Header image 

International Communist Workers Party

line decor
   To Contact ICWP, send an email to: icwp@anonymousspeech.com           
line decor

Español

About ICWP

Red Flag newspaper

Article Series from Red Flag

Communist Dialectics

Home

We Make Cars, They Make Profits! Let’s Abolish The Wage System! (Part 4)

BIGGER    SMALLER

As previous articles explained, capitalist production is intense. It demands the highest rate of profit, the largest share of the market and the cheapest possible rate of labor. In every sector it produces top dogs, o r market leaders. In order to survive, lesser manufacturers have to try and replace the leaders. It’s a situation that creates a cut-throat, chaotic climate that contains the seed of overproduction, crisis and the widespread destruction of plant, equipment and workers.
Today, in the world’s auto industries, Japanese, South Korean and European manufacturers are struggling with overcapacity, being able to produce far more cars than the market can sell. China, one of the few areas where sales are growing, is threatened too with overcapacity. Because of relatively weak markets in the rest of the world all the major manufacturers want to build and sell in the Chinese markets.
“It’s a bloodbath of pricing and it’s a bloodbath of margins.” That was how European auto boss Sergio Marchionne described profit margins in the world auto industry a couple of years ago and it’s only gotten bloodier since.
It’s bloody all right when BMW celebrates a record sales year by announcing it will cut costs (wages, benefits, conditions) by $575 million per year for the next 6 years!· 
It’s a bloodbath all right when VW, Europe’s largest auto maker, announces plans to cut costs an average of $2 billion for the next three years.
Or when VW plans to open its new Chinese factory not in wage-cheap Shanghai, but 4,000 kilometers away in China’s interior, in wage-cheaper Urumqil.
It’s even bloodier when you realize that wages are only part of the story. In Slovakia, often called the “Detroit of the East” 70,000 workers produced 500,000 vehicles in 2010, but just two years later, in 2012, they produced 900,000 vehicles.
It’s the same in the US. In 2004 there were 70 auto plants. Today there are 55 producing almost as many vehicles. Labor costs are down 27% while some crews have to work two 10-hour night shifts on a Monday and Tuesday and two 10-hour day shifts on Friday and Saturday as well as a “mandatory” Sunday once a month.
It’s the same the world over: longer hours, more intense work, week-end work and safety cuts all add up to work shifts “full of fatigue, empty of satisfaction.” In some plants 57 seconds of every minute are accounted for! At Toyota in Japan there is a new phenomenon - karosha, or death from overwork. In capitalism the wage worker is more robot than human, a commodity, to be used then discarded!
Listen to the German press comparing VW to Toyota. Toyota employs 339,000 workers and sold 9.98 million vehicles last year. VW employs 573,000 and sold 9.73 million vehicles. “Why does VW,” the German paper Suddeutsche Zeitung asks, “need more than 234,000 workers in order to produce fewer cars?” They want to cut the livelihood of 234,000 men and women! Capitalism is a world system with a world view, a view that sees wage workers as things.
The revolutionary movement Red Flag is building rubbishes that view of the world. If you think that instead of reducing a person to hour after hour of intense, repetitive actions, the production process should draw on the full array of human capacities, then you are already thinking like a communist.
You should join our movement, if you think that instead of having to go cap-in-hand to beg, plead or ask for a job, you should find yourself producing something the community needs as a result of group discussions you yourself participated in, then you are already thinking like a communist. You should join our movement. If you think that instead of working to make bankers, industrialists and land developers fatter and more powerful, you should work to create a share-and-share-alike world, you already think like a communist.
You know what to do!

 

Next Article