SEATTLE (US), September 28—Exasperated Boeing workers, friends, and partners gathered at the local pub. Two ICWP comrades (International Communist Workers’ Party) also attended. Quicky, it developed into more than two hours of political debates and plans for concrete action.
The crucial discussion centered around the necessity of building for communism to end the ever-increasing horrors of capitalist attacks on the working class. Many of these Boeing workers have made up their minds that capitalism is unreformable. Everyone at the meeting believed that union leaders and Democrats are good for nothing.
Various left-wing plans for action entered the conversation. A woman who doesn’t work at Boeing wanted to organize an SEIU local where she works. A Boeing employee asked ICWP members to accompany him to a labor party meeting at a nearby community college. He wanted to meet more workers, even though he didn’t believe in all the politics of a labor party election.
These Boeing workers post all sorts of working-class struggles on social media. The Italian workers’ revolt against the Gaza genocide. The flotilla that tried to bring food to Palestine. Against Tacoma ICE deportation. The courageous history of workers fighting against racism and sexism. Rivalry between empires that leads us to war. And more.
The debates about how to deal with these attacks reached dozens more Boeing workers. As discussions spread though the factories, the rank-and-file looked for answers.
Before the evening ended, almost everybody had started to read Red Flag and our immigration pamphlet: “Fight For The Day When No Worker Will Be Called Foreigner.”
Another Boeing friend, R., couldn’t attend because he worked overtime. He did send us an interesting question from the shop floor. “Under an open borders nation,” he asked, “how would xenophobia be combated?”
He didn’t have an answer yet, but he had thought about it a lot. People at the pub offered political suggestions he could use with his fellow workers. He thanked the ICWP comrade for sending him the party’s immigration pamphlet. Our comrades look forward to the struggle for communist answers to this important question.
Nationalism or Communism
A union member from Wichita, Kansas, (U.S.), who knows a lot about Marxist politics, traveled more than 1,800 miles to discuss our plans. He wrote about the importance of understanding class consciousness in a newsletter called “May Day” for Boeing workers. He liked the article from Red Flag (Volume 16, Number 12) entitled “Class Consciousness: One Of Our Greatest Weapons.” We told him about an ICWP forum on class consciousness in El Salvador, where workers were talking, among other things, about the work at Boeing in Seattle. He was inspired to learn that Red Flag is widely distributed at the company gates at Boeing in Seattle.
At first, when these Boeing workers judged what we should concentrate on in the coming months, a worker said that the “internal is primary.” In other words, he thought our global responsibility first rests on struggling within the industrial factories we work in.
But the ICWP is one International Communist Worker’s Party, not a collection of independent national chapters.
Industrial workers, including the younger Boeing workers at this meeting, must expand their efforts to build communist relationships in the plants and around the world. These relationships will help shape the foundation for a successful communist revolution. Our future depends on the international working class and the collectives our party builds, now and in the future.