In the last thirty years the world has changed dramatically. For the first time in history the majority of working people live in towns or cities and not in the countryside. The global labor force, including service and industrial workers, now adds up to three billion human beings, over half of whom live in East or South Asia.

For the first time, the majority are not most  immediately threatened by crop failure, flood, or famine, but by the boom or bust cycle of world capitalism. For the first time in history the masses live or die by the wage system, while their capitalists (the owners of the land, mines, factories and banks) live or die by the rate of profit and the amount of surplus value they can extract from our labors.

Today we are all wage workers...wage workers in the US or in South Africa or El Salvador and so on. The development of capitalism has uprooted subsistence farmers, forcing many into capitalism's reserve army of labor, and brought together workers of the world with an undeniable force.

In so doing they have created a world of three billion wage workers. They have concentrated those workers in huge urban cities. This has laid the basis for the revolutionary slogan "Abolish the wage system" to resound with a relevancy and anger it has never had before. It is this development that Red Flag is setting out to ignite with its call to fight for communism.

The Birth of the ICWP

This development of capitalism has been met by the organization of the International Communist Workers' Party (the ICWP). Our fledgling revolutionary communist movement was created not only because the old fight for socialism failed but because, organized along national lines, the old movement no longer reflected the conditions of the world's masses. We saw that the workers need to fight directly for communism, that the fight for reforms diverted the old movement from fighting for communist revolution.

Yet, side by side with the changes workers face, the imperialists themselves confront new challenges. Up to World War II, the thrust to dominate the globe centered on grabbing access to minerals and raw materials while expanding markets. Today, the aim of controlling cheap (and cheaper) labor to exploit has become the main thrust of the imperialists' competition.

These developments began as a response to the serious crisis of overproduction that exploded in the 1970s and lasted through the 80s. The productive capacities of Japan and Western Europe (re-built after the devastation of World War II) now flooded world markets, competing against US industrial might. Profits dropped, social tensions mounted and, among some second-ranked capitalist powers, war erupted. The Iran-Iraq war saw the biggest tank battle since World War II and Malvinas-Falklands War saw huge naval operations.

Capitalist Crisis, Imperialist War or Communist Revolution?

These wars looked like precursors to a World War in the same way as the Spanish Civil War and the Japanese invasion of Manchuria proved to be precursors to World War II. However the development of open market capitalism in China proved a savior to world capitalism. The triumphant capitalist Party bosses opened up China to direct industrial investment. Since the late 1980s they have engineered the migration (legal and "illegal") of some 750 million farmers from the countryside to the city as industrial workers. "The China Price," as the cheapest industrial work in the world was called, returned a workable rate of profit to manufacturing and temporarily saved world capitalism from war.

However, in 2007 a new crisis of overproduction broke out.  This time the rising militancy of Chinese workers combined with a crisis-driven drop in world trade prompted the Chinese capitalists to protect their investments by expanding their domestic market. They pumped an astronomical $2.5 trillion credit into all aspects of their industrial capacity.

As a result "The China Price" is no longer the cheapest industrial work in the world. India, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Ukraine and other parts of Eastern Europe as well as Africa now vie for that title. Clearly, if the Chinese capitalists are to secure their investments they must search in part for cheaper labor to control. Just as the German imperialists increasingly exploit the cheap labor of East Europe, and the US imperialists build their maquiladora empire in Mexico and Central America, it appears that the Chinese are looking to Africa. At its birth the capitalist powers hunted the world for slave labor; today the imperialist powers hunt it for cheap (and cheaper) labor.

Today their fight over the world's resources, markets and cheap labor is sharpening even more. The specter of World War that haunted the world in the 1970's again haunts the world today. The mighty international working class is on the move. United with soldiers, workers can mobilize the masses to destroy capitalism-imperialism and build communism. Join us!