[A-List] GM .

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

>>There is no way to save GM as it is currently constituted.
In a bankruptcy, but labor and capital will be sacrificed, and the irony is
that capital also been coming from labor these days. So GM workers will be
shafted both coming and going, losing their jobs and their pension in one big
move. However, the union members have one thing left:
their anti  communist  love for freedom and democracy even if it does not buy
any
bread.

Henry C.K. Liu <<

Comment


Melvin P: I have a pretty good idea about what General Motors workers  are
thinking
at this very moment and more important than that what they are  feeling. That
is an estimate of the real subjective dimensions of our working  class that
many feel we communists who track the technological advance ignore.  We live
and are/our the subjective dimensions.

The ups and downs of life in auto has been a constant in American life  since
old man Ford fired up what became the modern assembly line.

What GM workers are feeling is fear. The younger workers are well removed
from a generation that referred to General Motors as Generous Motors. Their
every waking moment is filled with mental anguish and the uncertainty of
tomorrow. I reported on Pen-L or maybe Marxmail about 4 years ago a protest of  the
Detroit auto show by General Motors Executives who lost much of their health
care benefits in retirement.

I think about my first wife, who I  married when she was age 16 - with  her
mother's permission, and who identification papers we forged in order  for her
to be hired at the old Cadillac plant at Michigan and Scotten. In memory  has
not failed me this was in 1974. She has gone on to become an outstanding
trade unionists with over 30 years seniority, along with an entire group of  women
that were founders of the old League of Revolutionary
Black Workers  and later the Communist League.

The Poletown plant replaced the old Cadillac plant in the 1980s and she
migrated to Poletown. Both our children refused careers in auto, with only
my
brothers son becoming a skilled worker in auto. Three generations of
industrial
workers in auto. Our three generations embrace a historical era -  distinct
period of time, in American history.

Fear grips the land. And the unions are in fact semi-fascists and have
evolved all the preconditions for a fascist labor front. The battle to
overthrow Jim Crow softened the union movement and allowed for the influx of  black
and white militants, many who gravitated to and became Marxists, to one
degree or another. What many call "racism" in America is what it has always been
since the overthrow of Reconstruction - a militant fascist current. Yet, we
communist carry out our work no matter what the sacrifice.

They will come for my pension in about 7 - 10 years if I last that  long.

General Motors or the UAW will not conduct a serious campaign for National
Health Care. Why? The issue of health care is a broad class issue cutting
across all the layers of the working class and small business in America.
National health care is a core issue for the communist section of the  proletariat
or that sector of the workers increasingly pushed outside the active
productive bond of labor and capital. This communist class or most poverty  stricken
sector of the working class is not a surplus population and embraces  everyone
in the country making less than say $25,000 a year.

"(T)he union members have one thing left: their anti communist
love for  freedom and democracy even if it does not buy any bread"

Perhaps, but a trade union has never been a revolutionary organization as
such. Rather it is a buffer between labor and capital and an intimate part
of the
basic unity of the basic classes of the value producing system. It is
correct that the anti-communism of the union member is not simply a question of  bad
leaders. Today, we face a very new dynamic in national and world politics.
The period where one could be antifascist and anti-Communist democrat is long
gone and in this sense we can see the decay of the New Left and how the left
is  morphing into neoliberalism.

New unions are needed as advanced as industrial unionism was to craft
unionism. A union of the communist class or its future organizational fors, is  not
a unionism in the sense of industry or trade unions, but will  be
revolutionary by definition.

Here is the process forward. And it is fairly obvious to anyone that has
watched events over the past 30-50 years. See . . . we tried the
Unemployment
Councils - again, in Detroit in 1976, 1979, 1980 and 1981. I  was
vice-Chairperson
of ours at Local 51 and a Trotskyite - member of  International Socialist, a
hard driven and brilliant women, was the  Chairperson.

The Unemployed Council gravitated in and out of the trade union struggle  but
was always confined to it because of the connection in production that  is
bourgeoisie and proletariat. Further, the unemployed of the Unemployment
Council
was not "the unemployed" as a society configuration, but the  laid off
workers connected to the factory. When these workers returned to work  the
unemployed committee dissolved.

Organization of the communist class is on the agenda for today and the
communist are still stuck in political syndicalism and projection from the
Third
International. The poverty stricken sector of our proletariat is  viewed as a
surplus population unworthy of attention and the line of march of  the old
communists generation remains through the best paid workers who tend to  be
white and male.

A section of the best paid most organized workers in trade unions, are in
the
process of being hurled into the communist class or the communist
proletariat
or the communist sector of the working class. Here is the actual  process of
enlightenment of the bottom of the proletariat. A section of the
intelligencia
is always thrown into the bottom also as well as scattered  members of the
bourgeoisie. Here is how the most poverty stricken assimilate  its political
consciousness and organizational skills.

Here is the process I have lived and experienced over and over again.

Hired in 1972.
Laid off in 1974
Laid off in 1976
Laid off in  1978
Laid off from January 1980 - January 1984
Laid off in  1989
Continuous work after this until October 2001.

Then there is Ford Wixom outside Detroit.

I know what they feel and think - intimately.  Everyone in auto  understood
that sooner or later the robot - the march of advanced robotics,  was going
to get most of us . . . anyway. We live with this fear in our stomach.  Eight
years ago or maybe 10, General Motors proposed modular production of
automobiles and scrapping what is their present system of vehicle assembly. When
Poletown was first built the workers could not be trained on the new  equipment and
the system was "dumbed down." Here is the real human story.

In America the technological revolution is quite advance but it
implementation lags behind considerable for a complex of reason tied to the  circuit and
flow of capital and our culture.

Where are these well paid workers going to go? Into the communist class or
the communist sector of the proletariat, which is not a surplus population  at
all.

Nothing can halt the process. The technological advance makes over capacity
- not overproduction, a permanent feature of this stage of the decay of the
bourgeois mode of production and the value system. Competing with the wages of
workers in China is out of the question and they are closing the cultural gap
 that is industrial culture or what some call the cultural artifacts of the
result of transition from feudalism to capitalism and socialism.

Winning the workers to the cause of communism is blocked on the level of
ideology by the anti-Communist bourgeois democratic left world wide.  This  is
definitely not our fathers Oldsmobile or the period of the Third  International.

Melvin P.