http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-neil2-2008dec02,0,56178 45.story
>> Nationalize GM By Dan Neil The federal government should buy GM. We can run it, then sell it at a profit once it recovers. At the moment, D.C. and Detroit are brooding on a Morton's Fork: Watch the American automakers auger in and take hundreds of thousands of jobs with them, or bail out these failed and incorrigible companies whose management so richly deserves whatever hell (flying coach?) awaits them. Tops on the critics' list of grievances is Detroit's failure to anticipate the inevitable. Why didn't these companies sufficiently invest in next-generation technology -- fuel-efficient small cars, high-mileage hybrids, plug-ins and all-electric vehicles -- that could help wean the U.S. off foreign oil and take the automobile out of the climate-change equation? As the auto executives again bring their begging bowl to Congress, a consensus is forming: No bailout unless Detroit builds greener cars. Nonetheless, the question remains: What to do about the domestic automakers? My modest proposal: Nationalize GM. << Comment Whether General Motors or the entire American based auto industry is nationalized, saved, restructured or bail out, the shrinkage of the workforce and tossing hundreds of thousands of auto workers into the streets, will take place unabated as the result of so-called free market capitalism and this current business cycle. 30 years of reduction in the work force - due solely to technological innovation, is an absolute law of all modern bourgeois production. Specifically, what the auto workers and the entire working class affected by this particular crisis needs are housing, (section 8), food stuff (government commodities), basic transportation and basic health care. The union movement - (meaning all those organized into trade union rather than those who are not trade union members.) cannot win the aforementioned needs on the basis of negotiations with their respective employers. Government and the state must be confronted. For the past 50 years the UAW was compelled to approach the issue of health care from the standpoint of negotiations with its counterparts in the Big Three. Today this approach is worthless. To the degree the UAW shed its old trade union orientation and slowly but steadfastly act as an organized detachment of the labor movement rather than a narrow trade union sector, is the degree to which it can attach to itself, all those who must sell their labor power for wages. One writer in response to this article "Nationalize GM" wrote "fuck em," which is a general sentiment expressed towards auto and the auto unions, at least in America. For reasons of our history, the trade union movement, evolved and developed in opposition to the labor movement, although the trade union movement is a sector of the labor movement. Our trade union movement, notably the UAW, was and behaved as an aristocracy of the labor movement as compared with rest of the labor movement and most certainly those workers in the low wage South. One will find very little support of the UAW as a union and sector of the trade union movement throughout the working class owing to the political backwardness of our working class and a half century of sustained free market ideological campaigning by our ruing class. However, it cannot be denied that 50 years of bourgeois trade union ideology has taken its toll on our working class also. At any rate, no matter what solution are put forth as immediate and long terms solutions, the working class and working masses must have food to eat, shelter, basic health care, education and basic transportation. The class demands needs to be fought for and brought to the fore. It seems we have entered an era where free market ideology as a whole can be defeated on the basis of what our working class is experiencing in real life. Now it the time for communists and socialist advocacy. Waistline **************Life should be easier. So should your homepage. Try the NEW AOL.com. (http://www.aol.com/?optin=new-dp&icid=aolcom40vanity&ncid=emlcntaolcom00000002) _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [email protected] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
