International Conference Advances Struggle for Communism
LOS ANGELES (USA), January 18—Seventy-five comrades and friends from Mexico, Spain, El Salvador, Canada, Puerto Rico and several US cities met to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the International Communist Workers’ Party. This was not just a one-day event, but an important day in a week-long process that brought comrades together to struggle sharply for communist ideas and practices.
In the industrial workshop, five MTA comrades help to lead the discussion. In another workshop, several young comrades who had been recruited when they were in high school or college but who had recently been inactive recommitted to the party. Plans were made to strengthen the party’s work in a major university. New initiatives were taken to improve the party’s online presence.
The Birth of ICWP
Ten years ago, fifteen people met in a comrade’s backyard and formed the International Communist Workers’ Party. We needed a newspaper right away. The first edition put forward our task: “BUIILD A MASS FIGHTING INTERNATIONAL COMMUNIST PARTY!”
“The deepening world-wide capitalist economic crisis and the world imperialists’ unrelenting drive to wider and more lethal oil wars have hundreds of millions of workers questioning capitalism. Billions of workers unable to live in the old way, will look for radical alternatives.
“Our task is to win millions of workers to embrace communist ideas so that they will fight for, win and build a communist society. It is a monumental historical challenge.
“We have accepted it with responsibility, humility, confidence in our class and great revolutionary optimism.
“We are determined to destroy forever the bosses’ poisonous ideologies of racism, sexism, individualism, patriotism and nationalism. We are determined to fight for a world without borders.
“We are committed to building a communist world without bosses, where nothing will be bought or sold. A world where ‘from each according to his/her commitment, to each according to his/her needs’ will be the universal rule.”
(Read the entire editorial at http://icwpredflag.org/RF2-24-10.pdf)
Mobilize the Masses for Communism
Inspired by the mass uprisings of the Arab Spring, after a year of discussion, we published our manifesto: Mobilize the Masses for Communism. (available at icwpredflag.org/mmce.pdf )
We declared: “Our program of mobilizing the masses for communism is in many ways a sharp break from the policies of the old communist movement. The old movement did occasionally follow this path. But it was persuaded that the times weren’t right for communism and the masses were not ready for communism. The ICWP believes that these arguments were always wrong. But currently there is less reason to believe them than ever. Workers have nothing but our chains to lose by smashing capitalism.”
ICWP Spreads Globally
In its first years, ICWP consolidated party collectives in Mexico, El Salvador, and in the United States. We organized among aerospace workers at Boeing, MTA transit workers in Los Angeles, garment workers and students.
In South Africa, in response to the massacre of striking miners at Marikana, we were able to form a party cell in South Africa. Since then, comrades in South Africa have led the way in recruiting and writing for Red Flag. They have given our whole party a broader vision of mobilizing the masses for communism.
In recent months, ICWP has grown in India among garment and automobile workers, IT specialists and students. They have boldly raised communist ideas in mass struggles against racist attacks on Muslim and Dalit workers and on students.
Today, workers and students in forty countries read Red Flag. The potential exists for building new Party collectives in Puerto Rico, Canada, and elsewhere.
Masses Must Grasp and Apply the Communist Philosophy of Change
At our tenth-anniversary conference, a comrade charged us to improve our communist practice:
“We have the science of dialectical materialism and its laws of change. These help us to understand the process of mobilizing the masses for communism, to sharpen contradictions and to resolve them.
“We are confident that, like us, millions internationally can understand these laws and put them into practice in the struggle for communism.
“Today we want all of you to help us analyze our political work in industrial concentrations and concentrations of young workers and students.”
Party members and friends broke into workshops. We discussed contradictions between our political line and our practice. Comrades talked about internal obstacles: capitalist ideas and behavior we learned in a capitalist society. These keep us from being the communists that the working class needs.
In our workshops we struggled sharply against passivity and liberalism. We made concrete plans to raise communist ideas with our friends and family, to respond to the attacks of capitalism on our class, and to write for and distribute Red Flag. We can see the results in this issue of Red Flag and in practical steps that have strengthened our communist collectives.
Workers Have a Communist World to Win
Capitalism-imperialism is increasingly deadly. Workers everywhere face a crisis of overproduction and its resulting trade wars. Members of our working-class family die every day in armed conflicts in southwest Asia and in Africa. Migrants from Africa, Southwest Asia and Central America are fleeing these wars and crises.
And as the December US-Iran confrontation over Iraq showed, any conflict has the potential to erupt into world war. The increasing crisis of the system guarantees that eventually it will.
These crises have created uprisings, and with them, increased opportunities to build ICWP. Thousands are on the streets in Chile, Haiti, France, Iraq, Puerto Rico and elsewhere. Forty ICWP comrades in five cities of India joined a recent general strike of 200 million workers, students and others. They brought a communist vision and organization to the masses.
This is how we will turn this capitalist nightmare into our communist future. Build ICWP!
May Day, Los Angeles, USA 2010 Workers of the World, Unite! Fight for Communism International Communist Workers’ Party
Join the International Communist Workers’ Party
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