LETTERS, CRITICISM AND SUGGESTIONS
Social Connections Save Lives
Recently I came across a startling statement.
āResearchers in the UK have found that the period of the 20th century during which the most significant increases in life expectancy occurred in the UK was, paradoxically, the years of the Second World War.ā
Amazing! The writer, Vincente Navarro, goes on to explain:
āThe most important factor was the reduction of social distances that occurred as a result of people of all classes committing themselves to the same project (the war to defeat Nazism. Those who lived during that period will tell you that never before had people felt so much camaraderie toward one another.ā
In other words, it isnāt what the self-help books claim. It isnāt diet, genes, exercise regimens, or lack of stress (1/3 of British homes were bombed out of existence) that are the major factors in increasing life expectancy: it is āsocial cohesionā or mass political commitment.
Isnāt building these webs of āsocial cohesionā ā lessening the social distances among our co-workers, friends and family ā the first step in mobilizing the masses for communism?
āComrade Nose-in-a-book
Organizing Party Collectives around Red Flag
Our party cell has four membersātwo teachers and two young adults who were recruited when they were in high school.
We organize the work of our collective around Red Flag. When the paper comes out, we do our best to make sure that each member of the collective has it within 2 or 3 days. Then each comrade takes the responsibility to look the paper over, read key articles, and distribute the paper. Some of us participate in regular mass distribution of the paper at a high school and to transit and garment workers. Sometimes there are big events at which we distribute the paper. This is uneven because different comrades have different family and job situations. But during the teachersā strike in January, one or more of us was on the picket line every day with the paper. We all distribute some papers hand-to-hand to people in our political base: friends, relatives and/or co-workers.
The next week we meet as a group in the home of a comrade. There we talk about our political work, including the discussions we have had with our friends and co-workers while we were giving them the paper, our experiences in mass mobilizations, our plans for follow-up with people in our political base.
As a result of this, we talk about what we need to see in the next paper, and oftenābut maybe not often enoughādiscuss what we will be writing for the next issue.
Red Flag is our guide in mobilizing the masses for communism. Meeting regularly, every three weeks, to evaluate our work and plan the next steps, has helped us build stronger communist relations and expand our political base. We offer this as a suggestion to other party collectives as one way to structure the work of the party around Red Flag. We would also be very interested in reading the reports of other party cells about how they organize the life of the party.
āAn ICWP cell in Los Angeles
Communism: State and Revolution
Comrades in Mexico City and South Africa wrote about conversations theyāve had about Leninās themes in The State and Revolution. Letās all discuss these reports.
As the Mexico comrades wrote, the State exists mainly because of class struggle. This class struggle cannot be resolved peacefully.
The key elements of the state, as the South Africa comrades mentioned, are the judiciary, the legislature, the executive (including the government bureaucracy), the army and the police. We would add the schooling system.
Through these State institutions, the capitalists rule over the working class and exploit us. Communist revolution must destroy or dismantle these institutions ā not take them over.
When classes are gone, the State will disappear.
Our view of the āstate and revolutionā today is both like and different from Leninās in important ways. This is deeply connected to our line of fighting directly for communism.
In contrast, Lenin (like Marx and Engels) thought that a āsocialist stageā was needed and therefore a socialist state. That state would own and control the means of production. The intention was to benefit and empower the working masses.
This was impossible, in spite of important reforms. Socialism maintained a wage system and other key elements of capitalism. It turned out to be state capitalism.
It wasnāt the existence of a āgovernmentā that led to the rise of another class that ruled over the working class. It was Socialism. The communist party turned itself into a new bourgeoisie. We plan to avoid that by mobilizing directly for communist social relations of production and distribution.
The socialist state also carried out the violent class struggle to suppress internal and external class enemies. As a comrade in Mexico said, we will have to defend what the revolution has achieved.
Part of that is defending liberated communist zones from capitalist-imperialist armies that try to conquer us. The young Soviet Union and its Red Army fought off invading armies from sixteen countries in 1918-25. We will have to mobilize masses to do the same.
And then there will likely be remnants of fascist groups. They may become even more vicious as the bosses try desperately to prop up their decaying racist system. The communist state will have to mobilize masses to re-educate (where possible) or to destroy them.
But communist society ā unlike socialism ā will not continue to create contradictions between the party and the masses of producers. Instead, a mass communist party, constantly growing, will organize even broader masses to carry out all the functions of workersā state power.
Engels wrote that eventually āthe government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and the direction of the processes of production.ā We think this will happen more quickly than he or Lenin expected.
A society organized on communist principles will abolish classes and erase borders as it grows. As Engels said, āThe state is not abolished. It withers away.ā
Who will administer things and direct the processes of production, especially its social relations? A mass communist party. That is our political program, not a dream of a far-off future.
āLA Comrade
Need More Letters on Dialectical Materialism
The last issue of Red Flag (Vol 10, No 2) included two letters about dialectical materialism. I hope that readers who missed them will take another look.
One letter described MTA workersā discussions of communist philosophy. They discussed some ways that dialectical materialism is important for recruiting and organizing the struggle for communism.
The letter also pointed out that the ICWP study materials donāt have a clear and detailed explanation of some basic points, like the opposition between the materialist and idealist outlooks. We have to be sure the next version of our pamphlet fixes this.
The other letter is about helping people succeed in becoming and staying sober for the long term. This is often a difficult struggle where people have to learn new ways of coping. Dealing with a relapse, for example, does not have mean starting over from zero.
A negation of sobriety (a relapse) can itself be negated by negating the relapse. It is a law of dialectics, however, that negating a negation does not take you back to the beginning, but advances to a new stage of a process.
Letters like these are very important for moving forward the collective study of communist philosophy in our movement. I hope that more Red Flag readers will write more about this. Stories about discussions or about cases where dialectics has been helpful, as well as questions or objections, can help others learn and improve our work.
āa comrade
Thereās No Escape from CapitalismĀ
In the last few months there is another crisis that has gone largely ignored by the main stream media in Zimbabwe where literally millions of workers cannot afford basic needs. Teachers and doctors have not been paid for months. Hundreds of thousands of workers are leaving Zimbabwe for neighboring countries. A few weeks back, street protests were brutally suppressed by the regime.
Of course ICWP said from the start after the coup in Zimbabwe that anything short of communism will not benefit the working class
As these workers flee these horrors of capitalism, they are forced to confront other horrors in these countries. In South Africa immigrant workers are subjected to exploitation and xenophobia.
No matter where you go, there is no escape from capitalism. Itās all over the world. The only solution is for workers of the world to reject the bossesā lies that we are more different than we are similar and to build a mass party that will give leadership to the international working class.
āA Comrade from Zimbabwe living in South Africa
Getting More Comrades Involved Gives Better Results
A landscape worker dropped by my house on Sunday. I gave her a copy of the new migration pamphlet, āFight for the Day When No Worker Will Be Called Foreigner.ā
āThereās not a lot of words on each page,ā she observed. āItās not too intimidating.ā
I gave her a cup of tea and she read the pamphlet cover-to-cover in one sitting. Then she took some extras for her high-school aged children.
It seems to me this is the kind of design we are looking for. Lots of my friends at work had similar reactions.
āThis is great,ā said a Boeing friend. He was thinking of the high school students he coaches in his free time. āI said great, not good!ā
Then he gave me some money to defray the cost of production.
Part of the reason the design turned out well was that the design effort was led by a younger comrade with lots of fresh ideas. Not all the ideas worked out, but, in the end, the project was an advance. The young comrade showed great maturity, making edit after edit without complaint.
The design process was complicated by it being an international effort. This led to some typos and omissions, which was to be expected as we moved forward with this new collective.
A collateral advantage was that the new design process freed up the time of those who usually lay out these things. More base building!
Unlike the capitalists, we donāt rely on experts. We want friends and comrades all around the world involved in every aspect of producing literature. It will create more communists.
Ultimately, organizing like this will provide backup to insure the publication of our paper and literature under any and all circumstances.
Most, if not all comrades agree with thisāat least, in theory. But to turn this into reality, we need much more practice. This means more mistakes, but the lessons we learn along the way are essential.
āOlder Seattle Comrade
FIGHT FOR THE DAY WHEN NO WORKER WILL BE CALLED FOREIGNER
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