We went to a campus today. The school’s rules don’t allow people to distribute any political literature or be involved in any political meeting or discussion. That didn’t stop us. We waited until the students came out. In the meantime, we engaged some students who were not in class.
The day went well despite the ban against doing political work on the campus. There were students asking us questions. Since the administration didn’t want us there, we had to hide from security. It was the first campus where we weren’t allowed to sit down with the students.
Kuhle said, “I managed to engage with a young woman who was not in class. She said she is tired of all these political parties. They say one thing and do another. They don’t do what they promise. I told her that they will never change their ways because these are all capitalist parties. They want to administer capitalism. It doesn’t matter whether you vote or not. They won’t change. It only matters what you do.”
I told her that she should be part of the change by joining International Communist Workers’ Party and fighting for a communist society where everything that people produce is for themselves and no one profits from it—a future without exploitation.
After the discussion, she saw what Communism is about. She took two copies of Red Flag to give one to her roommate. I told her that if she wants more information she should go to the web site. She seemed really interested.
Comrades distributed 120 papers to the students as they came out because they waited from 11 am to 2 pm, when they distributed Red Flag to more students.
“As we were distributing, there was this white guy who was reading Red Flag. So I decided to engage him,” said Themba. “It was the first time I met a white guy who was willing to join our movement on the spot. We exchanged numbers. He was knowledgeable about communism. He had legitimate questions. He wanted to know our relationship with the South African Communist Party (SACP). He was really pleased that we are not affiliated with the SACP, the African National Congress and all the other parties in South Africa.”
He had questions about our ideology, what does the concept of Mobilize the Masses for Communism mean? We answered most of his questions within the limited time we had. We arranged to send him copies of MMC and the Education pamphlet. He said that he will read more on the web site. He definitely wants to join us.
Most of our work had been concentrated on black people and now we are breaking those racial barriers. We are approaching white and coloured (mixed-race) students, and from all of them the response has been tremendous.
This is the first step in creating a diverse collective. This can now clearly demonstrate to others that we are really fighting racism and sexism. This white comrade is going to be part of our collective. This will help other white people be part of this work.
He wanted to know if this was the last time we would go to the school. We said it was the first. We chose that area because there are technical colleges and factories.
There are a large number of students and industrial workers, including white people. If we can concentrate our efforts there—in the universities and factories for 2 or 3 months, we will see some results. From there, we can engage other places. Today, in a short time, we got contacts. This will encourage this comrade to bring others who are white and then we can take it from there.
As a collective we are stretched too thin. We need to do many things on different fronts. We need to keep in contact with the ladies we mobilized for May Day. Some of them came Sunday to get Red Flag but we didn’t reach all of them. We didn’t have enough air time (paid phone time).
We can’t cover the whole vast area without help from other collectives. It’s a struggle. We are preparing for the meeting of all the collectives of ICWP here so we can come up with solutions to distribute the work. Some challenges will take time. But today was very successful.