I am an autoworker. I can say it has been a long, interesting and challenging journey through the ICWP of learning new things every day and meeting with various kinds of people with diverse ways of thinking, attitudes and back grounds but all I can say is that all these challenges have built a strong and widely thinking comrade that can survive in any situation.
Ever since I joined ICWP, attended meetings and reading the Red Flag, filling myself with knowledge then I had to go to the next step of sharing that knowledge which is the distribution of Red Flag.
Well I took some Red Flags from a comrade in my collective to give to my colleagues (whom I promised to bring Red Flags for) to read. Luckily that day I was early at work, so we had more time to talk and I gave them the Red Flags, but they seemed to not understand the Red Flag.
I think they were expecting some sort of a history book with theories, then I explained to them that this is a newspaper and we had a Xhosa newspaper in the old days called IZIMVU ZABANTSUNDU (OPINIONS OF BLACKS) where all black people would write and express themselves. I used that as an example to explain the Red Flag to them.
They were enlightened. During lunch time, we started talking about the Red Flag. One of my colleagues said that this is none of our concern because it’s not happening here in South Africa. I then told him that it’s the same thing that’s happening here which is exploitation of the working class, and we agreed on that. He started expressing himself about how unhappy he is in this capitalist society, the other one was shocked and surprised that the same thing that we are experiencing here in South Africa is happening in other countries as well,
—Autoworker comrade