Industrial Workers Are Key here Defying the bosses’ fascism here ♦ Red Flag discussion groups here ♦
Organizing Industrial Workers:Key to Communist Revolution
EL SALVADOR— “I’ve been working in this maquila for 15 years. Sometimes I feel like giving up because the bosses treat us like garbage every day. But I need the job. They know it and that’s why they don’t mind paying us a pittance. They don’t pay us overtime. The boss complains that there are no orders and that he must get loans to pay us,” said a worker.
She continued: “I asked a person in the export area, and he told me that the trucks are going out quite normally. They are transporting the same quantities of goods. I knew it, but I wanted to make sure.
“Organizing in the International Communist Workers’ Party (ICWP) for several years has helped me to better understand this situation. It’s not about bad or good bosses. It’s about how the capitalist system works. But everything will change. In Communism, everything will be produced based on what is needed and not for profit,” she concluded.
For things to change and for us to be able to end the bosses’ exploitation, we must be part of ICWP and mobilize the masses for Communism. We need Red Flag to reach more workers. We must expand the networks of our newspaper.
Our guiding principle is Mobilize the Masses for Communism. One of our party’s concentrations are the industrial workers. Here there are thousands of workers who are part of the production process. Selling their labor power for a miserable wage, they increase the bosses’ profits.
The workers who read Red Flag go through a process of understanding that it is not thanks to the boss that they can earn what they need to support their families. Instead, the bosses appropriate the workers’ labor for their profit.
That place of exploitation, as the worker says, also becomes the opportunity to organize for Communism. There the men and women workers can understand their exploited condition. And that there is an antagonistic relationship between the owners of the means of production and the workers who produce everything, which becomes the main contradiction.
Most importantly, those workers organized in ICWP can lead a communist revolution to abolish wage slavery. They, along with soldiers, can be the spearhead to mobilize the masses for communism. They will produce everything based on need. Nothing will be bought or sold, it will be a classless and moneyless society.
The characteristics of the specialized work performed by each factory worker, such as assembly line work, make them a link in production. But at the same time this work can create habits of discipline, solidarity and organization that can then forge the conditions to fulfill revolutionary communist work of organizing more workers.
“The working class has nothing to lose but our chains; on the contrary, we have a world to win.”
Garment Sweatshop Workers Defy Repression, Organize for Communism
EL SALVADOR— “We had the capacity to go out on May 1, overcoming all obstacles, since the streets were blocked by repressive police and military groups that provide security to the capitalist system. We march, but we must also fight to carry out this activity with more workers,” said a comrade at a meeting held after working eight hours in the maquilas.
The collectives of the International Communist Workers’ Party (ICWP) met to plan the organizational political work and to read some articles in our Red Flag newspaper.
These meetings, the last of the month, discussed the current conditions for holding extended meetings. We conclude that it is necessary to decide to break the capitalist political fence of fear that they want to instill with these measures. While we are under capitalism we will be permanently under attack.
Three cell meetings have clandestinely counteracted the enemy of the working class. “We have two new comrades who want to know about Red Flag,” said a comrade. Our progress is modest, but we do not stop.
We have concentrated on recruiting more workers for ICWP, to fight directly for Communism.
“I also have two comrades who asked me for Party t-shirts and want to meet with us. I will take the opportunity to invite them to these meetings,” said a third comrade,
After lunch, a worker asked, “When is everyone going to meet? My son and I will go with you.”
Communist ideas interest the workers. We are building the party with the strong principles of solidarity and struggle that we are carrying out in our political practice.
No worker will feel alone in our organization, and comrades around the world have demonstrated this. The lives of our comrades matter to us, and that is why we share our political line of mobilizing the masses for Communism.
As we can see, ICWP is organizing the working class silently before the bosses but raising our voice before the workers.
—Comrade in the trenches of the Maquilas in El Salvador
El Salvador: Red Flag Readers Discuss Communist Revolution to Defeat Imperialism
We continue with political meetings with the main objective of mobilizing the masses for our communist struggle to end the capitalism that we face every day. In our workers’ collective we discuss what is happening worldwide and read our communist newspaper Red Flag.
Ricardo said, “I have always been outraged by social injustice and what we live through permanently. It breaks my heart as a human being, as a worker, and as a father to see all the information in Red Flag. What happens in the maquilas makes me so sad and indignant that the unions that should support the workers work in favor of the boss and not their own working class.”
He then commented on Chinese imperialism. “They have stronger territorial issues in and around their homeland that are relatively more important, but at the same time I think Chinese imperialism is in Latin America today. China’s influence in the region is mainly economic. It is strong enough to exist independently and to assert itself in political affiliations. At least with current issues (including the war in Ukraine) they can trade with most countries.”
We realize that China makes gigantic investments worldwide, having become the second-largest global investor behind the US. In Latin America, China acts as the new imperialist.
According to a UN agency (ECLAC), the Chinese increased their investments in Latin America in automotive and auto parts (44%), renewable energy (17%), financial services (11%), and consumer goods (6%). Eighty percent of Chinese investment in Latin America comes from state-owned enterprises while Chinese direct investment in the United States and the EU comes mainly from private companies.
I told Ricardo that for this very reason our ICWP party is fighting for this communist revolution to become a reality and defeat and break these chains of oppressive capitalism-imperialism.
Reviewing our newspaper Blanca commented, “The arrests that are happening in our country are unjust. I am grateful that the case I told you about was exposed (in the previous edition) and I will continue reading the Red Flag and pass it on to other friends.”
We had an uplifting meeting. They felt deeply involved in the issues we discussed and very sympathetic to our ICWP communist revolution. We will continue our virtual and face-to-face meetings while they continue reading our Red Flag newspaper.
We will continue to organize ourselves to raise our communist voice.
—Young comrade in El Salvador