Where did you find this crap? Communism Today?
On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 5:46 PM, Lone Wolf <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Why the UAW and the Democrats are pushing economic nationalism
> 18 December 2008
>
> The naked class character of the proposals for a so-called "bailout"
> of the US auto makers has become increasingly clear. The crisis of the
> Big Three companies is being seized upon as an opportunity to drive
> auto workers back to conditions of poverty and exploitation not seen
> since the Great Depression.
>
>
> As a condition for federal loans to avert the imminent bankruptcy of
> GM and Chrysler, politicians of both big business parties—who handed
> over trillions of dollars, with no strings attached, to Wall Street—
> are demanding that auto workers accept mass layoffs and a cut in pay
> that would lower their wages, in real terms, to less than half that
> earned by their fathers and grandfathers forty years ago. The United
> Auto Workers union is fully collaborating in this attack on rank-and-
> file workers.
>
>
> With anger among auto workers against the politicians, the companies
> and the UAW leadership growing by the day, both the Democratic Party
> and the union are attempting to whip up economic nationalism as a
> reactionary diversion to pit workers at the Big Three plants against
> their fellow workers at foreign-owned, non-union plants in the US as
> well as against auto workers in other countries. The aim is to
> politically disarm the workers, line them up behind their "own"
> employers and pre-empt any struggle in defense of jobs and living
> standards.
>
>
> After last week's defeat in Congress of a loan package backed by the
> Bush administration, the Democrats and the UAW, which called for
> massive layoffs and wage and benefit concessions, Michigan Governor
> Jennifer Granholm, a close ally of President-elect Barack Obama,
> railed against the "un-American behavior" of Senate Republicans who
> blocked the measure. Those who voted against the bill, she said, were
> "protecting the foreign companies that are in their borders. They are
> not acting as Americans."
>
>
> Her comments were echoed by a series of Democratic politicians and the
> UAW leadership. In a PBS television interview last weekend, UAW
> President Ron Gettelfinger denounced the Senate Republicans for
> backing the "foreign brands" and using taxpayer money to "subsidize
> the competition." He added, "We can't compete like this as a country."
>
>
> With the Big Three companies announcing layoffs and extending
> Christmas-New Year plant idlings for up to a month, and unemployment
> soaring in Michigan to 9.6 percent, this attempt to blame the crisis
> on "foreigners" is evidently having some effect. Police in the Detroit
> suburb of Woodhaven reported last Friday that the tires of five
> Japanese and European-made cars were punctured and the vehicles were
> defaced with "Buy USA" graffiti at a shopping mall parking lot next to
> a Ford plant.
>
>
> Auto workers have a long and bitter experience with the snake oil of
> America-first chauvinism peddled by the UAW bureaucracy and the
> Democratic Party. It has been nearly 30 years since the UAW, in league
> with CEO Lee Iacocca, initiated its flag-waving "Buy American"
> campaign during the 1979-80 Chrysler bailout, which marked the
> beginning of three decades of wage and benefit concessions.
>
>
> The denunciations of Japan and Germany, the "Remember Pearl Harbor"
> bumper stickers and the sledge-hammering of Toyotas and Datsuns in UAW
> parking lots coincided with the ever-closer integration of the union
> into the structure of corporate management, including the elevation of
> then-UAW President Douglas Fraser onto Chrysler's board of directors.
>
>
> Economic nationalism went hand-in-hand with corporatism and the claim
> by the UAW that workers had no independent interests separate and
> apart from those of the auto bosses. In the name of "labor-management
> partnership" the union suppressed all resistance to plant closures and
> demands for lower wages and speed-up. To oppose concessions, the UAW
> argued, was to undermine the "competitiveness" of the American auto
> companies and give the advantage to foreign companies.
>
>
> The chauvinism and anti-Asian racism of the UAW will forever be
> connected with one of the most disgraceful episodes in the history of
> the American labor movement—the murder of a young Chinese-American
> named Vincent Chin, who was beaten to death by a Chrysler supervisor
> and his laid-off stepson in the Detroit enclave of Highland Park in
> June 1982.
>
>
> The economic nationalism of the UAW has produced nothing but a
> disaster for auto workers, who have seen the destruction of more than
> 600,000 jobs at General Motors, Ford and Chrysler since 1979 and
> unending demands for concessions.
>
>
> For the union bureaucracy, it has been a different story. It has
> profited from union-management slush funds and joint investment
> schemes. Although the union has lost two-thirds of its membership, the
> UAW officialdom has managed to increase its income. Last year it was
> handed control of a multi-billion-dollar retiree healthcare trust fund
> and large amounts of company stock in exchange for its agreement to
> cut new-hires' wages in half.
>
>
> Automotive production is the most globally integrated industry in the
> world, drawing on the resources and skills of millions of working
> people in dozens of countries. In the most profound sense, there is no
> longer any such thing as a "national" car company. Chrysler produces
> mini-vans in its US plants for Volkswagen; GM builds cars with local
> Chinese manufacturers; Volvo, a "Swedish company," is owned by Ford.
>
>
> The enemy of American auto workers is not the workers of other
> countries or, for that matter, US workers employed by foreign-owned
> corporations in Alabama, Tennessee and Mississippi. Around the world,
> the failure of the capitalist profit system is throwing hundreds of
> thousands of auto workers out of their jobs. Workers' resistance is
> growing internationally, with protests against layoffs by Nissan
> workers in Spain, Renault workers in France and the seizure of an auto
> parts plant in Germany.
>
>
> All of the achievements of auto workers were won, not on the basis of
> nationalism, but through a fight for the solidarity of all workers
> against the corporations and the government. The UAW was founded in
> the mass strike battles of the 1930s as an international union,
> uniting US and Canadian workers.
>
>
> The most class-conscious workers who led the sit-down strikes, many of
> whom were socialists, insisted on a struggle against all forms of
> racism and nationalism employed by the corporations to divide and
> weaken the working class. The revival of the class struggle today
> depends on an uncompromising struggle against nationalism and for the
> international unity of the working class.
>
>
> The logic of the nationalist outlook promoted by the UAW is militarism
> and war. Increasingly over the last several weeks, leading Democrats
> have connected federal assistance to the auto industry with the
> "national security" of the US, i.e., its ability to quickly arm for
> war. In a speech on the floor of the Senate last week, Michigan's
> senior senator, Carl Levin, argued that the industry was key to the
> development of new armored vehicles, robotics and other wartime
> technologies that allowed "our soldiers to maintain their edge" on the
> battlefield.
>
>
> This theme has been echoed by "left" supporters of the UAW
> bureaucracy. In a joint op-ed piece published in the Detroit News,
> Mark Brenner and Jane Slaughter from the Labor Notes group argued for
> a government bailout, noting that "Detroit, the Arsenal of Democracy,
> retooled in a matter of weeks when we needed tanks, not cars, in
> 1941."
>
>
> It is an historic fact that the last global economic depression led to
> the outbreak of world war and the deaths of tens of millions of
> people, as the various imperialist powers fought for control of
> markets, raw materials and access to cheap labor. Something even more
> terrible is being prepared today behind the nationalist demagogy of
> big business politicians and their allies in the union bureaucracy.
>
>
> As events in the US and all over the world are demonstrating, the
> fundamental division in society is not nation, race or religion, but
> class. Auto workers in the US face the same basic conditions and the
> same attacks as their brothers and sisters all over the world. In
> every country, the corporate-financial elite is seeking to impose the
> full burden of the failure of its economic system on the backs of the
> working class.
>
>
> Confronting a globalized economy dominated by globally operating
> corporations and banks, auto workers and every other section of the
> working class must advance their own global strategy to defend their
> independent class interests. This means a fight to unite workers
> internationally in a struggle for the overthrow of the existing
> system, which subordinates all social needs to the profit drive of the
> monopolists who own and control the means of production, and the
> establishment of an egalitarian system based on public ownership of
> basic industry and the banks under the democratic control of the
> working class—that is, socialism.
>
>
> Jerry White
>
> >
>
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