Revolutionary Potential of Auto Workers in India
INDIA — “I worked at this plant for two years. Yesterday, the bosses told me and 400 others that we no longer have jobs,” said a young worker in an auto plant. He reads Red Flag regularly. He is angry at the bosses and fearful of his family’s future: “I have two children, my wife and my old parents. They all depend on me financially. Next month we will be homeless.”
The auto industry in India employs, directly and indirectly, four million workers. Six months ago, autoworkers in Chennai, the hub of auto industry, would say, “The auto industry has crashed.” Now they are saying, “The auto industry is going in reverse gear.”
Some 400,000 automobiles are unsold. Major manufactures are closing plants, laying off thousands of workers. Things are getting worse as potential buyers find it difficult to get loans. And those who have resources to buy a new car are waiting for more fuel-efficient electrical cars to be released next year. By years’ end, two million cars will remain unsold.
This unprecedented crisis in the auto industry has resulted in 300,000 workers losing their job. Tens of thousands of workers have the potential to confront and smash the entire capitalist system of wage slavery.
India has never seen a crisis like this before. The large flagship government-owned Air India has been unable to pay fuel for last eight months. The banks are refusing to keep it airborne. The crisis is spreading to railway transport, airlines, banks, cellular communication, insurance, oil industry, ports, housing and agriculture. Unemployment is the highest it has been in the last 45 years. Our International Communist Workers’ Party is active in the auto factory where our friend lost his job. We are confronting the contradiction between fear of losing jobs and hatred for the bosses for job losses. As individuals, the capitalist system leaves us hungry, homeless and in despair when we have no work. But we can convert that fear into class hatred and enthusiasm for communist revolution.
Capitalist bosses also understand this contradiction. They are trying to channel the mass anger of the working class into racist/fascist Hindu nationalism of blaming Muslims or Chinese for “taking away jobs.” They use racist terror to keep the workers fearful.
We had a series of study groups where we explained that it is capitalist bosses who own the factories and banks. They hire and fire workers to maximize their profits. But their system is crisis-ridden as they compete with other capitalists who try to produce commodities cheaper, like the Chinese capitalists. Our enemy is all capitalist bosses.
Capitalists also finance various political parties to spread the illusion that the crisis can be resolved within the capitalist system itself. All the unions and old sellout fake-communist parties use their mass base to fight for reforming the system which is not capable of any reform.
We also had heated but comradely meetings where some of us felt that this illusion that the system can be reformed is a major obstacle in the working class that we have to confront.
We are determined to seize this historic moment of transforming capitalist crisis into communist revolution. Only communist society, without the shackles of wage slavery, can free the working class from its unending misery.