Also, of course, just within the last year and a half, the North American autoworkers had several strikes in "strategic" plants that closed a group of territorially dispersed plants. The working class is catching up with the reorganization. This is the main thing, catching the working class consciousness up with the shift, which is initially disuniting.
Proletarian internationalism is more urgent than ever.
On the point of dialectics, I am interested in responses to my claim that this is precisely a dialectical contradiction and real Hegelian qualitative change. For , Marx in Capital Vol. I , Chapter entitled "Machinery and Modern Industry" makes mechanization and cooperation
the twin concepts making the shift to industry from manufacture. What I am saying that the one, mechanization, changes from reinforcing cooperation to negating it, with the current developments in mechanization or technology. It negates the 1840 form of cooperation - big factories, like the Ford Rouge plant used to have
100,000 here in Dearborn- the classic site of Leninist propaganda and agitation. Also, working class residential districts are not concentrated. Now they design the plants so that you can't stand at the gate and hand out literature to the workers coming and going to work, too.
Charles Brown
>>> Larry Haiven <haiven at lighthouse.usask.ca> 05/05 1:07 PM >>>
I've been reading the points made about global dispersal of production
facilities with interest. While this development would seem to decrease
the reliance of capitalists on the cooperation of workers in a single
enterprise or location, there is another, quite opposite effect at play.
Take the North American auto industry, for example - an example of widely dispersed sourcing and production. Problem is, when workers down tools in a plant in Toledo, Ohio or St. Therese, Quebec the entire continental industry can grind to a halt rather than a single plant.
There are two problems presented here: first is continental (or global) integration which places individual plants in a web of production; second is "just-in-time" techniques, which do away with inventories and make even small work disruptions more calamitous for the firm(s).
We need to look at these things dialectically. Within every phenomenon is the seed of its opposite. I'm not saying my point overrides the effect of global disaggregation, but it may limit the extent to which one can speak of "substantial reorganization of production."
Larry Haiven, Associate Professor Dept. of Industrial Relations & Organizational Behaviour College of Commerce University of Saskatchewan 25 Campus Drive Saskatoon, Saskatchewan CANADA S7N 5A7 Tel. (306) 966-8451 Fax. (306) 966-8709 Email: haiven at commerce.usask.ca