Workers Debate how to Escape Boeing’s Mass Unemployment here ♦ Boeing’s Disasters Left Hundreds Dead here ♦ Communist Struggle Leads to Greater Understanding here ♦
For decades, Boeing workers have fought hard against company attacks. In the face of mass unemployment, the only way forward for them is communist revolution.
Workers Debate How to Escape Boeing’s Legacy of Mass Unemployment
SEATTLE (USA), March 7— “Sad, the collapse of Boeing. Who would’ve thought?” said a laid-off aerospace worker. More Boeing workers than ever are contemplating this possibility, or, at least, the possibility that the company will never again employ as many workers at current wage levels.
The debate started when a comrade sent out a text that ended: “Some of my friends think capitalism has outlived its usefulness, but assumed Boeing workers would never entertain such an idea because they are too well paid, not like other workers around the world or in the U.S. What do you think?”
Many related questions have come up. Who is to blame? Can we ever trust this system to serve our needs? Does the answer lie in workers taking individual initiative or organizing collectively for communist revolution?
A multi-racial group of over a half dozen have joined this conversation. We expect more will be involved by the time you read this.
Most of these workers agreed with one who said, “Manufacturing needs to become strong again without the owners reaping all the benefits.”
But then a twenty-something new hire said, “Making the bosses or workers into enemies or victims creates a bias that neglects the upside of the current situation.”
When questioned further, he put most of the blame on workers for not taking initiative in finding new jobs.
The debate quickly turned to the question of “blaming the victim” [the working class]. “As I’m sure you know,” answered a comrade, “blame-the-victim is also used to justify sexism, racism and xenophobia. Of course, none of this excuses workers who do the bosses’ dirty work by encouraging and tolerating these capitalist evils.”
The new hire saw the connection with the blame-the-victim strategy when it came to sexism, racism and xenophobia, but wouldn’t acknowledge this strategy when it came to the economy and the working class.
Capitalism Offers Us Only Mass Unemployment
Comrades and friends took time to consider each other’s thoughts. Eventually the discussion got around to the difference between how the bosses and their intellectual apologists described capitalism versus Marxist political economy.
Rather than just accepting the bosses’ way of portraying economic development, our group began to explore the ways communists expose the system’s exploitative nature.
What the capitalist calls a saturated market, a communist calls a crisis of overproduction. More is produced than can be sold profitably. Crises of overproduction are global. They are baked into the system.
The Boeing new hire argued that “the wage slaves have the knowledge at their disposal to get a different, good job.” In fact, that’s not what happens for most workers.
Millions upon millions of workers—through no fault of their own—are thrown into the streets when these inevitable crises emerge. The ability to escape this catastrophe through individual initiative quickly disappears as the capitalist crisis spreads like a pandemic.
Working for the Collective Needs of Our Class Opens Up a New World
Next, we began to discuss how production will work in communism.
Communist production is organized to provide for our collective needs, not to enable the capitalist to steal the surplus value (profits) from the working class.
Communist production eliminates the necessity of an exclusive sphere of activity (that is, a job). By eliminating corporations, it frees the workers to provide useful work for all of society in many fields.
In communism, where you work and what kind of work you do will no longer determine your economic survival or social status. Everyone will be provided with the necessities of life as we build a society based on our collective needs.
These terms and ideas may be new to the young Boeing worker, but he is willing to tackle them.
He has a close family member who has helped lead our political fights at Boeing for many years. He knows that our comrades and friends have consistently been involved with anti-racist struggles on the job.
Mass unemployment will be the Boeing legacy. There is no reason that workers have to accept this fate. When workers like our friends who are debating this situation join the ICWP, we can build a new world. A communist world where work can be transformed into a labor of love for us all.
Boeing’s Disasters Left Hundreds Dead and Thousands of Workers in the Streets
The causes of Boeing’s downfall are many. Errors were made in the pursuit of profits. Some resulted in the deaths of hundreds of people. The company has been fined millions of dollars, but they can shrug that off easily.
So, they did what capitalists do to save their necks. They launched a massive layoff (tens of thousands) of workers and outsourced hundreds of jobs. Many of their subcontractors have closed up shop for good. These lost jobs were union jobs. However, the union (IAM) didn’t put up a fight.
Of course, the pandemic has meant a loss of profits for aerospace corporations worldwide. But Boeing’s main competitor, Airbus, delivered 566 planes in 2020. Boeing delivered only 157.
And China is scheduled to deliver its first jet that competes with Boeing’s MAX and Airbus’s A320 series at the end of this year.
Communist Struggle with Our Base Leads to Greater Understanding within the Party
Our conversations about mass unemployment resulting from Boeing’s collapse have sparked political struggle within our party collective—as they should. Communist debates with our base should help drive the party’s politics and practice forward.
Two questions came to the fore. How important is it to spend time struggling with young industrial workers who have illusions about capitalism? Should we feature dialogues like these in our paper?
One comrade said the people he knows already agree with communism. They need examples of how communism works, not long dialogues in our paper. Most others thought the retelling of these stories of struggle at work was what people wanted to hear; they inspire comrades and our base to raise communism in every struggle and in their day-to-day lives.
After hearing about the conversations among Boeing workers, a comrade teacher was inspired and contributed the following observation. “It does seem like more teachers are also more willing to entertain radical ideas. We must go beyond pushing to assimilate students in new ways. We need to imagine how things might be different. Definitively younger teachers, millennials, are far more likely to be anti-capitalist.”
The discussion continued online after our collective’s meeting. The consensus seems to be that these two ways of writing for the paper are not mutually exclusive. Red Flag needs articles that show how we invite our base to participate in political struggle. That means the collectives that write these articles must take into account where our friends are coming from, as well as where the working class has to go.
To be sure, this does not eliminate discussions about how communism works, but it puts these discussions in the context of shaping our lives around the workers we know. The best articles come from and reflect this focus.
—Seattle (USA) Collective
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