Sprouts of Victory!

The Beginning: Laying It Bare

The victories against Boeing are the fruits not only of Dissenters’ #BoeingArmsGenocide campaign but also of two decades of community opposition to Boeing’s presence in Chicago: petitions, people’s trials, and meetings with legislators organized by the Kick Boeing to the Curb campaign and the Coalition to Ground Boeing Torture Flights.5 Dissenters’ organizing around Boeing began in 2019 when the founding crew in Chicago engaged in its first Anti-Militarist DNA Training. Our DNA trainings ground members in our commitments to one another and provide political education about the abolitionist, anti-imperialist politics we believe in and build toward. During their training, the founding Chicago Dissenters crew studied the importance of stigmatizing war and those who profit from war, a group we have deemed the “Big 5”: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman.6 Because of this, Boeing’s presence in Chicago was impossible to ignore, particularly with a two-decade terrain of resistance before them, proclaiming Chicagoans’ grievances. Cultivating and building on this resistance, the Dissenters crew began digging into Boeing’s activities, both in Chicago and abroad. A member of the #BoeingArmsGenocide campaign described how, through this early research “it was just so obvious, it just took two or three Google searches to find Boeing’s ties to the war industry.” Boeing’s disinterest in disguising its extraction reified the principles learned in the crew’s DNA Training: these dealers of death steal and destroy our resources and homes for profit and power.

Building on this preliminary research, Chicago Dissenters organizers gathered and shared more research. The crew learned about Boeing’s arrival in Chicago in 2001, a result of widespread organizing efforts to chase them out of their last community, Seattle. Boeing fled to Chicago to distance its corporate image from weapons manufacturing and to escape strong union-organizing efforts in Seattle’s manufacturing sites.7 Chicago Dissenters members began to make clear connections between the company’s disregard for working-class people’s labor and resources in Chicago and its disregard for resources, labor, and life abroad. In 2019, the crew organized their first teach-in for a local radical reading group, detailing Boeing’s long-standing relationships and arms deals with Israel, India, the U.S. Border Patrol, and the U.S. military. As Shanaya K., a #BoeingArmsGenocide organizer describes: “So often, weapons manufacturers and war profiteers are able to hide in the shadows around the full extent of the violence they commit around the world.”8 As such, Dissenters organizers’ goal is to lay bare this violence, to drag these companies out of the shadows.

The Process: Education, Disruption, and a New Common Sense

Throughout 2019 and 2020, #BoeingArmsGenocide organizers continued to hold teach-ins. August of 2021 they began canvassing in Chicago neighborhoods, spreading information about the contract, laying bare Boeing’s violence and extraction, and collecting support for their petition to #BootBoeing from the city, which received over five hundred signatures.9 This petition called on Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot and the city council to cut the contract with Boeing and stop funneling taxpayer dollars. According to one campaign member: “Another part of our theory of change is targeting elected officials and making them listen to us and concede to our demands. We had to ask ourselves: Who are the folks in the city of Chicago who have authority to make what we want happen?” Organizers not only gathered petition signatures but spoke with Alder Maria Hadden of the Forty-Ninth Ward and held a teach-in with three members of the office of the inspector general.

Organizers frequently began their canvassing conversations with a question: “What do you know about Boeing?” Most frequently, the response was something about commercial planes. Organizers were then able to contrast this popular, falsified image of Boeing with a fact: the majority of Boeing’s profits come from weapons manufacturing, ranging from missiles and drones to fighter jets. In 2017, for example, 55 percent of profits came from military contracts and arms sales.10 These sales make possible genocide, occupation, and repression in Gaza, Kashmir, Yemen, the Philippines, and West Papua and along the U.S. border, among other locations. Boeing is using Chicagoans’ tax dollars to fund this devastation. In March of 2020, as community members were struggling to make ends meet and keep healthy in the pandemic, the city granted Boeing $1,739,905.60.11 Just as half of the city’s mental health clinics were shut down in 2012, Boeing received $1,330,045.69 of our money. This complete disregard for public life-affirming services while subsidizing a private war profiteer, organizers highlight, is a pattern.

In May 2021, Israeli forces bombarded Gaza, as they have almost every year during the holy month of Ramadan for the last decade.12 In the middle of these attacks, the United States delivered Israel $735 million worth of missiles bought from Boeing.13 In response to the bombings, #BoeingArmsGenocide campaigners organized a banner drop (Figures 2a–b) and passed out an earlier version of the zine (Figures 1a–h). After this action, the #BoeingArmsGenocide campaign released their petition to #BootBoeing, began canvassing around Chicago, targeted elected officials, and released their research publicly in op-eds and online resources.14

The Future: What Seeds Could We Plant Instead?

Boeing’s contract with Chicago has long been justified by arguments for supposed development and job creation. But, as Shanaya K. describes, “corporations like Boeing are able to exist and extract and exploit with no accountability or oversight. No one is looking to make sure they are actually investing the billions of dollars they are supposedly investing.” In 2021, after twenty years of limited scrutiny, the Better Government Association found that Boeing was not actually employing five hundred people, as its contract with the city stipulated, despite claims of meeting requirements.15

After the April announcement of Boeing’s move, #BoeingArmsGenocide and other abolitionist youth organizers reclaimed the outdoor Boeing galleries—one of Boeing’s arts initiatives in Millenium Park—with antimilitarist art and political education (Figures 3a–b). Inviting community members to imagine a world without war profiteers and dealers of death, organizers held a rally with interactive art installations including hand-constructed replicas of Boeing’s missiles and drones. In addition, organizers created a small garden with the question: “If we stopped spending all of our money on war, what seeds could we plant instead?” Community members responded by planting seeds of marigold for LANDBACK and chamomile for Medicare for All.

As Boeing moves to Washington, D.C., to leverage political connections, Dissenters in Virginia and D.C. will mobilize a D.C.–Maryland–Virginia–based #BoeingArmsGenocide campaign to continue organizing against federal spending on militarism. As Boeing collaborates with the U.S. Navy to build a drone-manufacturing facility in Southern Illinois, Midwest-based organizers will continue struggling for control over our taxpayer money, resources, and what is manufactured on our soil. Dissenters nationwide will continue to collaboratively imagine what relationships and services could be nurtured on that soil instead.