FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!
	International Communist Workers Party
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Talking to Shipyard Workers

For the past three years Red Flag has been distributed regularly at NASSCO, a shipyard in San Diego that builds ships for the US Navy. The paper has a steady readership, running about 70 copies per issue. Workers at the main gate are usually in a hurry to get the trolley or a vanpool, so when conversations happen, they are very short. Here are a few recent comments from workers.

“I love this paper!”
A young worker said this today. He also said that many workers in the yard don’t understand what communism means. I agreed and said that a lot of people think it is something terrible, like fascism. “Maybe they were made to think that way,” he said, and I agreed again.

“What is the short difference between communism and socialism?” This question came from an older worker who has been reading the paper for a while. I did my best to explain this briefly, that socialism has wages and inequality, and always creates a new class of bosses. Under communism, we will all work and share the results, without bosses.
 Afterwards, I realized that I had left out very important stuff, like communism doesn’t use money. Maybe next time we can go into that.

“I am a Christian”
I had a brief discussion with the worker who said this. I said that we aren’t religious, but Christian or not, we all want our children to live in a world without huge wars, economic crises, racism, and the other miseries capitalism has to offer. He said he would think that over.

“You are the last soldier”
The worker who said this meant that the communist movement is over and done with. Our experience is the opposite. Many workers are joining ICWP because they hate capitalism and see that we have figured out the main error of the old movement that fought for socialism. We respect and learn from the struggles of the old movement, but new “soldiers” are joining up to fight directly for communism, which is a really new idea that corrects the mistakes of the past.
ICWP thinks that industrial workers are the key to a communist future for the working class, and we hope that shipyard workers will tell us more about what they think and what they would like to see in Red Flag.

--A Comrade

The "Homeland"

In my first year of school, the first thing I learned was the national anthem and the flag salute. From then on, I was learning what my teacher told me, about how to be a good patriot.
When I was seventeen years old I entered a military academy. There they crammed my head with more nationalism, so that in case of going to war (World War II) it showed how a good
patriot knows to defend his country and democracy. I got so excited that I went to the appropriate office to present myself as a volunteer to go to the war to defend my country. I didn’t go, but they took note of my good sentiments.
But if I had gone and gotten killed, it would have served me right, because what was I doing defending a country that I never had or would have? I say this because, to mention a lfew things, sometimes I had to go to other cities in search of a job, where more than once I was arrested on the charges of not being from the city and going around loitering. They didn’t arrest only me under these charges. There were also many more workers jailed in these conditions. The police did this to have workers to sweep the streets, the plaza, the parks, etc. We had to look for food in the street in waste bins.
These things and much more, happened in the country that I considered my country, my nation. After that, I left for the country to the north, the United States, where it did not go better for me. They arrested me some 15 times for wanting to form the Farmworkers’ Union.
Kart Marx was right when he said that we workers have no nation. But what is the nation? The nation is the land. But, how much land do the workers own? None. The nation is the space, but we workers don’t have even a kite to throw in the air to fly and use the space. The nation is the sea, but we workers don’t have a plank of wood to use to throw ourselves on to go in the water. The resources lying in the subsoil are also the nation but we workers don’t have even a free gallon of gasoline. So, what nation do workers have under capitalism? None.
The “homeland” of the workers will be the whole world, a communist world. It will be a world without borders, nations, or classes. Currently the world is the property of the capitalists-imperialists. And they do what they want with it. They divide countries and workers. They have North Korea and South Korea; Sudan and South Sudan; Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, some feeling more important than others, etc.
For my part, since I’m not from here or there, I am a member of the International Communist Workers’ Party. I am an internationalist.

--Farmworker without a country

What is a Communist Strike?

Red Flag (v. 5 #15) highlights the west African nurses’ strike in September demanding more help and basic protective gear to fight Ebola. These were reform demands and not an attack on the system, but these reforms would help save lives of our class brothers and sisters. Our Seattle comrades were inspired by the nurses’ strike to discuss how communism will solve the health problems created by capitalism-imperialism. More of us are doing this now.
However, I think the article muddied the waters when it talked about the strike having “political overtones.” It showed me that we need to be clearer about what we mean by a “political strike.”
“Public” workers, like the nurses at these hospitals, have a government agency for a boss. So the nurses blamed (and struck against) the government. It wasn’t called as a strike against capitalism or for communism. But was it “political”?
Every class struggle, everything in our lives, is political in that it is shaped by capitalism. We should expose the role of the capitalist state in every situation, and open a discussion of how communism can transform it. We must make the hidden politics open, or overt.
Whenever workers join a struggle, it’s from a political perspective, even if not a conscious one. A lifetime of capitalist education trains us in reformism. Often that takes the form of demands, but not always. The essence of reformism is the illusion (or lie) that capitalism can or should, satisfy the needs and aspirations of the masses.
There have been many overtly political reformist strikes, some led by communists. Those strikes didn’t help to mobilize the masses for communism.
As more of us develop a communist perspective, we will lead communist class struggle up to and including armed insurrection to destroy capitalism. Then we will lead the class struggle to build a communist society.
Communist class struggle starts with ideological debate in conversations, meetings, and in this paper. But is there more that we can do today to expand communist class struggle, especially in industry and the military? What do we mean by a “political strike to mobilize for communism”?
The Seattle article asked us to “imagine if [the nurses] made their strike an overt political strike to build for communist health care.” But it didn’t give readers leadership on what to do in such situations, or how to prepare for them.
Certainly everyone should help get this paper to people from west Africa who could send it to friends or relatives. Circulating Red Flag in west Africa would create the material basis for imagining a communist strike there. And let’s be clearer that we can’t “build for communist health care” apart from mobilizing for communist revolution and communist society.
The work in Seattle is showing how to strengthen our industrial and other concentrations by sharply raising issues that aren’t limited to our co-workers’ daily lives. Let’s do this more, and better.

--A Comrade

Voting & Boycotting or Class Struggle?

LOS ANGELES, October 28--Municipal and county workers and members of community organizations protesting cuts in government services and workers’ pay gladly took copies of Red Flag. Under capitalism, the banks always come first! Communism will do away with money and banks!

A letter in Red Flag, Vol. 5 #17 talked about a transit union contract where many workers did not vote.
The writer compared it to the last Boeing contract that barely passed, but it was not because the workers chose to boycott it. Boeing and the IAM negotiated secretly, then chose to call for a vote while the workers were on Christmas break. They knew that many
Boeing workers and their families leave town for the holidays and would be unable to make it back in time to vote.
This was a particularly nasty trick to pull, but this is what these capitalists will do to save their system. There is no fairness, no justice, no guilt. There is no democratic process when the ruling class controls the unions, the courts, the media, the police, and the military.
Voting is one way the bosses lie to workers and distract us from the real issues. Boycotting is equally bad. Liberals love to boycott. It is passive and discourages us from fighting back.
As communists we need to be out in the streets if there is a demonstration; and at the plant gates if there is a walkout or strike Vote. We must engage the workers, students and soldiers in discussions about the need to destroy capitalism and fight for workers power with communist revolution.

--Red in Seattle

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