Letters, Vol 10, No 17

LETTERS, CRITICISM AND SUGGESTIONS

South Africa: Learning from Theory and Practice How to Build Communist Collectives 

In December we had a conference that was a three-way call with Mexico, and El Salvador and us. It was eye opening; we learned a lot which will help us with organizing on our side.

We talked about how the comrades use dialectical materialism to advance their work. This advances the party line and our practice. It’s not dogma—it helps our practice. The level of consistency and the way they do their work in El Salvador helps with some of the problems and challenges we face as a collective here. We do the work, we have to be more consistent if we want to see change.

We talked about our plans for the New Year. We are celebrating ten years of existence as the International Communist Workers’ Party. Based on the potential we see, we can do better. The conference helped us see how to utilize our potential to the fullest to build the organization.

We have made plans on how to grow the collective and to create other collectives We explained that for us to see more results in Marikana, we need to visit there frequently so that those comrades can be familiar with the line and the practice. Going there once every two or three months will help that collective be functioning and active. By consistently struggling with the comrades on that side, we will see change.

A comrade in the conference made an example about cooking. You can’t put the meat on the stove and then remove it and then put it on again, or switch the stove on and off and on and off. The food won’t be cooked. You need a consistent amount of heat so the food can be cooked.

To see change, we must be consistent in Marikana and also in Port Elizabeth. We also made some concrete plans to expand the active collective in our area in PE and to create a new collective in another area here. We had a collective in that area but it became inactive. We kept communist relations with them even though they were not active. Now they agree to help us rebuild the collective.

So by May Day we will have a functioning collective there that will help organize May Day and help with the communist school after that.

—Comrades in South Africa

ICWP International Conferences and Celebrations:

LOS ANGELES (USA) January 2020

PORT ELIZABETH (SOUTH AFRICA) MAY 2020

Proud to be a Member of ICWP

Greetings comrades, members and readers of Red Flag. We are celebrating 10 years of the International Communist Workers’ Party (ICWP), which is why I want to share the way I met the ICWP, of which I am now a member.

One day of a lot of work in the factory, as I was leaving work, comrades were handing out the Red Flag newspaper and they handed me one.

Afterwards, a co-worker introduced the ICWP comrades to me and they invited me to meet with them. After that I started reading the newspaper and what I did not understand, I underlined, to ask a co-worker at the factory later. He explained to me what the Party line was about. Thus began my participation.

Then I began going to the meetings to understand better the purpose to the Party. I went to these meetings several times.

But then I stopped attending because I was a member of a union, and they questioned me about why I was meeting with the ICWP. Some time passed and the comrades from the factory always invited me to their activities.

One day I thought about it very carefully and made the decision not to fight for small reforms any longer and to join the ICWP again. I appreciated that the Party fights for the entire working class and not just for its members, as the unions do, and fights directly for Communism.

And since then we have been fighting for Communism and we will continue to recruit more women and men workers every day to defeat capitalism and build Communism.

Greetings to all, I invite you to keep fighting.

—A Comrade in El Salvador.

Baghdad Tahrir Square Protest, October 2019

Trump’s Impeachment And US Foreign Policy

Impeachment was on the agenda when the US Congress re-convened on January 6. An image of a front-page 1998 NY Times headline circulated on social media: “Impeachment Vote in House Delayed as Clinton Launches Iraq Air Strike, Citing Military Need to Move Swiftly.” Some alleged that Trump ordered the murder of Soleimani to distract attention from his own misdeeds.

That’s possible. The Democratic Party’s impeachment charges emphasize Trump’s lack of patriotism. Their essence is that he betrayed the “national interest” for his partisan advantage. Maybe Trump did order the assassination to make it harder for his opponents to call him unpatriotic. Certainly, he and his allies are consolidating their fascist base around patriotism, racism and Islamophobia.

But it may very well turn out that Trump is more isolated within the US ruling class. One example is his former Secretary of Defense John Bolton, an Iran “hawk.” Bolton, who was reluctant to testify in the impeachment inquiry, has now said he will testify.

Another is Republican Senator (and 2012 presidential nominee) Mitt Romney. He is now urging the Senate to hear Bolton and others. That means a real trial in the Senate instead of the sham acquittal that Senate Majority Leader McConnell has promised.

US imperialism has no clear path to regaining the chokehold it once held over Persian Gulf oil, or even maintaining its current influence. For this reason – as well as ideological differences – there will continue to be major disagreements over Mideast policy among the capitalists who rule the USA. At this point, however, most of them seem angry that Trump is not carrying out a consistent (much less effective) imperialist policy regarding Iran.

The US ruling class agrees in general that the United States must shift its focus to China while not abandoning the Middle East. They approved that Obama sent US troops back to Iraq in 2014 and supported his initiative on the Iran nuclear deal. They agreed that in order to pivot to Asia, the US needed allies to help guarantee the oil and strategic value of the region.

The US had been gradually becoming more isolated. Trump accelerated this process, thumbing his nose at key European allies. He surrounded himself with Christian-Zionist advisors who are Iran “hawks” and dismantled the Iran nuclear deal.

At the same time, Trump has also seemed reluctant to respond to Iranian provocation, like when Iran targeted Saudi oil refineries in September. So the killing of Soleimani does appear impulsive. The NYTimes described it as “outside of any coherent policy context, and without adequate contemplation of near- or long-term strategic consequences.”

This reckless incompetence has impelled important forces in the US ruling class to push for Trump’s impeachment.

It is not in the interest of workers anywhere to take sides in the rulers’ quarrels. We must not champion more effective war-makers. It is in our interest to expose them all as imperialist butchers and to fight for the revolutionary victory of our own class.

—Comrade in Los Angeles (USA)

French General Strike Shows Workers’ Potential

The French ‘general’ strike is in its fifth week and showing no signs of stopping. It’s not really “general” since most French workers are still working. The train drivers and crew are on strike (trains are important in Europe) and the Paris subway workers as well.

The transportation workers and others are striking against the government’s pension ‘reforms’ which will sharply reduce many workers’ pensions and push back the retirement age by two years.

The strike has not put much pressure on the government. Its train company (the SNCF) has lost hundreds of millions but that’s small change compared to how much the pension cuts will save. The other major effect is huge inconvenience for commuters and travelers because of cancelled trains and closed subway lines. But the government doesn’t care about this.

The outlook for the strike is not good but, as with all reform struggles, even if they win, they lose. The best they can do is restore the status quo ante (“back to square one”). What workers really need is a revolution to get rid of capitalism.

All over the world it’s the same story. Workers rebel against the bosses’ increasingly vicious attacks and they’re maneuvered into defensive single-issue reform campaigns. Repealing a subway fare increase in Chile, repealing a gas price increase in Ecuador, repealing a WhatsApp tax in Lebanon, and so on.

Many workers want to break out of this reformist dead end but don’t know how. The reformist forces can take the leadership because the revolutionary forces are, for the most part, unorganized. Lenin and the Bolsheviks recognized this problem more than a century ago and created the party to solve it.

The parties of the movement founded by the Bolsheviks eventually degenerated into reformism, especially after the mid-1930s. They became conventional bourgeois parties run by cliques. The official French Communist Party still exists but what little influence it has it devotes to reformism.

The International Communist Workers’ Party has revived and revised the Bolshevik form of party. Workers, get off the reformist merry-go-round and join us. Use your energy and rebellious spirit to put an end to capitalism forever.

—Internationalist Comrade

Gas Price Protest, Iran, November 2019

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