Organising in Workplaces here ♦ Revolutionary Greetings here ♦ Generations of Struggle here ♦
Letter: Organising for Communism in Our Workplaces
I stand here as an ICWP member. My politics start where most of us spend 8, 10, 12 hours. On the job, in the factory, in the hospitals. ICWP stands for International Communist Workers’ Party, and for us communism is not just a slogan from a book. It is the idea that the people who create all the wealth, which is us, should decide how it gets used. No bosses, no more prioritising profit over people. Just workers planning production for human needs.
They tell us the system is broken. I say it is working exactly how it was designed: to keep us divided, scared, and tired. Divided by race, nationality, religion, etc. On the shop floor, in the strike line, we learn the truth: the boss needs all of us to make their profit. This means all of us have the power to shut it down and build something new.
This is where communism comes into play. So, what do we do? We organise, not for better wages, yes, we fight for this too. But the better struggle is for communism. We talk about it at lunch time, we distribute the Red Flag, we bring soldiers, students, workers, etc., together because the fight for communism has no borders.
The road won’t be easy. Every boss, every government, every TV station will say we are dreaming. But we choose class over country. We are able to make the dream a reality. Join us and fight with us in the struggle for communism!
—Comrade worker in South Africa
Letter: Comrades and class brothers and sisters, revolutionary greetings!
Arriving ten minutes late to the factory—after more than twenty years of work—was enough for them to reprimand me and threaten to dock me a day’s pay plus a seventh. In addition to barring me from entering the factory. Capitalism is the most brazen thief in history.
For several months now, they’ve dismantled the production line where I worked on the machine, in an attempt to drive me and other female coworkers to despair. We haven’t let them manipulate us as they please. We’ve resisted. Whenever they’ve tried to move me to another station, my female coworkers have shown solidarity. And as a group, we’ve refused to allow those changes.
In the International Communist Workers’ Party, I have learned that the most effective weapon is class consciousness. And that the class enemy is the boss who manipulates, threatens, and exploits workers to keep the profits for himself. Understanding my position as a worker has kept me steadfast in the communist struggle. There is no room for believing in capitalist illusions.
But in this contradiction between employer and worker, we have also learned that it is necessary to show the working masses that it is important to fight directly for communism to put an end to the horrors of capitalism.
Political work in the factories is quite controversial, since employers and unions play the same role. Favoring the system rather than our class. And they claim that we cannot represent the workers because we lack legal status.
Our struggle is resolute against the employer who wants to crush us, the workers organized in the ICWP.
Working in the garment factory means living a life of misery where the working class is exposed to verbal and psychological abuse. And they make it seem as if this is normal. Denying us time off even for a personal or family doctor’s appointment.
In the face of this capitalist exploitation, we must intensify the communist struggle.
—Red Worker in El Salvador
Letter: South Africa: Generations of Struggle
“I was born in 1954,” said the mother of a comrade. “I was sent to the rural areas. When I was fourteen, our choir conductor was taken by the police because of a song we were singing. It was a Xhosa song. I will translate it for you. ‘Our land is damaged, the land of our ancestors.’
“I passed the Matric in the rural area of Peddie. The next year, I went to Livingston Hospital in Port Elizabeth. I was training as a nurse. This was the time of riots. Houses were burnt, roads were closed, and police were shooting everywhere. Among the things people were fighting for were ‘no Afrikaans in our schools, and equal education.’
“I quit nursing because I could not endure the injuries. I could not tolerate seeing people injured like that.”
Instead, she became a teacher. Now she is retired.
The settler-colonial regime forced masses of rural workers into segregated prison-like townships. Their languages, culture, and food habits were changed to suit the needs of capitalist profit. South Africa became an apartheid state.
Recently we took an ailing comrade to a hospital. Right at the entrance, there was a bold sign directing people to a mortuary before we could even find a sign for the Emergency. These are the remnants from the apartheid times when hospitals were taking lots of injured people, and many succumbed.
We are now organizing ICWP in the same school where the retired teacher once taught. We are meeting young students aged fourteen and up. They are getting a communist education in dialectical materialism and how to use it to change the world.
—Older comrade