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In a message dated 8/15/2004 1:00:35 PM Central Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
>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.<
Comment
The domestic and historic American auto producers will never . . . ever . . . produce superior quality vehicles than their Japanese counter parts . . . for the very same reasons the Soviets could not produce vehicles superior to the American producers. On the one hand the industrial class in America was consolidated and evolved on a curve in front of its Japanese and Soviet counterpart the former produces better vehicles and the latter worse vehicles.
Why does the Japanese produce better vehicles and the old Soviet vehicles ... as massed produced . . . not specialized .. . were of an inferior quality? One thread of thought says the Soviet system was inferior to the American system and the Soviet workers were lazy, stupid, culturally backwards and lacked freedom of _expression_ due to their bureaucracy. This is the exact argument advanced by a section of the intellectual stratum of Japan against their American counterparts.
If memory serves me correct the book advancing this argument in Japan was "The Right To Say No" published in the 1980s. The reaction of the autoworkers union was to prohibit Japanese cars from being parked in the parking lot of the International Union and a wave of smashing Japanese vehicles in Detroit.
Everything is involved in the equation and real human beings - the subjective aspects . . . are always the decisive factor within a given qualitative and quantitative boundary of the industrial system. However, this does not isolate the set of factors that are fundamental to the production process. The Soviets production of military planes means the technological capability existed . . . so the human potential was present.
The history of Soviet industrial socialism contains an important key to understanding the components of industrial society because its system of production was constructed at a specific quantitative boundary. The Japanese producers . . . after the Second Imperial World War . . . constructed their industrial system at yet another . . . different . . . boundary of the industrial system.
Nor can the issue be looked at as "Forced industrialization" because industrialization by definition is forced on society in every country on earth as the material results of the triumph of a new mode of production. Even in its mode of accumulation . . . the injection of the money economy into a natural economy requires incredibly destructive force at every stage of the industrial advance. Look at the Western hemisphere and see the truth of the quest for gold. Look at American history . . . clearing of the Western frontier and the advance of the manufacturing process.
The difference in tempo of industrialization is another question all together. My understanding of industrialization - heavy industry, is that it grew out of the manufacturing process . . . and specifically heavy manufacturing as opposed to chair making.
From the 14th century on industrialization rivets in history and grows out slavery and the slave trade . . . ship building . . . heavy manufacturing . . . which laid an important basis for what would become the steel industry . . . science . . . navigation . . . the armament industry, trade routes and the early impulse of the state to shattered local constrained markets. We forget this was the actual process of divorcing millions of producers from the land and their means of production and with rose color glasses speak of capital magically rolling out of the countryside and the conversion of the serf into modern proletarians.
All industrialization is forced by definition. Soviet industrialization did not evolve from the slavery trade but occurred at another juncture of history and was infinitely more peaceful and humane than the earlier period of industrialization.
The anti-Sovietism under the banner of anti-Stalinism has very little to do with Stalin and more to do with imperial privilege and falsification of world history in y opinion. The hundreds of millions of descendants of 14th through 19th century slaves are very clear that the edifice of industrial society was carved from their backs. To hell with Stalin . . . because he is not the issue. He becomes the focal point because American Marxists have been in denial of their history for 400 years and point an accusing finger at everyone else.
Our inability to accurately describe Soviet industrial socialism and Soviet industrial democracy . . . seems to me to be based in difference about the meaning of the mode of production . . . on the level of theory. I use the concept "industrial mode of production" with the property relations within because two different systems of industrial produces existed.
I shy away from concepts like "socialist democracy" for the same reason one speaks of American bourgeois democracy or Korean bourgeois democracy or Japanese bourgeois democracy. I do not consider Soviet society fascists . . . although some folks probably see no difference.
The actual development of industrial society . . . on this planet . . . can be traced on the basis of the evolution of the manufacturing process as it was driven by the slave trade or heavy manufacturing which laid the basis for what would become the factory system as heavy industry. There are other approaches just as valid . . . but why is the role of slavery in revolutionizing the manufacturing process always universally excluded by the American Marxists?
Are we to be forever condemned by ourselves . . . for or origins? Forget the black skin for a moment and lets look at the process of transporting millions of human beings over the course of several centuries. Do the count . . . how many human being can be fit into a ship . . . subtract the ships lost at sea and then divide this by . . . say transporting 10 million people. This requires the development of an enormous infrastructure. (And a corresponding bureaucratic structure.)
The idea that the industrial system magically grew out of the manufacturing process in Venice is sinning against reality. On the scale of world history the primitive accumulation of capital meant slavery pure and simple . . . as a focal point for the evolution of heavy . . . heavy . . . manufacture. Forget the ships and consider what is required to manufacture 10 million sets of wrist and leg irons . . . connect by metal chains. The slaver runners had to have armaments . . . clothes . . . food supply . . . etc.
Here is a critical ingredient in the revolution in the mode of production.
All industrialization is forced.
What is not "forced" . . . as an assertion of the state . . . is the spontaneous development of tools, instruments and later the transition from wooden machines to steel machines. Even creating the various national markets and later the outline of the world market is forced . . . brutally forced . . . at the hands of the state as its shatters the various local trade routes and markets that arose based on indigenousness trade of various peoples.
Each quantitative stage . . . boundary . . . in the development of heavy manufacture and then the industrial system proper . . . set the basis for the next stage. Where did the Soviets enter the process in a dynamic way and where did the Japanese producers enter the process in a dynamic way?
The incremental improvement of the factory system was done incrementally in the American Union and in Japan there was a different curve of development as the result of its destruction in the Second Imperial World War. It heavy industry was reconstitute in way that is more organically integrated than in America. An entire corp. of Japanese engineers began their careers on the factory floor and the various suppliers of heavy machinery to the auto industry are intimately familiar with the operations and purpose of each piece of equipment.
No one in Japan makes left handed machinery for right handed people. Their cutting tools are more precise and the internal organization on the factory floor is more integrated. There are cultural differences dealing with space, shapes and design as well, as a different focus on details.
There is a difference in the culture of expectation expressed in engineering. Take the metal hood on your car for instance. In Japan their will be say a weld every six inches and in America the weld is every 12 inches. The result is an increase in wind drag and the American vehicle with have a rattle that increases with age.
Then the stamping presses that are designed and manufactured for the auto industry are done so by people reading blue prints and never having to actually run the machine. Machine are like people and have a personality and disposition . . . that a real engineer understands. Most of the folks I have worked with wanted to really make a good vehicle but the system as a bureaucratic assertion blocked this process for a complex of reasons.
It is easier to make a good vehicle than a bad one . . . really. Then the American producers are cheap mutherfuckers that will put a plastic timing chain on your car instead of metal and the plastic deteriorates after 30,000 miles. What kind of shit is that? See . . . our bourgeoisie had this enormous internal market to themselves and basically said "fuck the American people."
"You buy what I sell you or have nothing."
Sounds like something akin to Soviet industrial socialism to me.
Everything enters the picture which comes under the differences in culture . . . including the quest for very short term profits . . . to engineering. In America we do not have so much a one man management system as a boss system. The boss is elevated on his ability to oversee like the slave driver of old . . . and quickly reaches his level of incompetency. His tendency is to ensure the continuity of production without breaks or stops in the assembly process because his paycheck is depended on the quantity produced . . . and something tell me this underlay the Soviet industrial process also.
The point is that the difference between cars made in America and those made in Japan is not the property relations . . . because both are bourgeois. The shoddiness of Soviet products . . . some of them and not all . . . cannot be laid at the door of its property relations. The problem has to be laid at the door step of the distinct bureaucratic order and herein raises another complex of problems because no one can defeat the bureaucracy as such.
The evolution of the actual industrial culture is paramount.
See . . . the tenured professor in an American University cannot defeat the bureaucracy. I could not defeat the mutherfucker no matter how many member I mobilized . . . although I believed I could in the early 1970s. This was so because I had not grasped that we were really dealing with a category of history and not subjective politics and winning the political struggle.
I earnestly thought that if we stormed heaven and the imperial citadels of the bourgeois order all would be peace . . . democracy . . . and socialism. Man . . . the school of life corrects all democratic yearnings and reveals democracy in the flesh.
What gets defeated are specific individuals in the bureaucracy. When I did "defeat the bureaucracy" . . . I became "the man" and then the bureaucracy kicked the shit out of me. I fought back on a level unprecedented and the mutherfuckers gave me time off from work and had me on lock down for five years at a time.
I called my brother who would intervene and save my communist ass and ask me "who are you trying to kill little brother?"
"Hey big brother I was fighting this system of bullshit."
"What? Are you saying the plant manager needs to be fired because his ass is expendable. Is it the Labor Relations man or a foreman?"
"You can go back to work tomorrow."
"I do not want to go back to work tomorrow."
"Take your skinny ass back to work . . . and tell me who needs to be fired. No questions asked."
Hell . . . I was not trying to take anyone job . . . but did not like the way one of the managers walk through my area. He acted like he knew something I did not know and I was the man with 20 years and knew every job . . . every process . . . every 60 second increment of time. I asked him . . . "who the fuck you looking at?"
"Not your stupid ass . . . plus I ain't looked at nothing more than three seconds."
"Oh I'm a dumb mutherfucker? We got a two-second rule in this mutherfucker."
"I will tell you what Melvin . . . I am not in the mood for your bullshit shit today."
"What . . . you ain't went through the system . . . mutherfucker."
"I am the system." I was pissed off.
"Man fuck you and we can fight our way outside."
"Are you threatening me Melvin?"
Then this mutherfucker went to labor relations on my ass and that is how I got the three days off without pay . . . after my brother made me go back to work . . . because it is a poor mutherfucker than can't do 30.
Now Eddie Leach was the regional representative of the Union for my plant and me and Eddie start playing poker back when he was a Chief Steward at Lynch Road Assembly (late 1970s) . . . the sister plant of our Local Union. Our Local Union . . . for the historical record was Local 51 UAW. It did not hurt that I was screwing his niece . . . hey she was two years older than me . . . and then me and Eddie always got along swell.
Eddie had personally went to the plant the next day after I was given time off and I asked . . . "what the fuck you doing Eddie? I did not ask for your help!"
"Fuck you and shut up."
OK . . . I shut up because Eddie was my elder . . . although I was 41 years old.
The Labor Relations man calls my house . . . says . . . "your fucking brother called me and he is not in the process. Eddie Leach called me and your time off is not in the fucking process yet . . . so this is not a regional matter for the union. I do not have to negotiate with any of you. If your ass is not back to work Friday . . . for real . . . you are fired."
He left this message on my phone because I do not answer my phone. I already know that the company does not function in a way to discard people who mastered the industrial process over twenty years.
OK!
Now I am to believe that the Soviet workers did not have a voice in production.
And a foreign concept of democracy that does not correspond to anything I understand or have lived.
Brother . . . it is not like that and concepts in our head not verified by real life get us in trouble. I have been in trouble before.
The defeat of the bureaucracy requires that a certain set of conditions on which the current form of the bureaucracy arose be eroded enough to defeat several layers of the organization . . . and I am convinced beyond a doubt that the fundamental attribute of this process resided in the technological aspects.
Yea . . . you fight even when you cannot win . . . but to last half a century requires thinking about what you are doing. To be leader means purging the bureaucracy . . . or rather . . . those aspects of the bureaucracy rendered obsolete by history.
The Japanese auto producers make a superior product . . . according to JD Powers and Associates . . . than their American counterparts because they evolved their industrial process at another incremental stage in the development of the technology of the industrial system . . . and had the subjective will to master the process and implement it.
Now the Chinese are entering the world market and vehicle production on the basis of the level achieved by the Japanese producers.
This thing gets deeper . . . and I ask that we leave the Stalin thing alone and describe actual history and process . . . from a point of view people can relate to . . . and then describes Sovietism on the basis of American experience.
We do not abandon Marxism . . . but we get real.
Damn . . . I did not talk about Big brothers experience in Japan. Next time because some of the whiote guys got their asses kicked trying to roam the back alley's and everyone loved big brother because he knew how to talk to people and eat their food.
You put the food on the middle of your tongue and then chew and swallow.
Fucking chauvinists. (No . . . I did not know this until someone told me what to do.)
Melvin P.
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