Opinion | Mei W. and Farrukh Abadi
Earlier this month, tens of thousands of Boeing workers went on strike against their employer for better wages and benefits. At the same time, over the last year, the pro-Palestine movement across the country and particularly on campuses has been targeting Boeing for its role in the US-Israel genocide. The material basis of unity between students and workers has already existed—the overall decline in the standard of living, lack of employment, increase in cost of living, and the struggles unique to each section/class are all rooted in the same capitalist mode of production and against the same imperialist class. The problem of uniting the struggles, then, is a low level of consciousness prevailing among students and workers to unite against their common enemies. The reconstitution of the Communist Party, the current strategic task of all class-conscious workers and revolutionaries, provides the basis for the realization of this unity on a nation-wide scale. By being rooted in the working class and connected to all allied sections of society, the Communist Party is able to combine the demands of students and workers with the struggle for power, unifying and coordinating these forces into one torrent directed at the imperialist ruling class. The two simultaneous struggles against Boeing provides an opportunity for furthering the reconstitution process by uniting under Maoism the economic struggle of the workers and the anti-imperialist struggle of the students. The two struggles, currently separate, spawn from the same beast—imperialism—and as such, the struggles can and should be combined, necessitating the Communist Party, the advanced detachment of the working class.
Boeing Workers Go On Strike
The mass strike of 33,000 Boeing manufacturing workers at factories across the West Coast has entered its second week. Workers began striking with a 96% strike vote after they rejected the aerospace monopoly’s tentative contract. The contract, which their union’s negotiation team endorsed, included a 25% increase of wages over the next four years, far less than the workers’ demand for 40% over three years. The restoration of pension plans, which was also part of the workers’ demands, was absent in the contract. Striking workers interviewed by monopoly media explained that, with the current wages, many of them cannot cover rent, food, and other basic needs despite working 40-60 hours a week. Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg, who receives compensation of $22 million a year, condemned the workers’ strike for putting the battered monopoly’s “recovery in jeopardy.”
Boeing’s factories have been reported for their dangerous working conditions and their management forcing workers to rush defected airplanes through the assembly line in order to maximize production and profit. On the one hand, workers are forced into worsening working conditions as the company scrambles in the economic crisis, pushing the heavy burden of its “recovery” onto the workers through tempo increases, layoffs, and cutting corners. On the other hand, consumers such as Boeing flight passengers have to deal with the consequences of these defects, such as the hundreds of people who have died or been injured due to Boeing plane crashes.
This year alone, two Boeing whistleblowers suspiciously died months apart from each other after reporting these lethal quality-cutting practice. Boeing has been able to escape any real repercussions owing to its monopolization and domination of the aerospace and military market, making a large clientele—including the US government and its semi-colony Israel—dependent on its continued expansion.
Monopolies exist and expand through the realization of profits, and the working class, as the one creating value, is in a unique position to threaten profits. Unlike the government, which is complicit in and facilitates Boeing’s monopolization and declining consumer production quality, striking workers have successfully halted the production of most of the aerospace monopoly’s planes, including its best-selling airliner. This is expected to cut up to $3.5 billion of Boeing’s profits.
Boeing’s management scurried to minimize its losses by furloughing nonunion works, forcing tens of thousands of them to take one unpaid week off every four weeks. Boeing requested the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA) union, which represents 17,000 Boeing engineering workers, for its workers to also be furloughed, despite the union’s contract preventing furloughs. The SPEEA rejected Boeing’s request. Federal mediators have been deployed to quicken negotiations between Boeing and the union, who push for the end of the strike. The government intervenes to ensure Boeing’s domination of the market, because under capitalism, the decisions of politicians are dictated by the interests of the monopolies they serve and represent.
Students Target Boeing’s Involvement in US-Israel Genocide
Boeing is also being targeted by the Palestine Solidarity Movement, especially on campuses where students are demanding universities to divest from companies that fund and profit from Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people. Boeing has supplied almost 60% of the missiles that Israel purchased from the US over the past 2 years, making it the number one US supplier of arms to Israel’s genocide. Boeing’s revenue had a $2 billion increase in the last quarter of 2023, and 30% of this total revenue came from defense contracts. Israel purchases weapons from Boeing and other US monopolies with the $12.5 billion military funds that the Biden-Harris administration has sent over the past year—in other words, the state funnels workers’ money via taxes to armament manufacturers, among the most profitable sectors in the world. It is then no wonder why over 700 former military officials, intelligence officials, and “national security” officials have endorsed Harris in a letter released last Sunday—they know that she will continue to line their pockets and serve the capitalists that employ them.
In addition to sending federal mediators in an attempt to put a quick end to workers’ strikes—just as the Democrats did with the 2022 railway strike—the government serves to enhance Boeing and other US monopolies’ profits by funding the genocide of the masses in the Third World, particularly those that take up arms to resist imperialist aggression and super-exploitation like in Palestine. Student movements like those at Columbia University and Brown University are protesting their universities’ funding of the genocide, having exposed their universities’ investments in monopolies like Boeing.
Unite Under Maoism, Reconstitute the Communist Party
The conscious realization of the common enemy of students and workers provides a basis for connecting the struggles, supporting each other toward unity in action and unity in organization. Linking the student and workers’ struggle has been a task of historic importance for the successful conquest of their respective demands. Students are typically the most active section of society; however, since students do not have a direct relationship to production (of course some students do, but as workers), they can only be an auxiliary in service of the struggle against capitalists. The working class in the US today on the other hand tends to be slower to act and more conservative, but their direct relationship to production—and specifically the hardcore of the proletariat, the only section of society directly involved in the production of value—means that they are the only really revolutionary class, the gravediggers of the capitalist class, regardless of what their present consciousness may be. Though the workers on strike are engaged in an economic struggle, and many of those workers may be waving American flags at their pickets, they are still composed of those with relatively advanced, intermediate, and backward consciousness, and therefore a basis to develop the struggle and politicize it by uniting with the advanced, raising the intermediate, and winning over/isolating the backward elements.
In the May 68’ Uprisings in France, the student struggle served as a spark for the worker struggle and eventually paralyzed the entire country, posing the question of power. Students had begun to occupy their universities in response to the declining standard of education, the ongoing economic crisis, the rising cost of living, and repression of student activists. When they were able to score some victories against the government by maintaining their struggle and repelling the police, the workers became inspired and began occupying their factories as well. While the workers were initially suspicious of students—owing to the history of intellectuals betraying workers’ struggles to gain better positions for themselves—they respected the students’ tenacity in struggle, and as both struggles began to take on political dimensions, they found that they have common enemies, providing the basis for common action and common organization. A general strike ensued, momentarily paralyzing the bourgeoisie; however, owing to a lack of nation-wide working class leadership in the form of a Communist Party to develop the struggle further, the momentum dissolved through concessions granted by the capitalists to the workers who were under the leadership of revisionist and bourgeois unions, leaving the capitalist class in power. While the unity achieved between the students and workers was facilitated by embryonic Communist leadership at the time, the lack of a reconstituted, militarized Communist Party limited the degree of unity and its ability to persist in struggle.
The reconstitution of the Communist Party remains the present strategic task of all class-conscious workers and revolutionaries in the United States. While at moments of intense crisis the student-worker alliance may spontaneously develop, national leadership in the form of a Communist Party allows this process to take qualitative leaps owing to its nationwide connections to the working class and all of its allies, allowing greater class unity to develop and combine the struggles for demands with the conquest of power. The lack of national and even international unity and coordination—not only among students but with other sections of society as well—has been painfully obvious to students struggling against genocide and in defense of Palestine across campuses internationally. Although rudimentary attempts at coordination were made, the lack of unity remains a pending problem of the student movement. Monopolies like Boeing take on international dimensions, and so too must the struggle against them. The reconstitution of the Communist Party as an advanced detachment of the working class is the only solution to coordinate both national and international unity in action, the latter through its connections to international associations of Communist Parties and organizations, today the International Communist League.
Though the spontaneity of the masses has proven itself historically to be strong enough to oust certain representatives of the bourgeoisie, it has also proven itself unable to overthrow the bourgeoisie and its mode of production. This is because the capitalist class is highly organized and centralized, controlling every aspect of society; while the masses may be able to make breakthroughs and conquer this or that demand without revolutionary leadership, inevitably the movement comes under the leadership of one class or another, and if not the working class then the propertied class, which strangles it with reforms and repression.
At the present moment, the worker and student struggles attacking Boeing on two sides provides a clear path for their unity. However, the absence of a Communist Party to lead this unity means that it can only go so far. The present opportunity then allows for class-conscious workers and revolutionaries to carry out their present tasks in relation to its long-term aim of reconstitution of the Communist Party—to Unite Under Maoism and carry out mass work among the working class, the principal class. The reconstitution of the Communist Party is the realization of the organizational, political, and ideological unity of the leadership of the working class, providing the basis for the development of the struggle from times of class peace into times of class war, the initiation of people’s war for the conquest of power.
