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Accidental click-ignore Re: [Marxism] China to Press More Firms to Unionize (WSJ)



Rod Holt wrote:

The WSJ article on

Walter Lippmann wrote:

Rod and Marvin's comments are quite timely and worth exploring further.
No one, starting with me, claimed that the Chinese CP leadership had the
idea first. I simply said that the Chinese government, which has decided to encourage and support workers in foreign-owned private enterprises,
to join unions. I personally think that's a good thing, though evidently
opinions about that are divided here, as is often the case.

The Roosevelt analogy which Marvin raises occurred to me right away on
reading the WSJ report. U.S. capitalism was in a depression, and to get the
U.S. out of a depression, expanding internal consumption was a priority for
the capitalist government. At the same time, and that is a further reason for
Roosevelt's encouragement to unionism, the depressed capitalist countries
were faced with a separate challenge, that of the existence over one third
of the earth's surface, of a alternative model for social and economic life:
the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. They weren't experience depression
and they were experiencing very rapid economic growth. Trotsky explained
it all eloquently in THE REVOLUTION BETRAYED. His book remains the basic
reference on this question, unchallended by anything written subsequently.

As a bureaucratically-degenerated workers state, the Soviet Union provided
a contradictory model, with both sharp upward productive indices and harsh
political repression in an environment where some had extreme privileges
and the majority did not. Yet that bureaucratically-degenerated workers
state did build up enough economic power, and it harnessed enough of its
own national and nationalistic energies, that it was able to finally defeat the
invaders from Nazi Germany. This was an exceptionally-positive outcome.

Marvin and Rod both point to the increase in income for Chinese capital, but
omit the increased income for Chinese workers. Obviously, there's a radical
difference between the way the millionaire chinese capitalists live and how
ordinary Chinese workers live. Everyone agrees on that difference. One can
speculate on how it might have been had it not been the way it has been, but
the way is is is the way it is. Nothing can change that. All we can do if we want
to make life different is to try to UNDERSTAND what has taken place in order
to try to act in such a way as to make a political difference.

In time I'm hopeful that the domestic market in Cuba will also be increased in
whatever ways Cubans see best. Expanding domestic markets by expanding
the amount of money which the people have to spend internally is a good idea.
Better it should go more to the workers, of course. This is where expanding the
role of unions in society can prove helpful. Unions under capitalism provide a
contradictory mix of material benefits and social stability. Most of the time, the
majority of unions provide employers with social and job-related stability and
ways to resolve various differences. Unions under capitalism also serve most
of the time to keep the workers themselves in line and under control, which is
another reason some employers like unions and want to keep them. Most of
the time, most unions mostly function this way. The times when unions fight
for total control over the means of production, and thereby of society as a whole, are few.
The traditional conception which most of us learned in the Trotskyist move-
ment, that the workers are constrantly striving for more and more militant
combat against the employers, and that the workers are only being held back
in their struggle for revolutionary progress by the reformist betrayers of the
workers movement has precious little basis in material reality, I believe.

In the end, Chinese workers joining Chinese unions in China helps them by
providing an organized vehicle for them to increase their incomes, and thus
helps China as a country, to strengthen its position vis-a-vis the United States.

Today as we witness the profound dependency on China, in which the U.S. is
finding itself on the Korean peninsula, the importance of a strong China as a
counterweight to a desperately unilateral Washington, can hardly be under-
estimated, though, again, not everyone on Marxmail would agree with that.

For further reading on this matter, I would like to recommend people to read:
Made in China? The Crisis of US Imperialism
By Gerald Horne

Horne makes many fascinating points, among which this stands out:

"today ... the EU and US, whose combined population is less than Chinaâs, confront the rise of this largest of all nations, which happens to be ruled by a Communist Party. Ironically, the US spent trillions to bring down the former Soviet Union by allying with Maoist China, not to mention âIslamic fundament-
alism.â Now it is precisely that fateful decision, which involved the opening of China to massive foreign investment, that has placed China seemingly in the passing lane with consequences so immense for imperialism, white supremacy and global development generally that they have yet to be fully assessed."

FULL
http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/view/3515/1/188/

Walter Lippmann
Los Angeles, California
=================================================
MARVIN GANDALL wrote:
Capitalist governments can also encourage unions to stimulate domestic
demand . The most notable example was the FDR government's passage of the
depression-era Wagner Act giving workers a legal umbrella under which to
organize in order to boost purchasing power and revive production. A ubiquitous poster circulated by the unions famously proclaimed: "The
President wants you to join the union!" As Rod Holt notes, the Chinese want
to become less export-dependent by developing their huge home market, and
raising the general wage level, beginning with the big firms most able to
afford it, is part of the process..

ROD HOLT wrote:
A push by the Chinese to unionize plants of foreign capital to increase wages and benefits will squeeze imperialism's profit margins and will increase the domestic market. Both of these effects benefit Chinese capital. In fact, the economic effects will bring results similar to old-fashioned protectionist tariffs. But it won't look like old fashioned protectionism. Very interesting. hmmmââ And you say it was *Communists* who thought of this?



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