FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!
International Communist Workers Party
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FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM! |
International Communist Workers Party | |
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LOS ANGELES, March 27— “They asked me to stay but I have been a slave for 8 ½ hours and now I am going home,” declared a Metro worker, holding high a copy of Red Flag. She’d been asked to help at a company-sponsored circus at the newly-renamed “Leahy Division 3.” We happened to be there that day to distribute this paper.
Art Leahy, Metro CEO, started out driving for the regional bus line but boy, have things changed! At MTA, he got $310,000 a year, plus a $20,000 housing allowance and 20 days of paid vacation. At Metro-Link he will get $330,000 a year, 38 paid vacation days and benefits including a company car.
Few Division 3 workers were impressed by the music, free food, or the Mayor and other dignitaries.
“It’s a crock,” another Division 3 worker alleged. “Leahy was arrested twice for embezzlement. He had to buy his way out of jail.” He (like many others) took extra papers to distribute.
Another worker said, “Leahy’s God is money.”
In communism, we won’t name things after each other or post giant portraits because we understand that everybody is important, not just a few.
Everyone will be encouraged and helped to take leadership of aspects of our shared work and lives. Those who take on more responsibility will live just like all other workers, as our Party leaders do today. No privileges!
Capitalist societies, including even the greatest socialist experiments, accepted that some would live privileged lives. Communism rejects that idea.
In communism, corruption won’t be a big problem because everyone would see if someone tried to use a leadership position to get more (or better) than other workers. The Party would mobilize the masses to criticize that person and change their behavior.
In revolutionary China this happened in villages during the land redistribution movement. William Hinton’s book Fanshen describes how the Chinese Communist Party led in holding its own members and non-Party village leaders accountable before mass meetings. These cadre were asked to give up even the smallest struggle “fruits” that had not been formally allocated to them.
However, land distribution reorganized private property. It didn’t abolish it. When the People’s Commune movement began to merge private plots into huge collective farms a few years later, top Party leaders quickly attacked this practice. This struggle mushroomed during the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” of the 1960s. The capitalist line won and a generation later, massive privatization fueled the rise of a “free-market” economy that returned rural workers to wage slavery.
And throughout all this, stark inequities remained between workers in the cities and in the countryside. Ironically (and tragically) some young rural people would join the Communist Party just for the chance of moving to the city.
When we invite all Red Flag readers to join our International Communist Workers’ Party, we do not offer you opportunities to make money or lord it over others. The privilege we offer is to become part of a growing collective trying to learn how to mobilize the masses to bring communist society into being.
“You’ve made a convert,” another worker called back over his shoulder, waving Red Flag. We hope that he and others like him will contact us or give us their contact information to get involved in study-action groups and May Day activities.