Opening our Doors to Communism
I was completely inspired after attending our forum to celebrate ICWP’s 10th anniversary. And I’m writing to describe how our conference helped me understand how we can genuinely construct a communist society.
I consider myself a veteran comrade, and we always need that extra boost to motivate us to recognize our triumphs and internal contradictions in order to persevere against capitalist ideology.
Since we had visitors from all over the world, I was asked to house a comrade from Europe. I live in a house with three children, my spouse, and numerous pets. My family and I had never met our comrade, and we had to trust the communist relationship that he had built with a member of ICWP who I have known for many years. Frankly, there was a nervousness that sneaked in when agreeing to allow a total stranger to enter our house. In fact, this is the first time that my family has ever done such a thing.
In this nasty capitalist system, we have been trained to always question our safety from fellow workers. Through the media, we are constantly bombarded with all the violence, robberies and murders that exist in our current society. Consequently, we allow these incidents to sink into our psyche, preventing us from establishing genuine relationships with workers. We build this “stranger danger.”
But violence and murder exist now because of capitalism. It is capitalism that sickens the minds of workers to think that they need to hurt someone else in order to acquire monetary gain. This is why we stress that the end of capitalism is also the end of violence for greed.
But we must struggle against these internal contradictions because our comrade from Europe is definitely not a stranger if his relationship has a strong political foundation. Members of ICWP are not strangers no matter what part of the world they are from. In the future, we will have to open our doors to unfamiliar workers with one familiar political goal: communist revolution.
So what does it mean to be a communist, or what does a communist world look like? The answer truly lies in our creative power, but some basic practices include opening our doors in order to strengthen the working class. So I thank ICWP for intensifying a contradiction in my household because it allowed me to solidify my belief that we can truly build a communist world.
—Communist parent
Communists need to be in collectives
I want to talk about what it means to be a communist for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I have observed many examples that show that most of us here tend to lead two different lives. They only become communists when they are doing the work of the Party. They may be distributing the paper or recruiting or in meetings. After that they forget that they are communists.
That mind set creates some problems because that’s where liberal tendencies usually arise. Therefore we behave in a manner that is anti-communist.
There are many examples. We have some old comrades who were in the movement for many years. These are active comrades. They distribute and attend meetings. Others are students. But when they are in school, they forget that they are communists in carrying out the work among other students.
When we decided to join the movement, we made a commitment for life to communism. Our actions, our thoughts and also our words should reflect that, not just at a particular moment. Our constant lives should revolve around communism, around building the party.
Comrades who are in universities, who are supposed to recruit students, are not doing this. We are struggling with them to do this. That’s why I decided to enroll in a course in college so that we can be able to have more success with students, to set an example and give leadership to the students and to encourage other students.
We should be mindful of these liberal thoughts because one of the problems is that when you are in these institutions, you are constantly bombarded by capitalist propaganda. Therefore you need to be inside a collective where we can struggle collectively against capitalist propaganda. The collective is there to help every comrade to overcome these weaknesses.
It’s important for us is to struggle against these things and for the leadership to set an example for the whole collective as to how we should conduct ourselves as communists. To show the level of commitment that is required for us to build the party. We should become an example or a reference point for other comrades.
Thank you, comrades,
—A Comrade in South Africa
Workers and Students Fight to Resolve Internal Contradictions
During our conference in Los Angeles, workers and students both youth and old came together to discuss dialectics. The workshop I attended was the college students and young workers. A stu dent comrade from Mexico talked about the challenges of her political work and inspired us all to overcome obstacles in our own work.
We talked about issues affecting our generation of workers. Many of us have been won to the false narrative that education and hard work will get us out of manual labor. We all recognized the failures of the system. We said that we all have one foot in the door of trying to work hard and gain a decent life for ourselves and our future families and the other in organizing for a communist society. It is here that we got into the meat of our conversation.
One young worker mentioned that he feels isolated because most of our interaction in today’s society is done online. Another comrade spoke of how work and focusing on paying the bills makes him keep his head down and isolates him from communication from others.
One student worker said that he didn’t feel like people would see the certainty in a communist society. I responded that under capitalism there is no certainty either. If you don’t work for your check then you won’t have one and there is no guarantee that your check will cover all your necessities, so where’s the certainty in that? I asked the student worker. He agreed.
An older comrade said that being in the party, building communist social relationships and fighting for a better world was a beautiful life. She said she wanted that for us.
The student from Mexico urged us to remember that just because the meeting ends doesn’t mean we stop being communists.
It was something truly beautiful and out of that discussion came a concrete plan to keep in communication.
People say that there’s a communist dog and a capitalist dog inside you, fighting for dominance. You have to feed the dog that you want to win and we want to feed the part of us that wants communism to prevail.
—Young worker comrade
Southern California, January 19—ICWP takes communist ideas to rally against fascist anti-Muslim measures in India