Industrial Worker’s Report to International ICWP Zoom Meeting
GQEBERHA (South Africa), November 30— All over the world, the working class is under attack from capitalist imperialists. They use different methods of violence to kill, maim, and contain the working class, to subdue it and lock it in endless exploitation.
As the internal contradictions of capitalism intensify, the falling rate of profit forces capitalists to fight and compete for those profits. As the intensity of imperialist rivalry grows, the capitalists increase their attacks on the working class from Palestine to Sudan to El Salvador, South Africa and the USA, Ukraine, and Russia.
In Gaza, the US imperialists and their Israeli partners are committing genocide, killing tens of thousands and displacing millions. Hunger and starvation are used for Israeli-US domination to continue to control the Middle East’s natural resources and gain the upper hand in their rivalries.
In Sudan, hundreds are killed as imperialist and aspiring capitalist factions fight for domination. Millions have been displaced in a civil war over the control of Sudan and its natural resources.
In South Africa, crime is unleashed against the working class. Poverty and drugs subjugate the working class to keep it passive.
In the USA, ICE agents attack immigrant workers. The massive decline in quality of life is explained through the prism of nationalism and racism. Job losses result from major US companies moving production to other regions where cheap labour can easily be exploited. This is hidden as a factor in mass unemployment of US workers. Rather, immigrants are used as scapegoats, as a tool for fascist capitalists to gain support from the masses.
Despite the unprecedented attacks, the working class is fighting back. Massive demonstrations and defiant struggles are taking place across the globe. The masses are seeking unity and want change.
We communists must stand shoulder to shoulder with our class siblings. We must not fight for socialism or reform but for the total uprooting of the capitalist economic and social system. We must mobilise the masses, and in particular the industrial workers, to fight for communism. And with it a future free of exploitation and segregation.
We must have a communist world view. We must defeat capitalist nationalist propaganda that divides the working class and allows for fascist attacks on immigrants and allows genocide in Gaza. We must refute nationalist propaganda and stand against xenophobic nationalism in South Africa. Our collective must struggle worldwide to dismiss the notions of immigrants “stealing jobs” when they are our class siblings at the forefront of exploitation.
The imperialist balance of forces is narrowing. Chinese imperialists and their allies want to ascend to a dominant position while the US and its allies plan to cling to their dominance. Their proxy wars and economic wars are escalating. This will lead to world war and immense destruction. However, the working class can rise in its ruins and emerge with a new communist world and organise society to meet our needs.
Preparation of that starts now. The process will not be mechanical. If we don’t organise workers, fascists and other evils will take the opportunity, which will doom the working class.
I work in the tapestry industry. I organise workers in our factory to join the International Communist Workers’ Party (ICWP). We have workers who regularly receive our Red Flags. The next step is to have them join the party and become committed members who also organise where they live.
We organise industrial workers in different areas to win them in the struggle for communism. We have a presence at Volkswagen, where we are forming a collective to recruit workers to fight for our cause overtly and covertly. In the pastry industrial factories in Gqeberha, we have comrades who are mobilising the workers to join the ICWP.
We have started developing young ICWP leaders in high schools who, one day, will become industrial workers and recruit inside to lead a communist revolution. Many young comrades will work at plants like VW. We encourage those comrades to build relationships with the comrades that work there already.
To sit at home and do nothing is to be complicit in the violence against the international working class. Our collectives must see ourselves as the international working class so much that what happens in Gaza or Sudan is not something isolated but rather an attack on us.
We struggle against nationalism. We should not be defined by our borders but by our class. Before we are “South Africans” we are workers who happen to live in South Africa. Our enemies are not immigrants from other demarcated borders but the capitalist class that seeks to divide and exploit us and conquer us.
We are embarking on the struggle to fight back by recruiting as many industrial workers and young people as possible in order to fight and destroy capitalist exploitation and all the ills that come with it.
Read the ICWP manifesto Mobilize the Masses for Communism here