South Africa May Day Meeting here ♦ Spain Workers Welcome Red Flag here ♦
South Africa May Day Meeting: Answering Questions, Making Plans
GQEBERHA (South Africa), May 12— Comrades who participated with us for the first time at our May Day get-together were impressed and vowed to come back for future meetings.
“This is interesting, comrade. We would like to know more.”
“I hear what you’re saying.”
“We will come to more meetings.”
We celebrated May Day with a political get-together with more than ten comrades, some new to the organization. We explained what ICWP is and why we fight for communism. We fight for communism to end exploitation, mass starvation, crime, violence, wars, disasters, and poverty that are ensured by the continued existence of capitalism.
ICWP rejects elections; we don’t want to run for office. We want a communist revolution that will overthrow the system, not just one parliamentary party.
We explained that reforms and changing of political parties in parliament don’t change anything meaningful for the masses. For example, Gqeberha has had more than three mayors belonging to different parties over the last eight years. But nothing has changed materially for the workers and the masses in general.
The new comrades got our message.
The rest of the discussion was more targeted to comrades who have been around the party for a long time. We tried to answer critical questions while making plans. One question was: Why do we think communism can win?
We explained that people are already looking for an alternative given how terrible life already is under capitalism. Populists are taking advantage of the masses’ frustration and anger. We can show them that only communism will meet their needs. We can use this opportunity to recruit and win them.
What is the role of communists at this current time? We fight for communism because capitalism kills, makes wars, starves, creates inequality and poverty. Only communism will end all of this. Communists in this current time need to be communists all the time, when we are with friends and family, talking about communism, and not just at meetings.
What is the role of Red Flag? Red Flag is critical because it connects party members and workers all around the world and shows their struggles. It helps us recruit because workers see that other workers are facing similar problems all over the world. So, it’s not something unique to them, which the bosses try to perpetuate.
The Red Flag is critical to growing the party. We use it to recruit new members and bring them to the collectives. We struggle and discuss the articles in Red Flag, which helps us to read and to write for the party.
We discussed what communist relationships we can build and how they differ from capitalist relationships. What internal and external obstacles are primary and how can we resolve them? How are we recruiting new comrades and bringing them to the collectives?
We get comfortable with our familiar group. We need to challenge ourselves to bring in new comrades individually and collectively. That’s the way we will become more confident in the struggle and gain experience to recruit more people to ICWP.
Why are women comrades critical to our party? We should strive, especially here in Gqeberha, to recruit more of them.
How do we fight individualism and liberalism? How do we grow from a small collective into disciplined communists who can inspire hundreds more workers to join the party?
We can start by mobilizing and winning over those already close to us. This will create opportunities and conditions for us to grow exponentially among factory workers and others. (Revised 5/20/2023)
Workers Welcome Communist Ideas: Union Officials Fear Them
SPAIN, May 1st—Once again we took to the streets with the working class to celebrate May Day! We must fulfill the real need of the workers for communist ideas to allow us to get rid of the capitalist system.
We went to the streets to distribute a thousand copies of Red Flag. As in previous years, they were well received. Many workers asked for it, eager to know our ideas. Perhaps some had seen it before.
We went to three marches. In the first, the “Workers’ Union” (USO) march, union officials pulled out their claws and blocked us because we were distributing the newspaper. They told us we couldn’t distribute Red Flag to their ranks.
We asked why not. A young man who served as security said they only allowed their own literature.
We insisted that distributing our newspaper was not prohibited and that we were not the enemy. We said that we need to end bloodthirsty capitalism that exploits the working class. But a union official came to tell us that they had called the march and they were the only ones responsible for the flyers and information that their ranks would receive.
Seeing that we were engaged in a sterile fight, we decided to withdraw, but not before making a quick maneuver and distributing more newspapers on the way out. The working masses don’t agree with these union leaders.
The unions know of our existence, and they know we are exposing them as SELLOUTS. They are afraid of us and don’t want workers to know that they’re the bosses’ lackies. OR that there is a communist alternative to end wage slavery and exploitation.
The working class must know that the dialectical materialism taught by the International Communist Workers’ Party shows how to defeat the lies that these union leaders tell workers. But what’s most important is to see that as an international working class we can defeat capitalism and build a new communist society.
Encouraged, we went to two other union marches, where we distributed many Red Flags. We fulfilled the goal of bringing ICWP’s political line to the masses, and we hope to have more members join or party.
We gave some marchers the party’s email and encouraged them to join the red army. An army that will really fight for the workers and a communist system that will meet workers’ needs, not give us crumbs the union sellouts sell workers to calm their anger at the capitalist bosses.
We will continue spreading communist ideas and building the ICWP all over the world.
LONG LIVE ICWP! LONG LIVE MAY DAY! LONG LIVE COMMUNISM!
Jakarta, Indonesia, May Day 2023
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