July 21—For the past week I have been in Marikana to mobilize mine workers for communism. Mine workers are key and play a vital role for a communist revolution.
We distributed more than 200 Red Flag newspapers and Mobilize the Masses for Communism (MMC) pamphlets at two mine shafts: the Lonmin shaft and Impala shaft. When we talked to mine workers, especially in the Lonmin shaft, they showed at lot of anger towards the government and political parties.
A few mine workers said, “Don’t come here with your party. We are not interested. You have taken us for fools for far too long. When we were striking in 2012, you called us criminals who show nothing like workers’ behavior but criminal behavior.”
Apparently this was said by the South African Communist Party (SACP), calling miners “criminals” for striking for better wages. As a result, the SACP, together with the African National Congress government and the mine bosses, sent in their protectors, the Police to kill more than 40 mine workers and injure hundreds. But the miners’ struggle, their brave standing, showed us that when workers are organized they can stand the police brutality and fight the capitalists.
We explained to them that we are not SACP but the International Communist Workers’ Party (ICWP). We have nothing in common with traitors (the SACP). In actual fact, they are our enemy. They are the working class’s enemy. They are the ones we need to destroy, together with their capitalist bosses.
We explained that we are not only different from them, but ICWP is fighting directly for communism, not for failed socialism. They warmed to the idea once we explained it. They took the Red Flag and MMC. Two of them were really interested in the ICWP. They asked to meet again. We exchanged numbers and they wanted to join the party. This was a very good development for the party and it means now the party is going to have a cell in Lonmin.
After the visit to these, we met with the mine worker who really wanted to join. We struggled with him, because his most important contradiction was that even though communism sounds like a good idea to him, he didn’t think communist revolution and communist society is possible.
We studied some few pamphlets about the Russian revolution with him. He saw that really these major gains by the Russian workers in 1917 were indeed possible now. It just needs a determined working class with communist principles and communist solution to destroy our class enemies and create a society where exploitation does not exist. No one group gets more than others.
After that he said, “Really communist society is indeed true freedom, freedom we have been fighting for.” He said that some workers have given up but he is sure that when they hear more about the party and what it is all about they would join because they really need a solution to this capitalist brutality towards workers. “I will give workers the paper and explain it to them,” he added, “because some don’t know English and at least I speak the language they understand.”
This shows that workers need a communist solution to exploitation that they have subjected to for hundreds of years. This also means that for us party comrades here in South Africa, we need to go to mine workers more often. In that way the party will grow, because workers do not yet know about our ideas and they are what they have been waiting for.
Miners at Marikana, South Africa, on strike, August 2012. For more about this struggle, read our 2013 pamphlet, SOUTH AFRICA STRIKES CALL US TO MOBILIZE THE MASSES FOR COMMUNISM! (here)