Essential to Communist Revolution: Boeing Workers Struggle to Build Confidence in The Working Class
SEATTLE, USA— “You can’t change history. What is, is!” said a Boeing Red Flag distributer.
He’s been circulating excerpts from “The American Influenza Epidemic of 1918-1919” among his crew. He focused on Seattle’s history with that pandemic. It was his way of arguing against the right-wing attempt to “open up the economy” without concern for workers’ lives.
“You stay in, you live. You congregate in large numbers, you die. It’s as easy as that,” he argued with his co-workers, referring to this article.
He was frustrated. “Why don’t these people know about the history of pandemics?” he asked a comrade. “Why is it so hard to convince them of the truth, let alone get them to act on that truth?”
Changing behavior isn’t easy.
Most of us have been taught that a good historian just collects the facts and that those facts lead to correct conclusions. The article he was circulating, from the University of Michigan, emphasized the conclusion of the Health Commissioner at that time, Dr. J. S. McBride.
“McBride was quick to blame the people of Seattle for the spread of the epidemic, either overlooking or failing to acknowledge the way the disease had operated in nearly every other American city.”
Our comrade showed this friend an article that he’d been circulating among his own crew, “When the Seattle General Strike and the 1918 Flu Collided.” This article, from Jacobin Magazine, had a lot of the same facts but added other crucial items.
Rather than repeat McBride’s diatribe against workers, the second article laid the blame at McBride’s feet. His co-conspirators included the city’s industrial titans and the political establishment.
They were all determined to keep the shipyards open despite the fact that “every day or so some unlucky shipyard worker would be carried out in a dead wagon.”
In short, capitalism was the heart of the problem.
“The Seattle ruling class used patriotism [to justify this carnage]. The Puget Sound bristled with warship production and armed encampments. The yards were ‘the life’ of the city, ‘pulsing through every [other] industry.’ These yards employed some thirty-five thousand men; fifteen thousand more worked in Tacoma’s shipyards.
“The Rainier Valley, home to Seattle’s slums and cheap housing for workers, suffered most.”
And it still does.
Soon after, shipyard workers, many of whom came from this area, ignited the Seattle General Strike.
This article has a completely different conclusion.
“Seattle’s workers transformed a world of war, of sickness, death and grief, into a great celebration of living [for the five days of the General Strike]. A better world is possible. It still is.”
That world is a communist world, but this social democratic article did not draw that conclusion. That key piece of information had to be filled in by ICWP comrades. The article only called for socialist reform, not the communist revolution we need.
History Is Molded by The Struggle Between Classes
Who would have thought that two history articles would create such turmoil among so many Boeing workers? Previously, many workers would have shrugged off the ensuing debates. But things have changed.
The attacks on aerospace workers are coming from all sides (see above.) Indeed, a billion industrial workers around the world are in great peril.
It is clear that industrial workers are key to the functioning of capitalism, as they are to communist revolution. How much can we expect of the industrial working class? This came up over and over again. Now more than ever, we must have rock-solid confidence that these workers will be won to communism.
The life and death choice is now ours: either we blame the working class and condemn ourselves to capitalist bondage or we break free by mobilizing the masses for communism.
Industrial Workers Must Create a Better—Communist—World
Sixteen thousand Boeing jobs will be cut June 1. Airbus will lay off ten thousand more. These are just the first round. The real carnage will hit the subcontractor employees, disproportionately large numbers of whom are Black, Latinx and immigrants.
Boeing alone has 17,000 subcontractors spread throughout the world. Hundreds of thousands have already lost their jobs. Millions of industrial workers will be without a livelihood within months as the economic impact spreads.
Life is no better for those who work in plants that are now open. For example, major U.S. manufacturers and the U.S. government, in collusion with the Mexican government, have kept factories that supply Boeing and other U.S. industries open in Mexico. COVID-19 cases are surging in these plants.
Honeywell, a major Boeing supplier with expansive operations in Mexicali, has seen work stoppages for weeks. This factory is not alone, as work actions spread as fast as the virus.
“They exposed us to contagion,” said Jorge Rojas, a welder in the factory. “For them, delivering their products was more important than our health.”
The message from the Pentagon to the Mexican government was that the United States wanted to continue production to “minimize the impacts to the military supply chain and national security writ large.” National security writ large is code for Boeing commercial jet production.
Communist revolution will ensure the security of the world’s working class family. Industrial workers around the world will play a central role in the revolution and the subsequent organization of a communist society.
Death in the name of national security and capitalist production for profits will end. The sooner, the better!
Mexicali, Baja California: “Alarms aren’t essential. My life is!”
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