Workers and Students, Women and Men, Join ICWP
SOUTH AFRICA, August 3— We just came from the mobilization on a campus. The day went tremendously well. We were four comrades. We distributed over 60 Red Flags. Our primary goal was to establish some contacts on the campus so that we could coordinate our work and try to integrate the work on the two campuses and expand our work from there.
We did manage to get some contacts. The fortunate part about the contacts is they are females. Most of the students we talked to were females. We stressed the fact that we need more females in our Party.
“I think this will help us form the group at two universities where we have members. I did explain this to them,” explained a comrade.
“I also had a conversation with one young woman who is part of the Black Consciousness movement. She thought we were the South African Communist Party since she heard the word communism. I explained to her that you cannot say you are fighting the capitalist system but you align yourself with the bosses, you take orders from the bosses. So that’s not fighting capitalism.
“I think today’s mobilization will really help us a lot to try to recruit some students because most of the contacts that we got are on my campus. So I will try hard so that every time we receive a new issue of the Red Flag, to contact them and give it to them. We have their numbers and they are keen to learn more about the Party. They said they will raise some questions in the group when they’ve read the Red Flag and thought about what we presented to them.
So I think it really went well today and I think that more will come from what has been done today.”
Another comrade had a conversation with a young woman who belonged to the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) student organization. He explained, “After we talked awhile she was more interested in knowing more about us.
“We argued about what is right because I was saying we should fight directly for communism, not the so-called steps to Communism. History has proven to us that they don’t work. The socialism that the EFF is trying to fight for, which they mix with some black cultural consciousness philosophy, has been proven not to work. It’s not really a solution. It’s called reformism.
“We explained that what we are going to get with socialism is just state capitalism like we saw in the Soviet Union and also in countries like Cuba and China. So as much as we can nationalize industry, as long as we don’t eradicate the material basis for capitalism, which is first and foremost money and concentrating the means of production in private hands instead of collectives, nothing will change.
And we explained that we can’t win the fight just locally because capitalism is global, so therefore we need a global mass party, the ICWP, to actually win this fight and eradicate capitalism once and for all. That’s what we talked with the students about.”
Some were against what we said. We learn a lot even from those conversations too. Some of them, even though they were against our ideas, took Red Flag. Hopefully they will read it and have some questions they can ask on our website.
August 8 Update: We have met with two of the female students we met at the school the other day. They want to learn more about the party so they can join. This is good because we have had a lot of struggle in our collective about the importance of recruiting more female comrades.
Unity of women and men workers—and the leadership women can give—are crucial to the victory of communism.
South Africa, 2015
Joining ICWP
The first time I went to an ICWP meeting was when I was invited by a neighbor at his place. I asked him what it was about. He said it is a meeting we will be talking about communism. He had already given me the Red Flag and I knew just a little bit about ICWP.
When we got there, I had questions on how communism would work, given that we will not use money. The comrades were clear in their response that there are no definite rules written in stone about how communism will work; however, we do have guiding principles that we will mobilize the masses to produce for the needs of the working class as whole, we will organize ourselves to the best of our abilities and sharing the fruits of production instead of selling them.
The comrades talked at length too about the horrors of capitalism and how the system of exploitation doesn’t have color, it affects workers regardless of their race, gender and nationality. They talked about the urgency to fight against it. The comrades at the meeting asked me to join ICWP. I agreed to join not because I thought everything they were saying was perfect. But I saw, and they made clear the urgency with which we as the working class need to mobilize ourselves in order to fight capitalist blood suckers. If we don’t, nothing will change, and we will continue to suffer great sufferings.
I must say it has been a pleasure being a member of ICWP. I’ve learned a lot from mobilizing workers, students and miners. Since I joined, we have grown as a collective, we have made mistakes and learned from them, I encourage everyone to join ICWP and fight to end this terrible system.
—A comrade in South Africa