(The following article is from the April 16-30, 2009, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $25/year, or $12 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $25 US per year; other overseas readers - $25 US or $35 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 133 Herkimer St., Unit 502, Hamilton, ON, L8P 2H3.)

By Sam Hammond

     When wages are driven down, the cost of running the capitalist state shifts from the corporate sector to the wage sector, the cost of social services is loaded onto wage workers, and transportation and infrastructure are shifted to direct user fees, what is the result? Destruction of the domestic market, creating a self-propelled downward spiral of unemployment and impoverishment. After they accumulate impossible debt, working people can purchase only a dwindling fraction of what they produce.

     The super-profits accumulated from this social plunder are concentrated in pure investment speculation, the casino economy, deregulated and free to gamble with the social being of millions. What is the result?

     Well, just take a good look around. The classical cyclical contradiction of capitalism, triggered and accelerated by the neo‑liberal agenda, in its most acute form during its last imperialist stage, racing toward...?

     This question itself raises the spectre of a socialist alternative, enough to make every imperialist state pour billions into military and police to deal with the impending social unrest (and with its rivals). This of course aggravates the crisis, as the billions of dollars wasted on militarism empty the public purses even more.

     The cycle of boom and bust is not just a graph, highs and lows on paper. It is fundamentally a process of over-accumulation and relative over-production from the super-exploitation of labour and resources. Conversion of real value into speculative finance eventually cannibalizes and destroys the means of production, and creates large pools of impoverished unemployed workers to pressure those still employed to accept wage cuts, driving down the cost of labour for the next round of recovery. In the past, these crises have often led to war, the destruction of industrial cities and the slaughter of millions. This is not a horizontal cycle, but an upward spiral that gains momentum, becoming more destructive and creating more acute crashes closer together as it races toward negation.

     Since the industrial revolution, the working class has struggled to develop its own defence mechanisms on this treadmill. The struggles of the last couple of centuries are legendary, and include the development of the conscious revolutionary forces, the first socialist revolution, the national liberation movements, the trade unions and the peace and environmental movements. Cause and effect, attack and counterattack. The working masses, the non-capitalist world population, have been far from passive, but there are definitely moments of adjustment. If the imperialists have to pause and re‑build, so does the working class. That brings front and centre the huge problems the trade union movement is facing presently.

     It is in the interests of all working people to resist as strongly as possible the capitalist aim of rebuilding at our expense, using our lives as commodities of cheap labour power, denied by impoverishment the ability to consume what we produce. That is their dream; it cannot be ours. Within these unforgiving parameters we must decide our tactics, plan our defences and protect our homes and families. The debate fosters the divergent working class trends of compliance and resistance. Should we support the existing order and seek rebirth within a rapacious and more exploitive imperialism? Or should we fight for a fundamental change, get off the treadmill and then destroy it?

     Faced with these alternatives, some previous working class representatives supported their own national capitalists in the slaughterhouse of 20th century wars that claimed over 100 million lives. That collaboration did not lead to liberation; it led here, to the present crisis of unemployment, war, hunger, disease and environmental destruction. The treadmill tilts ever steeper and accelerates. Are those who comply and co‑operate really leaders? Or are they captives of an ideology that sees no other life, no other existence, just a social perspective of despair and subservience tied to the sinking ship of imperialism.

     This is not a personal gripe, but rather an objective look through the lenses of need and historical experience. It is through these lenses that the present concessionary partnering of CAW President Ken Lewenza should be examined.

     There is no doubt whatsoever that the CAW and its leadership are under extreme pressure. It may seem unfair to load the immediate future of labour onto these existing pressures.

     But reality is hard. The suggestion is that we are all in this together, that we must offer concessions to save "our" auto industry, that we should look at creative ways (like a Canadian VEBA) to handle "legacy" costs and enter into pension and other negotiations with the government, without one concrete demand. This is dangerous and will rebound throughout the working class far beyond the CAW and the auto industry.

     The VEBA (Voluntary Employees Beneficiary Association) is a "defined contribution" health, supplemental benefit, severance and pension program, a U.S. phenomenon currently not legal in Canada. The invitation to put this on the table is irresponsible at the least, leaving workers at the mercy of financial speculators whose aim is to privatize services and squeeze profit. It changes legacy costs into fixed costs, and relieves the corporations and government of all social responsibility to the workers who have spent their lives creating profits and building society.

     To ask the most right-wing, anti‑worker, pro-corporate government in Canadian history to enter into negotiations on this subject is nothing short of amazing. To do this while claiming to be protecting "legacy costs" is so transparent that readers can draw their own conclusions.

     In his April 1 speech to the Economic Club of Toronto where he took up the banners of the auto industry and introduced the VEBA concept, Ken Lewenza did not make a big pitch for the need for increase EI benefits and accessibility, pumping money into working families or equity issues. He said, more than once, that the billions given and requested by auto were not a bailout but a loan. He did not demand that the workers' concessions be in the form of a repayable loan. But why not?

     Unfortunately the CAW is introducing and inviting concepts that will reverberate throughout labour and be imposed on the unorganized at the corporate whim. The unorganized will not rush to the standards of labour as a result. Why should they? Alienating one's own class while serving the interests of another poses a serious threat to the future of the labour movement. A union born in the struggle against concessions, the CAW showed that an independent working class program was the best way forward, the best defence. Hopefully there will be debate and analyses throughout labour on these issues. There is too much at stake to stay silent.