Communism Will End Crisis of Racism and Xenophobia
SEATTLE (US), February 15— “It’s all about racism!” was how a Boeing friend viewed the “national emergency.”
Trump had just declared a national emergency supposedly to get money to build a wall on the southern US border. But this Boeing worker wasn’t fooled. He responded immediately to this crisis of racism and xenophobia.
As soon as he arrived at work, he went straight to a worker who has spouted xenophobic lies in the past.
“First they came for Blacks like me,” he began. “Then the Chinese.” He went through a list of local racist and xenophobic exploitation and oppression.
“Now they are going after Hispanics. Then they are going to come for you,” he ended. The racist didn’t say a word the rest of the day.
As mad as he was with this racist worker, our friend was even madder at the Democratic politicians. “You don’t make compromises with racists and anti-immigrant bigots,” he shouted so that many in his crew could hear. He was referring to the border-security agreement the Democratic Party had pushed.
Then he encouraged a comrade to step up the fight. “You have to be both profane and profound,” he said.
He told a story to illustrate how serious he thought the situation was. He had been at a demonstration some years ago where some racist had chanted against blacks using the “N” word. This racist’s son stared at his father. Eventually, the kid started the same chant.
“When you allow these racist and xenophobic rallies to go on, you embed this sh..t in society,” he said.
“Let’s discuss why this happens and how we can end racism and xenophobia,” said a comrade.
“I’ll tell you why it happens,” interrupted our friend. “Because it makes money!”
“Then we have to get rid of money,” our comrade answered.
The friend agreed and he knew the way to do this was with communism. He was clear this would require a revolution.
He didn’t agree to join the party on the spot. But he vowed to distribute our upcoming pamphlet, “Fight for the Day When No Worker Will Be Called Foreigner.” We made detailed plans together to distribute large numbers at work, among friends and family outside of work and among students.
Learning from Our Friends
It was time to go back to work. We decided to continue our debate about the potential for revolution. The question of whether or not we have this revolutionary potential seems to be a big stumbling block to recruiting more Party members.
Our comrade took the friend’s encouragement to heart. He expanded the discussion in his area of the plant.
Many workers were confused about the idea of a crisis at the border. Some of these workers had been in discussions before about how the bosses demonize immigrants.
The bosses haven’t let up with their xenophobic misinformation. Self-critically, our party and friends haven’t been working every day to counter this fascist propaganda with communist ideas. This opens the door to confusion.
We were able to make up for this lapse. Other friends and comrades had long conversations exposing racist and xenophobic lies yet again.
For example, some insisted that citizens’ taxes were being used to support immigrants. We pointed out that the biggest company in Seattle, Amazon, paid zero taxes on $11 billion in profits last year. The solution was to end the tyranny of corporations with communist revolution, not to blame other workers.
We learned a valuable lesson: the fight to bring communist solutions upfront must be consistent and timely.
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