Sister, What you experience, we live here ♦ Being a Communist here ♦
Sister: What you experience in the factory, we live in many geographies
–”I’m going to tell you about the factory where I work…”
And so you began your speech with a broken voice, but firm and determined to say your word, to be the voice of those who continue to be silenced by capital, sister comrade.
– “Rats pollute where you are working. (…) People are fired unfairly.”
What matters is production, not your health and even less your life. I listen to you and immediately visualize more working women from different geographies; but all of them from the same world within a logic of the market, sustained by rogue relations between employers and female and male workers, where only exploitation and wage slavery fit.
– “If the children get sick, you can’t ask permission. We have to leave them sick alone and our children do not understand.”
How do you explain to your sons and daughters that their mother is subjugated as an object of production, expropriated of all your value as a human being, where it is forbidden to think of a minimum dignified life for them? It is not your task, sister, it is a collective ethical-political responsibility; a complex but vital challenge that we need to take on.
– “In the factory there is one’s time. When you complain they just tell us: There, you see, if you don’t want to or don’t like it, leave.”
Again your words, emerging from your conscience and heart, beat in me and I see you in the endless rows of young people, mothers, fathers, and even grandmothers and grandfathers, under the sun and the rain, waiting to be “hired, hired”, transgressing borders, without expecting a minimum salary and working conditions.
–”We work and they don’t care about our health.
And one’s work is left there…
And one’s time is left there…”
Your existence, your life is synthesized in producing 140 dozen. It doesn’t matter how, but produce them. And you know the consequences of not reaching the “goal”. Are these consequences only in your factory? You fully understand that it is not, because capitalist interests and all political expressions of the right know no borders. They are like recipes/pieces part of a scaffolding that runs regardless of who it drags, defined by the bosses of your maquila, of the other maquilas near and far, of the so-called world of industry where the word “rights” does not exist, much less “justice”, “equality”, “freedom”.
– “Thanks to the Party I have understood what exploitation means, what to do and how to respond to exploitation.”
And that historic and wise question “What is to be done?”, in your voice has meaning again in my life and I walk and I experience it again as a result of the dialectical praxis in the class struggle. I have no words to tell you:
Thank you, comrade, comrade, sister! Let us always extend our fists in one heart against every expression born of infamous capitalism. You’re not alone! I assure you!
—Comrade in Costa Rica
Letter: Being a Communist
Greetings to the comrades of the north and the south! With whom we were able to meet in person in El Salvador, a territory of struggle and resistance against the system. Where that history marked by “war” is still alive.
In these days of work with the comrades, our voices were heard. We could feel that injustices remain the same in any part of the world. Because the minority continues to enrich itself at the expense of us, the working class.
That is why being a Communist and belonging to the ICWP positions me to be critical of this oppressive system and to fight together with comrades for a better world, for a communist society.
—Comrade in Mexico