Loose Bolts Shake Open Door to Racist Attacks here ♦ Comrade and Striker Share Experiences here ♦
NORTHERN IRELAND, January 18— Over 150,000 public workers walked out in the largest strike in fifty years. Transit workers plan further strikes. Irish workers, paid less than British workers, are hit harder by inflation and cuts in public services. In this deepening global capitalist crisis, the solution is not higher wages but communist revolution to end the wage system.
Loose Bolts Shake Open Door to Racist Attacks—Again!
SEATTLE (USA)— A Boeing Max plane crashed in October 2018, and another in March 2019, killing 346 people. Boeing’s Board of Directors and CEO implied that the fault lay with incompetent foreign pilots. Briefly, a few blue-collar Boeing workers tried to spread this lie. ICWP comrades and friends, including Asian immigrants, silenced those rumors before they could spread on the factory floor.
The latest Max emergency landing, after a door plug flew off mid-air, has opened the door to more widespread racism and sexism.
Blogger Walsh claimed, without evidence, that incompetent “diverse mechanics” were hired instead of “experienced” mechanics. “DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) is destroying the airline industry, and lots of people will die because of it,” Walsh told his 2.6 million followers on X.
Fascist commentator Ian Miles Cheong complained, “The 737 MAX was put together by a team of ‘diverse’ engineers.” Elon Musk amplified these attacks. Fox News said, “DEI must die, not passengers on your [Boeing] plane.”
These are not isolated racist rants. They reflect a national campaign, supported by billionaires, to intensify racism, sexism, and xenophobia.
A few years back, the company had to put on a show when millions demonstrated in cities where Boeing has factories. The new CEO and the Board promised to implement DEI. It became just a straw man for fascists to spread lying attacks on our fellow workers.
No key executives, who are overwhelmingly white men, are being held accountable for the latest Max blowout. Instead, the racists blame unknown, non-white Boeing and Spirit employees.
Subcontractor Spirit AeroSystems workers repeatedly warned corporate officials about “widespread and sustained quality failures” and “excessive amounts of defects.” A former Spirit Quality Control Inspector “struggled with Spirit’s culture which placed pushing out products over quality,” according to a 2023 lawsuit. Herein lies the real fault.
The question for retired and still-working Boeing workers is why racism and sexism are even more vitriolic than before. They are growing as the US loses its industrial power.
These divisive ideologies are baked into capitalism, which is built on a platform of wage slavery. The wage system pits one worker against another, making racism and sexism essential strategies of the capitalist system.
Long-Time Industrial Worker: Need Communist Solutions
A comrade worked for years as a boilermaker. He eventually got a job training men and women, children of immigrants and people of color, in aviation and other industrial jobs.
He met with about a hundred students every month to see how they were doing in the factories. Every month, the students complained about racist and sexist harassment. Every month he would go to the plants to defend these students.
“Looking back, I can see my weakness,” admitted this well-respected comrade. “I had a reformist line. I could have said anything at those monthly meetings. Militancy was there, but communist solutions were just not in the mix.”
He now meets with a Party collective with an openly communist line as he continues to develop training programs for young industrial workers. Most are BIPOC, reflecting the changing industrial workforce.
“We have a party now that can help comrades focus in on the only solution—communist revolution,” he concluded.
In communism, collective production is based on meeting the collective needs of the international working class, not the capitalists’ need for profits or divisive ideologies. As we mobilize again to silence these lies, our strategy must be to end racism and sexism finally with communist revolution.
ICWP Comrade and CSU Striker Share Experiences
“We are from Mississippi but moved to Detroit. Our parents and grandparents were industrial workers. Some worked in the auto plants,” said a striker.
“I also worked in an auto plant,” replied a comrade.
“How did you like it?”
“Working on the assembly line producing one car a minute was brutal on one’s body,” the comrade said. “But I liked factory work because the company only owned my body. My mind was free to roam. I wrote leaflets, prepared speeches and meetings, elaborated on discussions. Then de-industrialization set in.”
“Yes. It also happened in Detroit. These higher paid industrial jobs disappeared. They moved out of the country or to Southern states where wages were lower.”
“I always looked at it as a vicious, premeditated mass racist attack on the US Black community,” said the comrade. “Somewhat of a collective punishment for Black workers who led mass anti-racist urban rebellions that shook the racist US rulers to their boots during the 1960s.
“And for having led antiracist, multi-racial, and anti-imperialist rebellions in the US Armed Forces against the fascist US rulers’ genocide in Vietnam,” the comrade continued. “These rendered the US Army in Vietnam unreliable. It was, after the relentless, indomitable fighting spirit of the Vietnamese masses, the most important reason for the US leaving Vietnam.”
“I never thought of it that way,” said the striker.
“It continued with flooding the ghettos with crack cocaine, and the mass incarceration that followed. The destructive effects on Black workers’ lives have been generational. Only a communist revolution can end all this pain and misery for the profits of the few.”
We agreed to meet again to keep talking, after the holidays.
—Comrade in Los Angeles (USA)
Read our Pamphlet:
“To End Racism, Mobilize the Masses for Communism” here