PEN-L message, Re: Ford to end second shift at suburban St. Louis plant

>The "contract" between the auto companies and the UAW are extremely complex and one is required to literally have a background in law to understand their totality. I have no such background. <

Follow Up.

There is some theory stuff underlying the complexity of contract negotiations and the relationship that the organized workers actually stand in . . . as a living component of capital in the shape of heavy industry and government.

First of all . . . the absolute majority of the working class can never organized itself into a trade union under capital . . . but can form itself into a shape that is a political union of working men and women expressing their demands in the political sphere.

The union of workers of which Marx speaks of in the Communist Manifesto . . . is a political union . . . that leaps . . . to the formation of a political party of the class. Marx knew and most certainly "The General" - Engles . . . what a trade union was and is and elected not to describe "union of workers" as "trade union." Nor does Marx describe the "union of workers" and their combination into a political party as the logic of guild organizations and their evolution.

Brother . . . I know what I thought I thought 20 years ago and I was wrong and could not conceive outside the industrial form of society and syndicalist formulations given the material reality that is/was Detroit. Given our "weight" within the social and political system we reproduced a distortion . . . that had been reproduced by the previous generation.

This is going to get heavy and I am not sure how to formulate the question properly. The role of trade unions during the Soviet Revolution did not occupy center stage because the trade union movement did not occupy center stage. Soviets or Soviet form of unions of workers occupied center stage.

Trade union are not fundamentally reformists because of the "bribery of the working class" or because the individual leaders of these organizations are subjectively reformists. Something else is involved.

A trade Union leader that is not reformists and has earned his mantle as a leader ... is compelled by her consciousness to join or link up with a politically consciousness union of workers or a union expressing the sentiment and aspiration of the most poverty stricken.

I have to explain this backwards. During the Dodge Truck strike where the Judge came to the plant and started giving out this . . . jail sentences . . . this was a radical departure from the earlier strike wave . . . running from Dodge Main in 1968 to Jefferson to Mack Stamping. What was different was the intervention of the state as state which compels the trade union struggle to leap to another political basis . . . because the state itself causes a rupture in the bond that is worker and capitalists.

It is not that the trade union magically get bigger and stronger based on our selfless fight for what is right . . but another process unfolds that we have not paid enough attention to and unraveled in American Marxism.

Trade Union are political and enter the political struggle within the superstructure as trade unions . . . not political unions of workers . . . and much less the proletariat which may or may not be employed at any given cycle in industrial production. It is honorable to work in every single front of struggle. Something else is being said.

Modern trade Union are not political organizations but economic unions of men and women organized on the basis of the industrial configuration of society. These Unions by definition enter politics on the basis of the foundation of their existence . . . wages and conditions of labor. The employed workers cannot break their organic union with capital as their employer on the basis of thought. Their fight by definition is for reform of the system . . . and this is not bad . . . but an objective logic of our society.

The serf did not overthrow feudalism because he could not abolish himself as a class . . . and he could not conceive of such abolition. The serf conceived of a benevolent master in his collective and individual image. Workers . . . especially those in trade unions . . . collectively conceive of a good boss or them being the boss and this is not the meaning of communism.

Why do we think that is possible to change the economic struggle into a political struggle for socialism? When the state intervenes it creates the possibility for a political leap in understanding . . . and then you go back to fucking work.

Sorry . . . Event Horizon with Lawrence Fishburn just came on and I promised to watch it with the wife.

Later.

Melvin P.