GQEBERHA (South Africa), March 4— Comrades here are glued to the news coming from Gaza. Some of us lived in the apartheid state of South Africa. What we learned from that experience is extremely valuable to build our party in the fight for the communist revolution.
“When I was a young fighter in Cape Town, I was recruited by South African Communist Party (SACP),” comrade Bumza told a group of young ICWP members. “Masses were gathering in the street in the 1960s. After work and on the weekends, massive numbers of industrial workers used to protest. Women helped organize these rebellions by encouraging young boys to fight the apartheid regime.
“We were very militant, brave, and fearless,” the comrade continued. “But after the African National Congress (ANC) came to power and Mandela was president, everything changed suddenly. Masses realized that apartheid was gone but racism was more vicious, and the oppressors were ANC.
: So, when I met ICWP for the first time, I got a copy of Red Flag. And then the comrade who was distributing it asked me to join and invited me to study dialectics. I spent twenty years in SACP but never knew what dialectics was. We were told that it was for more advanced workers.”
Our collective is learning that the study of dialectical materialism is not difficult, but the masses can advance our understanding. Hamza’s letter made it very real. How the comrades in Gaza are learning to harvest water and install solar panels teaches us how quantity turns into quality. It starts with a few comrades teaching each other. They teach more, and the masses learn a new way of doing things.
There are many such examples of dialectics in comrade Hamza’s letters. Our collective found it very useful to look at the recent history of the working class in the Middle East. A young street vendor in Tunisia killed himself, fed up with high unemployment and his inability to earn a living for his family. This triggered an uprising and armed struggle in the 2010s that involved millions of industrial workers in the Middle East.
In Egypt, the corrupt government ended the regime of Hosni Mubarak when textile workers went on a violent strike in the Suez Canal area. This struggle directly affected the working class in Israel, when 10% of the population was actively participating in the fight to unite Palestinian and Israeli workers.
This shows the enormous potential of the industrial working class, armed with dialectics, to end the system of wage slavery. We are concentrating on these most oppressed workers in our townships by introducing Red Flag regularly. Our third toyi toyi protest is planned in two weeks. We will unite industrial workers, soldiers, students, and migrant workers from different areas of Africa. This march will culminate into a bigger May Day of 2024.
New Pamphlet:
“Genocide in Gaza Demands Communist Revolution” here