>> "The United Automobile Workers will not be managing the
company the way
unions tried, and failed, to manage United Airlines, they
said. Moreover,
Fiat is not Daimler . it is geared toward small, midmarket
cars, not fine
driving machines with wood-burl dashboards, they added."
But the unions had no operational control of UAL.<<
Comment
The union is pathetic. Not because it agreed to concession but because it
has not pushed to take the struggle outside the union-company boundary and
place issues directly on the table of the Constitutional authority. Hence, the
union cannot save itself and is in it death throes.
One broad seat for the union was won back in 1979/80 during that Chrysler
collapse, when Doug Fraser became a board member. The union is trapped by
history.
When the union owns a company the union becomes capitalist and the
workers are inevitable compelled to spontaneously form a new union. Our fight
- auto workers and members of the working class, is outside the wage
labor/capital bond. Our fight is for a Third Edition of the American
Revolution: Proletarian Revolution . . . for real. Nothing can be won from the
company in the new era of political domination of the speculator over the
world total social capital.
This is not Marxist slogans or crazy rhetoric.
What can we possibly win from a bankrupt company?
Things like health care is a nationwide issue demanding a national
resolution by the Constitutional authority. Things like pension funds canot be
resolved on the basis of wage labor/employer relations. America is not
Venezuela. We need not a 21st century socialism but a 22nd century new
economic communism. We are at the front of the curve of industrial/post
industrial development and have to base our solutions on our own
circumstances.
The old idea that the American peoples are scared of socialism and
communist talk has been overcome in the space of less than a year! This is
incredible.
Concretely, Chrysler has 80,000 retirees who cannot go back into the
workforce. I am one of them and perhaps the youngest, as age 56. I was writing
to this list when I retired at age 49 back in October 2001. In Jan/Feb 2002 we
talked about Ford's "company network" presentation to all its employers
warning of the emergence of a period of "profitless prosperity" - exact terms
used, and what it meant for the life of the working class in America.
Prosperity without profits was another way of saving wealth creation outside
the boundary of the production of surplus value. Now comes the
social consequence.
What we are witnessing is the first stage of the American Revolution.
First comes the social consequence impacting all of society. Then the slowly
forming political response. Events are moving at an incredibly fast
pace. 60 years of anti-communism and anti-socialism are being dissolved
as if this ideology never really existed.
Interesting.
I am sorry this emerging political revolution does not conform to or
looks like what one might have thought or envisioned.
Still to upset to write about this right now. Will write about his later,
promise.
WL.