From Factories to Jails here Capitalism Can’t Meet Masses’ Needs here (WEB ONLY)
Letter: From Factories to Jails: “The Pitcher Will Eventually Break”
I have concluded that here we are just a few days away from starting eleven-hour workdays for four days a week. We know what that means for the lives of all workers: more wage slavery and oppression in the factories. However, due to our household needs and responsibilities, we have to work those hours just to survive in this inhumane system. A system that forces us to work longer hours for the same wage, and as always, it is the workers who bear the brunt of it.
Over the past several years, thousands of workers have been imprisoned through no fault of their own, simply to meet the monthly quotas set for police and soldiers to arrest people. In this country, people are afraid to speak out or protest, as they may be accused of vandalism or terrorism. This oppression by the capitalist system must be fought by the working class, by organizing ourselves into the International Communist Workers’ Party
Property owners set fire to markets by causing electrical short circuits, leaving many people without their commercial spaces. They intend to remodel them and rent the premises to business owners with government backing. To prevent the informal vendors who emerged from those burned-down markets from working, the police confiscate their goods, beat them, and arrest them under the state of emergency. They deny them even the rights afforded by capitalist laws.
Business owners saved on labor costs by putting prisoners to work. And now they want to avoid paying bonuses by extending the workday to 11 hours.
Everything is going so well for them that they’ve forgotten the saying: “You can carry the pitcher to the river so many times, but eventually it will break.” And that will happen when the people wake up and find the courage to protest against this system, no matter what it takes. Just as in past movements and actions by the working class that say, “enough is enough.”
An example of this is the struggle being waged by our comrades in Spain, France, Italy, and other countries. But the most important thing in all of this is organizing for communism.
No reform will be enough, no matter how much hope they may offer. The only alternative is the communist system.
—Factory worker in El Salvador
Letter: Capitalism can’t meet masses’ needs—Communism Will!
We need real Communism without bosses, exploitation or borders.
Masses of youth and workers are showing they are fed up with the attacks of capitalism and fascism. The working class is the vast majority. Masses are acting with solidarity, courage, and collectivity in the face of the rulers’ attacks.
We are capable of much more! Of getting rid of capitalism and running society to meet our needs, without capitalist bosses. Industrial workers, working-class soldiers and youth are key to ending capitalism and building communism.
Official unemployment among youth in France stands at 20.6% Using more machines, including AI, has meant layoffs. Competition with China, where wages are even lower, also adds to soaring unemployment. To pay bank loans and to wage war, capitalists are cutting workers’ benefits. The French government is planning to send troops to Ukraine.
These rebellions are the product of capitalism and imperialism in crisis and preparing for wider war.
Capitalism is based on exploitation of workers for profit. Workers create everything of value. The capitalists steal most of that value as profit and pay us barely subsistence wages. Capitalists always pay workers less than the value they produced. Wages conceal this fundamental relationship of exploitation with the lie that we are being paid for our work.
Capitalism is wage slavery and deadly competition among the capitalists-imperialists for maximum profit. The imperialists today are building their armies for wider war to get working class soldiers to fight for the capitalists’ profits and empires.
This capitalist system only works for the capitalist blood suckers. In this period of crisis, capitalism is only capable of death and destruction. To fight for our future, the masses everywhere—from France, Spain, Italy to Albania to Argentina, India, El Salvador to USA and beyond—need to fight for communist revolution. To defeat capitalism and build a system where we collectively plan and produce only to meet the needs of the international working class, not for the profits of any capitalist or imperialist.
The imperialists are heading towards a full World War III over which of them will become the world’s number one exploiter. They don’t care how many of us they kill for their empires! We can and must unite across borders and continents to end their deadly system before they murder more millions of our class. Only communist workers’ power will end imperialist wars by ending the capitalist system that inevitably produces them.
Let’s not fight for failed socialism as the revolutions in Russia and China did. By keeping the wage system, money and the market for buying and selling, socialism was state capitalism. It has led to Russia and China becoming leading capitalist-imperialist exploiters today competing with the US and EU.
ICWP fights directly for communism where education and all work will be solely to meet the needs of the masses, not for profits or to justify and train the masses for wage slavery and imperialist war.
The International Communist Workers’ Party is fighting to become a mass party among workers, youth, and soldiers everywhere. The working class needs thousands, millions of communist leaders. Join us. Read, write for and spread Red Flag. Organize collectives of ICWP.
—A Comrade
Learn more about communist political economy here
Read a short introduction to Marx’s Capital here
Please send your letters, responses, and suggestions to: contact@icwpredflag.org