The Boeing walkout and the lessons of the 1919 Seattle General Strike

The following statement was delivered by Socialist Equality Party vice presidential candidate Jerry White in Seattle, Washington.

I am in downtown Seattle, Washington, outside of what was once the headquarters of the Industrial Workers of the World in the early part of the 20th Century.

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The Seattle area is the center of the strike by 33,000 Boeing workers, which began on September 13 after workers rejected by 95 percent the sellout contract recommended by the International Association of Machinists bureaucracy. 

The revolt by Boeing workers is part of the growing resistance of the working class in the US and internationally to the corporate-financial oligarchy and its reactionary political parties that want to force workers to pay for the capitalist economic crisis and the slide to World War III. To build the necessary leadership to oppose capitalist exploitation, war and fascism, workers and young people must reappropriate the rich history of class struggle and socialism, including in this city, which they have been cut off from. 

One important episode was the Seattle General Strike of 1919, which was part of the wave of mass struggles, led by socialists and left-wing militants following World War I. In 1919, more than four million workers participated in the largest strike wave in US history to that point. Deep antiwar sentiment intersected with opposition to high inflation caused by the war. In Seattle, the cost of living had more than doubled between 1913 and 1919.

Seattle’s workers were inspired by the Russian Revolution of 1917, where the working class seized power for the first time in history. Months before the general strike, Seattle longshoremen refused to load ships bound for the counter-revolutionary armies seeking to overthrow Soviet Russia. Thousands in the area were attracted to socialism and the revolutionary syndicalism of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), in spite of mass repression by the Democratic administration of Woodrow Wilson.

The spark that ignited the Seattle upheaval came from the city’s 35,000 shipyard workers who struck on January 21 to demand pay increases that had been promised to them. On February 6, roughly 65,000 workers walked off their jobs in solidarity with the shipyard workers, including 60,000 organized in the various AFL unions, thousands of IWW members, Japanese and black workers organized in segregated union locals, and non-union workers. Including those blocked from going to work, the strike involved as many as 100,000 workers in a city with a population of 315,000. 

Despite the media warnings about anarchy, throughout the strike, workers organized food kitchens, childcare, public health, sanitation, newspapers and self-defense squads, making sure the basic needs of the working class were met. 

Writing at the time, Anna Louise Strong, a leader of the General Strike Committee, wrote that the shutdown of Seattle industries alone was not what the capitalist class feared the most. “BUT, the closing down of the capitalistically controlled industries of Seattle, while the WORKERS ORGANIZE to feed the people, to care for the babies and the sick, to preserve order - THIS will move them, for this looks too much like the taking over of POWER by the workers.”

A widely circulated IWW leaflet, titled, “Russia did it,” was addressed to striking shipyard workers in Seattle and Tacoma. It declared: “It is you and you alone who build the ships; you create all the wealth of society today; you make possible the $75,000 sable coats for millionaires’ wives. It is you alone who can build the ships…They can’t build the ship. You can. Why don’t you?”

It continued: “In Russia, the masters refused to give their slaves a living wage too. The Russian workers put aside their bosses and their tool, the Russian government, and took over industry in their own interests.” It concluded: “You are doomed to wage slavery till you die unless you wake up and realize that you and the boss have not one thing in common, that the employing class must be overthrown, and that you, the workers, must take over the control of your jobs, and through them, the control of your lives, instead of offering yourself up to the masters as a sacrifice six days a week, so they may coin profits out of your sweat and toil.” 

The ruling class responded with hysterical red-baiting and violence, led by Seattle Mayor Ole Hanson. Elected with union support in 1918, denounced the “thousands of Russian Bolsheviki who have arrived here over the past two years…who want to take possession of our American government and try to duplicate the anarchy of Russia.” He called in thousands of federal and troops and local police and deputized and armed some 3,000 right-wing vigilantes who were ordered to “kill on sight anyone that caused disorder.” 

“The unions on the nation,” Hanson said, “are on trial. They are either American Federation of Labor loyalists or Bolsheviki traitors.” 

Rank-and-file workers resisted the initial efforts by the AFL leaders to end the general strike, but after five days the Central Labor Council called it off without workers winning any significant gains. The Seattle Times declared: “The Revolution is Over.” 

After the strike’s end, federal agents swarmed into the city, raiding the halls of the Socialist Party and IWW, and arresting the left-wing leaders on charges of sedition. The vengefulness of Washington’s capitalist class was graphically revealed nine months after the strike when IWW member Wesley Everest was lynched in Centralia, Washington, on Armistice Day.

The defeat of the Seattle general strike, along with the Great Steel Strike of 1919, were followed by the infamous Palmer Raids, the arrest of thousands of suspected foreign radicals and the deportation of hundreds. What would follow would be more than a decade of “Government by injunction” and the virtual outlawing of strikes and labor activity, until the powerful resurgence of labor struggles in the 1930s that led to the founding of the CIO industrial unions. Once again, these struggles, including the 1934 dockworkers strike, in which Seattle workers played a prominent role, were led by socialists and left-wing militants. 

Now more than 100 years since the Seattle general strike, Boeing workers are confronting the power of a giant corporation, backed to the hilt by both big business parties, and a treacherous IAM leadership. They have formed the Boeing Workers Rank-and-File Committee to break the isolation of their strike and mobilize dock, airline, railroad, teachers and other workers in common action to win their struggle. 

And just like the beginning of the 20th century, workers in the 21st century, face a ruling class hellbent on world war and determined to crush the “ENEMY WITHIN”— the workers and youth who refuse to pay for this war with their lives, wages and social rights. In response Trump is inciting anti-immigrant violence and trying to build a fascist movement on the basis of the anti-socialist hysteria reminiscent of Mayor Ole Hanson. This is aimed at suppressing any resistance by the working class to capitalism. 

As for Harris and the Democrats, they are fixated on war with Russia, suppressing anti-genocide protests, and working with the union bureaucracy to prepare for war.

Just like the heroic workers who fought in the 1919 Seattle general strike, the fundamental issue posed before Boeing and all workers, is the need to build a powerful political movement of the working class whose aim is to seize power and reorganize economic life for human needs, not profit. This is the only way to end capitalist exploitation, war and fascism. 

To fight for this, we urge workers to support the Socialist Equality Party election campaign and our candidate, Joseph Kishore for US president, and myself for vice president.