Tamil Nadu, India—Auto workers on strike in January, 2019
CHENNAI (India), June 19— “We are going to remember comrade Bai,” said comrade Vishu in Chennai. “She will remain in our memory from when she visited us. My wife and children still talk about her kindness. She was a true communist.” Bai had visited Chennai from Bengaluru about two years ago when she and her other comrades took an overnight train to meet them.
That was the only time the comrades from two cities met to discuss how to expand and increase the recruitment of our party.
Word spread quickly among the auto workers when they received the news of the passing of comrade Bai. We have to continue our fight that inspired her.
Coronavirus and the Crisis in Auto
There is talk in the auto industry of imminent collapse. Three of our comrades are among thousands who have been laid off. The Covid crisis seriously crippled the bosses’ plan to expand the automotive industry. Steel prices skyrocketed in the last two years. Now fuel prices are reaching an all-time high. These factors make it difficult for the auto industry to survive.
Comrade Vishu works in the Hyundai factory. He said, “The factory is like a ghost town. They closed the entire plant for five days in late May because many people were getting coronavirus. Now the government is trying to vaccinate auto workers.”
He added that the government considers F a priority because Chennai could provide the Chinese automobile industry with a competitive advantage. Chennai is considered the Detroit of India. In the last five years, the Chinese auto industry has seen the potential in Chennai. They were pouring capital into building their plants.
Everything has changed since the coronavirus crisis. Modern factories have become ghost towns and people are finding it difficult to find work.
Understanding the Contradictions of Capitalism
Comrades of ICWP met to discuss our work. A comrade pointed out that coronavirus intensified the crisis, but it was not the cause. In Chennai, Indian, Korean, Japanese, European, the US and Chinese capitalists were investing money to make super-profits.
They make these super-profits by investing in automated robots which require fewer workers to produce more cars. But the profit comes only from workers, not the robots. Now we have fewer workers, more cars and less profit. The bosses try to overcome this contradiction by eliminating weaker capitalists who cannot compete with sophisticated robots. This again makes many workers lose jobs.
This cycle of more workers losing work while fewer capitalists make super-profits does not end. It creates bigger contradictions. This is what is happening in Chennai.
Big capitalist and imperialist powers like China, Europe, the US, and India are fighting for world domination. They have created huge capacity but the working class in the world cannot buy what is produced in the car industry. The bosses’ productive capacity turns into its opposite. Competing imperialists try to eliminate their rivals by making their plants unproductive either by abandoning them or by violent destruction as in war.
Advancing the Communist Solution
Discussions like these have inspired new comrades to talk more seriously about our work. It becomes clear to us that we need to have a society without bloodsucking bosses and without wage slavery or money.
All the subjective needs of the bosses to make super-profits are the cause of divisions in the working class based on caste, race, nationalism, xenophobia, sexism, and oppression of Dalits and Muslims. We can only eliminate these divisions among the masses by going to the root of the problem – wage slavery.
In our room of about a dozen people, we went into how we are distributing Red Flag. Some comrades took a stack of Red Flags. Others were reading Red Flag, but they could not explain to their coworkers the need to read it. This discussion helped us in trying to overcome this obstacle and encouraged us to take many Red Flags.
This was a very healthy discussion that resolved the contradiction between readers and distributors. We have more distributors with conviction. As we progress, we will struggle with the distributors to bring new comrades to join and come to the meetings. Some comrades in the meeting were so enthusiastic that they joined the Party.