> [mailto:owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com]On Behalf Of Dennis R Redmond
>
> This is hilarious. So what's IG Metall, chopped liver? Forty percent of
> Germany's banking system is state-owned. Is that irrelevant to the class
> struggle?
Of course it's not irrelevant. But I find the mindless defense of European corporations and even European state-run industries to be pretty ridiculous, given the union-busting of Thatcher against workers in such industries. And I don't buy the idea that German firms are so much better to their "semi-peripheries."
German firms may be under pressure within Germany to treat workers better because of domestic pressure, but those firms are still often the same firms that happily employed slave labor under the Nazis (and continued to lie about it until recently) and continue to bust unions anywhere they can. When Continental AG bought General Tire, it led to a year long strike in North Carolina by 1500 workers and the company happily closed an Edinburgh plant, throwing workers out in the street.
What evidence do you have that German firms, when they can get away with it, are not as much bastards to their employees as US firms? The difference in results for German workers is the strength of German unions, not the corporate model of German capitalists.
> Daimler's co-determination system is giving the UAW more clout
> than it ever had before in running Chrysler.
Or rather, the merger gives the German unions additional power they were rapidly losing overseas, as shown by the fact that despite sitting on the board, they were unable to prevent Mercedes from opening its Alabama plant non-union. The combo of US and German unions may strengthen workers against Chrysler-Daimler.
It is worth noting that every Japanese and German auto plant in the US is non-union, except for the auto plants that started as joint ventures with US firms. It is only when US firms have been involved that European or Japanese companies have not fought the union tooth-and-nail in its US plants.
France's Government mandated a shorter workweek, not a
> longer one. Etc. etc. etc. The only thing the Euroleft has lacked, I
> think, has been radical cultural theory, where the US scene has been much
> livelier in many ways.
They also lack any serious defense of immigrant workers. The basic reality of the last decade is that the Left in the US successfully fought off attempts to limit legal immigration, while Europe is now engaged in a pretty tough round of immigration restrictions. As Jorge Haider has rightly noted, he has been just articulating the reasons for the policies being implemented in Britain and other European countries.
The European model does pretty well for its European workers who can fight and demand a share, but to argue that European firms are somehow more noble when they operate in developing nations (or even in the US) has no basis in reality.
Why folks like you and O'Connor want to defend European capitalists as some kind of more virtuous form of economic elite is beyond me. The problem is the international capitalist class wherever they are-- playing games choosing between them is the wrong strategy. The right approach is global labor solidarity against all of them.
-- Nathan Newman