Buzz Off

In the true tradition of business unionism Canadian Autoworkers President Buzz Hargrove sold his members out for a bowl of pottage. Despite his pseudo-socialist bluster, which was really ghost written by Sam Gidden, and his so called political activist unionism, in the end like all other union bosses he sold out his workers for a contract today.

It makes one wonder why we need unions. Well actually the bosses need them more than the workers do, since they are used to curtail authentic class struggle, and to mediate on behalf of 'variable labour' with the owners of capital.

The recent record breaking settlement with the Big 3 auto companies was a sell out by Buzz as he prepares to retire.

In the latest round of talks, Mr. Hargrove managed to negotiate what is effectively a wage and benefits freeze.

While denouncing two tiered wage settlements agreed to by UAW and the Big 3 south of the border, Buzz agreed to a made in Canada two tier wage structure no different than those he was denouncing.

Economic provisions of the deals mirror those of the CAW's deal with Ford Motor Co., which was cemented May 4. New hires will be paid 70% of base wages during the first three years of employment before climbing into the full wage scale. The deal cuts a week's vacation in return for 3,500 Canadian dollar (US$3,485) one-time payments and increases to drug co-payments.

The sell out of principles began when Buzz and CAW agreed to a no strike deal with Magna.

The Magna-CAW deal struck last fall between Mr. Stronach and Mr. Hargrove is a good start: In return for a no-strike clause from the union, Magna agreed to stop resisting unionization.

He has now followed it up with a sweet heart deal with the Big 3 selling out autoworkers by tying them into a contract that does not assure them job security, but rather see's further lay offs and plant closures with a payout to the survivors.

The auto industry is bleeding and all Buzz got was a band aid, and he admitted it.

Major economic clauses for all three companies

Wage freeze for three years.

Elimination of cost-of-living adjustment until 2009.

Employee co-payments of 10 per cent on prescription drug costs, amounting to $250 in the first year and growing slightly in the next two years.

Newly hired employees receive 70 per cent of full wages and take three years to get to full level, compared to previous provision of 85 per cent and two-year growth to full wages.

Surrender of 40 hours of holidays a year in return for a one-time payment of $3,500 in 2009.

Chrysler

Etobicoke casting plant in Toronto kept open for 2½ years instead of being closed next year. Company and union will look for buyer or joint venture partner for Chrysler.

Confirmation that next generation of Chrysler's large sedans will be built at Brampton, Ont., plant.

Minivan plant in Windsor, Ont., will maintain three shifts as long as market stays healthy. Shift at St. Louis plant to be cut before any shifts in Windsor.

GM

New rear-wheel-drive car for Oshawa, Ont., to join Chevrolet Camaro.

Extension of Chevrolet Impala production at Oshawa plant to 2012.

New six-speed transmission for St. Catharines, Ont., pending government financial support.

New V8 engine for St. Catharines.

Retirement incentives up to $125,000 and a $35,000 vehicle voucher for workers at Windsor transmission plant, which will be closed in 2010.

Retention of second shift of workers at Oshawa Truck plant. Instead of layoffs, workers will go on two-week rotating shifts until September, 2009.

Ford

Adds new vehicle to Oakville, Ont., assembly plant beyond Ford Flex, which goes into production this year.

Extends life of St. Thomas, Ont., large-car assembly plant by three years from expected closing next year.

Autoworkers in Canada are marking time, as CAW rests on its laurels happy to have organized the Big 3 and now Magna. They have made little effort to take on the Japanese or Korean automakers in Canada who now outsell the Big 3.

Instead of organizing Toyota, Buzz cozied up to Toyota management and backed one of their VP's who was running for Liberal MP last election. Like his bargaining strategies his political strategy of strategic voting leads workers to a dead end.

It's a good thing he is finally retiring unfortunately while that will end the cult of personality in the CAW it will not end the entrenched bureaucracy of labour fakirs and pork choppers who dominate the organization.

CAW likes to claim to be a social union, a left leaning union, but it is in the end regardless of its ideological claims, a business union, structured to maintain capitalism.

As Marx pointed out years ago; Trade unions are not revolutionary organizations, but defense organizations of the working class. They call for a fair days wage instead of demanding the abolition of the wage system.

Trades Unions work well as centers of resistance against the encroachments of capital. They fail partially from an injudicious use of their power. The fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class that is to say the ultimate abolition of the wages system.

Under the Fordist model of mass production and with the post War boom they became the hand maiden of capitalism, bargaining with the bosses to get crumbs off the table for their members.

They abandoned any pretense to being agents of social change, instead they became the cops on the shop floor, halting wildcats and job actions by workers. Building permanent corporate style organizations paid for by workers, and populated by professional permanent non-elected paid representatives, they have abandoned the revolutionary aims of workers self-organization; the control of the means of production, the take over and self management of factories by the workers themselves.

Instead they accept the day to day operations of capitalism as inevitable, not worth fighting over except to try and ameliorate its worse excesses, which keeps the bosses happy.

Workers since the beginning of capitalism have organized themselves, when unions were outlawed or banned, workers still created them and used them to strike against the bosses.

This self organization of workers is the dialectic of the conflict between labour and capital. When capitalism boomed it offered unions labour peace, a greater share of the pie, through out the sixties and seventies this was known as the social contract, and was reflected in a trilateral approach to State governance, the unions joined the politicians and capitalists at the table of civil society, determining how the welfare state would function.

Capitalism created the welfare state, in order to avoid a revolution at the end of WWII, and the labour leaders gleefully joined the bosses and their state glad to be accepted as equals. But they never were equals they were bought off, as the eighties and nineties proved when the bosses tore up the social contract and went on the offensive attacking union gains and calling for the privatization of the state.

The unions still slow to wake up, like the door mouse at Alice's Tea Party, thought this assault was an aberration, a few bad apples amongst their friends the bosses.
Instead it was a well planned and orchestrated assault on the State by capitalism which needed more capitals to expand, and saw public sector services as a waste of the that capital.

The class war had been declared when capital started calling for roll backs, give backs, started off shoring and contracting out, and creating two tiered wage structures. The unions gave up fighting back accepting Maggie Thatchers admonition that There Is No Alternative.

And we hear Maggie echoed in Buzz's departing deal with the Big 3.

The 64-year-old Mr. Hargrove described this year's set of talks as the toughest he has faced since he became president in 1992. He warned in an interview yesterday, however, that they will "look like a picnic" compared with what his successor will face in 2011 if Chrysler, Ford and GM continue to lose market share and are forced to continue slashing their Canadian and U.S. operations.

There is a solution to the problem, and it was shown by the Aluminum workers in Quebec, and by workers in Argentina, when capital abandons the factories the workers still make them run.

We can exist with out capitalism, with out hedge fund investments, workers self management of their factories, and of public services is the alternative. Unfortunately it is usually embraced after the fact, after capital has abandoned the factories and communities that surround those factories.

But it shows that workers can organize themselves to run things for themselves and for their communities, without capitalists.

It is the secret of capitalism, that without workers there is no capitalism, we create the beast which oppresses us. Our challenge is not to tame the beast but to end its existence by creating the conditions for real existing socialism.

For more critiques of the CAW deals see:

	Bruce Allen	Learning Some Lessons from Michigan's Auto Jobs Crisis
The evidence of manufacturing job loss on a massive scale in Ontario where the Canadian auto industry is concentrated is clear and undeniable. Nonetheless a question must be asked. Is it accurate to characterize what is taking place here as a “manufacturing crisis?” Or is it something else?

	Sam Gindin	The CAW and Panic Bargaining: Early Opening at the Big Three
In the face of a deteriorating economic climate and concerns about the ‘investment competitiveness’ of Canadian plants, the CAW leadership made a startling move this spring. It had an air of panic about it: the leadership quietly asked the Big Three – GM, Ford and Chrysler – to open their collective agreements early, offering a new ‘pragmatic’ settlement. ...

Sam Gindin	Two-tier Wages, Second-Class Workers
When Autoworker President Buzz Hargrove makes new pronouncements, they carry weight within and beyond the labour movement – even when, as has recently been the case, they seem to undermine what Canadian unions have always stood for...

	Herman Rosenfeld	MAGNA IS NOT CAMI
In Bob White’s October 30th Op-Ed piece in the Toronto Star, the retired CAW president refers to the current Magna deal as a form of "innovation", comparing it to the 1980s fight against concessions and the formation of the new Canadian auto union...
		Sam Gindin	The CAW and Magna: What if Magna Builds an Assembly Plant?
In the discussions of the proposed Magna-CAW (Canadian Auto Workers) ‘Framework of Fairness’ deal, the focus has been on Magna as a components company. But what if Magna opened an assembly plant? Under the language of the ‘Framework of Fairness’, it too would be part of the deal...

SP Labour Committee	Windsor Modules: The CAW-Magna Deal Delivers – Or Does it?
On November 7, 2007, the CAW made an historic announcement. The first collective agreement under the new CAW-Magna Framework of Fairness Agreement (FFA) was ratified at Windsor Modules, a plant of some 250 workers...

SEE:

Alcan Proves Marx Right

Workers Control vs Corporate Welfare

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Industrial Ecology

Another conservative climate change denier attempts to paint left wing ideas and environmentalism as reactionary.

The concept of "nature" is a romantic invention. It was spun by the likes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 18th century as a confabulated utopian contrast to the dystopia of urbanization and materialism. The traces of this dewy-eyed conception of the "savage" and his unmolested, unadulterated surroundings can be found in the more malignant forms of fundamentalist environmentalism.

At the other extreme are religious literalists who regard Man as the crown of creation with complete dominion over nature and the right to exploit its resources unreservedly. Similar, veiled, sentiments can be found among scientists. The Anthropic Principle, for instance, promoted by many outstanding physicists, claims that the nature of the Universe is preordained to accommodate sentient beings - namely, us humans.

Industrialists, politicians and economists have only recently begun paying lip service to sustainable development and to the environmental costs of their policies. Thus, in a way, they bridge the abyss - at least verbally - between these two diametrically opposed forms of fundamentalism. Still, essential dissimilarities between the schools notwithstanding, the dualism of Man vs. Nature is universally acknowledged.


Quoted by The Economist, Daniel Esty of Yale, the leader of an environmental project sponsored by World Economic Forum, exclaimed:

"Why hasn't anyone done careful environmental measurement before? Businessmen always say, 'what matters gets measured'. Social scientists started quantitative measurement 30 years ago, and even political science turned to hard numbers 15 years ago. Yet look at environmental policy, and the data are lousy."

However we do know how to measure environmental impacts of capitalism, and we can reduce them through Industrial Ecology. In fact that was how industrial capitalism boomed during WWII, it reduced, reused and recycled. The fact is that capitalism needs to adapt, or die. Thus IE is a closed loop system based on biology and ecology. While technology continues to adapt itself in an organic fashion as well. But in order to overcome these contradictions we need to move beyond Green Industrialism to social ecology.

Industrial ecology is the shifting of industrial process from linear (open loop) systems, in which resource and capital investments move through the system to become waste, to a closed loop system where wastes become inputs for new processes.

Industrial ecology proposes not to see industrial systems (for example a factory, an ecoregion, or national or global economy) as being separate from the biosphere, but to consider it as a particular case of an ecosystem - but based on infrastructural capital rather than on natural capital. It is the idea that if natural systems do not have waste in them, we should model our systems after natural ones if we want them to be sustainable.

Along with more general energy conservation and material conservation goals, and redefining commodity markets and product stewardship relations strictly as a service economy, industrial ecology is one of the four objectives of Natural Capitalism. This strategy discourages forms of amoral purchasing arising from ignorance of what goes on at a distance and implies a political economy that values natural capital highly and relies on more instructional capital to design and maintain each unique industrial ecology.

How does an industrial facility measure its impact on the surrounding community?

And with a voluntary commitment to sustainable practices, can it improve its environmental, economic and social "footprint" over time?

These are the questions the Washington Department of Ecology and Simpson Tacoma Kraft Company, LLC will explore under a new partnership called the "Industrial Footprint Project." The Tacoma pulp and paper mill has volunteered, along with three other pulp and paper mills in the state, to provide baseline data to Ecology on a range of environmental, economic and social indicators.

Working with a consultant, stakeholders and the participating mills, Ecology will use the data to create a scoring system to establish a "footprint" measurement for each facility. The footprint will serve as a baseline to help companies set targets for improving over time.

Environmental data to be collected includes waste streams, recycling, emissions, water consumption and purchase of raw materials. One part of the project will be an energy challenge-asking each facility to voluntarily reduce their energy usage. On the economic side, some data analyzed will include jobs provided and the costs of good and services. Social indicators may include community involvement, health and safety records or good neighbor efforts.

Simpson Tacoma Kraft Company is an integrated pulp and paper manufacturing mill located on the Commencement Bay waterfront in Tacoma, Washington. It produces upwards of 1300 tons per day of bleached and unbleached packaging-grade paper and unbleached kraft pulp. About one-third of the fiber used comes from recycling old corrugated containers.

SEE:

Capitalism Is Not Sustainable

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The Carbon Market Myth

Once again capitalism tries to make a buck off the environmental crisis it created. In this case it is carbon markets.

In Canada the dispute over a domestic carbon exchange, linked to the stock exchange, is between Quebec which supports Kyoto in order to get the carbon exchange to locate in Montreal, while the Conservatives refuse to play in the carbon market, disadvantaging the TSX.

While the Tories talk about Carbon credits going to Russia, the reality is that the carbon market is housed in the Chicago commodity exchange. It is a non starter when it comes to actually reducing green house gases. Instead of being some futuristic market it is a return to the state monopoly mercantilism of the 17th Century.

The carbon market is unique in that the commodity traded derives its value primarily from its ability to meet the requirements set by an environmental regulator. There is also a market for voluntary offsets to emissions, but this market is small and unlikely to ever represent a significant piece of the total carbon trading pie (the World Bank estimates (PDF document) that the EU ETS, the only regulations-based emissions trading market in the world, accounted for 99% of total market value in 2006).

The problem with this is that governments have a long history of messing things up when they get involved in any industry. For instance, in Europe, the market for phase one emission allowances took a massive hit after it became clear that EU governments had over-allocated emissions to shield their national industries from the full effects of strict emissions caps. Besides effectively neutralizing the economic incentive to innovate and reduce emissions, this seriously shook the market's confidence in the ability of governments to uphold the necessary conditions for an effective and efficient carbon market to develop.

See:

Corporate America Greener Than Harper

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Waiting For Dion

In response to the Conservatives Made In Alberta Green Plan the Liberal Leader was nowhere to be found.

Not on Don Newman's show on CBC or Mike Duffy's on CTV, heck not even on CPAC.

Stephane Dion was absent from the debate.

MIA.

Oh Dion, Dion, where art though Dion?

Why hast thou blown this opportunity?

Because it's like waiting for Godot.

Neither the Tories or Liberals want to deal with the reality of Kyoto being a carbon tax system.



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CEO Profits From Ford Failure

Once again a CEO makes off with filthy lucre while the company collapses. Though some speculate that he may have been rewarded for saving Bush.
Since he did nothing that saved jobs at Ford.

Ford CEO: $28M for 4 months work
Struggling Ford Motor Co., which posted a record $12.7 billion net loss in 2006, gave its new CEO Alan Mulally $28 million for four months on the job, according to the company's proxy statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission Thursday.The Ford (Charts) pay package for Mulally comes on top of the $7.4 million that aerospace company Boeing (Charts) had previously reported paying him for his eight months running that company's commercial aircraft unit before he made the move to Ford at the beginning of September. Mulally's pay package at Ford included a $7.5 million hiring bonus, as well as $11 million that Ford described as an offset for forfeited performance and stock option awards at Boeing. In addition he received $55,469 for relocation costs and temporary housing. The details of the compensation packages and costs come as Ford moves ahead with plans to close plants and cut more than 30,000 hourly positions from the company in an effort to stem losses.

The company had disclosed in a footnote buried on page 228 of an earlier filing with SEC that Mulally saw the value of his stock bonuses increase to $6 million from the originally agreed upon $5 million "after reviewing the company's 2006 performance results and Mr. Mulally's leadership role in progressing his key priorities."

Ford announced in March that all full-time staff would receive some form of modest bonus for 2006, as it attempted to improve morale in the middle of a downsizing. Most salaried workers and supervisors received between $300 to $800, depending on their location and rank in the company. Most union members received about $500. The company did not detail the overall cost of the bonus program, but the widespread bonuses cost the company at least $62 million, based on the 125,000 employees who were eligible for the payment.

See

Zero Sum Gain

Ford

CEO

Stock Options

Corporate Crime

White Collar Crime

Criminal Capitalism

Productivity

Wealth


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IWD: Raya Dunayevskaya

Since today is International Women's Day I thought I would blog about an overlooked founder of the New Left and Marxist Feminism; Raya Dunayevskaya.
Founder of News and Letters, and a Marxist philosopher whose praxis focused on the revolutionary potential of youth, women and black workers and the anti-war movement.

I cannot recommend highly enough Eugene Gogol's historical biography of her life and work which she termed Marxist Humanism. Raya Dunayevskaya: Philosopher of Marxist-Humanism, Wipfandstock Publishers: Eugene, Oregon, 2003. This extraordinarily accessible work covers the development of her ideas and theories in relation to her life which was a revolutionary praxis.

I can think of no higher praise then the fact that I lent the book to a friend who while a Leftist had not heard of Dunayevskaya. He read the whole work in week, and while the work deals with Hegelian and Marxist Philosophy, Gogols presentation, within the context of her life and political development, my friend was suitably impressed that he went in search of her works online. He returned the book, and related to me that not being as computer literate as some, this was the first time he had downloaded her papers to read later. If you know nothing of her, then this is the political biography to read.

This philosophical comprehension of Marx's mature work of political economy needs to be reckoned with by today's "anti-globalization" movement. That movement is largely motivated by the injustice of the huge disparity in wealth between the northern, advanced capitalist nations and the nations of the south. The rallying cry is for a more just distribution of the world's wealth. Marxism and Freedom moves beyond this politics of equity. It illuminates how deeply capital must be uprooted in order to transform labor into an activity for human development and the realization of individual potentialities.

Dunayevskaya highlights the question, "What are we for?" Typically it is more immediately clear what we are against-capital's globalized reach, or imperialism. The question of the kind of society we are working for is usually ducked as too remote or potentially divisive. Dunayevskaya nonetheless insists on the need for full-fledged discussion within the movement and a collective focus for working it out.

This orientation comes out of Dunayevskaya's embrace of Hegel's method of the negation of the negation. She likens it to Marx's concept of "revolution in permanence," which "made it clear that the revolution does not end with the overthrow of the old but must continue to the new, so you begin to feel this presence of the future in the present" (12). The revolutionary impulse thus seeks the creation of a new human being beyond the uprooting of the old society. Only this ceaseless negation, including the negation of the initial attempts at negation, can lead us beyond a reshuffling of the cards so as to achieve an equitable redistribution of the world's wealth.

For Dunayevskaya the dialectic of negativity is the notion that forward movement emerges from the negation of obstacles to freedom. Negation needs to go further than the refutation of the given, because the first negation is still imprinted with the old. Only when negativity goes on to become self-directed, self-related, or in Hegelian terms "absolute," does it create the positive and the truly new.

While the aim of a humanistic transformation of society has this dialectical philosophical basis, it emerges out of actual human struggles. Dunayevskaya anticipates the focus on fighting for "new human relations" that later became central to the women's, Black liberation and workers' struggles. She quotes a young worker from Los Angeles who asked: "What skill do you need in this day of Automation? What pride can you have in your work if everything is done electronically...? What about the human being?"

She was raised in the Ukrainian diaspora in Chicago. Amongst the immigrant workers who shared the ghetto and jobs in the meat packing plants with their African American neighbors. It was in this community that Raya began as a young Communist to identify the indigenous class struggle in America as dealing with the Negro Question and Womens Liberation. They were not side issues, or matters simply of oppression, for her they were were key to class struggle.

"Those who have dedicated their lives to the creation of more just societies stand back now and take stock of the disintegration of so many of the socialist experiments. Feminism was palpably missing from those plans drawn up by men. Raya Dunayevskaya knew the importance of a feminist vision and hers informed the Marxist-Humanism she explained so well. Women's Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolution is as relevant today as when it was written, perhaps more so. This is necessary reading for all who want to know what went wrong and how to do it better next time."— Margaret Randall

While many will point to others as founders of the New Left, in reality it was her and her comrade's C.L. R. James and Grace Lee Boggs that really gave birth to the American Marxist New Left. While much of the New Left in America was shaped by the baby boom and subsequent proletarianization of post secondary education and the consequences of the draft which created a youth revolt, it was the change in production that is Fordism that really was key to Dunayevskaya's work.

under capitalism machines exploit labor. “Capital is then a material thing which exploits labor” (p. 13). Instead of analyzing the capitalist labor process and thus discovering how a material thing becomes an exploiting force, ........that the thing, means of production, has become the social relation, capital, because of what Marx calls “the contradiction between the personification of objects and the representation of persons by things.”

The focal point of Marx’s analysis of capitalist society is his critique of capitalist production. The ideology which flows from this historic mode of production is enveloped in the perverted relation of dead to living labor. Marx pointed out that the very simple relation—capital uses labor—expresses “the personification of things and the reification of people.” That is to say, the means of production become capital and are personified as capitalists at the same time that the workers become reified, that is, their labor becomes objectified into the property of others.

Marx’s critique of capitalist society, based primarily on this inverted relation of dead to living labor at the point of production, extends also to the surface of society (the market), where the social relation between people assumes “the fantastic form of a relation between things.”This is the fetishism of commodities.

Marx proceeds to analyze the capitalist mode of production. Now that the worker is in the factory, the “social relation” becomes a production relation.

By virtue of that fact his relationship to the boss is very clear; it in no sense assumes the fantastic form of a relation between things. On the contrary, there the worker overestimates the capitalist’s might. He thinks that the capitalist alone is responsible for his plight instead of seeing the cause in the mode of production which the capitalist represents. There the worker personifies things: the means of production used as capital become the capitalists. We are here confronted with what Marx called “the personification of things and the reification of people.” Marx was most emphatic in laying bare this “reification of people” because that is the very heart of his critique of political economy. He grasped this very early. “When one speaks of private property,” wrote the young Marx in 1844, “one thinks of something outside of man. When one speaks of labor, one has to do immediately with man himself. The new formulation of the question already involves its solution.”

Dunayevskaya Outline of Marx's Capital--volume one

In evolving through the Communist party to Trotskyism, Dunayevskaya and James became the Forrest Johnson Tendency after Trotsky's death as a political crisis shook the Fourth International. They articulated the earliest State Capitalist critique , within Trotskyism, of the Soviet Union and subsequently of historical capitalism as it evolved through WWII and the Cold War.

She became Leon Trotsky’s Russian-language secretary in 1937 during his exile in Mexico, but broke with him in 1939 at the time of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Her simultaneous study of the Russian economy and of Marx’s early writings (later known as the 1844 Humanist Essays) led to her 1941-42 analysis that not only was Russia a state-capitalist society, but that state-capitalism was a new world stage.

It was this articulation plus their emphasis on women, blacks and youth as part of the class struggle, culturally as well as politically and economically that set them apart from the rest of the Left. They were part of a movement known as the third way, but different from its other proponents because even though they were steeped in Leninism, they confronted the failure of the Vanguard of professional revolutionaries and their parties, to really speak for the whole of the class.

When we reach state-capitalism, one-party state, cold war, hydrogen bomb, it is obvious that we have reached ultimates. We are now at the stage where all universal questions are matters of concrete specific urgency for society in general as well as for every individual. As we wrote in The Invading Socialist Society:

“It is precisely the character of our age and the maturity of humanity that obliterates the opposition between theory and practice, between the intellectual occupations of the ‘educated’ and the masses.” (p. 14.)

All previous distinctions, politics and economics, war and peace, agitation and propaganda, party and mass, the individual and society, national, civil and imperialist war, single country and one world, immediate needs and ultimate solutions – all these it is impossible to keep separate any longer. Total planning is inseparable from permanent crisis, the world struggle for the minds of men from the world tendency to the complete mechanization of men.

State-capitalism is in itself the total contradiction, absolute antagonism. In it are concentrated all the contradictions of revolution and counter-revolution. The proletariat, never so revolutionary as it is today, is over half the world in the stranglehold of Stalinism, the form of the counter-revolution in our day, the absolute opposite of the proletarian revolution.

It is the totality of these contradictions that today compels philosophy, a total conception. Hence the propaganda ministry of Hitler, the omnipresent orthodoxy of Stalinism, the Voice of America. The war over productivity is fought in terms of philosophy, a way of life. When men question not the fruits of toil but the toil itself, then philosophy in Marx’s sense of human activity has become actual.

World War I plunged the world into complete chaos. Lenin between 1914 and 1917 established in theory: (a) the economic basis of the counter-revolutionary Social Democracy (The economic basis of imperialist war had been established before him.); (b) the Soviet democracy in contradistinction to bourgeois democracy. But before he did this, he had to break with the philosophical method of the Second International. He worked at this privately in a profound study of the Hegelian dialectic applied to Marx’s Capital, the proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Thirty years have now passed. Lenin’s method of economic analysis is ours to use, not to repeat his findings. His political conception of complete abolition of bureaucracy and all ordering from above is today to be driven to its ultimate as the revolutionary weapon against the one-party state. But today the problems of production which Lenin had to tackle in Russia in 1920 are universal. No longer to be ignored is the philosophical method he used in holding fast to the creation of a new and higher social organization of labor as "the essence” of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is not the Marxists who have compelled society to face this issue. Today in every layer of society, the great philosophical battles that matter are precisely those over production, the role of the proletariat, the one-party state, and many of the combatants are professed dialecticians.

The crisis of production today is the crisis of the antagonism between manual and intellectual labor. The problem of modern philosophy from Descartes in the sixteenth century to Stalinism in 1950 is the problem of the division of labor between the intellectuals and the workers.

Source: State Capitalism and World Revolution, by C.L.R. James in collaboration with Raya Dunayevskaya & Grace Lee; with a new introduction by Paul Buhle. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 1986. Chapter XI, pp. 113-135. Original publication: 1950. Note: Asterisks were changed to numbered footnotes for greater clarity.

News and Letters, Dunayevskaya's organization evolved out of the post war Cold War as the Left faced the crisis of Imperialism and Stalinism. Those who came out of the Trotskyist movement created a new force on the Left called the Third Way, neither supporting Stalinism or American Imperialism. In Europe they moved beyond Trotskyism into Libertarian Marxism and Socialism.

Like News and Letters, these organizations were small and centered around the need to build radical rank and file based proletarian organizations, like the ICC and Socialism and Barbarism in France and England. These organizations originated out of the crisis of the Fourth International as well as the Left/Council Communist movement.

What made News and Letters unique, was they did not give up on class struggle, instead they focused on the new wave of post WWII Fordist industrialization and the new proletarianization of African Americans, women and youth.

While originating out of Leninism, James and Dunayevskaya's praxis made them critical of the Leninist, Trotskyist and Stalinist left, and its failure to see the working class as a broad based movement of race, sex and class. Most of the left had identified with the white industrial working class, rather than understanding the key to class struggle in America was the self organization of the most oppressed and exploited proletarians.

The New Left would mistakenly identify this later as groups who were the revolutionary vanguard, always looking for a vanguard to be the vanguard party of. Third Worldism, support for Black Power and the Black Panthers, the very origins of todays 'identity politics' by the New Left saw youth, blacks, the oppressed in general as revolutionary and rejected the white industrial working class as reactionary.

Such was not the case with Dunyaveskaya and her group News and Letters. In fact one of her collaborators for many years was Martin Glaberman. Together they identified with and worked in building rank and file movements in the Detroit area unions, the very heart of modern and post modern Fordism.

In 1953, Dunayevskaya split with Lee and James, leading to the formation of Marxist-Humanism by Dunayevskaya (later solidified into the group News and Letters), while James and Lee would go on to form a new group, Facing Reality, which would eventually see the split between James and now Grace Lee-Boggs. James' work would continue to influence other people through the journal started by longtime co-revolutionary Martin Glaberman called "Radical America", whose writers are a virtual "Who's Who of the Marxist critique of racism and white supremacy, including George Rawick and David Roediger. The group Sojourner Truth was influenced by James' work and took up the name of autonomist Marxism, but independent of James' practical organisational efforts. The work of Noel Ignatiev and Race Traitor would form the other well known tendency within the Marxist critique of white supremacy through the theory of 'white skin privilege.'

Dunayevskaya and News and Letters have been influenced by the early Hegelians and the Frankfurt School and themselves represent one of the more vocal defenders of a Hegelian Marxism which they refer to as Marxist-Humanism, having made theoretical contributions to the study of Marx and Hegel and the post-Marx Marxist world, as well as innovative readings of Lenin and issues of race, gender and sexuality. The group is also influenced by Rosa Luxemburg and did much to resurrect her in the English-speaking world as a major theorist.

Rank and file organizing against the union bosses and bureaucracy, self organization, the need for revolutionaries to recognize all struggles of the oppressed in America as part of the class struggle took News and Letters and Glaberman and Dunayevskaya, into a different non-Leninist non-vanguard form of revolutionary organization and praxis. As their detractors have pointed out; There is also a close internal relationship between Dunayevskaya and the morality of anarchism.

Indeed Dunayevskaya, Glaberman and James influenced many of the anarchist and autonomists of the 1970's. In Canada their works influenced a Toronto Libertarian Socialist mileux called Lotta Continua, aka The New Tendency which was situated in the Post Office. Most of the Left at this time was adopting a back to the factories approach to revolutionary politics. The failure of the social revolution to occur through and around the Anti-War and Youth movements, led the socialist groups in Canada to identify student and anti-war movements as petite-bourgeoisie and they needed to hone their revolutionary practice by engaging the working class.

What they overlooked was that they were the proletariat, whether in school or in the factory. Many went to work in auto plants in Southern Ontario, but by far the vast majority went to work at the Post Office. The Post Office struggles became the class struggle for the left in Canada, every one of Canada's socialist groups had a cell in the Post Office, and still do today, their influence is felt in CUPW the postal workers union they helped build in practice. Which is why CUPW still to this day uses the slogan Lotta Continua, the Struggle Continues.

That praxis was far more in keeping with the class struggle as Glaberman and Dunayevskaya saw it than the ideologies of the Heinz 57 varieties of Leninist organizations that headed back to the factories.

I was introduced to their works from having heard CLR James speak in Edmonton, in the Seventies, and we carried their books at our anarchist bookstore Erewhon Books.

All her life as a revolutionary Dunayevskaya was an optimist, she saw the revolution not as armed struggle, or a mere moment in history, she like Marx saw class struggle as the evolution of society towards a better more human future.
And her view of that class struggle was inclusive formulated as it was in the Chicago ghetto where she grew up.


Her work is approachable, important and still relevant.

MARX AND CRITICAL THOUGHT.

Raya Dunayevskaya Archive

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Saving Capitalism From Itself

While the Flat Earth Society of climate change deniers think they are defending capitalism they are not.

The real advocates for saving capitalism are those who recognize Climate Change/Global Warming is a crisis. A crisis of capitalism.

Unlike the flat earth society that believes in and advocates for an a-historical mythical free market capitalism, these hard nosed realists, the real spokespeople for real existing capitalism accept they need to do something.

But of course they have no solution to the crisis. They only focus on making money off the crisis by ameliorating capitalist excess.

Which is why Sir Nicholas Stern made his announcements about the need for Green Capitalism from the TSX and the Economic Club. Bastions of real pragmatic capitalism.

"I’m not here to speak to any particular individual. I’m here to share ideas with Canadians, and the key message that was very influential, I think, in the way that Europe is moving forward," Stern told reporters Monday morning at the Toronto Stock Exchange during a joint news conference with Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki. "It’s very clear to me now that you can be green and grow."

Former World Bank chief economist Sir Nicholas Stern was making his first visit to Canada since last fall, when he published a 700-page report that made international headlines with its warnings that the world could face an economic catastrophe similar to the Great Depression by ignoring the threat of climate change.

"So you have your choice now," Stern said in a speech to the Economic Club of Toronto: "You can be absurd and reject the science; you can be reckless and say we can adapt to whatever happens; or you can be unethical and disregard the future, simply because it’s in the future. That’s entirely up to you."

The remarks earned praise from Clive Mather, president and CEO of Shell Canada, which co-sponsored the event.

"Growth is for sure," said Mather, who has supported the international Kyoto protocol on climate change. "The issue is: On what basis do we grow. Do we grow low-carbon, or do we carry on as usual? And I think, as Nick Stern (explained), carrying on as usual carries enormous risks."

Meanwhile, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) last week outlined a course US utilities could take to drop their emissions to 1990 levels by 2030. For the industry, that would represent a more aggressive timetable than Stern's. In the process, the EPRI report suggests tacking a surcharge onto electric bills to help fund research into carbon-dioxide-light energy sources. EPRI estimates the surcharge would amount to an extra 47 cents on the average monthly electric bill. That would bring an additional $2 billion to the $3 billion the federal government now spends on energy research. One EPRI solution is to add 50 nuclear power plants, an uncertain prospect.

Big Enviro Groups ‘Holding Back’ Anti-Warming Movement

None of [the solutions presented by mainstream groups] address the power structures. None of them address corporations. None of them address a lack of democracy.”

The heat is on environmental groups and politicians to churn out proposals for stabilizing the planet’s rising temperatures, but some environmentalists say existing plans to cool climate change are timid. Their criticism reveals a rift between two approaches: preserving the American way of life at the expense of quicker solutions, or changing the structure of US society to counter an unprecedented threat.

The dominant approach to human-induced global warming revolves around slow but dramatic reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions by mid-century. The mainstream environmental community, along with a handful of politicians and corporations, is calling for various regulations and market-based actions to reduce greenhouse-gas output by 60 to 80 percent over the next 43 years.

This goal is based on what some scientists have estimated the United States needs to do to help the world limit the rise in global temperatures to less than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The goal presupposes that some climate change is inevitable. In 2006, a government-commissioned report in the United Kingdom called the "Stern Review" said that the "worst impacts of climate change can be substantially reduced" by cutting greenhouse emissions to meet the two-degree goal.

Market-based solutions

The basic premise behind long-term plans for emissions reduction is that moving away from a fossil-fuel-based energy system will take time because market forces will take a while to make renewable technology prices competitive.

"It’s still possible that we can avoid dangerous climate change and cut emissions in half by mid-century through a process that doesn’t require an immediate shutdown of all of our coal-powered plants," said John Coequyt, Greenpeace energy policy analyst. "We can still do this in a phased – and as a result – economically beneficial manner."

“There’s no reason we can’t get there within the next five to ten years with significant funding.”

In January, Greenpeace published what it called a "blueprint for solving global warming." The plan calls for 80 percent of electricity to be produced from renewable energy, 72 percent less carbon dioxide emissions, and for the US’s oil use to be cut in half – all by 2050.

The timeline is based on removing the market barriers to green energy, while making dirty energy more expensive. It does not call for significant public funding of renewable energy or government investments in new energy infrastructure or public transportation.

See

Capitalism

Environment

Bio-fuels


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Harpers Buzz Off

So as Chrysler Canada announces two thousand job cuts, the PM refuses to meet or take phone calls from Buzz Hargrove, President of the CAW.

Hargrove expressed disappointment that Prime Minister Stephen Harper didn't find some time to meet with him Thursday, especially given the dire circumstances in the auto sector. The prime minister's officials said they had no record of a request from Hargrove to meet.

Gee thats strange since Buzz called, left messages, was in Ottawa, and the NDP and Liberals knew he wanted to meet with Harper. Both parties raised Harpers refusal to meet with Buzz during question period.

Automobile Industry

Hon. Scott Brison (Kings—Hants, Lib.):

Mr. Speaker, with massive layoffs pending at Chrysler, why has the government cancelled labour market partnership agreements that could have helped many of the 2,000 Chrysler workers and why is this Prime Minister, the first in 40 years, refusing to meet with the head of the CAW?

Hon. Monte Solberg (Minister of Human Resources and Social Development, CPC):

Mr. Speaker, the member should know that the government announced its intentions to strengthen labour market initiatives in “Advantage Canada”. We are in constant contact with our provincial partners on all of these issues.

We will certainly put in place all the measures necessary to ensure that we have the strongest possible economy, something that is already happening under the leadership of the Prime Minister.

Hon. Scott Brison (Kings—Hants, Lib.):

Mr. Speaker, we have a minister who is laissez-faire and a Prime Minister who does not care.

The Liberal government partnered with the auto industry to create thousands of new jobs. Canada's neo-Conservative government has done almost nothing and we are losing thousands of auto workers jobs.

Will the Prime Minister meet with the head of the CAW, take action, and reintroduce the previous government's auto strategy that was working and creating jobs here in Canada?

[Translation]

Hon. Maxime Bernier (Minister of Industry, CPC):

Mr. Speaker, I would remind my hon. colleague that we tabled the Advantage Canada plan, a plan that will enable the automobile industry and all other industries to enjoy competitive tax conditions.

We will continue to lower taxes, to limit paperwork and regulations interfering with the productivity of Canadian business in the automobile sector, and we are proud of what we are doing.

Harper is the first PM not to meet with Buzz. But maybe he didn't need to meet with Buzz.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper says the looming job losses at Chrysler have nothing to do with federal government policy.

Except that Canada is negotiating a bilateral trade deal with Korea, home of Hyundai.

And considering that Buzz and Stephen agree on the need to go slow on emission regulations you would think Harper would take a call from Hargrove.

Buzz Hargrove, head of the Canadian Auto Workers' union, told the committee that too-tough efficiency standards could result in plant closures.

No sooner had Buzz said that then this happened.

Buzz Hargrove fears major job cuts at Chrysler
OTTAWA – As many as 2000 of Canada's workers with DaimlerChrysler could lose their jobs, Canadian Auto Workers leader Buzz Hargrove suggested Thursday. ...

And suddenly Buzz is doing as I have said Canada's labour movement would have to do, accept the global market and demand Fair Trade agreements.

Hargrove calls for 'fair trade' deal with Asia to curb auto job losses

Automobile Industry

[Table of Contents]

Hon. Jack Layton (Toronto—Danforth, NDP):

Mr. Speaker, today's news that Chrysler is going to eliminate 2,000 jobs in Canada makes it very clear that we have to get down to helping out our auto industry. Consumers want fuel efficient cars, but the government stands by and does absolutely nothing about it.

That is why the NDP put forward a green car strategy in 2003, supported by Greenpeace and the CAW. Too bad the Liberals would not adopt it because it would have transformed our industry and we would have been in the forefront of protecting jobs and creating new jobs as well.

Does the Prime Minister not understand that when it comes to building green cars, either we get it done or China, Japan and Korea will do it?

Right Hon. Stephen Harper (Prime Minister, CPC):

Mr. Speaker, while we are obviously concerned by the announcements that we expect from Chrysler, this is a global company that is making global decisions. These are not related to policies in our country, as the member well knows. At the same time, we have seen a growth in other parts of the auto industry.

I appreciate some of the suggestions the leader of the NDP has made. They are much more positive than the motion tabled last week by the Leader of the Opposition, which would effectively propose that we cut emissions from the auto sector, from all sectors, by one-third in the next four and a half years. I wonder if he has any idea how that would devastate the Canadian auto sector.

Hon. Jack Layton (Toronto—Danforth, NDP):

Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister is wrong about the impact of his own actions. The workers in the auto sector are worried and rightly so. Their jobs are on the line. As people look for more efficient cars, they will not find them manufactured here because there has been no action.

The government says that it is a global marketplace, that the market will take care of it, but the market is not fair. Those other countries can sell their cars in Canada without limit, but we cannot sell good Canadian cars, built right here, to countries like China, Korea and Japan.

Is that why the Prime Minister thinks it is a good idea to sign a free trade deal, signing away our auto industry to Korea?

Right Hon. Stephen Harper (Prime Minister, CPC):

Mr. Speaker, the government has been pursuing negotiations with South Korea and with others for the express purpose of opening up Asian markets to Canadian products. I am glad to see that Buzz Hargrove seems to have completely reversed himself and now suggests that is exactly what we should be doing, trying to open Asian markets. The government will work hard with the industry to do that.

The government has ongoing consultations with the energy sector. There are some happening this very day. We think it is important to consult with industry before telling it to simply slash one-third of its production, as the opposition would.

Ouch! Of course that is not what Buzz is saying, but that's the spin the Free Traders will make over Fair Trade. Until the labour movement and its political allies spell out the difference.

What we need is a national industrial ecology strategy, not just tax cuts and credits for the industry. And that does not mean that industries in Canada have to be Canadian owned either. Sovereignty is not determined by corporate ownership but by the working class, having autonomous Canadian unions, and eventually in joint ownership of industry in Canada.

As recent negotiations with CAW and Falconbridge's new owners Xstrata PLC have shown.

Each of the past three bargaining rounds between the Canadian Auto Workers and previous owner Falconbridge Ltd. were marred by bitter confrontations and each ended in dispute. Workers were off the job in 1997, 2000 and in 2004.

Things were so bad, that after members voted to end a particularly acrimonious seven-month strike in February, 2001, the CAW was still hurling public insults at Falconbridge's front office.

"The previous owners seemed willing to spend a million dollars to save a dime. These people, the new owners, seem to recognize the value of a dime. That's different. It's going to require us to adjust our style as well. So we've made a commitment to try to work on the relationship over the life of the agreement and that was part of our settlement. How do we communicate better and how do we get things done in a positive way?" Mr. Mitic said.

See

Hargrove

CAW



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