As of August, 3,200 IAM workers have been out striking at the Boeing manufacturing facility in St. Louis, MO demanding better pay and conditions. This facility primarily produces commodities for what is known as the “defense” industry; meaning, the production of the tools of proletarian slaughter, and part of the larger network of US weapons manufacturing for its role of leading weapons supplier and profiteer of global conflict.

Boeing, plagued with the troubles of crashing profit rates in recent years from the various manifestations of the overproduction crisis and the natural laws of bourgeois economics, has repeatedly pushed its burdens onto the workers, whether it be from large layoffs or major concessions from the workers on their contracts. In 2014, the company removed the false safety-net pension plans for the workers, revealing the fickleness of bourgeois welfare and “company benefits”. These “concessions of the bourgeoisie”, as the social democrats like to frame it, are more accurately concessions of the workers, who have shackled themselves to the abusive slave master who can threaten to pull the plug when the workers get “too out of line.”

In March, Boeing was bestowed a $20 Billion defense contract to produce the newest generation of F-47 fighter jets by the US government to be produced in the St. Louis facility as well as secured $155 million in tax breaks by the city. The Trump administration has gone to certain lengths to not only “protect” Boeing from the ongoing trade war but has also facilitated a $522 billion deal with Qatar, using the US imperialist influence to both bolster the company on the verge of collapse and strengthen US control in the middle east.

With demand increasing, the company will certainly feel pressure from any interruption in production and the workers are right in withholding their labor power to demand higher wages, refusing anything less. Despite local union leadership pretending to praise the solidarity of the workers in the media spotlight, they simultaneously suggested workers approve the company’s contract proposal in July. The opportunist union leaders said in a public statement that workers deserve “a contract reflecting their skill, dedication, and the critical role they play in our nation’s defense”.

Workers are already seeing that even as the bourgeoisies move to fanatically rearm themselves in a necessary move to obliterate the surplus of capital that haunts the bourgeois in this period of an ongoing overproduction crisis through war, they are forced into sacrifices even before the bloodshed begins. The proletariat is asked to martyr themselves economically for the “defense of the nation”, when in reality the enemy of the US proletariat is inside its borders; it is the national ruling class, the bourgeoisie. The further the unions integrate themselves into the regime, serving only to facilitate contracts of legal slavery, the weaker the collective power of the proletariat, becoming lackeys for the labor aristocracy and the bourgeoisie.

Scott Mayer, who is Boeing’s chief labor council and also a Trump appointee to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), spoke on the Boeing strike while being reviewed at a recent Senate committee hearing, saying “the concept of fairness” (in the context of a contract) “is an elusive one.” And to this end, this is true. What “fairness” can be negotiated between a slave and master, while simultaneously perpetuating this social relationship?

“...the wage worker has permission to work for his own subsistence—that is, to live, only insofar as he works for a certain time gratis for the capitalist (and hence also for the latter’s co-consumers of surplus value); that the whole capitalist system of production turns on the increase of this gratis labor by extending the working day, or by developing the productivity—that is, increasing the intensity or labor power, etc.; that, consequently, the system of wage labor is a system of slavery, and indeed of a slavery which becomes more severe in proportion as the social productive forces of labor develop, whether the worker receives better or worse payment…It is as if, among slaves who have at last got behind the secret of slavery and broken out in rebellion, a slave still in thrall to obsolete notions were to inscribe on the program of the rebellion: Slavery must be abolished because the feeding of slaves in the system of slavery cannot exceed a certain low maximum!” (Critique of the Gotha Programme)

The union struggle is in itself as ephemeral as the capitalist system from which it arises. An indefinite ‘democratic’ facilitation of class collaboration between the bourgeoisie and the workers for petty legal and monetary agreements, serves only the bourgeoisie. That is why unions should be understood, not as revolutionary organizations, but “schools of class struggle”, they are the organizations that unite the workers on the grounds of economic interests and reveal the ruthless lengths at which the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie will go to deprive the workers, cutting through the ‘patriotic’ veneer of union nationalism. As the unions and workers strengthen their unification on class grounds and form “class unions” rather than fascistic regime unions, the greater the success of their economic gains, but syndicalism is not enough to free the proletariat. Only a world communist party and the destruction of bourgeois institutions, including eventually the unions themselves, can truly overturn the anarchistic hell of capitalism.

The “anti-war” strikes that have appeared, including the substantial developments in Italy and with the dockworkers of Europe, are positive developments in that the proletariat has recognized a divergence of interests with the bourgeois warmongers and have refused to put targets on themselves in the struggle between nations, choosing instead to unite in coordinated general strikes, but without the leadership of the Communist Party, pushing past the hard limit of trade-union consciousness as described by Lenin, the smashing of the bourgeois state is impossible and war is inevitable.

The war industry is naturally deeply tied to the respective bourgeois state and therefore poses a conflict of interest for the proletariat that, like the eventual proletarian soldiers who, when asked to walk into the crucible of an imperialist war, will be unable to self-organize on the basis of “mutual interest” and turn the the war between nations into a war between classes.