Boeing Workers Answer Anti-Asian Violence with struggle to build ICWP here ♦ History of Racism, Sexism and War here ♦ Deeper Understanding of Sexism and Racism Builds Closer ties here ♦
Los Angeles (US), March 13
Boeing Workers Answer Anger and Anxiety over Anti-Asian Violence: Let’s Struggle to Spread Communist Ideas and Build the Party
SEATTLE (US), March 29— “It’s time I got out there,” declared C., a retired Boeing comrade. He decided to get a vaccine shot despite the racist history of the U.S. medical establishment.
He changed his mind partly because of the struggle raging in the U.S. and around the world. The anti-Asian racist-sexist murders in Atlanta were the last straw.
The U.S ruling class has slaughtered untold millions in a never-ending racist reign of terror. It targets specific groups of people based on the needs of their empire at a particular time. It may even concede to temporary, minor relief (reform) for some in exchange for supporting attacks on others. “Divide and conquer” is their overarching strategy.
To be sure, the U.S. rulers are not alone. Every country uses similar schemes to maintain the bosses’ power and profits.
When our party says communist revolution is a life and death issue, it is not hyperbole. The latest attacks highlight this truth. Only the growth of the International Communist Workers’ Party will give the working class what it needs to smash this shape-shifting racist horror.
A Toxic Brew of Sexism and Racism
A large group of Boeing comrades and friends reacted with anger and anxiety to the Atlanta slaughter. A half-dozen Asian immigrant workers from four countries were joined in outrage by even more Black and white employees and retirees. All but one of the Asian immigrants were women.
Everyone agreed that it was impossible to disentangle the racism and sexism that drove this attack and many others. Capitalism, particularly in the age of imperialism, invented the image of Asian women as the ideal submissive feminine sex object. During World War II, Japanese imperialism – which was racist against Koreans—enslaved South Korean women in brothels. The working class must actively oppose all sexist and racist stereotypes.
That is how capitalism works. Racism and sexism amplify each other. But Vietnamese women soldiers during the war against US imperialism, and many others before and since, prove that Asian women are powerful fighters for the working class.
Comrades vowed, self-critically, to focus more in the coming weeks and months on the how communist revolution will end this toxic brew.
What to Do About Atlanta?
Boeing workers really wanted to know what to do about the deadly spike in racist, sexist and xenophobic terror.
Some remembered the separation of families at the US-Mexico border several years ago. Multi-racial groups of Boeing workers responded by demonstrating and supporting anti-xenophobic encampments outside a detention prison. Scores fanned out through the plant with ICWP literature. Comrades made sure communist ideas were discussed everywhere.
A. didn’t “think the current U.S. government supports anti-immigrant racism and anti-Asian and Pacific Islander racism.” Hence, no need for a similar mobilization.
M. didn’t trust the politicians: “They will say nice things, but they won’t do anything.” Although she supported demonstrations, she didn’t have much faith they would change the situation. Despite worries about her family, she still felt powerless.
Confidence in the Working Class
The newly vaccinated comrade C. was quick to observe that the capitalists always try to divide us and pit one “minority” against another. Racist, sexist stereotypes of Asian women pissed him off. Capitalist white supremacist ideology bolsters the whole rotten, racist system.
“But we are not all that divided,” he concluded. “I hear friends say white people do this or that, but when you get to know people, you realize that’s not all white people.”
He made no excuses for committed racists even if they are workers. The threat of fascism is too real. But he sees a way forward.
“We must heal the sickness,” C. said. “You say the sickness comes from capitalism. I agree, but I wonder if there’s a little bit of capitalism we can tolerate.”
A little bit of capitalism is like a little bit of cancer. If you don’t end it with communist revolution, it will re-emerge more deadly than before.
We stand on the shoulders of giants. Since even before the Paris Commune, millions have dedicated their lives to fighting for their vision of communism. We should emulate their dedication to the working class.
But the communist movement established socialism, which keeps the wage system and other core aspects of capitalism. Eventually, this mistake undermined their heroic efforts. Capitalism reemerged along with even more vicious racism, sexism and xenophobia. The ICWP fights directly for communism, eliminating capitalism in its entirety—forever.
Comrades and friends are not powerless. We measure our progress by getting out there with communist ideas and growing the International Communist Workers Party.
The Long History of Racism, Sexism and War
The U.S. ruling class has manufactured several themes to push anti-Asian racism. One is Covid. The pandemic was first seen in China; the bosses’ press somehow makes this the fault of the Chinese people. They even peddle an insane conspiracy theory implying that Covid was developed as a weapon released from a Chinese lab (ignoring the history of US biological weapons research).
But anti-Asian racism, sexism and xenophobia date back more than a century. They set the stage for the current anti-Asian propaganda.
The first immigration laws in the US, the Fugitive Slave Laws passed by Congress in 1792 and 1850, were directed at black people escaping slavery.
The Page Act of 1875 prohibited Chinese women from coming to the US, slandering them as prostitutes. Men could come work but not their wives. Then came the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. It called for halting Chinese immigration to “maintain racial purity.”
The US rulers need to whip up xenophobia and especially anti-Chinese sentiment because they understand that China is their main enemy. Biden’s “America is back” is directed at trying to re-build international support to counter China.
The root of all this is the sharpening economic competition between the US and China and China’s threat to U.S. dominance. Historically, such propaganda has been used to win soldiers and the general population to war—either proxy battles or direct conflicts up to and including world war.
Deeper Understanding of Sexism and Racism Builds Closer Relationships
The murders in Atlanta, mainly of Asian women, led a group of about 15 teachers and staff where I work to gather (on Zoom) to “hold space” to share our grief and anger.
We didn’t all understand the events in the same way, but the hour-long conversation centered on the intersection of sexism and racism.
A Japanese American woman shared her family trauma from being dispossessed and imprisoned during World War II. A Puerto Rican woman, married to an Asian man, said she feared for her biracial daughter every time they went to the park.
Several women with roots in two other Asian countries told of their personal experiences of repeated harassment based on sexually explicit stereotypes of Asian women.
A Pacific-Islander man wasn’t sure that racism had much to do with the Atlanta attack and said he didn’t want to hear about blaming Trump for it. Everyone else saw the murders as racist as well as sexist.
Later in the conversation, I mentioned that when Biden said that “China is eating our lunch” he was building anti-Asian racism as surely as Trump’s “China virus” garbage. Anti-Chinese racism helps prepare people to accept war, just as anti-Japanese racism did during World War II.
Most other participants were Black or Latinx. Several said that while their experiences with racism were not the same as their Asian co-workers, they had a lot in common. And that racism and sexism are deeply intertwined as part of the structure and history of oppression. Many heads nodded when someone commented that we mustn’t fall prey to “divide and conquer” strategies.
The capitalist class here in Los Angeles (USA) has worked hard for over thirty years to turn Black and Korean people against each other. The Black faculty in this meeting were clearly committed to fighting this racist maneuver.
The general sense was that the Atlanta murderer was guilt-ridden about his sexuality (based on his rigid Christian upbringing). He sought out Asian women to fulfill his fetishized racist fantasies about them. He killed them to shift blame from his own sick self to them as “temptresses.” That is, these were quintessentially sexist murders, shaped by racism.
This meeting was part of an ongoing conversation at our campus about how to oppose racism and white supremacy. In Zoom events, I post links to Red Flag and the ICWP pamphlet about racism. Several of these colleagues (and others) read Red Flag.
What made this “hold space” different was that people felt secure enough to “open up” much more about deeply personal experiences. I think that confronting sexism directly helped to make that happen.
Teacher comrade
Los Angeles (US), March 27
In response to the wave of vicious racist attacks on Asian workers in the US, thousands of people took to the streets on Saturday. The murderous sexist attack in Atlanta was the last straw of a series of attacks, fomented by Trump’s racist blaming of Chinese people for the Covid virus, but reflecting a long history of attacks on Asian workers in the US. ICWP comrades in Los Angeles and Seattle brought Red Flag and our communist analysis to two of these rallies. In Los Angeles, comrades distributed more than 120 RFs to a very diverse crowd of 500 people. In Seattle, comrades distributed 55 papers to a smaller crowd.
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