"Strategic" Plants (was Replies: "Better times" cannot...)

Charles Brown charlesb at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us
Thu May 7 13:45:53 PDT 1998


Hi Yoshie,

How have you been ?

I agree that the workers have not caught up to the new organization of

plants yet. Surely, in these strikes

there was no full use of the new potential strategies. Of course, the union leadership is still Reutherite opportunist, so they are always looking for ways to avoid confrontation with the system. In this case that means not using the new potential strategies fully or at all.

I guess our job is to talk this up to make more workers conscious of it and other aspects of the new organization of production. We need to overcome the

sense of powerlessness that grew with the plantclosings of ten years ago, by

broadcasting the new strengths , especially in proletarian internationalism, which is more "strategic"today than ever.

Charles


>>> Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> 05/05 7:33 PM >>>
Charles Brown wrote:
>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.

It is, but the lesson from those strikes Charles mentions above seems to be that strikes at strategically important plants have _yet_ to be used 'strategically' by workers. I agree that the 'just-in-time' system creates its own weaknesses, but it doesn't look as though the American working class are catching up with this fact and using it to their advantage, does it? At least not yet. It's something that the left has to work on.

Yoshie



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