Letters, Vol 10, No 7

LETTERS, CRITICISM AND SUGGESTIONS

More About Danger of War in Persian Gulf

There is a big dispute within the US ruling class about where to go to war against China and Russia.

One sector wants to face them in the Middle East. They are provoking Iran, hoping its rulers will overreact and give them an excuse to wage war to retake control of the whole region. This would force the Chinese and Russian imperialists to intervene or see the US use the huge oil reserves there to collapse the Russian economy and deny China the oil for its industries and military machine.

The other sector wants to face them in Asia- Pacific. Their thinking is that in the Middle East the US is isolated and has no military allies, except Israel and Saudi Arabia. In the South China Sea, they think they could form a more formidable alliance with Japan, India, the Philippines, Indonesia, Australia and Vietnam.

These sectors are also divided over when to go to war. One sector wants to do it before the Chinese become too militarily powerful. The other sector agrees but wants more time to win the US working class to willingly fight and die for US imperialism.

The world’s imperialist butchers – like Trump in the US, Modi in India, Le Pen in France, Salvini in Italy, Bolsonaro in Brazil and others – are struggling hard to win their working classes’ allegiance for war. They are having some success building fascism. This makes our struggle to win those masses to communism even more urgent.

Mobilizing billions of workers and soldiers for war, if they are not won ideologically, could be very dangerous for the capitalists-imperialists. When this happened in World War I, the suffering and horrors imposed by the war quickly radicalized masses of soldiers and workers. In Russia – where a communist party existed that was dedicated to making revolution and with a base in the military – these masses of workers and soldiers were won relatively quickly to overthrow capitalism.

This did not happen in other imperialist armies and countries because there were no similar communist parties. The other parties supported their ruling classes in the war.

Let’s struggle hard to win the allegiance of the working masses to communism! Let the rulers of the world tremble at this scenario! This time we will bury them forever with workers’ communist power!

—Los Angeles comrades

One International Party: What We Do Counts

Sometimes it may seem that what we do doesn’t count, but it does. Maybe one comrade in the US donates $1 or $2 to the organization. Maybe that $1 helps to produce Red Flag in South Africa and in turn it helps us recruit new members. That may seem insignificant but it is really important. It helps our work.

Our May Day Dinner would never have been possible without the support of the whole international collective. We had to transport people to the event. So, the contribution from other Party comrades played a significant role in our recruitment and advances.

It is important to point out the inter-connectiveness. We are not an island. In order for us to grow, we need the whole party. As individuals we can’t do anything. The contributions of the international organization led to the event. Inter-connectiveness led to the collectivity of the event.

Please keep the donations coming!

—Comrades in South Africa

New Comrade Encourages Everyone to Join ICWP

The first time I went to an ICWP meeting was when I was invited by a friend. I asked him what it was about. He said, “It is a meeting, we will be talking about communism.” He had already given me the Red Flag and I knew just a little bit about ICWP.

When we got there, I had questions on how communism would work, given that we will not use money. The comrades were clear in their response that there are no definite rules written in stone about how communism will work. However, we do have guiding principles that we will mobilize the masses to produce for the needs of the working class as whole.   We will organize ourselves to the best of our abilities and sharing the fruits of production instead of selling them.

The comrades talked at length, too, about the horrors of capitalism and how the system of exploitation doesn’t have color.   It affects workers regardless of their race, gender and nationality. They talked about the urgency to fight against it.

The comrades at the meeting asked me to join ICWP.   I agreed to join, not because I thought everything they were saying was perfect. But I saw, and they made clear, the urgency with which we as the working class need to mobilize ourselves in order to fight capitalism. If we don’t, nothing will change, and we will continue to suffer great sufferings.

I must say it has been a pleasure being a member of ICWP. I’ve learned a lot from mobilizing workers, students and from each other. Since I joined, we have grown as a collective and also as individuals.  We have made mistakes and learned from them.

I encourage everyone to join ICWP and fight to end this terrible system.

—Comrade in South Africa

Racism, Class Oppression & Police Murder

It’s important to discuss how we analyze the data about police murders in the US. It’s even more important to use these numbers to help us build the communist movement that the working class needs to get rid of this murderous system.

The letter in the previous issue criticizing the article “Communist Movement Needed to Fight Fascist Police Murders,” highlighted a weakness in the presentation of the argument.

An earlier article, “Racism is the cutting edge as Epidemic of Police Murder…Aimed at Cheapening the Life of the Working Class” Volume 6, #23, did a better job of explaining how an intense attack on one section affects the lives of all workers. In that article we argued among other things that “Economic status is one of the best indicators about what class a person belongs to…Our ‘hunch’ is that 99% of the victims (no matter their racial or ethnic identity) were from families earning around or less than $80,000 a year.”

The data from the Washington Post that we looked at backed up our “hunch.” It looked at “police killing zones”—cities, towns and rural counties where the police kill civilians. About one fourth of Americans live in these zones, which taken together have a lower median household income and a higher poverty rate than the country as a whole. However, in our attempt to simplify the research we made an important error. We claimed all the murders take place in neighborhoods with a median household income (mhi) of $52,218. We should have said that $52,218 was the mhi of all the neighborhoods where the murders are committed.

The main point of the article, however, still stands. The police in 2017 killed 987 people. Racism means that black and Hispanic men are killed at a higher rate than their percentage of the population.

These are the data that the ruling-class media concentrate on. What they cover up is the class aspect. Class oppression and residential segregation means that most of the white victims (292 of them) lived in lower-income working-class rural counties. Most of the black victims (149 of them) lived in lower-income working-class city neighborhoods. The Hispanic victims lived in both rural and urban lower-income working-class communities.

As we pointed out in the original article, its workers that the cops are murdering—and while racism means that more black and Hispanic men are killed by the cops, working-class white men in rural counties around the US are also being killed at a shocking rate.

Understanding how capitalism works can help us build the class consciousness which is necessary to avoid reformist traps and to build a revolutionary movement to win the communist world we all need.

–Comrades in California, US

Ports Closed to War Ports Open to Migrants

Genoa, Italy, May 20—Italian dock workers walked off the job to prevent the loading of a deadly cargo of weapons onto the Saudi ship Bahri Yanbu.

They said they refused to be complicit in sending military equipment for use in the murderous war on Yemen.

They aren’t alone. Activists in Le Havre, France, and Santander, Spain, had previously blocked the Bahri Yanbu from taking on weapons.

The Saudi-led war on Yemen has caused at least 50,000 deaths since March, 2016, and pushed the country to the brink of the worst global famine in a century. Despite allegations of war crimes, Saudi Arabia continues to be supported militarily by Britain, France, and the United States.

Port workers in Genoa have a long history of solidarity. They were the first to block U.S. ships headed to Vietnam, and refused to allow war equipment to disembark for the 1973 Chile coup. They went out on strike in 2003 in refusal to load arms for the US invasion of Iraq.

But the action in Genoa was only a temporary victory. The arms were sent to the Italian military port of La Spezia, 100 kilometers east, where they were loaded by Italian sailors onto the Bahri Yanbu.

This strike shows militant class consciousness and potential—but to end murderous wars like that in Yemen we must organize workers and sailors/soldiers not just to boycott arms shipments, but to get rid of this entire murderous system.

737 MAX Tragedy Shows Need for Communism

Even in casual conversations amongst Boeing workers the topic of the 737 MAX pops up. Over a couple of glasses of beer, a comrade and an inspector discussed who was ultimately responsible for the tragic crashes and the subsequent grounding of the airplane. Even more importantly, how we could end these preventable deaths.

Over the last three months, dozens of experts—pilots, engineers and FAA inspectors—have reported how their warnings were ignored or how flaws in the aircraft design were hidden from them. Whenever an objection was raised, corporate bigwigs overrode them. “Isn’t that always the case,” said the inspector.

The inspector had good reason to feel this way. The company is eliminating 1000 inspector jobs, even as production increases and new, less-experienced workers are hired.

“Now that there is all this news about the 737 MAX, headquarters may delay the plan a little while, but you know they’ll go full steam ahead as soon as this furor dies down,” he gloomily predicted.

The bosses’ media is busy advocating reform of regulatory agencies like the FAA. But we agreed no regulatory agency can rein in the drive for profits.

Capitalist companies must compete in the marketplace. In this case, Corporate promoted the design of a fatally flawed plane to save $10 billion in development costs and to catch up with the best-selling Airbus model.

Could this have been avoided by relying more on a circle of experts? Never! In this system the power remains in the hands of the bosses. If these experts want to keep their jobs, they will always bow to those in power.

The only answer is to put the power in the hands of the working class. To exercise such power, we’ll need a society that eliminates the separation of mental and manual labor. Markets and profits will be replaced by the will of mobilized masses. Only communism can do this.

—A couple of disgusted Boeing workers.

Comrades, not Allies

“When you and I stood shoulder to shoulder against the fascists, Harriet, I was there, not as your ‘[white] ally,’ but as your comrade.”

Harriet and I were in a book club sponsored by the Santa Monica Committee for Racial Justice (CRJ). We’re from the activist generation of the 1960s and 70s. She’s black and I’m white.

We were discussing Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together In The Cafeteria. The author begins by defining racism as a system involving cultural messages and institutional policies and practices as well as the beliefs and actions of individuals that clearly operates to the advantage of whites and to the disadvantage of people of color.

She says that’s her definition, and people should be clear about their own definition.

I said that I got that, it’s her book, but I’d like to pose an alternate Marxist definition.

I said that racist ideology justifies systemic racist super-exploitation and special oppression. Capitalism is based on the exploitation and oppression of the entire working class. Capitalist competition needs the economic competitive edge that racist super-exploitation provides.

However, the political necessity of racism is even more crucial. Because the workers always outnumber the bosses, they need racist terror and special oppression to keep the working class divided.

Capitalism is based on the oppression and exploitation of all workers. That’s why I, as a communist, talk about extra oppression and exploitation of workers of color (as well as women, immigrants, queer and disabled people) rather than some advantage for white (male, citizen, straight/cis and abled) workers.

We talked about that a little. Many of the members of the book club are teachers or doctors, and are not always clear about how they are exploited or oppressed as part of the working class. And the term “white privilege” is the dominant discourse in progressive circles these days.

These folks hate racism and want to change the world. They’re not convinced by what I’ve been saying for almost three years, but people respect me and some of them read Red Flag regularly.

Actions speak louder than words

In July 2017, an organized group of about 30 white supremacists showed up to disrupt the monthly CRJ meeting. A number of people tried to persuade them to go away. Harriet and I guarded the door. The fascists did not get in and the meeting proceeded, although in a very tense atmosphere.

It was that event that I referred to in the book club meeting. Harriet and I agreed that we had been there as comrades. I was not there to back her up—or to defend black people from white supremacists. It wasn’t charity, but solidarity.

I was there because the fight against fascism is my fight—it’s a life or death struggle for the entire working class. And it’s a fight we must win—as comrades.

Comrade in Los Angeles (USA)

Ask Friends What They Think About Red Flag

A couple of days ago I asked a student friend and Red Flag reader to give me his opinion on the recent article COMMUNISM, NOT SOCIALISM, WILL GUARANTEE HEALTH FOR ALL

I wanted to know the opinion of other people outside of my ICWP collective of the articles that are published in each edition of Red Flag. He answered me that same night:

“Well, look, the way I see it, it seems that it is good for all to work for the benefit of all. That seems good to get us to grow as a society with no need for a rate of exchange or a whole monetary system. But I don’t know, maybe I have questions or doubts because I wonder how to change the way people think, the masses?

…Well, because the text talks about abolishing the system of money and everything that concerns money, such as businesses or big companies. But people are used to money, it is a pattern that has been implanted for a long time. How can we remove this idea from our minds? This idea is very entrenched in society, and I do not think it can be changed overnight. Besides, I think the problem is that people accept what there is. They don’t dare to read a little or at least find out about political and government systems and beyond this to think about ways of living. And it is not only to talk about money, but also many other aspects as mentioned in the text, culture, health, education, etc. But if we talk about capitalism, I think that if people accept what is and continue to be a little asleep, this suits them. I don’t know, that’s what comes to mind.”

I thanked him for his contribution to improving the quality of our articles. This can help those of us in the party see what we are not grasping about the message we are conveying about communist revolution and communism. I asked him to see us at the end of the term when we finish our final exams.

—Young Comrade in El Salvador

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