence and by the capitalist health care that is available to the working class.
One night outside the hospital, with the uncertainty that he was facing over his father’s health, Oliver and I started to talk angrily about how rotten capitalism is and how in a society without classes everything would be different.
For the moment, Elias continues to fight one more battle. He has been a Red Flag reader since I met Oliver, and has said that he wants to actively participate as a member of ICWP and has offered a series of articles that he has written. His experience and know-ledge will be useful in the fight for communism.
I am writing this letter in solidarity with someone I have never seen, but because of the stories of his struggle, I feel that I know and value him as a comrade. We will win.
—Young Industrial Comrade

The bosses are not in an optimistic mood these days. Their pessimism is increasingly taking the extreme form of apocalyptic thinking. We must not let them drag us down.
An apocalypse is a giant catastrophe that will supposedly completely change the world. For example, before the climate conference the bosses and their experts claimed we were going to hell in a hand basket. Human society was spewing carbon emissions into the atmosphere at such a rate that a global warming disaster was unavoidable.
As communists we don’t buy into this hysteria. Over half the world’s pollution is caused by coal and private cars. Once we establish communism, we can start to end pollution by “scrubbing” coal emissions (too expensive for the bosses) and moving on to other forms of energy. Transportation will be collective. The drastically reduced number of small cars and pickups will be collectively owned and used as needed.
We communists in the ICWP do not believe in world-changing apocalypses – of any kind. Sure, capitalism produces disasters, crises, wars, and catastrophes. But no disaster, however extreme, will on its own end capitalism. Capitalism continues to produce, in Lenin’s words, “horror without end”.
As communists we fight to end capitalism with revolution. This will be the exact opposite of an apocalypse – a joyous event, a “festival of the oppressed”. We will end unemployment and homelessness almost immediately, and strike major blows against racism and sexism.
Apocalyptic thinking is a form of bourgeois ideology. It is the outlook of a class that is dying. For them the end of capitalism is the end of the world and they see apocalypses everywhere.
A while back there was overpopulation, global cooling (!), and peak oil. Now it’s climate, of course, antibiotic super bugs and intelligent machines overthrowing humanity. And, as always, WWIII.
Communism will abolish all these threats. We’ll abolish money and wages and distribute food free. Sure, lots of people means lots of mouths to feed, but as Mao pointed out it also means lots of hands to produce food. Under communism no hands will be idle and we’ll all eat.
Nuclear war, of course, is a real possibility, but we are ready even for that. As Mao said, you (imperialists) can start your war; we (communists) will finish it.
In the time of slavery, the slaves had a word for the coming day when they would be freed – the “Jubilee.” Communist revolution will be the second Jubilee, ending wage slavery. However, to have a Jubilee, we need the ICWP to be a truly massive party. Don’t be paralyzed with fear of the apocalypse of the day. Don’t waste time waiting for it to strike. Join the ICWP and fight for a joyous future.
—Northern Comrade

EL SALVADOR-In the month of December, the audiovisual collective in which I am working carried out two activities in front of the house of Salvadoran ex-President Francisco Flores. In an ironic and joking way, tinged with anger and protest, we sang carols and had a party in reaction to his house-arrest while he is being accused of stealing more than 10 million dollars that were allocated to the victims of the 2001 earthquake.
We know that corruption is an act by which the capitalists control and bribe the politicians who control the state that serves these capitalists.
The case of Francisco Flores has caused mass indignation. However, this outrage has not gone in the right direction because the masses have not been mobilized with a communist line and by a communist party.
The two activities that the collective has carried out were organized through social networks. Around 25 people came to each activity. They sang, chanted slogans, and insulted the family of the ex-President as they came to visit him.
Self-critically, we did not give the communist leadership that would have taken this action into a struggle against capitalism. However, among the demonstrators there are young readers distributors of Red Flag. Other youth gave speeches against the bourgeoisie and the pro-bourgeois government of the FMLN.
These mobilizations taught us many lessons: about mistakes and opportunities for ICWP. Social media is a very useful tool for convening activities. Many youth use these virtual platforms and through this they find out about many activities.
We made a mistake in not openly calling for the struggle for communism in this activity. We must have more confidence in our line and in the capacity that it has to mobilize. But this requires collective work of all the Party clubs nationally. The opportunities are in front of our eyes. These same young people can be won to participate in the ranks of ICWP, since many of them already participate in our activities.
2016 begins with challenges and opportunities. We must begin to work for a mass Communist May Day.
—Young Comrade

Not too long ago, I had the opportunity to work in Kazakhstan as a teacher in a government-run autonomous school, part of a network called Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools. (NIS)
When I got to know the place, one thing that interested me was the personal space of the
teacher in the room. There was an area where they would post photos, awards, diplomas, and other items which meant a lot to them.
I noticed one photo of a man who apparently was a mathematician, and who was a member of the Kazakhstan Soviet Socialist Republic leadership. From that day, I began to look at who was in the leadership of the NIS structure, and many of the women and men at the top were from the Communist Party.
It became apparent to me that the leaders of the party became the ruling class with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. And, from that, I began to think that these elite were simply overseers of the socialist state, who transferred their leadership from the socialist state to the capitalist state. The workers apparently had little say in the running of the socialist state and in its dissolution.
Thus: one of the lessons of socialism. The masses must be in control of the apparatus of the society, led by the leading theory and determined to build communism on a world wide scale. They must be resolute against the appropriation of the people’s infrastructure and society by the elites. To me, that is what happened with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in Kazakhstan.
—Supporter of ICWP

FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!

International Communist Workers Party

Letters to Red Flag

	FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!
	International Communist Workers Party


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