This brings Revolutionary Greetings from South African workers and the poor. We are holding our meetings every Sunday. Yesterday we held another exciting meeting in spite of the chilly weather.

The meeting place was full of excitement as new comrades joined in. We will have to find a bigger meeting place in future. We looked at the recent issues of the Red Flag and decided that we need to identify areas where we need clarity and further elaboration.

At our next meeting, we will attempt to respond to any questions seeking clarity. We are all going to do the exercise together as a collective. In that way we will help each other to grow in articulating the ICWP political line of communist revolution.

Our last meeting was mostly dominated by the recent national general election circus. The nationalist, pro-capitalist African National Congress was returned to power by the overwhelming majority of voters. As we reflected on these elections, we emphasized that these elections will only bring misery to us like all the previous ones.

Mineworkers at the platinum mines continue to lose lives. Recently four miners are reported to have been killed. Employers are desperately engaged in dirty tricks and threats to woo the workers back to work. They are by-passing the unions by sending text messages to workers directly to return to work or face retrenchments. They are restructuring the mines and workers will bear the brunt of these restructurings. They have issued an ultimatum for workers to return to work by Thursday this week or face the consequences.

There is another strike by workers at the Coega Harbor which has been going on for three weeks. They are militantly stopping scabs and demanding safe working conditions, better pay and an end to the use of labor brokers. They want permanent jobs as opposed to the worldwide plague of informal work. These militant strikers need Red Flag and to fight to eliminate wage slavery with communism.

In summary, we as members of ICWP, held  a successful a two-day 12 April dinner and conference and May Day events, even though the official May Day celebration was hijacked by nationalists and made into a lousy electioneering affair.

We continue to distribute Red Flag to our comrades and friends to mobilize the masses for communism.

The struggle continues! Amandla!!!

Bolivian Miners' Struggle Shows:  Socialism Is No Solution

A Turkish labor activist blamed the privatization of mines for a sharp increase in accidents "because profit is always more valuable than miners' lives in the private sector."   But state-controlled public-sector capitalism is no better.

Since April, mass demonstrations of Bolivian miners' cooperatives have fought police, protesting a new mining law signed by the indigenous socialist president Evo Morales.  After police killed two miners and injured fifty more, forty-three policemen were taken prisoner by dynamite-wielding miners. 

As with the Marikana massacre in South Africa, this struggle is extremely sharp because the ruling party had counted miners among its strongest supporters.  In Bolivia as in Turkey, the mining industry is the mainstay of capitalist growth.

The new law gives the mining industry rights to public water (which it then pollutes) while denying water rights to rural workers and farmers.  It criminalizes protests against mining operations.   These provisions reflect Morales's commitment to the century-old socialist lie that building state capitalism in "underdeveloped" areas is a path toward eventual communism.

But cooperative miners also oppose the law's provisions limiting the ability of private tin, silver, and zinc miners to sell these minerals to foreign companies.  Their small-producer outlook drives them into the arms of imperialists such as Japan's Sumitomo and  India's Jindal Steel, while the State-run hydrocarbon conglomerate YPFB seeks deals with Russia's Gazprom and China's Shengli. 

From Bolivia's state-owned enterprises to Turkey's privatized ones, class struggle and inter-imperialist conflicts are sharpening.  Miners and other industrial workers must mobilize the masses for COMMUNISM.