Strong party clubs are crucial to the fight for communism. They embody the collectives that will be the basic unit of communist society—a society where we aren’t workers and bosses, or leaders and followers, but comrades. Clubs are where comradeship, the main feature of communist relationships, is struggled over and developed. It is the unity and struggle in strong party clubs, alongside the production and distribution of the paper, that guarantees the work of mobilizing the masses for communism.
The West Coast (USA) schools’ collective includes teachers and their former students, from our 20s to our 80s. It grew out of political work in high schools in Los Angeles and the SF Bay Area. It includes comrades from Los Angeles who are now in Alaska and Arizona. Our concentration is on recruiting students who will be workers and soldiers, and developing younger comrades as party leaders.
The club in Los Angeles has always fought for regular meetings—even when it was only three of us late at night in a Jack-in-the Box. When the pandemic produced the lockdown, this practice helped us overcome individual fears and go out in the streets in a safe way on the very first weekend. In the middle of the George Floyd rebellions, a few of us distributed Red Flag to National Guard soldiers. Both actions gave confidence to the party as a whole.
Collective work gets results. At the beginning of the pandemic, the club in Los Angeles switched quickly to Zoom meetings. When the party asked us to lead a May Day Zoom, we reached out to comrades on three continents and put together an inspiring meeting. Soon comrade teachers in the Bay Area asked to join our club. Although the two of them had been meeting more or less regularly, their practice showed them it takes more than two to function fully as a club. They put the Bay Area ICWP book club on Zoom. And a long-time friend whose first ICWP meeting was last year’s May Day forum has just joined the party.
Some struggles take longer than others. A comrade who for years had been going to mass demonstrations as part of the crowd was won during the pandemic to showing up with Red Flag as a communist organizer. The club is the key site for persistent revolutionary struggle. Changes like this don’t remain singular advances but sharpen the struggle within the club.
All of us have been able to get vaccinated, but it’s been more than a year since most of us have done regular agitation. Consistent struggle in the club has allowed us to overcome our fears and subjectivity, and to go back out on the streets on the weekend before the verdict in the trial of the murderer of George Floyd, on May Day, and to go back to distributing the paper to transit workers in Los Angeles.
“Thank you for never giving up on me.” Covid-19 put a serious hold on our concentration at a high school in Los Angeles. In the past year and a half, we have concentrated on relations with former students—now young workers and university students. We organized a “Red Flag Reunion” before May Day 2021 with several ex-student comrades who had been inactive. Life under capitalism, especially during the pandemic, has meant that some folks have become less active. The struggle in the club has allowed us to maintain patient struggle with those comrades. Still, we have been uneven and inconsistent about this. We need to do better.
Comradely struggle helps us to fight individualism. Some of us just talk too much, and forget that we’re not always right. Sometimes we fight so hard for OUR UNDERSTANDING of the Party’s perspective that we don’t listen to each other. But we have learned through struggle that we and the party are strengthened by the contributions of comrades with different strengths and life experiences, but a common commitment to a communist world. Collective struggle has helped us to learn humility, to be consistently respectful to each other, and to rely on criticism and self-criticism when we fall short.
Meetings are only part of the process. We have been with each other in the hard times, through the deaths of family members, raising children and grandchildren, celebrating birthdays and anniversaries. Building a party collective requires a decision to join your fate to the collective while always fighting to expand the circle. These are your comrades, fighting side-by-side in a life-and-death struggle. You know they have your back…now and in the future. We have cried together, laughed together, and continue to do so—on Zoom and as we go back to seeing each other in real life.
Our students and former students, colleagues and former colleagues, fellow church members, neighbors, old friends, aunts, uncles and cousins are being more sharply attacked by capitalism every day. The Party not only gives us the tools to understand the world, but a glimpse of the communist future. Party collectives working together, building the ties that allow us to stand shoulder to shoulder in the struggle, can inspire our friends and family to join us. In the end the club provides the best arena where the line the party has developed is put into practice and evaluated. It is where comradeship shows its revolutionary value. Together, we can become the revolutionary force required to crush capitalism and build the communist future that we all need.
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