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Preface by Patrice Greanville

San Gindin has filed a thoughtful and timely piece on the question of concessions by the working class. Given the importance of this topic, I think a few words are required to place it in better perspective. Concessions have cumulatively devastated labor over decades of constant assault by the American ruling class and its political minions, with plenty of help from the corporate media and the courts, in other words, the bourgeois state, which in a corporate-dominated society —it bears repeating—functions  primarily as the main instrument to guarantee the rule of the super-rich and their gross advantage.

This decline has been accentuated by the betrayal of the labor cause by union leaders themselves ——not all by any means— but by a significant number who preferred the “business unionism” model to actual class struggle. The abject, frothing-at-the-mouth jingoist anti-communist  George Meany easily springs to mind, but there have been others, perhaps not as notorious as Meany, like Samuel Gompers, equally nefarious for the workers’ cause. Still, concessions and all they imply is only part of the picture.  Concessions, however important they may seem in the heat of the moment, fall into the narrow trench of history, and they look backward, too.  There’s a broader, always not quite accidentally forgotten framework for the discussions and struggles between labor and its class foe, the capitalists, a discussion that easily transcends the short-termer’s agenda revolving around jobs, jobs and only jobs. Fact is, jobs have become a sacred cow, an inviolable talisman to beat back an escalation of the discussion for those who profess to speak for labor, and the upshot is that such witting or unwitting myopia has ended up trumping the class struggle, since it confines the tug of war between the two antagonist classes only to the natural boundary of all trade unionist efforts, the immediate amelioration of the status quo.  While this task is important it should never be allowed to co-opt the overarching task of the working class which is to come to power and eliminate class divisions once and for all.  Reformism, no matter how highfalutin and pretentious in terms of “realism” can never birth a true revolution. Bourgeois reformism is a historically proven cul-de-sac.

Irish activist James Fearon, affiliated with socialistdemocracy.org, has zeroed in on precisely this aspect of the struggle. His study of Lenin yields immensely valuable insights:

The attempts in Ireland to establish a trade union activist network and in Britain the determined campaigning of the Grass Roots Left, suggests that rank and file trade unionists are on the move.  These developments involve a great deal of confusion in the working class and a corresponding confusion on the part of socialists. Should we unite with the trade union bureaucracy and use the reformist ideas about a “better fairer way” to gain a hearing in a wider swathe of the union movement or should we put forward a working class programme even if it is not widely accepted.? If we are to face and defeat entrenched bureaucracies we require a clear view of the political landscape within which their corruption exists. With democratic governments being replaced by technocratic juntas in Europe and a nationalist response to the Euro crisis growing, the problems facing workers  cannot be reduced to trade union issues. An approach that neglects political tasks will fail to enthuse the most political workers and leave others vulnerable to the misconception that vigorous trade unionism will automatically advance the socialist revolution. With this in mind it is perhaps appropriate to revisit Lenin, who spoke very clearly on spontaneity and trade union consciousness.

Lenin argued that any intervention by revolutionary socialists into labour ‘politics’, while relating to trade union consciousness, must transcend it. No doubt within the confines of spontaneity a degree of conscious advance can be gained and Lenin’s memorable line that “there is a difference  between  spontaneity and spontaneity” points to a degree of development, but not one that equates to a revolutionary consciousness. Lenin forcefully argued that socialist consciousness could only be brought to the struggle by drawing on Marxism and the understanding gained from history and especially the long history of struggle by the working class. It is for this reason that socialists intervening in labour struggles must not limit themselves to simply “trade union issues”. A danger exists in that immersion in the “too narrow” field of trade union work can cause revolutionaries to lose sight of themselves as political agitators. Lenin’s criticism of “economism” emphasized the fact that this work “taken by itself, is not in essence Social-Democratic (revolutionary) work, but merely trade union work.” Whereas, trade union work should serve as “a beginning and constituent part” of socialists’ work, losing sight of their revolutionary political tasks means they abrogate their political responsibility to represent the working class in relation “to the state as an organised political force.” Failing to raise acute political demands means failing to confront all aspects of class oppression and Lenin consistently  argued  that, “We must actively take up the political education of the working class and the development of its political consciousness.”

Yes, as Fearon indicates, to confine the whole global struggle against capital to mere concessions of one kind or another, to temporary relief from the tightening garrote,  is to choose vassalage and eventually death.  Trade unionism looks backward because in the first place it is non-Marxian, and by that I mean it chooses to remain ignorant about history’s forces, chiefly the class struggle, and secondly because, in Luddite fashion, it refuses to recognize that technology, being only applied science (and the desire of human knowledge irrepressible), is here to stay.  Thus anyone sensible can bet that technology in the form of ever more refined automation will go on eliminating jobs because all modern technology is designed with maximum efficiency as its main selling point. This will happen no matter how loudly anyone protests. So the real issue is not how to preserve a static pool of jobs or stop science; the pool is liable to shrink regardless of what we do. The real issue is how to preserve and expand incomes, while working less, not more, both of which are made possible by higher productivity.  Productivity is a friend of humanity, not its enemy. Problem is, as any Marxian knows, under the capitalist system social relations, due to the cockamammy way in which the national income is distributed, almost the entirety of this gain is appropriated by the ruling 0.001%.  This means that while a puny minority grabs an ever larger share of the social pie, the losing side is presented with more unemployment and more underemployment, in effect a denial of access to such gains. With such political rules in effect the richest percentile’s income continues to rise while those of the middle class remain flat or  decline, and those of the poor plummet.  Does this picture sound familiar?

In reality, the fact is that in an egalitarian, worker-dominated nation (read real socialism), the question of jobs, which after all are only a mechanism to share in the national pie, with the salaries and wages being simply claims on the mountain of goods and services turned out by the entire productive apparatus of society, of which they are the critical component—would take a back seat to the more important question: how is humanity to distribute the increasing amount of goods made possible by nonstop improvements in technology and productivity? A former colleague, Dr. Susan Rosenthal, summed up the dilemma thusly:

By 2000, U.S. workers took half the time to produce all the goods and services they produced in 1973. If the benefits of this rise in productivity had been shared, most Americans could be enjoying a four-hour work day, or a six-month work year, or they could be taking off every other year from work with no loss of pay. (See, Globalization: Theirs or Ours?)

She didn’t need to mention that under such conditions unemployment in all its forms would quickly become history, and the road would open—at last—to envisage the true potential of humanity.

Wrap your minds about that little fact for a while.—Patrice Greanville

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Concessions Have Gutted Organized Labour

Sam Gindin

At the end of the 1970s, just before the era of concessions began, the U.S. section of the United Auto Workers included some 700,000 members at the Big Three (GM, Ford and Chrysler). In each subsequent round of bargaining, the union accepted concessions in exchange for the promise of ‘job security.’ Today, after three decades of this charade – sold by the union as well as the companies – there are 110,000 UAW members left at these companies, a stunning loss of almost 85 per cent of the jobs.

The Canadian section of the union resisted this direction for a time. In fact, it was tensions over the response to concessionary demands that led in 1985 to the Canadians breaking away from their parent and establishing the Canadian Auto Workers. As it turned out, the new union did somewhat better in terms of jobs for a significant period, but today their numbers too are dramatically down: from some 70,000 at the end of the 1970s to under 21,000 today, a fall of some two-thirds.

Since the early 1980s, real productivity in the Canada-U.S. auto industry (i.e. after discounting for inflation) has more than doubled. Real wages, on the other hand, have actually fallen in the U.S. and only increased moderately in Canada.

Worse for New Hires

For new workers, the change is even more shocking. An American autoworker hired at the Big Three today will be working at a lower inflation-adjusted wage than he or she would have gotten a half-century ago. In Canada, the real starting rate will now be 12 per cent below where it was when the Canadians split from the Americans a generation ago. And whereas new workers could expect to reach the top rate in 18 months then, they will now have to wait 10 years.

There are four crucial lessons to be taken from all this.

First, it is simply not credible to argue that concessions are a strategy for autoworkers ‘ultimately’ achieving a better life. Concessions not only increase inequality and dampen demand, leaving corporations reluctant to invest, but also are a diversion from addressing what really needs to be done to create jobs.

Second, the great productive potential of this sector cannot be met if we restrict that potential to making cars. With productivity improvements in the auto industry of 3 per cent per year when long-term demand is growing at less than 2 per cent per year, jobs will inevitably shrink over time – and this is aside from whether we really want or can sustain more cars on the road.

Rather than watching the disappearance of the productive assets we have in this sector, we should be talking about how to convert its flexible tools and equipment, creative engineering capacity and proven worker skills into meeting the obvious needs that environmental pressures will imply through the rest of the century.

Such transformations will have to include not just our energy and transportation systems, but also our factories and offices, the nature of our homes and appliances. This cannot happen, as experience shows, through reliance on markets and unilateral corporate decisions; a sustainable future demands placing some notion of democratic planning back on the agenda. (The technical feasibility of such changes was demonstrated as long ago as World War II when industries were converted to war production and back again in remarkably short periods.)

Renewed Labour Movement?

Third, it is hard to imagine a significant move in this direction without a push from a renewed labour movement. Unions themselves need to radically rethink their structures and role as representatives of working people. It isn’t enough to lament corporate and government attacks or to look to better PR or technical fixes. Two-tier wages for the same work, for example, alienate the very young workers on whom unions depend for their revival, and that lack of solidarity within the workplace destroys credibility in promises of broader solidarities beyond the workplace.

Unions will have to demonstrate in practice that they are leaders in the fight for needed social services, that they have ideas for job creation, and that they are ready to put their organizational resources into winning such directions. The right has radically and aggressively championed an agenda that has brought greater inequality and greater insecurity for working people. Only an equally radical and determined response can reverse this course.

Finally and more generally, we must come to grips with the fact that private investment is not going to lead us out of the immediate economic crisis. Though productivity has grown and costs have been restrained, the resultant hordes of cash – as has been much noted – are only sloshing around in corporate treasuries or in the financial ether. Neither further cuts in interest rates nor tax cuts will change this reality. Only direct government intervention in massive infrastructural spending and the expansion of needed public services will create jobs – and induce the private sector, in spite of itself, to meet the consequent spending. •

Sam Gindin is retired from the CAW, where he served as assistant to the president. He is the co-author with Leo Panitch of the recently released The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of the American Empire (Verso, 2012). This article first appeared in the Toronto Star.

two quotes…
“What if I told you” is paraphrased from the Matrix movie… it’s not an exact quote, but it sounds like something the Morpheus character would say to Neo.

And the second quote about “class struggle” is by Marx and/or Engels from the Communist Manifesto:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm

Hence the image of Marx (as Morpheus) reminding us all about the most important and inescapable fact of our existence in a class-divided society – class struggle.

TWO ORIGINAL COMMENTS

#4 Garry Lawrence 2012-09-27 09:17 EDT
Sam on the Mark(x) about Concessions

#3 Jim Reid 2012-09-27 09:08 EDT
Concessions
To blame concessions alone for job loss in the auto industry is a huge stretch that ignores key factors such as imbalanced trade, foregn competition producing vehicles in North America, hugely restrictive rights to organize, especially in US right to work states and the arrogant, narrow behaviours of D-3 companies that until 10 years ago put out an inferior product. As well the move to automation and outsorcing of everythng from parts production to who cleans the toilets has also been a key driver in the reduction of D-3 auto jobs.

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•••

Introduction
The New Social Democracy

Edited by Bryan Evans and Ingo Schmidt, published by AU Press. Guest speaker: Leo Panitch.

Note that, while this article is instructive, we take exception to the liberaloid disparagement of Soviet Communism and Stalin by the authors, who, of course, are social democrats and true to their bourgeois roots. 

Olof Palme: Perhaps the summit of modern social democracy. After him, le deluge.

Offering a comparative look at social democratic experience since the Cold War, the volume examines countries where social democracy has long been an influential political force – Sweden, Germany, Britain, and Australia – while also considering the history of Canada's NDP, the social democratic tradition in the United States, and the emergence of New Left parties in Germany and the province of Québec. Once marked by redistributive and egalitarian policy perspectives, social democracy has, the book argues, assumed a new role – that of a modernizing force advancing the neoliberal cause.

¶

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he contributions to this volume provide a comprehensive examination of a politics that has come to be identified as the “new” social democracy. What makes this historic political movement, with its origins in the late nineteenth century, “new” is the transformation that has occurred in its politics, policy, and ideology since the 1980s, but especially through the 1990s.

Of course, social democracy has reinvented itself before. Its original ideological roots, at least in Europe, were broadly Marxist, and its political base was the urban working class. In the postwar era, however, shaped by the Cold War and the brutalities of Stalinism (sic), this heritage was largely jettisoned and replaced with a form of progressive Keynesianism and an increasingly heterodox political base that included a growing number of professionals. The social democracy we see today has now abandoned even that commitment to a mixed economy characterized by significant but not dominant public ownership and redistributive social and economic policies. What distinguishes the new social democracy is an embrace of its new “modern” role as a manager of neoliberal restructuring.

This transformation was noted by Michael Harrington (1986, 2), who warned that the social democratic Left in power had, in failing to understand the economic change underway in the 1980s, come to pursue the policies of the New Right. In this context, social democracy was “confronting a crisis of definition and political effectiveness” (Laxer 1996, 11). How would social democracy distinguish itself from explicitly neoliberal parties? Or could it? Of this period in the history of social democracy, Moschonas (2002, 229) writes:

The “new” social democracy has definitely not sprung up like some jack-in-the-box. . . . In a sense, the “third way” was already present as well, prior to its adoption by New Labour and theoretical formulation by Giddens. The new social democracy of the 1990s is the worthy, direct heir of 1980s social democracy. The continuity between them is manifest, and manifestly strong.

Indeed, as a result of the efforts of the “progressive modernizers,” for whom modernization “has too often meant deregulation and privatization,” social democracy is no longer what it used to be, argues Robert Taylor (2008). “Too many have sought to accommodate or embrace global capitalism,” he observes, “with varying degrees of enthusiasm. They continue to see the market as an overwhelming force for good.” Social democrats have, moreover, “too often argued that the only way forward is to abandon notions of equality and fraternity . . . and to weaken the state to the advantage of the forces of capital.”

Through the lens of seven cases — Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Sweden, Germany, and Québec — this volume seeks to survey and document this turn from the postwar social democracy marked by redistributive and egalitarian policy perspectives to a new social democracy with a role as a “modernizing” force advancing neoliberalism. The contributions here present original insights into how and why this second refoundation of social democracy has occurred and why this is significant in political and policy terms.

The selection of these particular cases provides an interesting survey of social democracy. Represented in this sample are social democratic parties operating in rather different political and historical contexts. In Sweden, the Social Democratic Party has been the “natural governing party” for most of the past ninety years. Through the forty-four years from 1932 to 1976, it formed the government without interruption and constructed a comprehensive welfare state that is seen as an icon of the social democratic project. Germany, geographically proximate to Sweden, offers a very different story. Since the end of the Second World War, German social democracy has struggled to win national government. The Cold War and the loss of the social democratic–voting East as a result of partition profoundly shaped the electoral prospects and strategies of the social democrats there. And, today, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (spd) competes with the Left Party for working-class votes.

Britain’s Labour Party shares with the other two European cases a historical base in the working class. However, whereas the Swedish Social Democrats are the exemplars of redistributive social democracy, in the 1990s Britain’s Labour Party came to be the most notable expression of the “new” social democracy.

While less well known, Australia’s Labor Party (alp), like its British counterpart, also reinvented itself as a neoliberal modernizing party by implementing marketization and privatization policies while in government and distancing itself from its working-class and trade union base. In Canada, the New Democratic Party (ndp) has never formed government at a national level, but it has had policy influence at certain moments and significant electoral success in several provinces. But, like other social democratic parties, the ndp has transformed itself from a “protest movement” into a party as capable of managing neoliberalism as any of the capitalist parties. And in Québec, a new party, Québec Solidaire (qs), has emerged to give voice to community and anti-globalization activists and workers alienated by the Parti Québécois’s rightward drift. Perhaps because of its origins at a time of expanding neoliberalism, the qs remains deeply committed to redistributive social and economic policies but, at the same time, cannot be characterized as monolithically anti-capitalist. The qs is struggling in a space in which the question is whether it will reinvent Keynesian social democracy or move toward an anti-capitalist politics with a mass base, something that has yet to emerge in North America. And, finally, the United States is often held out as an example of American exceptionalism in that the social democratic movement is widely viewed as non-existent. This is, however, a gross misreading of the American political scene.

[CONTINUE READING, download entire document/PDF]

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•••

SPECIAL DISPATCH FROM RT (RUSSIAN TELEVISION)

Skirmishes continue between protesters and riot police in Madrid, with cops firing rubber bullets and tear gas at the crowd. Fourteen people have been injured and 22 arrested, local media report. Local emergency services have confirmed that at least 14 people, including four policemen, have been injured in clashes between police and protesters. One of the wounded is believed to be in critical condition, according to local news. One of the injured policemen suffered a severe concussion.

Riot police dispersed the protesters, dragging some by the arms and legs, who had tried to get through police lines. An uneasy order was restored and reinforcements have been brought in to try and disperse the crowd. Thirteen of those arrested have been detained after a group of protesters tried to break through the police barrier. Several others were reportedly arrested later for arguing with police, bringing the total number of arrests to 22.

Thousands of activists have congregated in Madrid’s Plaza de Neptune, 100 meters from the Congress building, to protest Spanish austerity measures. The demonstrators pledged to march around the building, and called for new elections. Metal barriers have been placed around the building to block access from every possible direction.

Demonstrators waved banners with the slogan ‘No’ written on them, in reference to the austerity policies of the Spanish government. Protesters said that today is a key day to level criticism against politicians and the Spanish government. The city stationed armored police vehicles bumper-to-bumper around the parliament building, and announced that around 1,300 police would be deployed to counter the protesters.

The organizers of the protest dubbed their movement ‘Surround Congress,’ and expressed hopes that thousands would turn out. The protestors called themselves ‘indignants’ and claimed that their democracy had been ‘kidnapped,’ calling for new elections and rallies against the austerity measures enacted by Mariano Rajoy’s government.

Some 200 demonstrators gathered near the city’s main railway station chanting “Rescue democracy,” and “This is not a crisis, it’s a swindle.”

Carmen Rivero – a 40-year old photographer who travelled overnight by bus from the southern city of Granada – said, “We think this is an illegal government. We want the parliament to be dissolved, a referendum and a constituent assembly so that the people can have a say in everything.”

Another 100 protesters were scattered across the city’s main square, the Plaza de Espana.

“This is not a real democracy. This is a democracy kidnapped by the parties in collaboration with the economic powers and the people have no say in it,” said Romula Barnares, a 40-year-old artist wearing sunglasses with a dollar sign on one lens and a euro sign on another.

But Miguel-anxo Murado, a journalist and writer, told RT that he thought their demands are too vague and that they would not be successful, “it seems that they are back with the same very vague and ambitious platform and in-fact they have been over shadowed by a different constitutional challenge, which is for the independence movement in Catalonia, which is more likely to change the constitution, although in a different way, so I’m afraid they will probably not have a huge success today.” Spain is in the middle of its second recession in two years, and faces a 25 percent unemployment rate.

Madrid introduced the controversial austerity measures in a gesture meant to show that it intends to fix its debt and budgetary shortfalls. The European Central Bank granted Spain a 100 billion euro rescue loan for its banks, but the country has not decided whether to seek another bailout.

Europe’s financial leaders are pleading for Spain to reduce volatility in its markets by deciding whether or not to request the second loan.

During a September 15 protest, waves of some 50,000 anti-austerity demonstrators converged in downtown Madrid, blowing whistles and hoisting banners that read, “They are destroying the country, we must stop them.” Representatives from over 230 civic and professional organizations also turned out amid cries of “lies,” and “enough.”

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•••

A tribute to Joe Bageant we could not miss

Joe at the keys: We still miss you, old man.