Fight for a World that Values all People here ♦ For A World without Borders here ♦ An Athlete who was on the Workers’ Side here ♦
PARIS–December 12—Every weekend for three weeks, thousands have taken to the streets of Paris and other French cities to protest against a proposed security law that would make it illegal to share videos of the police. This is in the wake of the November beating of Black music producer Michael Zecler by four Paris cops. Protestors are also denouncing a draft law targeting open expression of Islam. Signs: “I will never stop filming,” “I don’t want my future taxes to pay for police violence,” and “Revolution on the march, fight the cowards!”
Fight for a World that Values All People
The pandemic has exacerbated every problem we face. It has forced us to confront the many systemic problems rife within our institutions and also to reckon with ourselves individually.
My reckoning centers around finding meaning in my work. For most of my adult life, I thought my greatest desire was to become a successful TV writer and comedian. I can’t help but see my old career goals as ultimately selfish. That is normal and encouraged in American culture, but I have experienced a political and cultural awakening. I now see and understand the crumbling of American society all around us and the role all of us have to play in creating a better world.
I started to see new possibilities in 2018, when I first heard Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speak fearlessly of unconditional love for humanity. Her belief in the good of our neighbors made me finally feel less alone in secretly harboring those feelings as well. She made me feel that I was allowed to believe things could be better and speak that belief fearlessly into the world. I didn’t have to quietly accept the status quo. I was allowed to be different.
I felt called to pursue this new vision of the world, even though I was raised around the Los Angeles entertainment industry, where social and political work wasn’t on the radar. But AOC showed me that working to empower my community was something anyone can do. All that is required is a belief in the intrinsic value of all people and the desire to fight for a world and society that reflects that truth.
After June 2018, I started following the progressive movement with a passion I’d always felt was missing from my work in the entertainment industry. At first, I just dipped my toes in and worked for the Bernie Sanders campaign. When lockdown hit in March 2020, I lost my job and the ability to perform stand up entirely. Then Sanders withdrew from the race, and I felt lost at sea.
But leaning into my community work brought me a new, more powerful sense of purpose. I volunteered for a local congressional campaign, joined my Neighborhood Council, and found a community at my local food bank.
Seeing myself as a part of a community, instead of trying to stand out and apart from my community, gave me a special sense of belonging and purpose I’d never known before. Being a member of my community is a role more meaningful and enduring than any job title.
I looked into Social Work and found a webinar in which a comrade social worker spoke about how capitalism makes people depressed. She realized that the bones of the system need to be changed. I reached out to her to learn more about how she saw things, and through her I learned about Red Flag.
—Writer Comrade
Fight for a world without borders
“We’re going along here with everything the hurricane left us,” said a man with a backpack on his back and a two-year-old boy sitting on his neck. His partner accompanied him, pushing a child’s stroller with plastic bags with clothes and water. They were among more than a thousand victims of hurricanes Eta and Iota who walked for more than 24 hours on an attempt to migrate to the United States before being dispersed by the Honduran police.
Poverty, violence and the effects of the pandemic added to the hurricanes that affected more than four million Central Americans. Especially in Honduras and Nicaragua, the poorest countries in a poor region.
“As I tell my son: ‘I don’t have a home, I don’t have food to give you.’ The child only cries for milk. Let us pass!” the woman shouted to the police who blocked her passage. Her husband had lost his job on a banana farm.
The working class can’t take it anymore. Many see migrating as their only hope. Capitalism forces the working class to make desperate decisions when disasters strike. The pandemic and the economic crisis are the results of an economic system that does not work for workers. Capitalism is a system based on money for the bosses’ pockets.
We must fight to change this corrupt system. We must not depend on the bosses to solve the problems they themselves cause. The bosses profit more from it, and indeed some are now richer than when the pandemic started. When crises happen, unemployment increases and jobs are scarce, causing the workers to fight each other for jobs with lower wages. We must fight for a system that works for the benefit of the workers, for a Communist system.
We, the working class, are the only ones who can solve our problems, organizing ourselves to fight against wage slavery. We are the only ones who can fight for a system without bosses, where food, housing and all the needs of the workers are met without any family lacking. And where we do not have to emigrate exposing our life and that of our family to dangers, chasing dreams that turn into capitalist nightmares.
In a society without classes, borders won’t exist, nor will border guards who detain us nor police who block us from passing freely.
Let’s organize cells of the International Communist Workers’ Party. Let’s build the Party by distributing, reading and organizing study circles with our Red Flag newspaper. Let’s make the bosses tremble feeling that their end is near. Let us raise the red flag of the proletariat and destroy the capitalist profit system with an armed revolution.
—Comrade in Los Angeles, USA
An Athlete Whose Heart Was on the Workers’ Side
“I went to the Vatican and saw the gold roof. And I said to myself how could anyone be such a son of a _____ as to live with a golden roof and then go to poor countries and kiss children with empty bellies. I stopped believing.”
There is more to why Diego Maradona is idolized the world over than his incredible abilities with a football. The player who had a tattoo of Che on his arm and Fidel Castro on his leg continually blurted out statements that declared his heart was on the side of the workers of the world.
Again and again, the ruling classes dispatched intellectuals, sport figures and politicians to talk him out of his anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist statements, but Diego Maradona was in effect “taking the knee” generations before today’s athletes. That is why the masses love and respect him so much.
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