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The troubles in the U.S. automobile industry have taken an interesting turn. In return for considerable concessions to Chrysler and General Motors, the United Auto Workers may become a majority shareholder in Chrysler and a large stakeholder in General Motors. The federal government will also own a large fraction of the shares of the two corporations, making both of them a lot less capitalist in their ownership structure than would have been imaginable only a few months ago. Doug Henwood, on his lbo-talk email list, raised a critical question: what does ownership mean for the union? Or perhaps a better formulation: what could it mean for the union? Let’s look at this. Like any organization, a union must have goals, and strategy and tactics aimed at realizing them. When capitalism was much younger and workers were beginning to understand it, the organizations of the working class—labor unions and political parties—had as their aim the abolition of the system of wage labor. This meant that they hoped to bring an end to capitalism itself, since wage labor is its lifeblood. It is through the ability of employers—an ability that rests on their ownership of society’s productive wealth—to compel workers to labor enough hours to produce an output which, when sold, will generate for employers a surplus over their costs that allows employers to make a profit.. This profit is the property of the owners, and they use it to expand their operations and their political and social power. If there is no wage labor, there is no capitalism. There were good reasons for the working class movement to want to abolish wage labor. Here is how I summed it up in an article I wrote more than a decade ago: Now, the whole thrust of capitalism is to alienate us from our humanity, to deny to us that which makes us human. We enter the workplace, having sold our labor power, our ability to create, to the capitalist, who considers it to be property, on a par with the other means of production. To the capitalist, we are costs of production, costs to be minimized whatever the human cost, which does not enter into the capitalist’s calculations at all. However, we are not happy to have sold our humanity, so we have to be forced to do the capitalist’s bidding. While this force is often enough effectuated violently, the true and perverted genius of capital is to accomplish it indirectly by reorganizing the labor process so that it is extraordinarily difficult for the workers to control it. [As Harry] Braverman shows us with wonderful clarity [in his book Labor and Monopoly Capital] . . .the essence of capitalist management is control, control over the labor process and therefore control over the worker. First, the workers are herded into factories, then they are watched and the divisions that they make in their own labors are turned against them through the detailed division of labor. Machines threaten them with redundance and further deskill their work. All of the piecemeal efforts at control are systematized by [Frederick]Taylor, who makes the separation of conception and execution the sine qua non of capitalist production. Both Taylorism and personnel management are reconceptualized again with lean production and its super-systematic hiring, just-in-time inventories, design for manufacture, team production, subcontracting, andon boards, and constant kaizening of the work. So careful have become the capitalist’s calculations that workers in modern automobile factories, places that autoworker, Ben Hamper, in his book, Rivethead, calls gulags, work as much as fifty-seven seconds of every minute, often for ten to twelve hours per day. The constant pressure to produce in circumstances in which the worker can exert virtually no control over the work, is what Braverman aptly describes as "a generalized social insanity."
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