DETROIT, MI., October 19 — While the International UAW leadership was drumming up support for the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests, they were also signing new four-year agreements with GM, Ford and Chrysler, the first since the federal bailout and bankruptcies of GM and Chrysler in 2009. These new contracts show that the “progressive” union leaders share the rulers’ vision of a low-wage, highly productive workforce that will keep the profits flowing from the GM Building to Wall St.

GM made more than $1 billion in profit last year and Ford about $4 billion. The new contracts continue the wage freeze of senior workers that began in 2005. Instead, there is a series of signing bonuses and lump-sum payments (as high as $16,000 to senior Ford workers, at least 50 percent less at GM and Chrysler) that do not go into our base pay or begin to make up the concessions taken from us. For new second-tier workers, base pay could rise by $4/hr. over the life of the Ford contract, but there is no bridge from the second tier to the first.  There is no increase in the pension and the retirees’ Christmas bonus has been ended.

‘Improve Competitiveness’ on Workers’ Backs

John Fleming, Ford’s head of global manufacturing and labor affairs, said the new deal “will continue to improve our competitiveness...” Harley Shaiken, a labor professor at the University of California, Berkeley said the union tried to win bonuses and new jobs without creating additional costs.

In fact, overall labor costs could go down. GM and Ford are reopening a few plants and bringing more work to some others, promising as many as 12-15,000 new jobs, all at the lower-wage second tier. At the same time they are starting a new round of buyouts of senior workers. Now, second-tier workers are about 5% of the total workforce. By 2015 they could be as much as 20%. And in the industry as a whole, including the transnational assembly plants and the hundreds of supplier plants, probably two-thirds of the industry is at or below the GM, Ford and Chrysler second tier.

The UAW’s efforts to keep the Detroit Big Three “more competitive” has turned the U.S. into one of the low-wage, non-union centers of the international auto industry. And any promise of new jobs at any wage assumes the economy doesn’t crash again, taking the auto industry with it.

Forty Percent Say ‘No!’

The contracts are not going down easy with the workers. More than a third of the 40,000 GM workers voted to reject the deal and workers at the Ford Assembly and Stamping plants in Chicago turned the deal down by almost 80%. These are both older and newer workers whose communities have been ravaged by racist unemployment and cutbacks. They want to fight the rulers, not serve them.

Then the union hacks pressured the workers at two Kentucky plants to approve Ford’s new offer which resulted in overall ratification on October 18. Forty percent of the total vote rejected it.

The bosses and union leaders got their contracts this time, but as OWS and the high “No” vote indicate, the class struggle is heating up. This means a greater opening to win auto and other industrial workers to the revolutionary communist PLP.  We will be up to the challenge.J

Western guidebooks and the slickest of upscale marketing do their best to erode the history of communist-led revolution in China. The plain two-story building, where the Communist Party of China (CPC) was founded, is totally out of place, surrounded by upscale shops and overpriced restaurants catering to the international tourist trade.

Today, the little historic site, being a tiny island of workers’ history, has a quiet power. Yet it is in a rising sea of Chinese yuppie culture, next to giant photos of sexist models wearing the latest fashions from Paris and New York. The morning I went to Xingye Road there was a steady stream of visitors, including 20 young men in China Air Force uniforms. I also saw small groups of older men and women with weathered, solemn faces and callused hands and a group of younger adults who stood in front of the large hammer and sickle display and repeated some sort of oath with their hands over their hearts.

China’s Bosses Steal Fruits of Revolution’s Advances

Chinese capitalism is everywhere I visited in the huge country. But the historical facts persist. The option to become the dominant capitalist economic power in Asia, and soon in the world, was only available to the current Chinese ruling class because communists of Mao’s generation ended a 2,000-year-old a system of exploitation. Pre-Revolution, 95% of the Chinese people were poor, ignorant and powerless. In the years after the 1949 socialist revolution the working people built a new country with schools, hospitals, factories and farms that existed to serve the people. Over the first 25 years of the People’s Republic there was the greatest increase in literacy and life expectancy ever recorded in a large impoverished country.

How was it possible for the “red capitalists” of the CPC — still calling themselves communists — to become fabulously rich by the restoration of a capitalist market system in the 1980s?  They simply took advantage of the foundation of economic infrastructure and human power (a generation of workers raised with access to food, health services and education) to start making profit. They used, and still use, the prestige of the CPC to maintain their rule.

The “Communist” Party’s prestige comes from their former revolutionary leadership that ended semi-feudal exploitation and drove out the occupying forces of Japan and the Western imperial powers in 1949. They took advantage of their positions in the CPC and made themselves CEOs. In the process many Chinese have experienced the rising level of material possessions associated with rapid industrialization, but hundreds of millions are being brutally exploited in sweatshops and have no voice in the current China. “Serve the People,” the slogan of the1950s and 1960s is dead. “To Get Rich is Glorious” is the new order.

Capitalism Sows the Seeds of Its Own Destruction

 The injustice and inequality that are growing just as rapidly as the modern skylines in China form the objective basis for a new revolutionary movement for social change in China. Despite the Chinese government’s efforts to control and distort people’s understanding of their country’s history, there are still millions alive who saw it unfold and know the truth. We know from the laws of capitalism that the rosy appearance of China’s prosperity for some will not last forever. The contradictions that we know so well in mature, decaying capitalist societies like the U.S., will develop further in China over the years ahead. They are already shifting resources from human needs to massive military investment.

PLP will connect with those who seek to re-establish a movement for communism in China, as we have in dozens of other countries. The needs of our class make that essential. The power of the world-wide movement for workers’ power and equality will take a great leap forward when that happens.J

In early 2011, Antonio Gramsci Jr., the grandson of a founder of the Italian Communist Party, gave a concert of Renaissance music in Rome on the last day of an impressive exhibition, “Avanti popolo: Il PCI nella storia d’Italia,” commemorating the history of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), founded in 1921.

Twenty years ago, in 1991, the Italian CP was disbanded after seventy years of struggle. ¹ At that time it was the largest “communist” party in Western Europe, and the second largest party in the Italian parliament, winning approximately 30% of the votes. CHALLENGE articles often state that communist revolution, not reform, is the only road to working-class victory over capitalism. Looking at the history of the Italian CP helps us to see why.

Shortly after its founding, the Party and workers of Italy faced a dangerous enemy, as Mussolini’s Fascists marched on Rome in 1922. The king appointed Mussolini to be his prime minister and soon after Gramsci and other founders were in prison. Gramsci never left prison, where he died in1937, leaving behind his famous Prison Notebooks. Nonetheless, during World War II, communists and other anti-fascist forces fought bravely. After the liberation of Italy Mussolini was captured as he tried to escape and his body, along with 14 other fascist leaders, was hung upside down from lampposts in Milan’s central square.

Despite this apparent victory, Palmiro Togliatti, the new leader of the Italian Communist Party, returned from the USSR to find a country occupied by the British and American armies and devastated by Allied bombings, civil war and severe food shortages. At this critical juncture, Togliatti and the Italian communists made a grave mistake by accepting the logic of the Popular Front, an alliance of anti-fascist forces, including communists, anarchists, socialists and the liberal bourgeoisie. They began supporting “democratic” reform measures and abandoned the philosophy of armed struggle to bring about communism.

The Italian CP became the largest “communist” party in Western Europe and the second largest party in Italy. Ironically, the larger the party became, the less communist it became. In practice, Italian Communists practiced reformism in the parliament but hypocritically preached revolution at party rallies. ²

By 1964 democratic centralism was abandoned and reformist factions flourished. In 1972, Enrico Berlinguer, the new leader, announced the party’s “historic compromise” of collaborating with the Socialists and center-left Catholics; revolution would no longer even be preached while reform was practiced. The Italian CP was now openly a reform party.

The 1991 party congress was the end. The Italian CP was dissolved and the name “The Democratic Party of the Left” was adopted, which today has become the “Democratic Party,” and mimics the U.S. model.

Valuable lessons can be drawn from the history of the Italian Communist Party. We cannot dismiss those who founded the party and were jailed for their commitment to communism, such as Antonio Gramsci. Neither can we ignore the communist partisans who fought fascism and died during World War II. We must also acknowledge how party members participated in strikes, protests and other struggles hoping to defeat capitalism.

But our Italian predecessors have shown us very clearly that holding elected office demands maintenance of the capitalist state, not revolt against it. Therefore, the most important lesson that can be learned from the mistakes of the Italian CP is that revolution cannot co-exist with electoral politics. Long ago, Karl Marx had warned workers that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” ³ Instead, he said, the entire state (political parties and practices, the courts, the cops, etc.) must be smashed.

As the final notes of Antonio Gramsci Jr.’s concert died away, the crowded hall burst into applause. Many of those present, old and young, still hope for a better future, one that will never come from reform, but only from communist revolution. The Italian CP was not an end, but a beginning, because we have learned from its mistakes. Antonio Gramsci Jr. took a copy of CHALLENGE and sends his “red greetings to his American comrades,” words to strengthen us in our struggles, wherever we are in the world.J

(Endnotes)

1 Images and Italian texts are available at <http://ilpcinellastoriaditalia.it/index.html>.

2 < http://partitocomunistaitaliano.blogspot.com/>

3            Karl Marx: The Civil War in France http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htm

The U.S. is in decline relative to China, the primary emerging imperialist rival. The U.S. ruling class is faced with massive unemployment, a continuing financial mess, a thinly spread and poorly functioning military, and an inability to enforce discipline within their own class. At the same, China displays an increasingly aggressive imperialism, challenging U.S. hegemony. Bosses are rarely hesitant to sacrifice the lives of workers in order to claim their piece of the capitalist pie, and so, as China’s rulers demand a reordering of the world with them on top, imperialist war could lie in the future. Workers of the world have nothing to win from backing one group of capitalists over the other. Transforming this potential future imperialist war into communist revolution is the long-term outlook of PLP.

Industry is the centerpiece of capitalist economy. Industrial workers produce real value, and unlike the financial manipulations that are increasingly at the center of the U.S. economy, China’s industrial might has skyrocketed. The economic crisis has certainly hit China and just as in the U.S., the Chinese bosses are making the working class pay. The net income of 400 million people has stagnated in the last decade and poverty levels have increased. But in the absence of a REAL communist party (unlike the profit-driven fake Chinese Communist Party) aimed at destroying capitalism, the bosses will salvage their system, and it appears that China might be on top of the pile when the dust clears.

Chinese Dominance Grows In Key Industries

Chinese oil companies have exerted their influence across the globe. The China National Petroleum Corporation has contracts in 29 countries around the world, including Iraq, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Burma.

Or consider steel. There is a dispute about how much steel China produced in 2010. The official figure — likely an underestimate — is 627 million tons, 44% of the world output and 50% more than Europe, the U.S., Japan and Russia COMBINED. Even if the lower official numbers are correct, the growth in China’s steel output from 2007 to 2010 exceeded the total U.S. steel output in 2010: China’s output in those three years grew by 131 million tons, whereas U.S. output in 2010 was 81 million tons.

In the auto industry the situation is similar. In 2010, the U.S. produced 7.8 million cars while China made 18.3 million, double the number in 2008 and nine times the number it produced in 2000. Again, the growth in auto production outstrips U.S. production. From 2000 to 2010 China’s auto industry output grew by 16.2 million cars. The U.S. produced 7.8 million cars in 2010. However, a goodly portion of the profits from China’s production goes to international auto companies like Ford, GM, and Nissan.

Battle Over Profits

In other basic industries, China’s share of world output is around 40%. For instance, China makes 44% of the world’s cement. Their dominance is even more complete in many other products. By some estimates, 90% of the world’s shoes are made in China. All told, over the last ten years, the Chinese share of world manufacturing has risen to 19.7% from 7%. Meanwhile, the U.S. share went down from 27% to 19%. The U.S. has lost 5.7 million manufacturing jobs in the last ten years.

The picture is not complete, however, without understanding what happens to the profit that this manufacturing generates. Companies that simply manufacture their products in China but export the profit are not contributing to the rise of the Chinese ruling class.  In some cases, the profits leave China. For example nearly all of Apple Computer’s products are assembled in China. Most of the profit, however, leaves the country. Apple makes eight times more in profit than it spends in China.

However, in industry after industry — including the ones cited above — China has gone from low-cost assembler to controlling the entire process: raw materials, basic manufacturing, assembly and sales.  And not only are these manufactured goods controlled by Chinese companies, a large percentage are directly controlled by the government, through state-owned enterprises (SOEs).

About 80% of the bank loans in China go to SOEs, which get discounted rates compared to privately owned companies. There are 150 central and 120,000 local SOEs, which account for the vast majority of manufacturing in the country. The 150 central SOEs generate more than two-thirds of China’s GDP and more than half of the country’s wealth. This profit can be funneled directly into build-up of industry, infrastructure and military.

Compare this to the U.S., where Warren Buffet, the ringleader of the liberal ruling class, has to beg and plead to the Tea Party-influenced government to raise taxes on the rich so that the U.S. can face its imperialist rivals in the future. The increase in taxes that Buffet is calling for is one aspect of the move towards fascism. Fascism is not just a ferocious attack on workers, using increased racism, nationalism and sexism to discipline the working class during crises. Another aspect of fascism is the attempt to forcefully impose discipline on the ruling class.

Industrial Battles Eventually Turn Into Military Battles

What Buffet and Obama are planning for, to some degree, is a potential future where the U.S. and China drag the working class into the hell of imperialist war. And they are worried that this future could be turning in the favor of the Chinese bosses. The Chinese Navy is already much larger than the U.S. forces in the Pacific. If current trends continue, within the next decade the Chinese Navy will be larger than the U.S. Navy in every category except aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines. They will likely have more attack submarines, destroyers, frigates, troop landing craft and smaller missile-carrying ships. The U.S. equipment is often more sophisticated, but it appears that the Chinese military has been quick to update to the latest technology. One thing is clear: the Chinese bosses think that they are catching up with the U.S. military and will soon pass it. 

A century ago, the Russian communist Vladimir Lenin showed that modern capitalism has entered the era of imperialism and therefore war, as the imperialists fight over how to re-divide the world.

U.S. Wars Encircle the Globe 

Ever since World War II, the main source of imperialist war has been the United States: Korea, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Kuwait, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. The reason was not because the United States rulers are uniquely evil, but because of the nature of imperialism. For the first 40 years, U.S. bosses were desperately trying to stop the advance of communist ideas. After the implosion of the Soviet Union, they wielded their singular imperialist power to make others fall in line. Now, the world is changing as China’s bosses’ aggressive push for power challenges the U.S. position.

Both U.S. and Chinese bosses will be feverishly attempting to build political support among “their” workers for a potential world war. Already, there is a growing amount of anti-Chinese rhetoric coming from the U.S. bosses and their lackies in the industrial unions. The international working class has nothing to gain and absolutely everything to lose from aligning with one set of bosses over another. They are all bloodsuckers, willing to sacrifice the lives of workers on the altar of profit and imperialist war. Our class needs no bosses! Workers have no country!J