September 15 – Twenty comrades from four cities crowded into a small living room in Los Angeles, USA. Nine circled a laptop in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. Six arranged themselves around a cell phone in San Salvador, El Salvador. With the help of social media, after a few anxious minutes, we were all part of an exciting tri-lingual discussion about using Red Flag to organize for communism.
The South African comrades reported on their limited progress in establishing networks of Red Flag readers inside factories. But most of the comrades are not permanent workers. They are casual (temporary). So are the people they’re trying to recruit.
They struggled to make their work more consistent. Now they meet with new readers from the factories in their homes. In this way, they recently recruited three comrades who work at another plant. They struggle with these new members to become more active and recruit others from their workplaces and neighborhoods.
V, on the line in El Salvador, had a similar story. She had to leave the factory that is the main party concentration. Her comrades lost touch for a while. “We didn’t try hard enough to find her at home,” a party leader admitted.
Then V contacted them. She wondered if it was okay to organize for the party in her neighborhood and her new factory? Yes! Of course!
“Can you say more about how you expanded party work from three to four factories?” M, a South African comrade, asked P, another worker-leader in El Salvador.
“Instead of giving one copy of Red Flag to each party member in the factory where we are most established, we started giving everyone two copies,” P explained. “They had to find someone else to take one. We doubled the distribution. One comrade worked very hard to get a neighbor interested in the paper. That was our first contact in the new factory.”
“Every member reads the paper together in the club and sees the important role that the paper plays,” P added. The South African comrades made a similar point. P was very interested in how so many of the South African comrades (ten or more) have become regular writers for Red Flag.
Their report explained that what made this possible was a change of approach. “Writing can be intimidating but now we are doing it as a group. That makes it easier. It has helped sharpen the struggle and given confidence to comrades who lacked understanding of the line.”
Comrade L in South Africa told about an article he had written about education. He brought it to the collective and said they should take out anything that was not useful. They took out almost everything. “I had written it like it was for a capitalist paper,” he admitted. “The solutions I proposed were capitalist solutions.”
Comrades gave him the Party pamphlet on education and he read it. Then he understood better what the communist solutions are and rewrote his article.
Comrade P still thought writing was very hard. He apologized for the collective not contributing regularly to the paper as they had promised to do at an earlier meeting.
Comrade A in Los Angeles reminded him that it had been hard to start the party in the factory, but he had helped to do that. As a leader, he was responsible for trying to do hard tasks. He seemed to appreciate the struggle.
A comrade from the editorial collective in Los Angeles wrapped up the discussion. She said that how we do the work of Red Flag builds on, and builds up, the relationships among Party comrades and collectives. We should always think about how to do this in a constructive, collective and comradely way – especially when we struggle to advance the line and the work of the party.
Our three-way meeting – conducted in Spanish, English and Xhosa – showed us all how this can be done.
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