India: Five Weeks, Thirty Comrades, Fifteen Thousand Copies of Red Flag
September 20 — “Let’s organize the masses for communism, we need to find each and every new comrade in our neighborhood,” said comrades in India. About two dozen comrades in three different cities were overjoyed to receive 15,000 copies of a shorter edition of Red Flag.
They wasted no time, knowing that our call for communist revolution is the only way out of the horrors of coronavirus, massive unemployment and unending poverty that grinds us down.
Reforms only lead back to intense wage slavery. Union officials are toothless and cannot make any difference as the bosses march to fascism and war. Socialism in Russia initially succeeded in the workers seizing state power. But it proved to be another form of wage slavery that became ruthless capitalism.
It is either wage slavery or liberation from it. The International Communist Workers’ Party (ICWP) chooses the path of communist revolution that will end an over 600-year history of wage slavery. The masses mobilized for communism have the potential to eradicate capitalism. We are a small party with a correct line. The confrontation between the working class and our class enemy must lead to a massive ICWP.
Understanding this, dozens of comrades started organizing Red Flag in seven different languages. We have friends, neighbors, and coworkers all around us who read different languages. Among 30 comrades, we aimed to distribute about 500 copies each. For each comrade, we identified other coworkers and friends who can take anywhere from 10 to 100 copies each. We were able to send 500 copies each to comrades in Pakistan and Bangladesh.
We have now spent over five weeks and our Red Flags are almost all distributed. We want to summarize some of our results and what we can learn from it.
A very large number of workers opened up to us, even in areas controlled by the fascists. We learned that workers absolutely hate the bosses, their corruption, the police, their political parties. These workers have no illusions about the bosses.
Many people believed that the situation is so bad that communist revolution is the only solution. But they did not know how to fight for it. Many believed that reforms are bad, but still hope they can be achieved to overcome the burden of hunger, unemployment.
More thought that the coronavirus pandemic and unemployment can never be resolved in the capitalist system. Some workers have friends who live in villages. In these villages everybody wants to join the military because nobody gets a job in a factory or a farm. They said many of these soldiers die in Kashmir, commit suicide, or are forced to commit fascist atrocities, including rapes.
Garment workers described how, every day, they are forced to enter sweatshops with only about 30% of workers still working. They constantly fear coronavirus and eviction from the slumlords. The condition of the remaining 70% is beyond imagination with workers and kids skipping meals for days.
Some garment workers we know have openly defied the system by collecting food and distributing it to everybody. They have joined healthcare workers to distribute masks.
Recently we met mine workers who are fed up with the union officials. They said they want to fight for ‘real communism’.
These are only a small part of what thousands of workers have said to us in only five weeks. Each of their stories and struggles has shown us that they are open to communism. We must embrace their resilience and their resolve to end capitalism.
We are a new party. But we are growing. We do not have all the answers but the working class, with the communist outlook, will make sure that the bosses’ days of ‘horrors without end’ are about to end.
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