On Apr 28, 2009, at 1:56 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
> Referrig to this as in any remote way of any interest whatever to
> leftists makes me so sad I can't even bother to argue it.The workers
> are being screwed out of their decent wages and their benefits.
Really, Carrol, what planet do you live on? The UAW is handed controlling interest in one auto company and a very large minority stake in another. And you don't think it presents interesting questions? You don't think the union - which is in theory the organized representative of the working class - shouldn't think about trying to do something with this? That's just fucking nuts. This isn't some abstract thing you're always deriding as sandbox politics. The UAW is likely to own a big chunk of the U.S. auto sector.
They should just be fighting for higher wages instead? Marx:
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/ch03.htm
>
"At the same time, and quite apart form the general servitude involved in the wages system, the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!" they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wages system!""