Who Do You Trust: Bosses or Workers?
March 11—Boeing CEO Muilenburg and his pal Trump tried to keep the crash-prone 737 max flying. Along with Boeing’s lapdog, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), they were eventually forced to ground them, but only after most countries banned the jet from their airspace.
The present spin says all that is needed is a software fix. In fact, the plane was knowingly designed to be prone to stall. A stall occurs when an aircraft tilts up too much. If the incline is great enough, lift decreases. Then the plane crashes to the ground.
“How can that be?” asked a Boeing friend. “Why would they knowingly design a jet that would kill 346 people to save a little money?”
That’s the way he thinks, and most workers think, but not how the bosses think.
A few years ago, Airbus came out with a new single-aisle A320. It was more fuel efficient, in part because it had bigger, more modern engines. The Airbus wings were high enough to accommodate these bigger engines. It was a big seller.
The wings on the 737 were lower. The company could either design a new plane or raise the landing gear and position the engines closer to the body and more forward. Not surprisingly, they chose the second option because it was $10 billion cheaper to develop, and it would get to market quicker.
The aerodynamics of this modification tended to make the nose of the plane rise. That’s what causes a stall.
Murder for Profit
With profits on their mind, the executives convinced themselves they could compensate with a software program. The idea was that the software would automatically bring the nose down if a sensor said the plane was tilted too high. Instead, in two instances in less than five months, the software crashed the plane.
Now the company wants to convince the flying public to concentrate on the software fix. Even if the fix makes it easier to disengage the automatic anti-stall maneuver, you are still left with an unstable plane. But a fix is cheaper and quicker than a total redesign.
Most workers have learned through bitter experience that profits are always primary for capitalist companies. So why did this particular worker have doubts?
The rest of the conversation offered a hint. “Capitalism is here to stay,” he asserted when we began to talk about how this would never happen in communism.
He didn’t want capitalism to continue, but he saw no way out. “Offer a worker a lot of money and they will give up the struggle. They are looking for an easy way out.”
This cynicism could lead to putting more faith in the CEO (who actually does get a lot of money, $30 million last year) than in his fellow workers. Even now, the truth is many workers are not looking for an easy life. They want a meaningful one. And this will only be truer in communism.
As workers struggled to come to grips with this tragedy, we saw some indications of our potential. When one racist said there would be no problem if those “foreign pilots only learned English,” workers jumped all over him. They called his comment “racist bullsh-t.”
Another worker had heard similar xenophobia on TV. A company spokesperson implied that Ethiopian pilots weren’t as well-trained as U.S. pilots.
This worker was not about to let the bosses off the hook with this racist slur. He went to nearly everyone in the crew saying how stupid the spokesperson was.
It was also inspiring to see workers educating themselves about aerodynamics in a few days. This information has been hidden from “ordinary” workers. It has been restricted to university-schooled engineers. Even as the company and the FAA continued to hide what was going on, workers fought to understand the science.
In communism, all aerospace workers will learn the science behind what they are building. In turn, they will spread this knowledge to the population at large. Designing crash-prone airplanes in secret will become a relic of the long-defeated capitalism system.
Capitalism = Murder
March 21: The New York Times revealed today that the doomed Boeing jets in Ethiopia and Indonesia lacked two important safety features because Boeing charged extra for them. A back-up fire extinguisher in the cargo hold and oxygen masks for the crew are also optional.
What a dramatic example of a murderous system which places profits over human life!
One hundred and fifty-seven people in the Ethiopian Lion Air crash. One hundred and eight-nine people in the Garuda Indonesia crash. Because Boeing charged extra and the airlines refused to pay.
And “regulators”—the overseers of airline safety in the bosses’ governments—did not require them.
Communism will eliminate money, markets, production for sale and profit. Our motivation will be human life and comradely relations of production. Nothing will be produced without every safety feature we can think of. There won’t be “safe” airlines for the big carriers and less-safe airlines for others.
Boeing’s nickel-and-diming at the cost of human life reflects more than the ghoulish essence of capitalism. It also reflects the desperate competition between Boeing and Airbus in a world where inter-imperialist rivalry is getting more vicious and heading to World War III.
Boeing and Airbus rightly see this competition as a matter of life-and-death for them. Eventually one of them will go under, as Boeing’s US competitor McDonnell Douglas did.
In the process, they take us down with them until we rise up to overthrow them.
So, too, the larger competition between imperialists—especially US and China—for whose militaries Boeing and Airbus build warplanes. As Red Flag has explained before, the US is a declining power, facing a rising rival China.
In 2014 the Chinese Air Force had eleven Boeing 737s in service. Last November, Airbus teamed up with Lockheed to compete for US Air Force tanker contracts.
Just like companies, in capitalism imperialists constantly compete for markets, resources and labor to maximize their profits. This inevitably leads to crises, wars and world war.
As capitalist bosses move towards war, they increasingly build fascism to attack and divide the masses. At the same time, they promote patriotism to try to win us to kill and die for their empire and their profits.
We need to fight to get rid of capitalism and build communism—a system based not on mass murder for the profits of a few, but on the unity of workers to produce collectively to meet our needs.
For our own survival and that of our working-class family around the world, we must end this murderous system. Join us to fight for a communist world!
Soviet poster: Pass the knowledge of old manufacturers to young workers
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