[Marxism] new blog post/what if the uaw owned an auto company?

[MICHAEL YATES <mikedjyates@xxxxxxx>]

Full at http://www.cheapmotelsandahotplate.org

 

The troubles in the U.S. automobile industry have taken an interesting turn. In 
return for considerable concessions to Chrysler and General Motors, the United 
Auto Workers may become a majority shareholder in Chrysler and a large 
stakeholder in General Motors. The federal government will also own a large 
fraction of the shares of the two corporations, making both of them a lot less 
capitalist in their ownership structure than would have been imaginable only a 
few months ago.

 

Doug Henwood, on his lbo-talk email list, raised a critical question: what does 
ownership mean for the union? Or perhaps a better formulation: what could it 
mean for the union? Let’s look at this.

 

Like any organization, a union must have goals, and strategy and tactics aimed 
at realizing them. When capitalism was much younger and workers were beginning 
to understand it, the organizations of the working class—labor unions and 
political parties—had as their aim the abolition of the system of wage labor. 
This meant that they hoped to bring an end to capitalism itself, since wage 
labor is its lifeblood. It is through the ability of employers—an ability that 
rests on their ownership of society’s productive wealth—to compel workers to 
labor enough hours to produce an output which, when sold, will generate for 
employers a surplus over their costs that allows employers to make a profit.. 
This profit is the property of the owners, and they use it to expand their 
operations and their political and social power. If there is no wage labor, 
there is no capitalism.

There were good reasons for the working class movement to want to abolish wage 
labor. Here is how I summed it up in an article I wrote more than a decade ago:


Now, the whole thrust of capitalism is to alienate us from our humanity, to 
deny to us that which makes us human. We enter the workplace, having sold our 
labor power, our ability to create, to the capitalist, who considers it to be 
property, on a par with the other means of production. To the capitalist, we 
are costs of production, costs to be minimized whatever the human cost, which 
does not enter into the capitalist’s calculations at all. However, we are not 
happy to have sold our humanity, so we have to be forced to do the capitalist’s 
bidding. While this force is often enough effectuated violently, the true and 
perverted genius of capital is to accomplish it indirectly by reorganizing the 
labor process so that it is extraordinarily difficult for the workers to 
control it. [As Harry] Braverman shows us with wonderful clarity [in his book 
Labor and Monopoly Capital] . . .the essence of capitalist management is 
control, control over the labor process and therefore control over the worker. 
First, the workers are herded into factories, then they are watched and the 
divisions that they make in their own labors are turned against them through 
the detailed division of labor. Machines threaten them with redundance and 
further deskill their work. All of the piecemeal efforts at control are 
systematized by [Frederick]Taylor, who makes the separation of conception and 
execution the sine qua non of capitalist production. Both Taylorism and 
personnel management are reconceptualized again with lean production and its 
super-systematic hiring, just-in-time inventories, design for manufacture, team 
production, subcontracting, andon boards, and constant kaizening of the work. 
So careful have become the capitalist’s calculations that workers in modern 
automobile factories, places that autoworker, Ben Hamper, in his book, 
Rivethead, calls gulags, work as much as fifty-seven seconds of every minute, 
often for ten to twelve hours per day. The constant pressure to produce in 
circumstances in which the worker can exert virtually no control over the work, 
is what Braverman aptly describes as "a generalized social insanity."

 
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