Red Flag Letters

We are not here to win an argument; we have the world to win. This is what the articles from El Salvador tell us. After the struggle at the international meeting the comrades are more active and writing clearly. Articles like these are what we want for Red Flag.

One suggestion: when we discuss where the value workers create goes, we must be clear. While it is true that some of it supports the bosses’ lavish life style and their police, most value goes back into productive forces like raw material, better machinery, etc. The lavish life style of the bosses and police brutality are real and visible to the workers. However, the bosses face life-and-death competition from other capitalists. This competition propels the bosses to invest more in machines, replacing workers constantly. But since only workers produce value and profit, their rate of profit declines.

The bosses counter this declining rate of profit by intensifying exploitation: speeding workers up and moving capital to areas where the wages are cheaper. Horrific working condition and constant threat of job loss are what workers face. In The Communist Manifesto Marx explained this process this way: “The development of industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.”

It is our job to recruit the masses of these angry workers to be grave-diggers of capitalism in our party. With struggle, criticism and self-criticism, the workers in El Salvador are showing that we can advance and win.

After some discussions with other comrades, I think that the box in the climate change article in the 10/2 issue was seriously misleading. It mentioned that Ebola and other diseases may increase as the result of global warming. Whether this is true or not, the current epidemic is caused by capitalism, not global warming. Given the fact that Ebola only spreads by contact with the body fluids of infected people, it is preventable by simple means. The epidemic is happening because the infrastructure of medical care, sanitation and public health education is nearly non-existent in many African countries.

Angry Liberian workers confront fascist police terror during Ebola epidemic

This fact is not only the result of poverty or neglect by African governments or imperialist countries, but the ongoing exploitation of Africa by imperialism plays a big role in holding back health care for the African masses.

In the 1970s a number of African countries had government-sponsored medical care. In the 1980s some got into debt trouble and asked the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to bail them out. As usual the IMF imposed a series of “structural adjustment policies” as a condition of the loan. These conditions aim at making sure that governments cut back spending for things like medical care or food subsidies, so the big banks will get paid back at the expense of the working class. The World Bank and the IMF want everyone to be dependent on capitalism, working for wages or producing a cash crop, rather than growing food for their own consumption. In Tanzania and other countries, the IMF required that either government clinics charge fees, private for-profit clinics be opened or health insurance be set up. IMF requirements also severely limited local government spending on health care and other social services at the same time as Tanzania faced (and still faces) major epidemics of HIV/AIDS and TB.

In recent decades foreign non-governmental organizations (NGOs), funded by imperialist governments and foundations, have greatly increased their activities in Africa. These NGOs usually focus on particular regions or particular diseases, often for limited periods of time, rather than general improvements in health care for the masses. The NGOs have numerous links with big businesses and help those business carry out profitable projects, like testing new drugs. Similarly, the Gates Foundation money goes almost exclusively to private organizations, not to health care infrastructure.

Even when NGO activities help some workers, their decision-making benefits the bosses, who fear instability and revolts, loss of workers to exploit or threats to their intellectual property. US and European drug companies finally provided some anti-retrovirus drugs for African AIDS patients at low cost only after production of copy-cat drugs by companies in India. The drug companies wanted to protect their patents, just like Microsoft, whose billions bankroll the Gates Foundation.

There is nothing new or charitable about imperialists dispensing some health care to benefit themselves in countries they dominate. French rubber plantations in Vietnam used to force skilled rubber workers to take anti-malarial medications on the spot in order to get paid.

I hope that Red Flag and its readers will write articles to help show why the fight for communism is a matter of life and death for the working class.

Yes, my mom was elderly and sickly but the capitalist system definitely hastened her demise. During her hospitalization that led to her death, she contracted MRSA, a “staph” germ that is resistant to many antibiotics. This infection spread to her lungs, causing respiratory failure and eventually killed her.

The ICU she was in had numerous rooms under isolation precautions for these bacteria but somewhere there was a break in those precautions and she contracted the bacteria.

It could have been as simple as a health care worker not washing their hands or improper sterilization of instrumentation. Unfortunately this is not uncommon in the US. There are 99,000 patient deaths annually from hospital- acquired infections like MRSA. The very nature of capitalist health care makes these infections endemic in the US hospitals. Hospitals run for profit. Obtaining zero infections would cut into hospital profits. Understaffing, poor maintenance of sterilization equipment, poor infection control procedures in general all contribute.

There is a lack of attention, inherent in US hospital and health care culture and practices when trying to prevent or dealing with infections like MRSA under capitalism. Some hospital administrators even strongly believe that some infections are inevitable, just the cost of doing business, while patients suffer and die from these preventable infections. MRSA and other US hospital-acquired infections are like a revolving door, through which new MRSA infections are passed from one patient to the next without regard to the consequences to the lives of working-class people.

Some capitalist countries like Norway have been able to reduce MRSA by establishing “costly” isolation procedures of patients.

According to US hospitals, adopting similar procedures would cost too much, even though it has been proven that a screening program for MRSA would actually cost the same as treating a single MRSA patient.

Under communism the entire culture of health care will change. Heath care would not be for profit. Workers’ lives will be more important than profit. Therefore there would be a zero-infection policy that would ensure the infection revolving door is closed.

All staff would be trained in infection control as a top priority. This can only happen when profits are no longer the goal of hospitals. Rather the goal would be to help working class people recover their health and return to productive, fulfilling lives, not make more money.

October 1—Middle-school students have joined high-school students and 70% of the teachers at two Jefferson County (Colorado) schools in a weeks-long protest against the Board of Education’s proposal to review the teaching of US history “to promote patriotism, respect for authority and the free market system, and avoid material which condones civil disorder, social strife, or disregard of the law.” Capitalist schools never have taught the history that would help our youth fight for the communist future we need. And they never will. We must teach and learn it ourselves as part of our struggle to transform society.

A worker told me that Emma Watson, a British actress known for her role in the Harry Potter movies, spoke about the challenges of gender equality. She said that they should do away with the belief that feminism is synonymous with hating men. He commented to me that what she argued is reasonable, and added that there are people who confuse feminism with women who think they are superior to men.

In extreme cases, there are people who use the term “feminazi” to refer to the contempt that some women have for men. These women feel superior to the opposite sex who they try to subjugate and look on with hatred.

He also told me that equality is within the reach of everyone, that it is a question of working on discarding backward ideas that they teach to young girls and boys like, for example, “you are a man, don’t cry,” or “ladies first.”

In confronting these ideas, as the International Communist Workers’ Party, we argue that the capitalist system, in which everything is based on exploitation of the workers, uses tools like racism and sexism, and when this

sexism flows in the midst of the working class it confuses our thinking and makes us think that being a man or a woman are very different things.

We understand that when the bosses want super-profits they resort to low-down tricks like these to divide men and women workers who are both being exploited. In this way they create low-paid labor and build an environment of competition among the workers. Capitalism doesn’t want the working class to be united.

In Communism, there won’t be hatred of men, feminism, sexism, or any other tool to divide the working class because in Communism people will not be treated like tools of production who make profits only for the owner.

In communism, there is only a working class that produces to meet its own needs, vastly improving on whatever quality of life that we can imagine. Education, health, housing, food and clothing will always be within the reach of the workers.

It will not be necessary to divide the strength of the workers as women or as men. The ability and dedication of each will determine their type of work. We will eliminate this type of

sexism that says that a man is “more capable,” than a woman for a certain type of work.

Building communism, we will defeat this type of sexist or racist ideas that the capitalists have developed to keep the working class divided. It is our duty as communists to fight against these ideas. LET’S FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM…we ask for more opinions.

Red Flag is the newspaper of the ICWP (International Communist Workers’ Party) that combines, shares, addresses and exposes the problems, pains, suffering and the exploitation of the workers in the working environment by the bosses the working class is slaving for world wide. Red Flag is the best newspaper I have ever read simply because it’s written by the working class and all the members of the party. Anyone from anywhere in the world is free to write to our newspaper because we believe we are all equal.

Which other newspaper in the whole wide world that you know is written by the victims, working class and the community oppressed by the capitalist system? Our newspaper brings together all the people from all countries and corners of the world into one single newspaper. Red Flag alone is clearly a revolutionary newspaper because this kind of a newspaper has never existed before in the newspaper media world.

All the stories in the Red Flag newspaper address the struggle and the suffering, the exploitation, low wage system and our fight against capitalism, which is the same all over the world. South African, American, Mexican, Brazilian working class, the list goes on; we are all the victims of the capitalist system. We urge the working class from anywhere in the world to write to our paper. Racism, low-wage system, labor exploitation, unfair labor treatment and practices must be destroyed.

It is of vital importance to read Red Flag because the stories are encouraging and show the working class that we support their struggle, and we will fight together in the struggle. They show that all the working class around the world shares the same struggle. We are all victims of this cruel and heartless system called capitalism.

Write and express all your struggles in Red Flag and mobilise masses for an international strike against this ruthless capitalist system. Let’s use the paper to expose in black and white all these bosses of these firms, companies who are getting rich from the sweat, blood and lives of the hard-working labor. No mercy for capitalism the same way they don’t have mercy for the working class. Let’s all sing one song: “destroy capitalism and all its elements once and for all.”

Forward with Red Flag, forward! Say no to slavery, say no! Say no to racism, say no! Say no to poverty wages, say no! Say no to employment agencies, say no! And say no to capitalism, say no! The workers deserve far much more than the peanuts these greedy bosses offer. The time, the lives and the energy labor of the workers are brutally abused by the bosses and capitalism; they are starving, slaving and abusing the working class. The money they give us doesn’t meet even 10 percent of the needs of the working class. Join ICWP.

Sisters and Brothers of our union, for too long we have let things go, thinking that those we elected into power had our best interest in mind. We have seen this is not the case. Bus operators like us that were given our trust have failed us. Instead of uniting us and doing the right things by us, they have pitted us against each other. There has been a struggle to wrangle this power from this union, and it has been defeated, because we have not had the courage to take the power back from those that hold it like misers, not willing to change to benefit the masses. They only kowtow to MTA. The majority of the operators got a raw deal in this contract. Those in power have given our future away. We will see in the days to come how insidious this contract is.

Now more than ever we must unite and wrangle away the power that the elected officials have. Elections are fast approaching; nominations will be at next union meetings. Keep in mind, the chairmen got to go back to driving, so they can get a feel of the “greatest” contract they negotiated for us. We must place people into office that are willing to buck the trend. As for the elected officials that currently are running our union, let them work under the harsh-est work rules this company has ever imposed on a workforce in any contract.

We, as united sisters and brothers can start to take back this union and find the right path back. We need a plan: that starts with the general chairman being ousted, that begins to deal with the aftermath of these stringent work rules, that gives every union member the know-ledge to protect themselves from the unwarranted attacks of the MTA, that gives us more details of everything that might affect anyone of the membership, where we bring what occurs at union meetings to all the members of every local. I am sure there are more suggestions you sisters and brothers can think of. Together strong we can be the Strongest and most Effective union ever!

Thank you for your letter. We workers are slaves. Slaves do not need a union; we need an organization that fights to end the master-slave relationship. This organization is the International Communist Workers’ Party.

Taking the same road with a different person in charge won’t change the nature of the system. A slave/worker who gets better treatment is still a slave/worker. A contract is just a “piece of paper” that can be broken at any time.

The capitalist masters still have the power. If we unite as the slaves we are, we can make a real change, without contracts and union leaders. We don’t accept being worked as slaves because we should be in charge of our lives, and not others.

We should not fight for temporary solutions. It’s better to fight for communism where we, free men and women workers, will make and implement all decisions on all levels of society. Join us!

FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!

International Communist Workers Party

Letters to Red Flag

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	FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!
	International Communist Workers Party


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