On September 18, 2019, Joseph Kishore writes on WSWS.org:
An enormous struggle is taking place in the United States, the heart of global capitalism. More than 46,000 autoworkers are engaged in a strike against General Motors, one of the most powerful industrial corporations in the world. After decades of suppression, the class struggle is reemerging, and the consequences will be felt throughout the world.
The immense traditions of class struggle in America are rising to the surface, expressed in the statements of auto workers—opposition to the corporations, the desire for unity, hostility to the existing society. To this must be added the universal hatred of the United Auto Workers, which has been exposed as a bribed tool of corporate management.
It is at such moments that workers begin to find their voice. On the picket lines, workers of different races, genders and ethnicities are united by a common conception of their shared exploitation and their determination to fight for a future for themselves and their children. Workers have been heartened by messages of solidarity from Mexico, Brazil and Germany, expressing the international unity of the working class.
Everything that is taking place contradicts the reactionary narrative that has proclaimed the death of the working class and the end of the class struggle, supposedly replaced by conflicts centered on race, gender and sexual orientation. Not only does the working class exist, but the class struggle is, as Marx insisted, the driving force of world history.
Striking GM workers
This fact terrifies the ruling class, which is responding by doing whatever it can to foment racial and ethnic divisions.
Just one month ago, the New York Times published a special 100-page edition of its Sunday magazine on “The 1619 project,” which presented a race-obsessed falsification of American history. The conflict between “black people” and “white people” is at the center of American society, wrote the Times columnist Nikole Hannah-Jones, and “anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country.” This conception is being actively promoted through an aggressive campaign in the media and on campuses throughout the country.
As the WSWS wrote in its statement analyzing the 1619 project, entirely absent from the Times narrative is any reference to the history and development of the American working class. “There is no class struggle,” the WSWS wrote, “and, therefore, there is no real history of the African-American population and the events which shaped a population of freed slaves into a critical section of the working class.”
Entirely left out in the Times’ account is the way in which racial divisions were consciously and deliberately promoted by the ruling class to undermine class consciousness in the decades following the Civil War. Among the most prominent examples of this pernicious form of ideological warfare was the racism and anti-Semitism promoted by Ford and the other auto companies in the 1920s and 30s, which was overcome in the formation of the industrial unions, led at the time by socialist-minded workers.
Over the past forty years, the promotion of racial divisions has become a central component of pseudo-left politics, a reactionary attack on socialism rooted in the interests of privileged sections of the upper middle class.
The racialist historical narrative serves contemporary political purposes—to divide the workers against each other, to block and divert the development of class consciousness. In an earlier essay published by Hannah-Jones, in July 2016, the Times columnist, in responding to incidents of police violence, wrote of “the vast gulf between the collective lived experiences of white Americans and that of black Americans,” which “can make true empathy seem impossible.”
Where does one see this “vast gulf” among the striking GM workers? Whether black or white, they have the same experience of declining wages, attacks on jobs, the destruction of health care. And this is true not just of auto workers in the United States, but of workers in all sectors and throughout the world.
The past year has seen strikes of teachers from West Virginia and Kentucky to Oklahoma and Arizona—states condemned as bastions of racism by the Democratic Party and the pseudo-left. Last month, the largest strike in the American south in recent history involved black and white workers at AT&T in a common struggle. Mass demonstrations have spread from Puerto Rico and France to Algeria, Hong Kong and Sudan.
Neither, it must be pointed out, is there a racial divide among the indicted UAW officials—which include among them black and white executives who have demonstrated their equal ability to steal from workers and accept bribes from the companies. This is part of an enormous growth of social inequality within minority populations, with a small minority brought into positions of power and privilege in academia, the state, corporate board rooms and the trade union apparatus.
Anyone who comes to the picket lines talking about “white privilege”—or, for that matter, male privilege and patriarchy—should be viewed as a company provocateur hired to try to divide workers against each other. While organizations that surround the Democratic Party have largely ignored the struggle of autoworkers, to the extent that they intervene it will be in the attempt to bolster the UAW while injecting racial and gender politics.
The fight to unify the working class in the United States across all racial, ethnic and gender lines is a component part of the struggle to unite workers throughout the world on the basis of their common class interests. The racialist and identity politics that is the specialty of the Democratic Party is the counterpart to the anti-immigrant chauvinism promoted by the Trump administration—and facilitated by the Democrats—which is aimed at pitting workers in the United States against their class brothers and sisters in Latin America and Asia.
The strike at GM is a stage in a much broader tendency. The growth of the class struggle is an objective process that profoundly undermines all efforts to divide the working class along the lines of nation, race, ethnicity, language or gender. As the class struggle develops and takes on an openly anti-capitalist and socialist character, the nature and role of racialist identity politics, and the organizations that promote it, will be ever more clearly revealed.
Gary Reber Comments:
We live in a world driven through the one-factor lens of workers and demands for more pay for the same work input (or less) as automation and “machine” inputs continue to out-produce labor’s input. Yet there is never a focus on the necessity for workers to gain ownership stakes in the non-human productive capital assets that are replacing them in the production of good, products, and services. Instead, it is the same old fight for more wages and benefits, which is an added cost to production, and a fight against automation and “machines” that replace workers. These “old” ways will no longer work in the advancing age of all-encompassing non-human “automation” of the means of production.
As the article concludes, “The fight to unify the working class in the United States across all racial, ethnic and gender lines is a component part of the struggle to unite workers throughout the world on the basis of their common class interests.”
Of course, what is not mentioned is the tremendous wage-pay gap between workers in the United States and elsewhere in Latin America, Asia, India, and Africa, or the regulatory or lack of regulatory and environmental-protection requirements that is a core cost factor in manufacturing, and the primary consideration for the controlling owners of corporations making decisions as to where to manufacture to optimize profits for themselves and rest of the stockowners.
Full employment is not an objective of businesses nor is conducting business stationary in terms of geographical location. Companies strive to achieve cost efficiencies to maximize sales and profits for the owners, thus keeping labor input and other operating and production costs at a minimum. A company’s goal is pursuit of profit. Employment is one expensive byproduct of that, not the primary purpose. Companies always are implementing cost savings to stay competitive. They strive to minimize marginal costs, the cost of producing an additional unit of a good, product or service once a business has its fixed costs in place, in order to stay competitive with other companies racing to stay competitive through technological invention and innovation. Reducing marginal costs enables businesses to increase profits, offer goods, products and services at a lower price (which people as consumers seek), or both. Increasingly, new technologies are enabling companies to achieve near-zero cost growth without having to hire people. Thus, private sector job creation in numbers that match the pool of people willing and able to work is constantly being eroded by physical productive capital’s ever increasing role.
The result is that the price of products and services are extremely competitive as consumers will always seek the lowest cost/quality/performance alternative, no matter where the country of origin, and thus for-profit companies are constantly competing with each other (on a local, national and global scale) for attracting “customers with money” to purchase their goods, products or services in order to generate increased sales and profits, and thus return on investment (ROI).
The fight to unify the working class in the United States and elsewhere should be a fight to gain ownership stakes in the corporations who employ them. Yet, the fight is always the same –– “pay us more wages.”
Americans need to understand the anger and developing turmoil as it relates to job losses and the devaluation of labor value amongst auto workers and all other workers who feel taken advantage of by the owners of businesses who rely on both labor and the non-human factor –– productive capital “automated” and “machine” assets –– to produce goods, products, and services. Increasingly, and at a rapid rate, workers are being dismissed as tectonic shifts in the technologies of product replace them and devalue labor’s worth.
We must recognize that human life, dignity, and liberty require that each person has the power and independent means to support and sustain one’s own life, dignity, and liberty –– i.e. through one’s own private property rights (personal or shared control) and rights to the full fruits or “profits” in what one owns. Thus, we, as a society need to aim to structurally diffuse economic power by democratizing access to capital ownership for each person.
One of the core planks, for example, of Senator Bernie Sanders’ platform is a total overhaul of the basic structure of union organizing as a means to unify the working class.
Sanders would replace the old structure with sectoral bargaining, as seen in much of Europe. Under this model all the unions and all the employers in a particular industry negotiate a bargain for wages and benefits, and then the government extends the contract to cover every employee in the industry –– whether they are members of a union or not. It is argued that this would drastically reduce the incentive for individual bosses to stop their workers from organizing, and stop investors from strategically directing capital to non-union firms.
But significantly, what is missing?
Historically and in its present form, the labor movement is destructive in that it agrees with the idea that propertyless people should exist to serve those who own property. In other words, keep the working class in the servitude to the wealthy capital ownership class. The labor movement doesn’t seek to end wage slavery; it merely seeks to improve the condition of the wage slave. If it actually cared about human rights and freedom, it wouldn’t call itself the “labor movement.”
Sanders, other political leaders and aspires to the presidency of the United States, and others in union negotiating positions should be advocating for a union movement transformation to a producers’ ownership union movement and embrace and fight for economic democracy. They should play the part that they have always aspired to, that is, a better and easier life through participation in the nation’s economic growth and progress. As a result, labor unions will be able to broaden their functions, revitalize their constituency, and reverse their decline.
Unfortunately, at the present time the movement is built on one-factor economics –– the labor worker. The insufficiency of labor worker earnings to purchase increasingly capital-produced products and services gave rise to labor laws and labor unions designed to coerce higher and higher prices (wages) for the same or reduced labor input. With government assistance, unions have gradually converted productive enterprises in the private and public sectors into welfare institutions.
Binary economist, corporate tax attorney, investment banker and author, Louis O. Kelso stated: “The myth of the “rising productivity” of labor is used to conceal the increasing productiveness of capital and the decreasing productiveness of labor, and to disguise income redistribution by making it seem morally acceptable.”
Kelso argued that “unions must adopt a sound strategy that conforms to the economic facts of life. If under free-market conditions, 90 percent of the goods and services are produced by capital input, then 90 percent of the earnings of working people must flow to them as wages of their capital and the remainder as wages of their labor work… If there are in reality two ways for people to participate in production and earn income, then tomorrow’s producers’ union must take cognizance of both… The question is only whether the labor union will help lead this movement or, refusing to learn, to change, and to innovate, become irrelevant.”
Unions are the only group of people in the whole world who can demand a real, justice managed, equal allocation Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP), who can demand the right to participate in the expansion of their employer by asserting their constitutional preferential rights to become capital owners, be productive, and succeed. The ESOP can give employees access to capital credit so that they can purchase the employer’s stock, pay for it in pre-tax dollars out of the earnings generated by the new assets that underlie that stock, and after the stock is paid for earn and collect the capital earnings income from it, and accumulate it in a tax haven until they retire, whereby they continue to be productive capital earners receiving income from their capital asset ownership stakes. This is a viable route to individual self-sufficiency needing significantly less or no government redistributive assistance.
The unions should reassess their role of bargaining for more and more income for the same work or less and less work, and embrace a cooperative approach to survival, whereby they redefine “more” income for their workers in terms of the combined wages of labor and capital on the part of the workforce. They should continue to represent the workers as labor workers in all the aspects that are represented today –– wages, hours, and working conditions –– and, in addition, represent workers as full voting stockowners as capital ownership is built into the workforce. What is needed is leadership to define “more” as two ways to earn income.
If we continue with the past’s unworkable trickle-down economic policies, governments will have to continue to use the coercive power of taxation to redistribute income that is made by people who earn it through owning “tools” as inputs to production or their labor and give it to those who need it. This results in ever deepening massive debt on local, state, and national government levels, which leads to the citizenry becoming parasites instead of enabling people to become productive in the way that goods, products, and services are actually produced.
When labor unions transform to producers’ ownership unions, opportunity will be created for the unions to reach out to all shareholders (stock owners) who are not adequately represented on corporate boards, and eventually all labor workers will want to join an ownership union in order to be effectively represented as an aspiring capital owner. The overall strategy should assure that the labor compensation of the union’s members does not exceed the labor costs of the employer’s competitors, and that capital earnings of its members are built up to a level that optimizes their combined labor-capital worker earnings. A producers’ ownership union would work collaboratively with management to secure financing of advanced technologies and other new capital investments and broaden ownership. This will enable American companies to become more cost-competitive in global markets and to reduce the outsourcing of jobs to workers willing or forced to take lower wages.
Kelso stated, “Working conditions for the labor force have, of course, improved over the years. But the economic quality of life for the majority of Americans has trailed far behind the technical capabilities of the economy to produce creature comforts, and even further behind the desires of consumers to live economically better lives. The missing link is that most of those un-produced goods and services can be produced only through capital, and the people who need them have no opportunity to earn income from capital ownership.”
Kelso realized that the only way to make the economy work for everyone is to make it possible for everyone who consumes to produce what he consumes, and for everyone who produces to consume what he produces –– Say’s Law of Markets, named for Jean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832).
Kelso once wrote: “It doesn’t make any difference what’s going on in the scientific world or the business world or the industrial world, we still believe full employment will solve our income distribution problems. This is what major political figures have always maintained.” One can substitute for “full employment” with boosts in the minimum wage and a “guaranteed” universal basic income and other “safety net” entitlements as solutions to our income distribution problems, without ever addressing how to democratize wealth and prevent the further accumulation of concentrated capital wealth among those people who already OWN America.
Kelso also was quoted as saying, “Conventional wisdom says there is only one way to earn a living, and that’s to work. Conventional wisdom effectively treats capital as though it were a kind of holy water that, sprinkled on or about labor, makes it more productive. Thus, if you have a thousand people working in a factory and you increase the design and power of the machinery so that one hundred men can now do what a thousand did before, conventional wisdom says, ‘Voila! The productivity of the labor has gone up 900 percent!’ I say ‘hogwash.’ All you’ve done is wipe out 90 percent of the jobs, and even the remaining ten percent are probably sitting around pushing buttons. What the economy needs is a way of legitimately getting capital ownership into the hands of the people who now don’t have it.”
Kelso concluded –– given that advancing technology is displacing human labor from production –– that the way to make everyone productive is to make it possible for “as many as possible of the people to become owners” of capital.
Walter Reuther, President of the United Auto Workers, expressed his open-mindedness to the goal of democratic worker ownership in his 1967 testimony to the Joint Economic Committee of Congress as a strategy for saving manufacturing jobs in America from being outcompeted by Japan and eventual outsourcing to other Asian countries with far lower wage costs: “Profit sharing in the form of stock distributions to workers would help to democratize the ownership of America’s vast corporate wealth, which is today appallingly undemocratic and unhealthy.
“If workers had definite assurance of equitable shares in the profits of the corporations that employ them, they would see less need to seek an equitable balance between their gains and soaring profits through augmented increases in basic wage rates. This would be a desirable result from the standpoint of stabilization policy because profit sharing does not increase costs. Since profits are a residual, after all costs have been met, and since their size is not determinable until after customers have paid the prices charged for the firm’s products, profit sharing [through wider share ownership] cannot be said to have any inflationary impact on costs and prices.”
Unfortunately for democratic unionism, the United Auto Workers, American manufacturing workers, and American citizens generally, Reuther was killed in an airplane crash in 1970 before his idea was implemented. Leonard Woodcock, his successor, nor any subsequent union leader never followed through.
Advocates for economic equality of opportunity also should advocate that the union movement expand beyond representing corporate employees and represent capital ownership empowerment for all propertyless citizens.
As for the idea that workers create all value through the labor process, see https://just3rdway.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-circle-of-ownership.html. Also see ESOP at https://www.cesj.org/ch-vehicles/employee-stock-ownership-plans-esops/.
