South Africa Strike picture here ♦ Maquila Worker Responds here ♦ Communist Class Struggle here ♦ Concessions or Communism here ♦
August 24—Thousands marched in Pretoria, Durban, Johannesburg, and Cape Town during a nationwide strike called by two of the largest trade union federations in South Africa. Workers are fed up with rising costs, frequent load shedding, high unemployment, escalating gang violence, and xenophobia. ICWP comrades distributed a leaflet to workers in Port Elizabeth. It explained why only a communist revolution can end this scourge of the capitalist system that values only money and profits.
Criticism and Self-Criticism Helps Advance the Struggle for Communism
EL SALVADOR—We are living the horrors of capitalism just like our fellow workers in maquilas (sweatshops) in all parts of the world. We understand your problems and we see many protests and mobilizations that become opportunities to organize for our International Communist Workers’ Party (ICWP).
As ICWP we know that our line is to put the fight for communism first. Even so, there are days when the situation inside the factory has meant facing attacks from the bosses and union leaders who are their allies.
A threat from the bosses led us to make the decision to confront the bosses in their offices (Red Flag, Vol. 13 #9). As communists we must be on the side of the workers. But this action is not what defines us as ICWP organizers. We are defined by our permanent fight to recruit more workers, create new party cells, develop more Red Flag readers.
We were strongly criticized, perhaps it’s better to say given very objective observations. They said that we do not have to throw ourselves like this to the capitalist lions.
I have read the letters from the Red Flag editorial collective and the comrade in Canada regarding the action we took. “No labor code or bill of rights protects workers.” In this they are right. But it is also true that we need to show the workers that we are not going to be passive in the face of repressive measures. The action served to bring other workers closer to the Party.
But from this action we learn that we need to make collective decisions, and not rely on bourgeois democracy.
Committed to the Party, we opened a cell meeting (which we hold every week at the end of the working day) with the delivery of the Red Flag. Then we opened the discussion, returning to the issue of workers’ struggles: how to mobilize more workers for communism without forgetting that a reform struggle is not the solution for the working class.
We have said in our weekly cell meetings that we must have a short-term goal (to recruit more members) and a medium-term goal, already having a broader and stronger base, to create strategies of communist struggle with which we can abolish wage slavery.
—Comrade in the Maquilas
Let’s Organize Communist Class Struggle in Industrial Concentrations
ICWP’s guiding principle is “mobilize the masses for communism and nothing less.” Our strategy to avoid the trap of reformism is organizing communist class struggle.
Class struggle is either reformist or communist. All previous communist Parties relied mostly on reformist class struggle to mobilize the masses of workers, soldiers and youth for socialism, national liberation, democracy, and so forth.
Communists must consciously organize communist class struggle. The old communist movement didn’t do this consistently.
What is communist class struggle? Let’s define it as anything we do to mobilize the masses to fight directly for communism and nothing less.
This has two distinct but interrelated levels. One is the ideological struggle to win workers to the Party. The other is the ideological struggle to mobilize Party members and their base to organize the masses to respond to capitalism’s attacks or to go on the offensive against capitalism.
This includes mass actions: discussions, confrontations, demonstrations, work stoppages, strikes and eventually armed insurrection. We don’t push reformist solutions or demands, only communist solutions and slogans.
Through these actions communist revolution becomes a possibility and eventually a reality. As Marx wrote, “Theory becomes a material force when it has gripped the masses.” It is the only force capable of destroying capitalism and building a communist world.
Both levels of struggle are indispensable and complementary. However, once we have recruited a certain number of comrades, recruitment on a massive scale can only advance by getting these and their base to mobilize masses to take concrete actions against capitalism. This is mainly what we mean by communist class struggle.
Mass communist class struggles will lay the material and ideological basis for building massively the indestructible communist social relations – between us and the masses, and among the masses – crucial for making revolution and building communism worldwide.
Struggling to mobilize masses around our advanced political slogans will advance everyone’s ideological understanding. It will create the basis for advancing our political line with direct mass participation.
Today we recruit and mobilize the indispensable ones and twos. They will organize and lead the massive communist class struggles necessary to mobilize and recruit the millions needed to make the communist revolution. It is the only way to mobilize masses of workers, soldiers, and youth under our direct leadership, especially in our concentrations.
Going to workers’ strikes and demonstrations to massify communist ideas is necessary, but only doing this is not enough. It de-emphasizes our main strategy of mobilizing the masses at Party concentrations in industry, the military, and among youth.
We participate in reformist class struggles on the job, but we do not organize or lead them even if workers ask us to do so. We go out on strike with them, do picket line duty, and fight with them against the scabs and police. We are there physically to develop the ties that will allow us to fight against their reformism and win them to communism.
We continue to recruit the ones and twos, but we get them and their base to organize short-term mass actions now – compared to our more long-term goal – to help build a mass Party which will then mobilize even bigger masses for communist revolution.
—Comrades in California (USA)
Militant Fights for Concessions Versus Communist Class Struggle
A letter (last issue) distinguished between “concessions” and “reforms.” It saw “concessions” as things like air-conditioning on a sweltering day. It contrasted this with demanding union representation on a health and safety committee. Demanding concessions, it says, is not reformism like demanding union seats on a committee. It says that communists should lead fights for concessions but not reforms.
I don’t think this is helpful. Of course. we don’t lead fights for union representation on the bosses’ committees. We show how union leaders work hand in hand with the bosses already.
But what about demands for wage increases? They would be “concessions,” but the letter doesn’t address the contradiction between fighting for higher wages and fighting to end the wage system. Many (if not all) “concessions” would raise similar issues.
When I was in college years ago, the left-wing group SDS led a massive anti-war and pro-worker student strike around “eight demands.” Those concessions included ending Army officer training for the Vietnam war and stopping university expansion into working-class neighborhoods. Liberal students and faculty opposed SDS by organizing a “Committee for Radical Structural Reform.”
At first, I thought that committee sounded more … radical. Clearly the university needed more fundamental change than the “eight demands.” But “radical structural reform” soon proved to be a diversion. The SDS demands for “concessions” at least exposed both the US and the university as imperialist.
But does this example support the letter? No. SDS and its communist (PL) leadership grew rapidly and built a mass base. But its emphasis on fighting militantly for demands pushed communism (and even socialism) into the background. Out of thousands that PL led and the dozens it recruited from that struggle, only a handful (if that) identified as communists five years later.
What might have been a communist class struggle instead of a reform struggle led by communists? A popular poster showed a red fist over a litany of student grievances: “Strike for the eight demands. Strike because you hate cops. Strike because classes are a bore. Strike for power. Strike because they are trying to squeeze the life out of you” and more.
What if it had ended: Strike for the communist future we need! What if communists had linked all these grievances to racist capitalism-imperialism? And explained how communism will meet the students’ aspirations?
A popular slogan back then was “Dare to struggle, dare to win!” Our party collectives today must dare to lead communist class struggle in our concentrations as best we understand it. The results will be uneven – as development is always – but that’s how we will win a clearer understanding and a sharper line.
—Older comrade
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