Bail Out Is Not Job Security

And we got what for this?

And the $6-billion that the Big Three domestic automakers are now seeking from the federal and Ontario governments is on top of what Mike said is $752-million in financial assistance to the industry from the two governments since 2004, including $200-million for Ford, $200-million for GM and $125-million for Toyota.

Layoffs, new plants with shifts shut down, pension plan payments deferred, and let's not forget that auto industry in Canada does not pay for health care.

Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-MA) pointed out that the only cost difference between operating in the U.S. and Canada “has got to be entirely on health care.”

And there is no asssurances that there will not be further layoffs even with a bail out and further worker concessions. Unlike equity investments past performance does predict future performance when it comes to the auto industry. There is no job security in the auto sector no matter how much money gets thrown at it. And of course we know the only solution to this crisis is socializing the auto sector under workers control. Anything else is a band aid trying to patch a gaping wound.

Canada's three struggling automakers must come clean on plans to cut jobs if they hope to win taxpayer support for the $6 billion in aid they're seeking, Premier Dalton McGuinty says. McGuinty's push for details followed days of criticism from opposition parties worried that an aid deal could be cut with taxpayers knowing nothing about the fate of thousands of auto jobs and how their money will be spent. McGuinty noted the automakers have made public far less information about their plans in Canada compared with their U.S. parent companies, leaving lawmakers here in a difficult position in trying to sell an aid plan to taxpayers already feeling the pinch of the economic downturn themselves.
Overall, GM is seeking $800 million by year's end and $1.6 billion later, Ford wants a "standby" line of credit worth $2 billion and Chrysler $1.6 billion. GM, which is Canada's largest automaker, has signalled it may need another $1 billion if the rapid vehicle sales decline continues.Chrysler has already warned its car assembly plant in Brampton and minivan plant in Windsor may not be able to survive without financial help soon.

General Motors of Canada Ltd. is seeking "painful" cost cuts from the Canadian Auto Workers, as the Canadian units of the Detroit Three ask for financial help from Ottawa and Ontario. "What GM said is, 'We must share in this pain together. And we've got to come up with cost savings, Ken, that may be painful,' " CAW president Ken Lewenza said he has been told. The GM Canada request did not specify what cuts it is seeking, Mr. Lewenza said yesterday, but a union source said the company wants overall hourly labour costs trimmed and workers to give up some of their paid time off. Lewenza's comments came after the United Auto Workers in the U.S. revealed it will revise contracts with GM, Ford and Chrysler to delay billions of dollars in payments to a union run health-care trust. Furthermore, UAW president Ron Gettelfinger said the union would modify a jobs bank in which members on layoff receive up to 95 per cent of their pay. The CAW does not have a similar health-care trust or jobs bank in Canada at the three automakers. But even if CAW members worked for free for an entire year, Chrysler, Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Corp. losses are so massive that the savings from that move would offset just 11 days of losses at the three companies, CAW economist Jim Stanford told the meeting.

SEE:
Chrysler Black Mail
On The Dole
There Is An Alternative To Capitalism
Auto Solution II
We Own GMAuto Solution


tags
MGuinty, GM, concesssion bargaining, unions, trade union, Marx, Ontario, Corporate Welfare, Canada, cars, automobilie, production, taxes, tax credit, investment, environment, hybrid, self-valorization,, self-management,, workers control,, autoworkers,, KEN LEWENZA,,CAW, Big Three Auto,, libertarian socialism, automobile, Chrysler, Tony Clement, business unions, auto parts, workers, layoffs, plant-closings, workers-control, unions, labour, Canada

We Own GM

Since the Big Three have already accepted taxpayer bail outs over the past five years, and now are delinquint on thier pension payments for their workers, why bail them out, we already own them. Time to make them publicly owned under workers control.

As the Toronto Star reported Saturday, GM's actuaries estimated the pension plan for hourly workers would have been short $4.9 billion if the company had gone out of business at the end of November, 2007. But because the pension fund is heavily invested in stocks, the recent fall in stock markets would have left the fund short another $1.5 billion, assuming no other changes in the meantime.

Paul Duxbury, an actuary who has advised GM pensioners in the past, said yesterday that such a shortfall would cost Ontario's guarantee fund as much as $3 billion, if the province provided the money.

The General Motors of Canada Ltd. pension funds had a shortfall of $4.5-billion as of last November - before the stock market collapse - creating a massive financial headache for the Ontario government and pension cuts for retired employees if the company falls into bankruptcy protection.
Senior GM officials revealed the shortfall between the assets in the company's unionized and salaried plans and their liabilities in a meeting yesterday with the editorial board of The Globe and Mail. The shortfalls are measured on a solvency deficiency basis, which would apply if the plans have to be wound up in the event of bankruptcy.

SEE:
Auto Solution
Whiners and Losers
Business Unionism Offers No Solution To Capitalist Crisis
Concessions Don't Work
And Then There Was One
Pension Rip Off
Buzz Off
Unions=Competitiveness
McGuinty Corporate Welfare
Is Delphi the Oracle of things to come?
How Ford Screwed Up
What's good for GM is bad for Workers
Unions the State and Capital
Chrysler Made In Canada?



tags MGuinty, GM, concesssion bargaining, unions, trade union, Marx, Ontario, Corporate Welfare, Canada, cars, automobilie, production, taxes, taxcredit, investment, environment, hybrid, self-valorization,, self-management,, workers control,, autoworkers,, Buzz Hargrove,,CAW, Big Three Auto,, libertarian socialism, automobile, Frank Stronach, Magna, business unions, auto parts, workers, layoffs, plant-closings, workers-control, unions, labour, Canada

Super Bubble Burst

As Eric Janzen in the February issue of Harpers Magazine warned this is a super bubble that just burst.

A financial bubble is a market aberration manufactured by government, finance, and industry, a shared speculative hallucination and then a crash, followed by depression. Bubbles were once very rare—one every hundred years or so was enough to motivate politicians, bearing the post-bubble ire of their newly destitute citizenry, to enact legislation that would prevent subsequent occurrences. After the dust settled from the 1720 crash of the South Sea Bubble, for instance, British Parliament passed the Bubble Act to forbid “raising or pretending to raise a transferable stock.” For a century this law did much to prevent the formation of new speculative swellings.

The housing bubble has left us in dire shape, worse than after the technology-stock bubble, when the Federal Reserve Funds Rate was 6 percent, the dollar was at a multi-decade peak, the federal government was running a surplus, and tax rates were relatively high, making reflation—interest-rate cuts, dollar depreciation, increased government spending, and tax cuts—relatively painless. Now the Funds Rate is only 4.5 percent, the dollar is at multi-decade lows, the federal budget is in deficit, and tax cuts are still in effect. The chronic trade deficit, the sudden depreciation of our currency, and the lack of foreign buyers willing to purchase its debt will require the United States government to print new money simply to fund its own operations and pay its 22 million employees.


But unlike the South Sea Bubble or the Tulip Bubble, or even the Dot Com Bubble this one has brought capitalism to its global knees.

Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney underscored the deteriorating situation when he said Canada’s business conditions will worsen alongside other industrialized countries next year and the Canadian economy may slip into a recession for the first time since 1992.
“We are predicting very marginal growth in 2009,” Carney said in an interview with Bloomberg News, when asked if he thought a recession might happen. “By definition that’s close to negative growth, and if we have a balanced forecast you can see it going either side, so it’s a possibility."
Carney cut the Bank of Canada’s key interest rate to 2.25 per cent last month and said the world’s eighth-largest economy would shrink this quarter and stall in the first three months of 2009, just skirting the two quarters of contraction that most economists call a recession. He has said further rate cuts may be needed to prop up economic growth.
In Brazil, Flaherty also said the world is facing what appears to be a runaway economic downturn. He noted that the International Monetary Fund continues to lower its growth forecasts month by month. The IMF now predicts the major industrialized Group of 7 countries will fall into a recession next year - with the exception of Canada, which is forecast to post a minuscule 0.3 per cent growth.

For the leading spokespeople of capitalism to say they didn't see it coming well thats laughable. It could be excused as Hegelian black humour if the mouthpieces of capital were not so sincere in denying the obvious; recession and the dreaded follow through; depression.

Hegel remarks somewhere that history tends to repeat itself. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)

SEE:

And Then There Was One

Concessions Don't Work

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Chrysler Black Mail

Chrysler is blackmailing Canada.

In its submission to the federal government, Chrysler compared plants in Windsor and Brampton, Ont., with American facilities that could assemble the same models, and noted it had spare capacity in the United States - a comment that some in government saw as a veiled threat to shift production if Canada does not provide emergency assistance.

Meanwhile the Harpocrites offer no new solutions to the auto crisis instead they offer workers the same old same old;

Mr. Clement met with senior officials from the Canadian Auto Workers union, including its president, Ken Lewenza. Mr. Clement has urged the union to be "part of the solution" and has suggested they may need to take a cut in wages and benefits to keep jobs in Canada.


The solution to the auto crisis is not more concessions from workers nor bailing out the Big 3. It is to socialize them under workers control.


SEE
There Is An Alternative To Capitalism
Auto Solution II
We Own GM
Auto Solution

tags
MGuinty, GM, concesssion bargaining, unions, trade union, Marx, Ontario, Corporate Welfare, Canada, cars, automobilie, production, taxes, tax credit, investment, environment, hybrid, self-valorization,, self-management,, workers control,, autoworkers,, KEN LEWENZA,,CAW, Big Three Auto,, libertarian socialism, automobile, Chrysler, Tony Clement, business unions, auto parts, workers, layoffs, plant-closings, workers-control, unions, labour, Canada

Whiners and Losers

This is the same line used by the provincial tories in Alberta since the days of King Klein; the government should not pick winners and lossers iin the capitalist marketplace. But of course it does, as we have seen with Alberta's support of privatiziation initiatives like K-Bro contracting outhospital laundry services, not to mention of course oil and gas development royalty and tax holidays, and dare I say investment in the mythical CO2 coal extraction process that will supposedly reduce methane gas.

Now the Feds are denying the obvious as Jim Flaherty explains about a pending bail out for the auto industry in Canada, with nary a recongition that yes he indeed just did pick winners and losers in Canada's auto industry. Canada: Government is open to selective industry support

Mr. Flaherty said most economists would consider a bailout unwise, since such a
package puts government in the dicey business of choosing winners and losers.
Rather, he said, he would be guided by which plants have the best chance of
remaining viable over the long term.
"So if General Motors is going to build a hybrid car in Oshawa, people can understand that that is a good investment for the longer term. Operating a large truck plant, pickup trucks - probably not a good investment of taxpayers' money," Mr. Flaherty said.
His top priority, however, is to ensure that banks are lending to each other, and that credit is
available to corporate and household borrowers at a decent price. A
well-functioning credit market, he said, will help the manufacturing sector as
much as any kind of direct aid.
David Paterson, vice-president of corporate and environmental affairs for
General Motors of Canada Ltd., said the largest auto maker in Canada has not
outlined specific proposals to Ottawa, but supports calls for both immediate
assistance and a longer-term Canadian program similar to an existing $25-billion
fund Washington created this year. That fund is supposed to help the industry
develop more environmentally friendly technologies.
Mr. Paterson said GM is in the midst of transforming its business in Canada
to meet the sustainability objective Mr. Flaherty has outlined.

There ya go Jim ya picked a winner. But of course this is not a real industrial policy, nor what is needed to create a Made In Canada Auto Industry. Which of course is workers control of production through 'workers cooperatives owning the factories. Now that would be worth taxpayers dollars. Anything is else is the same old same old neo-con crap; public funding of private capitalism.

SEE:

Concessions Don't Work

And Then There Was One

October Surprise Was The Market Crash

No Austrians In Foxholes

Pension Rip Off

Deja Vu

The Failure of Privatization



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Great Depression, John McCain, market crash, free trade, Republicans, recession, asset-backed commercial paper ,, goldhomes, mortgages, housing, bubble, US, economy, oil prices, sub-prime mortgage, Wall Street, crash, recession,October Surprise, Inflation, Staglation, Stock-Market, US, Federal-Reserve-Chairman, Oil, gold, commoditiesSmoot-Hawley, protectionism, tariffs, Herbert Hoover, U.S., U.S. economy, Canada, Flaherty, tax cuts, corporate tax cuts, politics, Conservativestaxes, tax-credit, budget, economy, government, Conservatives, Flaherty, HarperSalaries, Canada, wages, Economy,

Auto Solution

In the U.S. the debate over the failure of the big three automakers has devolved into an argument over bail-out or bankruptcy. As usual the Republicans arguing in favour of bankruptcy and opposing a bail out claim that part of the Big Three's failure is the high cost of production. They attack the UAW for being part of the problem with their retiree pension plans, healthcare costs and wage demands.

Make union pay cuts mandatory for auto aid

They claim that that Toyota and other import car manufactureres in the U.S. can produce cars cheaper then America's own. Well that is true. However the elephant in the room in this debate is the fact where Toyota and other import auto manufacturers set up shop is in Right To Work States, states which use right to work laws to ban unions.

As for Health Care costs this is the other elephant, in Canada and around the world the government provides health care except in two countries America and China. In the US the healthcare cost is a burden born by business and labour.

So what would a solution be do ya think? Hmm how about passing the the proposed first union contract law that was pending in the Senate; Employee Free Choice Act. You know the one that in the last days of the Presidential campaign became an issue for McCain.
And instead of either Clinton's of Obama's weak tea HealthCare reform, a universal healthcare program was adopted in the U.S. like it is in Canada.

Unionization of Toyota and other import car companies American workers would level the playing field as would creating a universal healthcare program.

While these would go a long way to really changing the auto industry in North America the only real solution is nationalization the auto industry under workers control. Something no one is talking about, including the UAW and CAW.

CAW President Ken Lewenza said the failure of even one of those companies would be a "devastating blow to the economy, a devastating blow to consumers out there and quite frankly devastating to our members."
Ontario, especially, would suffer, he told CTV Newsnet.
"It's not even imaginable what would happen in communities like Oshawa, Windsor, St. Catharines, Oakville. These communities are dominated by the auto industry."
Lewenza said the union has done its part to respond to the Detroit Three's shrinking market share, giving up hundreds of millions of dollars in concessions in collective bargaining.
However, Lewenza didn't blame management either, saying "nobody anticipated at the beginning of this business year we would be selling 12 to 13 million vehicles in the United States, when most people were anticipating 16 or 17."

Oh come on now quit apologizing for your bosses incompetence. What part of Climate Crisis did you miss? I mean for christ sakes the NDP proposes a Green Vehicle plan three years ago and what does CAW get fromall its politcal pull and lobbying? An investment in GM by the Ontario Government for a Camaro plant. Is that counter intuitive or what.

If we are going to produce green vehicles then it will take a complete restructuring of the industry based not on concession bargaining but on workers control and workers ownership.



SEE:
Whiners and Losers
Business Unionism Offers No Solution To Capitalist Crisis
Concessions Don't Work
And Then There Was One
October Surprise Was The Market Crash
No Austrians In Foxholes
Pension Rip Off


tags
MGuinty, GM, concesssion bargaining, unions, trade union, Marx, Ontario, Corporate Welfare, Canada, cars, automobilie, production, taxes, taxcredit, investment, environment, hybrid, self-valorization,, self-management,, workers control,, autoworkers,, Buzz Hargrove,,CAW, Big Three Auto,, libertarian socialism, automobile, Frank Stronach, Magna, business unions, auto parts, workers, layoffs, plant-closings, workers-control, unions, labour, Canada

Labour, Opera and Anarchy

This is the labour day long weekend in North America and for that reason the August Carnival of Anarchy will begin and carry on through the week. The theme is:

Anarchism and Work, Anarchism and Life

Why Opera you ask. Because it originates from the Latin word for work; Opus. As in creative, fulfilling, self directed activity. Liberated labour if you like. Self-Valorization.

Whereas the common modern word for labour, work and worker in the Latin based languages like French, Spanish, Italian, etc. is trabajo and travail (from the Latin tripalium, or “instrument of torture”)

Hence modern work for most of us is not an opera nor our opus but wage slavery.

Towards a History of Workers' Resistance to Work - Michael Seidman

And besides it gives me another chance to make a reference to that great cultural anarchist Bugs Bunny.

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Big Auto Crisis is the Crisis of Capitalism

The time has come to quit pussy footing around the issue at hand. Capitalism is in collapse. But the truth is that factories still are capable of production, raw resources are still available, technology has increased worker productivity, and workers are still able to work. So why are GM and Chrysler incapable of being productive. Because they rely not on creating products but creating profit. And the bottom line is that while their Canadian factories are some of the most productive they now face closure. No bail out by taxpayers, no bail out by bond holders (that's you folks who own mutual funds and bonds, including your pension funds which are institutional bond holders) nor concessions by workers will end the bleeding at GM or Chrysler. Indeed you can include Ford in that as well.
Instead of bailing out the Big Three it is time to fire the executive class, stop the bleeding of white collar and blue collar jobs and socialize big auto under workers control. In fact that should be the agenda of the left from the NDP and CLC through to the more radical of the left.
And yet nowhere do I hear the call to socialize capital under workers control. Despite statist attempts to nationalize banks and financial institutions by various governments of diverse ideologies, this is simply a public bail out of private capital.
Capitalism is the problem contrary to Gordon Brown, George Bush and Stephen Harper, it is not the solution. The solution is not taxpayer stimulus of existing infrastructure of capitalism and its state. Rather it is the complete and total overhaul of capitalism by socializing it, recognizing that capitalism is currently publicly funded by workers wages, pensions and taxes. It is time to restructure all production under workers control, to reconstitute government as the administration of things rather than people.
Just as big auto cannot restructure itself neither can capitalism. Ownership at GM and Chrysler has not changed, the executives have not changed, the command structure of the organisation has not changed. Nor has concessions, nor bail outs changed the fact that big auto like capitalism in general is simply about the creative destruction of workers and factories, in order to get slim enough to increase the bottom line; profit. And what is profit? It is the surplus value accumulated for further investment to make, more profit. It is this simple equation which exposes the capitalist system as being incapable of solving its own crisis. Which is not a crisis of production but of profit making.
This is the solution that needs to be shouted from the roof tops. And yet I find no cheerleaders for socialism, rather the left seems as despondent as the apologists for capitalism. It is time to challenge the established propaganda of the day that capitalism is a horrible system but it is better than the alternative. The alternative is socialism which contrary to popular mythology is not the same as state owned public works. Socialism is socialized capital, and production under the democratic control of those who own and use it that is us the vast majority of people.
Socialism as a democratic restructuring of capitalism and its statist forms is the unknown country, still to be explored. In this crisis it is time to begin the broad discussion that was so vibrant forty years ago, after the failures of Stalinism and Labourism, about new forms of community and worker control, extending democracy to the work place and into our public institutions, etc.
Unless we have a vibrant vision of a new world, being built in the shell of the old, we will not be grave diggers of capitalism, but rather labour and its political parties will simply dig themselfves into a grave created for them by the current capitalist crisis. Their lack of imigination is their failure to see beyond things as they are, because inevitably for the past fifty years they have abandoned the belief in the revolutionary potential of the working class they claim to represent.


SEE

There Is An Alternative To Capitalism

Auto Solution II

tags
MGuinty, GM, concesssion bargaining, unions, trade union, Marx, Ontario, Corporate Welfare, Canada, cars, automobilie, production, taxes, tax credit, investment, environment, hybrid, self-valorization,, self-management,, workers control,, autoworkers,, KEN LEWENZA,,CAW, Big Three Auto,, libertarian socialism, automobile, Frank Stronach, Magna, business unions, auto parts, workers, layoffs, plant-closings, workers-control, unions, labour, Canada

 

Engineer Menni and the Prose of Project Management

The recent efforts of Mckenzie Wark to rehabilitate Bogdanov have brought back more than just the lovable vampiric theorist from his bloody grave. With him emerge the concurrent spectres of utopia, state socialism and grandiose public works. Bogdanov, the activist revolutionary of 1905, had by 1917 become a theorist of the abstract, a scientific socialist, and a constructor of tangible Martian utopias. It is on Mars that Bogdanov pursues the doppelganger of Earthly socialism, and so, it is to Mars we go, by means of the collected translation Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia.

What is Mars for Bogdanov? If he defines Nature as “that which labor encounters,” Mars becomes something like “that which theory encounters”.

Mckenzie Wark makes use of the Deleuzian notion of molar and molecular in order to reach Bogdanov. If the molar is the realm of abstract grand thinking, high level concepts, and authoritarian pronouncements, then the molecular is the unseen, the below the below, the minute and particular, carbon liberation, and the world of “actually existing theoritism”. We must contrast the molar concepts of history, philosophy, love, art, with the molecular concepts of metabolic rift, development, attraction, and labor.

What does Bogdanov’s Mars represent? It is a world that is much older than ours, and yet has only progressed a few hundred years ahead of humanity (at least by 1905 – who knows what they’re up to now). They are a communist utopia of course, but have graduated to that position in much more molar way than the Earthlings were trending; because Mars is a harsher, larger, and sadder world, the populace, constrained to smaller plots of inhabitable land; Martians are much more tolerant of social development, much less cruel, much more abstract themselves as historical characters. Leonid (or affectionately, “Lenni”), the main character of Red Star, notices in Martian culture, art, politics, a certain abstract remove which contrasts with the brashness and threatening asymmetry of the development of the proletarian movement on Earth. As comes out in discussion:

“I don’t know,” he said thoughtfully, “but I think that you are wrong. True, the conflicts on Earth have been more acute than ours, and the natural environment has always shown a greater tendency to retaliate with death and destruction. But perhaps this is due to the fact that Earth is so much more richly endowed with natural resources and the life-giving energy of the sun. Look how much older our planet is, yet our humanity arose only a few tens of thousands of years before yours and is at present a mere two or three hundred years ahead of you in development. I tend to think of our two humanities as brothers. The elder one has a calm and balanced temperament, while the younger one is stormy and impetuous. The younger one is more wasteful with his resources, and prone to serious errors. His childhood was sickly and turbulent, and as he now approaches adolescence he often suffers from convulsive growing pains. But might he not become a greater and more powerful artist and creator than his elder brother? And in that case, will he not eventuaily be able to adorn our great Universe even better and more richly? I cannot be certain, but its seems to me that this is what may happen.”

Which is the molecular and which is the molar? In some sense, Mars is the same sort of abstraction as that used by Marx in Das Kapital, the abstractions that David Harvey’s brilliant youtube course makes commodity-clear; in Marx, certain real variables must be factored out of the equation because they over-complicate the development of a solution or tendency. In this sense, Martian society has progressed along molar lines. Big ideas have always managed to triumph with relative ease; the great public works of the canals have succeeded. Earth, on the other hand, is out-of-whack; it is full of metabolic rift, molecular instability, ideas emerge too soon or too late, and coalitions are much more radioactive. They even have a chiller, more widely read Martian doppelganger of Karl Marx, the “renowned Xarma”.

In this we see, not a rejection of the molar as such as Wark sometimes seems to suggest, but a comparison of the abstract with the concrete – by means of hypothetical abstraction (science fiction). The model of Mars, the cool temperaments of its inhabitants, serve as a template that the Earth is already corrupting beyond repair. In this sense, the Martian sequence can never be a program for the Earth, only ever a vague, super-egoic tease, an unreachable success-factor. Or in a more optimistic vein, Martian technical socialism is the idea that must be pursued by the various romantic truth procedures of love, science, art and politics on Earth, pursued but never fully actualized. Only on Mars is a cohesive “poetics of labor” capable of emerging as a whole. Maybe all that Earth can hope to do in the stead of a fully realized poetics of labor, is capture that movement into a banal realism, a “prose of project management”?

It is funny that Red Star, the more traditional utopia of travel, was a huge best-seller during the Russian Revolution, while its much superior prequel Engineer Menni went pretty much unnoticed. Yet the latter is perhaps the heart of Bogdanov’s project; to turn vulgar Marxism into a technical ideal of socialism, and this technical development, through the figure of the Engineer – the Martian Engineers Menni and Netti, who pre-figure the stupid figures of socialist realism and far surpass them.

Engineer Menni gives humanity hope that it can reach the molar one day too. It is the great manifesto of molar projection. The book is presented as a novel from Mars, translated into English by Leonid. As Leonid mentions in Red Star, there is a certain coolness to Martian literature that seems to find more aesthetic joy in the technical – a kind of latent suprematism or Neue Sachlichkeit. Bogdanov is true to his word when, in Engineer Menni, he really does compose such a novel. The device of writing, not about aliens, but an alien novel as such, is really quite brilliant. The gesture practiced in Menni is very compelling, nigh Lovecraftian in its staging of uncanny familiarity:

Translation from the single Martian language into those of Earth is much more difficult than translation from one Earthly language to another, and it is often even impossible to give a full and exact rendering of the content of the original. Imagine trying to translate a modern scientific work, a psychological novel, or a political article into the language of Homer or into Old Church Slavonic. I am aware that such a comparison does not Batter us Earthlings, but it is unfortunately no exaggeration-the difference between our respective civilizations is just about that great.

But who is Menni? The molar hero. The great architect, engineer, project manager, and a Lycurgus or pre-foundational figure of vulgar, technical, molar Marxism. The novel is about his great project and his interpersonal relationships, but moreso the former. Menni has an idea that will greatly expand the territory of Martian life and progress, exploit the untapped resources of the planet, and progress the species of Martian humanity, which feels cramped and narrow in its tiny pockets of inhabitable land, much like the characters in more recent fictions like Attack on Titan.

This is a socialist realist technique, to write about public works, and the great (projected) unity of state, technology, and labor against the elements. The whole trend of Bogdanov’s science fiction is the unity of labor against natural ferocity. He refutes a future left of localism not yet developed in his era; as Žižek proclaims, the Negri style pockets of progress and local contributions do not suffice to deal with the problems of a socialist race, even once the proletariat has conquered. The real enemy is not a rival class, but nature herself.

Thus in Red Star, the great debate of the Martians is whether to colonize Earth or Venus. Placid and artistic, hedonistic even on the surface, the Martians are all bitterly melancholic because the natural world is trying to kill them and their socialist paradise; a dilemma emerges – colonize and kill the humans in the name of a greater more developed humanity (the view of the Martian Sterni) or go to the inhospitable Venus to mine its resources? They have only enough fuel for one project, and they choose the more comradely, leaving Earth its chance.

Menni shows more the pure poetry of labor and project management, a struggle against organizational inertia and natural obstacles, and how class development and ideational progress attach themselves to technical developments in the concrete world. It is a strange novel. The strangest part is the long hallucinatory sequence of the vampire, the representative of old ideas and once-useful historical processes, like democracy or parliamentarism, that have become dead letters but continue to live on and pester the progressive forces.

Technicality triumphs, and history goes with her, but only, it seems, on Mars.

So far.

We have signs. Everybody on Earth now speaks English. The Martians too had a coming together of language. Beercroft’s “universal language” is now a reality.

But the idea lives on after the man disappears, and you have come to understand the main thing: the creativity that found one of its incarnations in you has no end.

The possibility of the Project Management Novel

So that’s why I came up with the phrase “prose of project management”, as a kind of realist response to the Bogdanovite “poetry of labor”. We need to recognize that tektological and organizational thinking brings about a weird counter-swing from the molar to the molecular and back to the molar again. Like Bogdanov’s notion of “crisis” as either a conjunction or a destruction (crisises C and D respectively). His point is that no crisis is just a pure crisis-D or crisis-C, but that the interesting features of either can appear to be dominantly one or the other, depending on your point of observation. Likewise, the “poetry of labor” needs its “managemental prose”. This is the molar prose of the technical abstraction, the Brechtian “crude thinking”, the concept-as-blunt-object used by committees to bludgeon reactionaries.

This is clearly a different spin on the idea of the “project” from the (quite molecular) “project-as-self” or any other individualistic narcissism; it is almost classically soviet in comparison to what is prevalent today. It should not be taken in the same vein as the Invisible Committee describes the “I AM WHAT I AM”, the petty atomistic personal project of the self:

The maintenance of the self in a permanent state of deterioration, in a chronic state of near-collapse, is the best-kept secret of the present order of things. The weak, depressed, self-critical, virtual self is essentially that endlessly adaptable subject required by the ceaseless innovation of production…It is at the same time the most voracious consumer and, paradoxically, the most productive self, the one that will most eagerly and energetically throw itself into the slightest project, only to return later to its original larval state. 

The PM methodology to be derived from Bogdanov emphatically rejects this. No slight projects, no larval pupas, and certainly no return. In this sense, molar.

Like the dreams of Benjamin, Platonov, Ehrenberg, Lunacharsky, and Piscator, among many others, the hope of functionalizing or socializing the novel form is so old to criticism that it’s surprising that it hasn’t actually manifested itself more frequently. The valorization of the report, the blueprint, the newspaper as aesthetic endstates was a constant refrain in the 1920s. Eventually this led to a re-capture within literature itself – Brecht and Alfred Döblin, for example, made heavy use of reportage and workerist flavoured functionality for artistic ends.

If rhyme really is of feudal provenance, then the same may be said of many other good and beautiful things.

If the Soviet Union’s contribution to the great unreadable genres of mankind was the production novel, Engineer Menni stands as an elegant and surprisingly readable precursor. Yet although production is certainly an element, it is far more high level. We see in Menni the possibility for something like a management or project novel. A novel or literary form that takes as its architecture not story arcs, but phases; not character development, but resource management; not plot resolutions, but outcomes; and finally, not moral platitudes or zen like moments of observation, but strictly documented lessons learned.

All of a suddenly he understood that one didn’t have to invent it all from scratch, that it was a matter of making something new by synthesis of all that was good in what came before.

Kim Stanley Robinson.

This functional trend seemed to have gone away for awhile. But the rehabilitation of Red Star/Engineer Menni opens up the possibility for a severe détournement; the language of management, organization, abstract project coordination can be stolen for aesthetic development. And once the literary captures this thinking, it can return it back with a vengeance. No longer will the notions of finance or human resources be linked to solely spreadsheets; a utilitarian flavor will remain, but legends and heroes, or perhaps even new methodologies embodied as heroes. Engineer Menni stands for both a political finality or class division, and a new methodology for the commune as a whole. A vindication of the major or state project, and as such, an aesthetic as much as political vindication.

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