“To Each According to Need” – Practice Communist Principles Today
EL SALVADOR, March 15— “We have to collect something to help the comrades who haven’t gotten paid this past two weeks,” said a worried ICWP worker leader. “Let’s start with the comrades of the F&D factory, since they have not been paid anything and at least we got a paycheck for two weeks a month ago. They always go with us to the extended meetings, and they are always there on May Day with their families.”
This telephone conversation had a big impact on the Regional Committee. It put in practice the communist theory “To each according to their need, from each according to their commitment.” This was how the Committee started to ask itself where we could start to provide. We concluded that there were savings that had been earmarked for another task of a comrade of the International Communist Workers’ Party. We decided that at this time the priority was to help the women workers, many of whom are single mothers, who have the greatest needs.
And because of the current reality of this Covid-19 pandemic, the ICWP collective in the maquilas organized ourselves and proposed allocating a food basket with basic staples such as rice, beans, and sugar, among other things, to supply the basic needs of the Party’s working class families.
“Already with this pandemic it has been proven that the capitalist system does not work for the working class,” said one worker leader. “Only workers can help each other.”
Workers demand subsidies, March 31
Many comrades and Red Flag readers have not been able to receive wages as a result of the obligatory quarantine. The bosses of the maquiladora companies still don’t want to pay their wages, saying that they have no money, because production is held up and that’s why the salaries are frozen. Although the current right-wing government has mentioned that imports and exports should not and have not stopped, it is always to the benefit of the bosses.
“We can’t get to the meeting point, because the police and the army won’t let us through,” said some worker comrades who came from the interior of the country. So one of the leading comrades from the factories brought them the food and met them as far as they could go. Examples of communist solidarity like this have occurred under the banner of our Party.
This has been an example of communist practice with comrades on the basis of need. They were very happy to receive the food for which they said they were grateful to the ICWP. They were looking forward to the meetings of the cells to which they belong and also the broader meetings.
This is only a small example of the solidarity among Party comrades. But we also have Red Flag readers who we want to support in these hard times of the Covid-19 crisis, which has finished unmasking this rotten bosses’ system.
We therefore ask the comrades and friends of the International Communist Workers’ Party to show solidarity in one way or another with these contingents of Party workers and Red Flag readers.
Immigrant Workers in Spain: Bosses Everywhere Are Only Interested in Profits
SPAIN—The pandemic of capitalism has been merciless! They don’t care about the lives of the workers. They are simply interested in their profits. This is the conclusion we reached with a friend from work. We are transportation workers. We deliver merchandise that customers buy on the internet to their homes.
My co-worker is a Salvadoran liberal who believes that Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, is doing an exceptional job in containing Covid-19 and lifting the country out of poverty. Well, we were talking about why that is not true, and we started by talking about the older people who live from day to day. If those people go out on the streets they are arrested and taken to containment centers. What do their families eat? And those who have been laid off? And if that person gets infected and dies, will his family get any benefits?
There is no plan by which a government, whether in El Salvador or anywhere else in the world, will solve the problem of working-class poverty and famine. I asked him if his boss in Spain would pay him if he didn’t go out to work. He answered that if he stopped working, he wouldn’t have enough money for rent or food for his wife and daughter. I also asked him if he had any relatives or friends in El Salvador who were in the same situation, and he said again that he did. The capitalist world is death to workers! Politicians like Bukele sell us crumbs.
This rotten system is creating a fascist state like never before in history. Under the pretext of health measures, it has put the army out on the streets. The police can stop you on the street and beat you if they want to. All the technology is put in place to control the working class. It is creating a state where the workers will be controlled and will not be able to talk about “rights and freedoms”. Obviously, rights and freedoms are the crumbs that the system has offered, but right now people have nothing at all.
We workers just need to know that WE DO NOT NEED MONEY, WE DO NOT NEED BORDERS AND WE DO NOT NEED RACISM. In a communist system we will only use technology to build tools to keep the population healthy. We will work collectively (not with social distancing) but conscious of taking care of everyone. Agricultural and industrial production will be for every man, woman, and child. Health workers will have all the help they need, both technological and social, to be able to face something like what we are living through!
Capitalism is a pandemic that kills workers of the world, but it has a cure! FIGHT FOR BUILDING A DIFFERENT SYSTEM: FOR BUILDING A COMMUNIST WORLD! That is why the International Communist Workers’ Party makes the call, WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE! Let’s distribute our newspaper Red Flag through the social networks. Let’s read Red Flag and study the communist practices. Only by being part of this movement fighting for the communist revolution can we defeat the pandemic. We can defeat capitalism.