When The Overseers Strike: For A Truly Anti-Imperialist Labor Movement

Comrade BRG is a Liberation organizer based in Saint Louis, Missouri.

“The Euro-Amerikan "left" has completely mystified the question of class consciousness. They see in every labor strike, in the slightest twitch for reform, examples of proletarianism. Some "socialist scholars" (a self-awarded title, to be sure) conduct almost anthropological expeditions into the settler masses, seeing in every remembered folk song or cultural nuance some profound but hidden nuggets of working class consciousness. Others, who have spent years as working class "experts," find proletarian vision in every joke about the bosses told during coffee breaks. This is not politics, whatever else it may be. There is nothing mystical, elusive or hidden about real working class consciousness. It is the political awareness that the exploiting class and its State must be fought, that the laboring masses of the world have unity in their need for socialism. The Red Army is class consciousness. An action for higher wages or better working conditions need not embody any real class consciousness whatsoever. Narrow self-interest is not the same as consciousness of class interests. "More for me" is not the same slogan as "liberate humanity." Lenin wrote on this: "Only when the individual worker realizes that he is a member of the entire working class, only when he recognizes the fact that his petty day-to-day struggle against individual employers and individual government officials is a struggle against the entire bourgeoisie and the entire government does his struggle become a class struggle." - J. Sakai, Settlers

The Left in the imperial core (the US, Australia, Japan, Europe, Canada) has a fascinating obsession with strikes. Every time anybody, anywhere, goes out on strike, they immediately hear the joyful strains of the Internationale on the horizon. Can we blame them? Of course not. Thousands, tens of thousands, of workers in motion is an exciting thing, if you haven’t studied and thoroughly steeled yourself in anti-imperialist, revolutionary politics. Many in DSA simply treat anti-imperialism as an adjunct to “real politics”, aka getting people elected and getting pictures of yourself wearing DSA merch on the picket line. This, comrades, simply is not politics, it’s playing at politics. Our Palestinian, Sudanese, Congolese, Okinawan, and countless other comrades ground under this country’s bootheel rightfully demand more. As the country’s largest socialist organization, we must do better. 

District 837 of the IAM (International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers), in my city (Saint Louis, MO), is currently on strike from Boeing. 3,200 workers in three factories at Saint Louis, St. Charles and Mascoutah, Illinois walked out after the failure of contract negotiations. Boeing is a major defense contractor, directly complicit in the genocide of the Palestinian people. IAM workers manufacture F-15 fighter jets and Apache AH-64 attack helicopters which have sown havoc and chaos throughout Gaza for years. They also manufacture JDAMs (Joint Direct Attack Munitions) and the 250lb GBU-39 guided small diameter bomb. All of these weapons are being used against the Palestinian people. Boeing workers, through the very nature of their work, are complicit with the genocide of the Palestinian people. When discussing unions, we should look at their political line, priorities, and character before wholeheartedly and uncritically jumping in to support them. The goal of socialists is not just to “support workers” (even those who are actively and wilfully involved in genocide?), but to politically develop and educate them. If we support workers on strike from a shitty industry, it is our task, first and foremost, to carry out anti-imperialist political education among them. We simply cannot help them get a better contract and then go back to making F-15s and JDAMs. That is abdication of our role as socialist organizers and revolutionaries, and a knife in the back of our comrades across the world. The primary contradiction worldwide is between imperialism and its victims, and the primary contradiction in the United States is between oppressed nations and the hellstate that oppresses them. Failure to take imperialism as the key link opens the door to social chauvinism, and the people of the world will not forgive us, nor should they. 

What is the political line of the IAM? Have they struck for the Palestinian people? Have they downed tools and refused to keep making weapons for the most barbaric empire and its running dogs in the Zionist entity? Are these political strikes? No. A search of their website for Palestine brings up more references to the East Palestine train disaster than the genocide that they actively produce weapons for. The only recent statement (March 1, 2024), that they have issued with regard to the genocide came five months after the October 7th jailbreak and is lukewarm. It ends thus: “The people of Palestine and Israel need our solidarity and they deserve peace. Thousands of innocent civilians have been killed and injured, while millions are displaced and sheltering in the Gaza Strip. This senseless conflict, and the hateful rhetoric spawning from it, must end now.” There is absolutely no mention of the complicity of the IAM in the genocide, which is unacceptable. Even worse, a review of the legislative agenda for 2024 is directly imperialist. “Robust U.S. defense spending is not only necessary to ensure the sovereignty and safety of our nation, but also creates hundreds of thousands of jobs and is the very background of the US manufacturing sector.” The first page goes on to demand: “Additional defense spending is needed to protect against emerging threats, ensure our national security, and retain our nation’s position as the leader in promoting global security.” Here we have a union demanding increased defense spending and the continued existence of the American Empire! Sending DSA members and supporters to a picket line held by a union with this political line without conducting intense anti-imperialist political education, again, is support for empire, and complicity in genocide all over the world. This also raises the contradiction, raised by the IAM itself, of participating in manufacturing strikes when the backbone of American manufacturing is production of imperialist weapons. We simply cannot do this. To do so would bathe our hands in blood and open us up to just, merciless criticism. 

Should we sit idly by and condemn from the sidelines? Absolutely not. Should we absentmindedly, like imperialist lemmings, see “strike” and bring our DSA banners, hats and shirts to the picket line without raising the question of what these workers produce? Should we be afraid of “alienating workers”? Of course not, any more than we would be afraid of alienating workers that supported slavery, or Jim Crow, or the imperialist wars in Korea or Vietnam. Socialists stand in the vanguard, not follow behind out of fear of “alienating workers”. From where can one lead except from the front? Our task as revolutionaries is to go wherever workers are in motion and advance their understanding. Our strategic goal is an arms embargo, and to get such requires Communist organization and agitation in all sectors of the industry, from the ports to the factories. This entails hundreds of dedicated revolutionary cadres, steeled in struggle and with a working knowledge of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, forming cells, and building up more cadres from the shop floor through struggle and political education. Only then can we truly have a fighting labor movement. Comrades who are engaged in labor work should not tail behind business unions or treat individual "discussions" that bear no organizational fruit as a substitute for intentional anti-imperialist organizing. Nor should they get upset and pull out their "organizing resumes" when they are criticized for failure to carry out political work out of fear of "alienating workers". Take heed from comrades in Red Star. 

“Every time we argue we must focus on labor or electoral organizing primarily, every time we argue that focusing on identity, or abolition, or anti-imperialism would be to our detriment, we negate the possibility of our organizing—and our organization—transgressing against the racial caste system in a revolutionary manner. Time and again, when elected members’ lack of willingness to take anti-imperialist stances test DSA’s political commitments, it is seen as a distraction that threatens DSA’s precarious grasp on power rather than an indication that the issue is at the knife’s edge of struggle against white supremacy. When campaign strategists appeal to the narrow interests of the median voter or organize around the lowest common denominator issues, they miss the opportunity to polarize people against the contradictions of capitalism. By focusing on the most winnable reforms, we make value judgments about which sections of the working class we care about supporting. So often, we have chosen to appease the most reactionary sections of the working class—the ones whose position in our caste system give them the most vested interest in reformism, and thus in capitalism and imperialism; the most reason to stay complacent. And we have done it at the cost of alienating the advanced sections of the working class, who now mobilize to the left of DSA readily and in huge numbers in the ongoing Palestine movement.”