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Boeing’s Weapons Pale:

Before the Power Of Mobilized Workers

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Boeing is the world’s largest arms exporter. The company protects U.S imperialism by tying murderous puppet regimes to the US bosses with arms sales, even as it attacks those of us who work here. It is no exaggeration to say that the company’s $47.47 billion in profits are soaked in blood.
Billions hate imperialism. Boeing workers can play a key role in giving voice to this justifiable class hatred. But first we must know what we are fighting against and what we are fighting for.
Our guiding principle is to mobilize the masses for communism the world over. Worker-to-worker communist internationalism is the strategy we use to answer the economic servitude and war inherent in imperialist foreign policy.

Millions Of Working Class Ambassadors
Will we still build planes under communism? Absolutely! We want workers to be free to travel and meet and work with comrades from many different places. Of course, our planes won’t be the cattle cars that Boeing currently makes.
Will we make warplanes? Yes, because we will have the capitalists of the whole world against us. Almost certainly, we will face invading capitalist armies. We’ll fight these armies out of immediate necessity, but our overall strategy would remain to mobilize the masses for communism everywhere.
Will we sell warplanes to capitalist countries? No way! We won’t give them weapons to attack their competitors and/or their own workers. In fact we won’t sell them passenger planes or cars or anything. We won’t want their filthy money and won’t be sucked into their capitalist marketplace. We won’t buy or sell anything.
U.S. and European imperialists thought they could tame the Chinese this way after the 1949 revolution. “It is a backward country,” they reasoned. “They will need the goods we produce and our expertise.”
In China, however, many asked, “How do we view the value of production?  Do we want useful labor that promotes collective relations or labor to expand Capital?”
Millions had a taste of communism in the Chinese Red Army leading up to the seizure of power and during the Cultural Revolution. The Red Army’s supply system and the communes’ production for collective need were very attractive. 
It took decades of violent repression to beat back these communist tendencies, even with the socialist government maintaining money, banks and markets.
In fact, the Chinese leaders had in mind relying on the Soviet Union and following their socialist (state capitalist) path of development.
Imagine what a state and party dedicated to mobilizing these masses for communist production could do. At a bare minimum we would create hundreds of millions of “working class communist ambassadors.” A far cry from today’s inter-imperialist rivalry!

Communist Solidarity Now and In The Future
Boeing comrades and the ICWP internationally launched solidarity efforts to support striking oil workers and South African metal workers in the last nine months. We called it communist solidarity.
We said the South African workers’ fight against Capital was our fight: that we all needed to mobilize for communism. The South African comrades answered in kind during the oil strike.
Self-critically, we could have been sharper politically and reached out to more workers. We might have fought harder if we were clearer about the crucial role worker-to-worker internationalism plays in the success of communism.
In the future the world’s workers will cooperate based on communist internationalism instead of being forced to fight each other by capitalist imperialism.

 

Fraternization Between the "Enemy” Troops Will Help Crush Imperialism

Red Russian solders and workers fought against invading imperialists for three years after the Bolsheviks took power. Workers from the Putilov tank factory, one of the largest in the world, would drive their newly manufactured weapons out of the plant gates directly to the front. There they instructed volunteers how to use them.
But the Red Army did much more than point guns at imperialist troops. Fourteen foreign countries invaded Russia after the Bolsheviks took power. Red Army soldiers fraternized with them all. Troops from fourteen countries revolted.
German generals refused to take back soldiers captured by the Reds. The imperialists were afraid they had become “infected with Bolshevism.”
These red troops were as much concerned about political events as they were with military tactics. For example, American reporter John Reed described his ride to the front with half a dozen Red Guards during the 1917 Russian revolution:
A big Red Guard, Vladimir Nikolayevich, plied me with questions about America. “Why did America come into the war?” Are American workers ready to throw over the capitalists?” and other, very difficult to answer [questions about class struggles in the US].
We thundered on, while Vladimir bellowed to me about the internationalism of the Panama Canal and such matters.[1]

These soldiers were ready to take hold of the world. And they met many similarly inclined among the rank-and-file of every invading force the bosses could muster.
Unfortunately, the Russian socialist leadership viewed fraternization as a temporary war tactic. A few years later, the Soviet government normalized relations with Iran and Turkey, whose governments were killing communists at the time.
We will make no such mistake. Soldiers will join millions of workers to expand communist mobilization around the globe. That will be the new normal.
[1] Ten Days That Shook The World by John Reed

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