Chinese Go Down The Road of Socialism
June 9, 2010
Honda resolved a two-week strike at a transmission plant in southern China by offering 1,900 workers there raises of 24 to 32 percent.
But the success of that walkout, which ended a week ago, seems to have prompted additional strikes at a time when workers in China are awakening to the idea of collective bargaining and demanding higher wages.
This is just terrible news. This means that some capitalist will be forced to suffer and might have to walk his own dog rather than employing the services of a dog walker. It will also make the workers lazy and unproductive. Does China really want to look like Detroit? When will people learn that socialism is wrong?
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LOL!
We will see what that means for all of the state supported/funded companies in China as well. How much collective bargaining will the Communist Party rulers tolerate? From the events in 1989, we know there are limits.
A British indutrialist is touring a factory in Leningrad in 1984. He is told the factory is far superior to anything in the UK. His guide says they have increased productivity by 14% each year for three years. They tell him that production costs have been lowered. There have been absolutely no labor problems.
They ask him if his factories in the UK can meet these standards. The Britisher responds “Well, that is not a fair comparision. We have to deal with all of the damn Communists stirring up trouble in our plants!”
Kurt,
And then there’s the old saw about how under Capitalism, man exploits man, and under Communism, it’s just the opposite.
The truth is that the people with the power to do so do what they want. In China the ruling class has managed to mold the country into a capitalist powerhouse sucking its workers dry while maintaining the notion that this is somehow a development of Communism–an exercise in “doublethink” at least as astounding as equating peace with war. Truth is at least as strange as fiction.
Some people are fond of saying that “ideas have consequences,” and sometimnes they do, but sometimes they dramatically don’t. When we make jokes about it, I guess it’s to laugh to keep from crying.
The important thing about worker unionism may be that it is not really about big ideas but about economic interest–the interest of the workers in getting decent working conditions and compensation. In the end this may be the best or the only viable “road to socialism”–a system in which social forces are not shaped by controlling ideas (which are subject to corruption) but by balancing institutions, with Labor on the one hand and Capital on the other fighting it out on some sort of fair playing field. This would be an adversary system like our legal sytem here in the US, where neither side is itself motivated to reach the desired end (justice), but the desired end, ideally and overall, comes out of the adversary process.