Red Flag Newspaper
International Communist Workers Party
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El Salvador—In a meeting to evaluate the May Day March, a worker said, “I read Red Flag all the way through because I am interested in knowing the Party’s ideology fully.” This was the first time this worker had participated in a meeting. He was also in the May Day March with the workers’ collective of the International Communist Workers’ Party (ICWP) in this country.
He added, “I had always attended the workers’ marches but had never participated organizationally as a member of a contingent, until this year when the comrades of ICWP contacted me and invited me to march with the Party, and I did so. I hope to continue coming to the marches and meetings.”
Another worker said, “This year we felt more represented as a Party, in quality and quantity. In addition to the literature, we brought banners, megaphones, and prepared chants. We are improving every year.”
Likewise each and every participant in the meeting explained whether they read all the articles in Red Flag, or if they read only the articles they consider more important or which reflect struggles in the factories in other parts of the world.
Men and women workers from two factories attended the meeting this weekend to evaluate the activities in which they participated as organizers of the ICWP here. “We have advanced more than what I myself thought we could,” stated a worker leader. “To see this number of participants who have come to the meeting, I think that we are on the correct road,” he concluded.
Part of the meeting consisted of analyzing the newspaper editorial. Each person read a paragraph. At the end of the reading we analyzed how we must confront the bosses’ system, and talked about when and how to build ICWP where there are struggles in favor of the working class. You could feel the enthusiasm. It put in bold relief that the organized struggle to build a communist system through the ICWP is taking place in several parts of the world and that it is necessary and urgent to make this in favor of the working class struggle bigger and more determined.
“We need to know and understand the difference between reform and revolution,” a young party leader pointed out. The discussion of this point expanded and many spoke about their experiences in unions and electoral parties.
Another point, discussed above, was about Red Flag. How are we reading Red Flag? We discussed the urgency of increasing the distribution and how to politically help comrades and friends read and analyze the articles that we read. We discussed how to grasp that Red Flag must fulfill three functions: to inform, to agitate and to organize the working class.
At the end of the meeting, we invited the workers who participated recently in the Party’s activities to join the International Communist Workers’ Party. Two women workers said that their experience showed them that the Party is like a family and that with no reservations because of reading Red Flag, they had joined the Party. Likewise a young worker musician was delegated to compose two songs for ICWP, a mission that he most gladly accepted.
SOUTH AFRICA—We are happy to report that ICWP is getting active on several different fronts here. The workers from Reclam, a metal recycling firm, some of whom are Red Flag readers, requested a meeting around the ideas of discussing communism and how we can win more workers to revolutionary communist ideas. This was the result of patiently distributing Red Flag to the workers inside the factory.
We also struggled with comrades to distribute Red Flag among the auto factory workers. One of the comrades went to the largest VW plant in Africa. The comrade described that the workers at VW and Goodyear plants are very interested in communism. As the comrade was distributing RF, several workers requested him to come back the following week so he could talk to more workers of VW. These workers promised to organize their coworkers so the comrade can have a large meeting with the workers interested in ICWP and Red Flag.
Another young comrade described an interesting experience he had riding in a taxi (a van for transporting workers). He was holding a copy of Red Flag and the passenger sitting next to him saw the front page. This passenger was very excited when he read Mobilize the Masses for Communism. “This is exactly what we need,” said the passenger. As it turned out the passenger is a young college student. The comrade gave him a copy of Red Flag and exchanged phone numbers. This young student did come to the next club meeting and we had a meeting around dialectical materialism.
A recent meeting was attended by the comrade who distributed Red Flag at the industrial locations who came with a very bright young worker and a comrade who is not very active but very passionate about communism. The presence of the young comrade and a very encouraging voice message from a comrade in the US motivated us to do more. The inactive comrade has now become very active as we seriously discussed dialectical materialism to identify internal weaknesses and how to overcome them.
We are struggling to focus so that we can be consistent. We have a wide base of workers who are Red Flag readers, but we have to guarantee that the same workers get the paper on a consistent basis. This requires more discipline, commitment and above all honest and collective struggle with each other to overcome our internal weaknesses. The results are very encouraging. We have a long ways to go but we are going in the right direction.
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