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The whole matter of workers control and democratic input in the actual production process or what I understand to be the collective intellectual and emotional passions of the working class . . . and giving this broad _expression_ . . . has driven me up the wall for twenty years of my working life.
In respects to Soviet society this whole question of democratic input versus one man management has been described under the theory category of socialist relations of production . . . and has cause me more than a few headaches. In my way of thinking an autoworker in the Soviet Union and America in 1935 or 1975 . . . had more in common in their actual life activity than "not in common."
The reason of this is the commonality of actual tools, machines and physical organization of auto production on the basis of that, which is industrial. Important differences exists that in turn impact the actual production process. These difference have to do with the property relations and the drive for profits. Auto plants in America produce one thing and one thing only besides profit . . . automobiles or vehicles while Soviet plants had multifunction production.
I do not want to stray to far from this question of workers democrary and control . . . but an industrial facility will manifest a variation in curve of intensive and extensive development based on whether it process . . . as a system . . . on primary product or many. If you produce many products then you instruments of production are developed to perform multifunctions or rather machines are created that can be repeatedly converted over to produce more than one thing. The more functions a machine or tool has to perform . . . the less efficient it is to bourgeois property.
Shoddy products achieved legendary status in the Soviet Union and some of this had much to do with its political system . . . but my position is that this was not the fundamentality. This is my thinking based on involvement in the actual fight to close the gap between the Japanese automotive producers and the Americans. Why are the Japanese vehicles absolutely superior to the American counterparts in every category?
I discovered another truth at the time Bob Eaton was the CEO for Chrysler and he personally sent my older brother to Japan to study the issue of production and we spent the better part of a year unraveling "why." The first implentation of the results were atrempted at Trenton Engine outside Detroit . . . whose evolution was based on a previous study of the Honda system.
Mutherfuckers should have went to Toyota . . . but that is another struggle dealing with the bureaucratic order.
I asked brother "why did you not do Germany . . . because Bob wanted you to go to Germany and look around?"
We did not know that Bob Eaton had consolidated his Germany contacts while he was with "General Motors Europe" before his tour at Chrysler Yes . . . Bob Eaton was consolidating his based amongst the workers in auto but we did not know this at the time of the unfolding of this history.
You know the auto magnates are rats and this knowledge is what compels you from nothing to politically something. But your world view is fucked up because you cannot see the world in concrete terms as living labor and the immediate combat . . . because you do not have the data and the subjective response of the individual is some unpredictable shit . . . that you cannot predict
"What the fuck is Bob talking about and are you going to Japan?
" I do not know brother but he seems to want to know something and I will go to Japan befoe going to Germany."
"Why in the fuck he wants you to go brother."
"Besides having the largest stamping plant in north America under my political jurisdiction and me cussing that mutherfucker out because he do not drive a Chrysler car and has a chauffeur . . . which means he never encounter quality problems . . . your Big Brother is the4 baddest mutherfucker thjaqt you know."
"OK Big Brother . . . I always knew I was number 2. Is Bob a 2 or one? This mutherfucker is not immune to operating within a certain family system or non family system?"
"He do not seem like a 1 little brother."
"That is why you not going to Germany?"
"Not at all brother . . . if we lose . . . none of us have jobs and all that retirement shit is out of the window . . . and all the money is gone. Plus. . . I want to go to Japan and see what a mutherfucker is doing. Plus I am hitting the back street of Japan and not taking the fucking tour shit. The whote guys scared and I am not hanging out with their puck ass because they treat eveyone like shit.
"Fuck them guys . . . ain't no one going to tell them shit in Japan."
"OK Big Brother . . . say all the notes and documents."
The evolution is deep . . . on every front.
Remember when General Motors was called "Generous Motors" and "what is good for General Motors is good for the country?"
Well, today General Motors is manufacturing Snoop Dog specialized vehicles and have caught up with a certain cultural and technological set of equations and yes . . . "social relations."
It is not one thing we are dealing with . . . but everything . . . but we have to keep our eye on the prize . . . the direction of the ball. The ideologist are not really in the game.
1. The point is to try and capture the actual life process in the same industrial facilities under the bourgeois property relations and Soviet socialism. Abstract theory discussions based on individual concepts of democracy are less credible when the discussion rivets on what is the experience of a very real bureaucratic order and its transformation.
2. Soviet industrial socialism was extremely bureaucratic. Yet . . . it is my view that Soviet industrial socialism suffered from cultural backwardness (I do not mean reading a book) . . . . technological backwardness . . . and a fundamental tendency inherit to socialism . . . public property relations that treasured extensive evolution of the intensive process over the absolute need of capital to evolve the intensive development of the labor process as condition for existence. (This fits under the general heading of "absolute and relative surplus value" and why the organic compositions of capital - dead labor as machine development versus living labor - wages to people, is important to our understanding of the direction of society).
The American system of vehicle production was very bureaucratic . . . but less than that of the Soviets and much more than that of the Japanese producers . . . in terms of democratic input of the workers . . . measured by their ability to halt production and correct a problem.
In the Soviet Union the workers did not necessarily halt the production process . . . rather production did not run until mutherfuckers got through reading the party press . . . playing checkers . . . and checking to see if their spot in the consumer line had been saved. This is after you went home to check to see if the maintenance man had fixed the plumbing and then had a couple of drinks with him toasting to the victory of socialism and the memory of Stalin. (In the mean time the factory managers are wondering who is going to get shot because they really cannot simply fire your ass and their lever of coercion are radically different from the bourgeoisie. Because Ivan the autoworker understand material socialism he returns to work with some fruit for the manager . . . who would prefer him to go to work and not give him fruit but help protect him from lead poisoning.)
Profit motive and the threat of death in the market place was the driving force behind changing the actual production processes in the American auto industry and "democratizing the workplace."
3. The Company or the actual management of the Chrysler Corporation . . . literally the bureaucratic order could not accomplish this transformation because every level of the bureaucratic order's existence is based on conformity and not changing the processes of which the bureaucratic order is solidified.
4. The last period of change wave in the bureaucratic order of Chrysler/Ford and General Motors occurred and began occurring around the time of the purchase of Chrysler by German owners - Daimler, (and I really have nothing derogatory to say about them . . . because they were not and are not bad managers as such.) This occurred in year 2000 and the German were able to eliminate entire levels of upper management because they reach a point of consolidation of their control not dependent on these upper levels of the bureaucratic order. (Think Soviet . . . one party state . . . intense "political struggle for survival" . . . the breath and depth of the struggle against the bureaucratic order. The one party state is important but not decisive in the struggle against the bureaucratic order because "one party state" means all the tendencies become focused in the one party in a most intense and acute form. Some factory managers would get shot and in America the same failed manager would move on the collapse another company.)
I decisively swing against the concept and practice of workers democracy and democratizing the workplace around 1985 - 1987. By the early 1990s I simply opposed the concept of democratizing the workplace and workers circles as dynamic intellectual institutions . . . only to swing back in favor of them . . . more than less in 1999 until my retirement from auto October 2001.
In part 2 . . . which no one has to read . . . I am going to talk about the Japanese experience my brother transferred to me . . . over a lengthy period of time . . . and why ideology . . . which we cannot escape means next to nothing to me . . . unless you are talking about why we right and die for what we know is right.
I will try and avoid the Stalin stuff . . . but anyone that has read anything I have written knows that in history . . . in history . . . I was a party man and voted for the boss. All workers more than less vote for the boss unless it is an acute revolutionary crisis . . . were millions of people are laying their lives on the line.
No . . . Stalin and the Stalinists did not appropriate the political and economic category of socialism . . . it was won in mortal combat with the bourgeoisie and during the period of history 1917 - 1953 . . . expressed what every one on earth thought and believed to the socialism or an industrial system without the bourgeoisie at the imperial helm.
Half a century after his death we have not yet arrived at a more meaningful description of property and industrial processes than to speak of a Stalinist society? What next. . . A Stalinist mode of production?
Look . . . Stalin . . . or rather Joseph the Steel . . . is the bone in the throat of the communist and Marxist movement that cannot be swallowed or sit up. I have no intention of gagging forever . . . and voted the party line and will do so in the future.
Is this not the behavior of the labor aristocracy in every country on earth all the time as a social stratum? Me . . . Being me . . . does not bother me . . . because I waged the good fight and will continue to wage the good fight on behave of the proletariat . . . the lowest stratum of society.
Melvin P
>>Do we really know at all what a socialist society would do about transportation safety? I think trying to predict from the hostory of Stalinist societies is a very shaky guide. A socialist society, as most conceive it in this list, would be one where there would be a lot more democratic input into decisions about how much weight to give values like transportation safety. Of course the very hallmark of Stalinism was that there was very little democratic input into such decisions. So you can't tell much from what people would do when they had no say about what they might do if they had a real say. Now, we might guess that if they had a say they would prefer to be safer, but (as this thread began) safety competes with other things that might matter a lot to them too. Cost in resources, availability of transportation, etc. So it's not really possible to say how the debate would come out beforehand. jks <<
<<The distinction between Stalinist societies that appropriated the name "socialist" and those based upon real democratic input is absolutely spot-on. >>
Bill |
