Gaza Genocide and Expanding Wars Call Us to Make Red Flag a Better Collective Organizer
Report for ICWP International Meeting, March 2024
LOS ANGELES, March 2— We ask today, “Where were the ‘good Germans’ when the Nazis launched their genocide and World War II?” Future generations will ask us, “What were you doing when Israel and US imperialism carried out genocide in Gaza and started World War III? When fascism spread in India, El Salvador, Argentina, and worldwide?”
We’ll answer: We were using Red Flag to mobilize masses for communism. We were reading it with co-workers and organizing them into party cells. Distributing it among angry youth protesting the Gaza genocide and recruiting them to party collectives. Passing it outside factories and military bases, knowing that industrial workers and soldiers are key to communist revolution.
We’ll answer: We were building an international communist party through the pages of Red Flag. Red Flag enabled garment worker comrades in India and El Salvador to forge a relationship. Letters from Gaza made communist internationalism real for people from the US to South Africa. We were learning how to consult across the bosses’ borders to produce articles that would be useful internationally.
We were producing Red Flag to make all this possible.
Back in 2024, we’ll say, we were too few to meet the urgency of the moment. But we were struggling collectively to recruit the numbers needed to build ICWP/PCOI into an effective force for communist revolution globally. To broaden participation in the work of producing Red Flag, to organize that work more collectively, in line with our communist principles.
How to do that will be an important discussion at the March international meeting.
Red Flag/Bandera Roja is already growing stronger as more new comrades and friends contribute. Comrade Hamza and other comrades in the Mideast have brought about a qualitative change. Collectives in El Salvador are involving more comrades and friends in producing articles. Others are too. More experienced comrades, with more practice writing, are also inspired to write more. Now we can take important steps toward greater collectivity—steps that will increase participation and strengthen the paper.
- We should decide more collectively what to write about, and how. This may mean planning for several issues at a time. Meanwhile, we need to be ready to change plans when something unexpected arises. We continue to welcome letters, including comments on this report.
- More of us need to distribute more copies of RF/BR, paper and electronic. And have more conversations with readers and include their opinions in what we write.
- When the collective decides we need an article, more comrades should be willing to step up and help. Even if it’s not directly about their work, and even if they must do some research and learn about the subject.
- Doing this will require a protracted collective struggle against individualism in its various forms. We must all try to pay more attention to “what the collective needs” especially when it comes to making meetings and chats welcoming to more people.
In addition to helping to write and revise letters and articles, who would help take or find pictures? Edit pictures for press? Draw original graphics or cartoons? Learn to use a layout program? Translate or polish translations? We should make sure that how we have been doing things so far does not become an obstacle to doing them better in the future.
- Given the urgency of the world situation, we should start thinking about how (and when) we can move to a biweekly RFBR.
Someday, when those of us who still survive are asked, “What did you do in the face of fascist genocide and imperialist war?” we’ll be able to answer: “We laid the groundwork for the communist society we’re building today.” That day may be sooner than we think.