Auto workers, in the US, are the latest group of workers across the globe striking for a pay rise to restore their living standards, after decades of falling relative wages, followed by inflation created by central banks to first boost the paper wealth of the global ruling class's assets, and now to try to protect profits.
As with many workers who have seen their relative wages (wage share) fall over decades, with some, also seeing falls in real wages (wages relative to the price of wage goods), as huge global relative surplus populations enabled capital to reduce wages, and expand profit share, US auto workers are now faced with having to submit what looks like a very large, 46%, demand for a pay rise. But, that simply shows how far labour fell relative to capital over the last 40 years, and also shows that the fundamental conditions have now changed, and workers are realising their real position.
As with hospital doctors striking, currently, in Britain, not just years, but decades of weakness of labour as against the power of capital, caused relative wages to fall significantly, as the rate of surplus value, and rate of profit grew massively during the 1980's and 90's, as the technological revolution of the late 1970's, and 1980's created huge relative surplus populations, added to by the drawing in of tens of millions of new workers, across the globe, moving from peasant production, as the process of globalisation and industrialisation expanded. It was accompanied by a huge release of capital, as the technological revolution also brought an across the board moral depreciation of fixed capital, as well as fall in the value of materials, causing a fall in the value composition of capital, and consequent fall in the organic composition. Together with a phenomenal rise in the rate of turnover of capital, resulting from the new technologies, and their effect on global communications, and financial systems, and from the effects of globalisation and removal of borders and restrictions, it led to a huge rise in the annual rate of profit, releasing vast amounts of realised profits/money-capital that flowed into capital markets, depressing interest rates, and sending asset prices soaring towards the sky.
So long as capitalism exists, this long wave cycle of stagnation, prosperity, boom and crisis will continue, with all of the attendant features of periods of unemployment and poverty, social division and strife, and of course, the manifestation of that in a continued competition of different capitalist nation states, joined in opposing blocs – as now seen in the growth of military conflict between NATO and Russia~China in Ukraine, Central Asia, the Middle East and the Pacific – which, with nuclear arsenals, threatens to destroy mankind much sooner and more extensively than any natural disaster or climate change. The immediate task for Marxists is to support workers across the globe as they find their feet once more, and fight back against capital, and their domestic ruling class, and its state, but, a real solution can only come from those workers, also realising the need for a political solution, the creation of revolutionary workers parties to represent their interests, and to overthrow capitalism itself.
The wave of strikes across the globe exposes clearly the need to build such workers' parties. In Britain, the so called “Labour Party” of Keir Starmer, is, and has never been any such thing. It is certainly a party, which, like the Liberal Party of the late 19th century, depends upon the support of workers, and their trades unions, much as does the Democrats in the US, the SPD in Germany, PSOE in Spain and so on. However, none of those parties have ever represented the interests of the working-class, only the interests of capital. They are, as Lenin described the Labour Party “bourgeois workers parties”. So, its no surprise that Starmer has failed to back striking workers in Britain, and has sacked ministers that turned up on picket lines, as well as organising the deselection of MP's that have done so. Nor is it any surprise that Biden intervened to block the right to strike of US dockworkers and rail workers, as they sought to defend their wages against the rising cost of living caused by the inflation produced by the policies of the Federal Reserve and Biden's government.
So far, Biden, who has claimed to be the most pro-union President – which tells you how anti-worker all the others have been – has not repeated his scabbing activities seen during the dockworkers and rail workers strikes. He has called on the auto companies to increase their offer to workers, whilst repeating the usual mealy mouthed, opportunist mantra that no one wants to see a strike. Well certainly he doesn't, as we enter the period running up to the 2024 elections. His problem is that he needs to win Michigan to have any chance of stopping Trump regaining the White House, whether he does so from behind bars or not. Michigan is where most of the auto companies are based, in Motown, and its hinterland, although, particularly foreign, companies have set up production in many other parts of America.
Biden has failed to advance the position of US workers. He has continued the global trade war policies introduced by Trump that have increased costs, and so hit workers living standards; his policy of lockdowns, as with those imposed elsewhere, seriously damaged workers interests, and the aftermath has added to it. Lockdowns were always insane and irrational, as Professor Woolhouse described at the time, and in his later book – The Year The World Went Mad. Lockdowns never were a rational means of dealing with a virus that was highly selective, and which the scientists and governments knew was highly selective, despite their statements. By introducing useless, blanket lockdowns, governments failed to concentrate attention and resources on locking down and protecting, effectively, the only part of the population actually at risk from the virus – the elderly. As a result, economies were trashed, young people lost years of education they cannot get back, and yet, the only people actually at risk, the elderly, died in huge numbers because they were not adequately protected in hospitals, care homes, or their own homes!
In the process, millions of workers were prevented from working, the global economy was dislocated, which caused far more death and destruction, particularly in poor developing economies, than did the virus itself. Those that did benefit were those companies with connections to the state or even just to politicians that picked up contracts worth billions to provide largely useless equipment, and computer systems. The Medical Industrial Complex benefits in any such panic, just as the Military Industrial Complex benefits when war hysteria is increased.
In both cases, that diverts resources from the real economy, and during lockdowns, it was accompanied by even more liquidity injections to boost asset prices, and, then, to bolster lockdowns, as workers began to rail against their enforced incarceration, and loss of income. As I set out at the time, the real purpose of lockdowns was to curtail the economic growth, which was again causing interest rates to rise, and threatening a new crash of asset prices, but, it couldn't last forever, and when they were lifted, it would simply see the lid blown off, as all of the pressure was released.
So, Biden, like Starmer, will not support workers as this process unfolds. So far, he has not come out to openly oppose the auto workers, but only for his own short-term electoral interests. His comments amount to a call for a fudge, and clearly the UAW bosses are amenable to that too. As with the strikes in Britain, the union leaders have been vacillating, under cover of using clever tactics and strategy. In Britain, workers in various industries have been called out on what amount to being merely protest strikes lasting just one or two days. They are inconvenient to consumes of those services, such as on the railways, or in hospitals, but, ultimately ineffective. What they do do, as union leaders then talk about extending those strikes out for months, is to demoralise the workers, who see no end to it. Health workers eventually voted to accept the bad deal the government had offered them.
The UAW has only called out a small part of its members, and done so in some of the least important plants across the US, outside Motown. The argument is that, it enables it to escalate the strike, and hit plants that the employers are not prepared for, whilst being able to pay high levels of strike pay. But, it also acts to divide the union members between those on strike, and those still working. At other times in labour history that is called scabbing! The history of the labour movement, and of its successes shows that it is built upon large-scale solidarity action, by as many workers simultaneously as possible, not clever tactics and strategy by union bosses. It also shows the need for that solidarity action to be international, breaking down national borders, in contrast to the growth of nationalistic ideas in the labour movement. A successful UAW strike will require support from auto workers at car plants in Mexico and Canada, for example.
There have been some cases where targeted action has worked, but those cases involve targeting the action at one particular employer. For example, in the 19th century, here, in the Potteries, the Potters Union would pick out an employer, and call out the workers in all of its factories. Faced with a severe loss of its profits, whilst its competitors stole a march on it, the employer would rush to settle, but having done so, it meant that all other employers had to follow suit, or face both the prospect of being targeted themselves, as well as seeing their workers move to these other employers that paid higher wages. Similar tactics have been used by IG-Metall in Germany. But, that involved taking out all the workers of the given employer, not just some workers of all employers, which misses the point of dividing the employers.
Better would be for the UAW to call an all-out strike, now, across the entire auto industry, in the US, and to call on the rest of the US labour movement to back it, as miners did in Britain, in 1972 and 1974, for example, with a devastating effect, which, in 1974, brought down the Tory government. Of course, the miners did the same in 1984, with quite different results, but the difference is that 1974 was not 1984, and likewise, today, in a period of global economic expansion, and labour shortages it is not 1984 either.
The same is true in Britain and elsewhere. Union members, as they did in the 1950's and 60's, need to begin to by-pass, and replace their complacent union bosses, to begin to build rank and file organisations of shop stewards, within and across different unions, and workplaces. Marxists who have gone through, or been instructed in how this was done in the past, need to be colonised into these industrial workplaces, and need to also turn their Labour Party/Democrat etc. local branches towards these strikes and struggles, to act as the memory of the class, speeding up the adoption of all of those lessons of the past.
In each workplace, its necessary to build cells of the more advanced workers, meeting at least weekly, to further their own education and solidarity, to produce workplace bulletins to educate and organise the workers in the plant on a wider scale, as part of developing factory committees of workers that break down sectional barriers between them, and these factory committees need to build links with other such committees, a function that existing political activists are well placed to do. Then, in the event of a strike, as with the dockworkers, rail workers, and now auto workers, these committees are ready to spring into action, to provide solidarity action and support, in each area.
But, the danger is always, especially in a period like now, where employers may be more likely to cough up in the face of effective industrial action, that workers may take such success as meaning it can simply be continued, as happened in the 1960's, when syndicalist ideas took hold in groups like the International Socialists, who thought that all that was needed was “more militancy”, or a “bigger demo”. That was a dead end when, in the 1980's material conditions changed, and employers responded to the more militancy, by closing down, or sitting out the strikes, introducing labour saving technology, which led to rising unemployment and increased weakness and division amongst workers.
The other danger, in such a period, is that of reformism, and the view that some party sympathetic to workers can simply act on their behalf in government, by passing reforms, or by nationalising this or that company or industry. The problem with that is that the existing “workers' parties”, are not going to do that, because they are bourgeois parties devoted to the interests of capital, not workers. But, even if we did get a revolutionary workers' party, it could not simply legislate socialism, or even seriously pro-worker policies into being, without a massive mobilisation of the working-class standing behind it, and that working-class would have to be organised in its own forms of democracy and state, i.e. workers councils. That would be where the real power resided, in the hands of an armed and mobilised working-class.
For years, reformist, statist socialists made these demands for some kind of Labour government to nationalise the banks, or the top 200 monopolies, and were pissing in the wind, as those governments had no intention of doing any such thing, and certainly not on workers' behalf. But, look what happened after 2008. Governments, and not just “Labour” governments, did quickly nationalise the banks, and then other large companies at risk of going bust. That was to the disdain of the Tea Party Republicans and Anarcho-Capitalists, but illustrating that just because they were opposed to it, does not mean that we have to support it, were any of those nationalisations actually of benefit to workers? No, of course not.
The Tea Party, and their heirs, the Trumpists, as with their international equivalents, opposed those measures, because they are representatives of the petty-bourgeoisie, whose enemy is as much large-scale socialised capital, as it is the working-class. But, when the state nationalised the banks and other finance houses, it was to benefit the global ruling class that owns its wealth in the form of fictitious-capital (shares and bonds), whose value was being completely trashed. To support those financial institutions – as Sraid Marx related in relation to Anglo-Irish Bank – states drained billions from the real economy, and, in the aftermath, to inflate the prices of bonds and shares, they imposed fiscal austerity on that real economy. Similarly, with the US effective nationalisation of car firms, to save them from bankruptcy, did it benefit US car workers? No, of course not. They got no more control over those firms than did British Miners get control over the coal mines after they were nationalised. All they got was real wage cuts and job losses, imposed by the capitalist state as a much more powerful employer than any non-state employer.
We can't allow that to happen again. We need to build a permanent political solution. That requires building a revolutionary workers party, as a global workers party to confront the global ruling class.
No comments:
Post a Comment