Unemployment and fight against starvation Breaking into history as narrative is a tricky business, where one is inevitably charged with leaving out an event of importance. This charge is true but stops no one from breaking into history as narrative. The battle against unemployment and starvation has been the FUNDAMENTAL event to galvanize the proletariat experiencing cyclical crisis. Marx and Engels analyzed the system wide cyclical crisis as occurring in a ten year period. In Detroit cyclical class as the experience of our proletariat occurred every 36 months in the post WW II era. Between 1917 and the outbreak of WW II cyclical crisis was experienced as every 18 - 24 months, given the nature of auto as a commodity. We have gone from rags to riches, feast to famine, and paupers to prince for so long that that crisis of overproduction appear as a law of nature rather than a law of an economic system. We starve also. In 1929 our working class was "starving like Marvin." Pretending we are all right when we not is a subjective block to unity because each individual thinks "the other fellow is doing all right and it is just me." "The system works, I am at fault" is so much bourgeois ideology, but the first instinct of individuals constituting a mass being economically decimated. The spontaneous tendency is an impulse to the right as the individual/mass seeks to restore a previous state of unity - employment relations. This thinking as individual/mass spontaneous impulse is a subjective implosion or turning against oneself and ones class. Its dialectical counterpart is explosion or turning outward against the system. Communist are the catalytic agent of explosion. Class consciousness is the substance of our catalytic agent. Events leading to the 1929 "market crash" - the Great Depression, was a series of violent seizures and convulsions of bourgeois production, with corporations vomiting wage labor out of the production process. Unemployment soared. Insanity grip the economy. It was if the devil himself had the people by the throat. Unemployment rose because there were to many products that could not be sold for a profit. Therefore people had none of the plentiful products. People were cold and without heat because there was to much coal available. People went hungry because there was to much food available. People became homeless because there were to many empty houses. The fifteen years between 1920 and 1935 - (the Great Depression dragged society down in 1929, which had never really recovered from 1924) were years of major economic dislocation and wages of starvation for the proletarian masses: the bitter paycheck years. With the defeat of the Fisher Body strike (1922) and cascading waves of mounting unemployment, the communist influence and organization within the factories was virtually reduced to zero, as layer after layer of working where thrown into the streets. In the fall of 1931 General Motors and Ford led the battle cutting wages by 10%. Between 1930 and 1932 wages were cut between 5% to 20% depending on job classifications. This meant wages between $8.00 to $9.60 a day dropped to $6.00 and $6.40. This was not the worse of things. The Briggs body company introduced their revolutionary closed coach body in 1922. It was the first closed vehicle available at a price close to the open-bodied model. Within a few short years, the open touring car was a thing of the past. Old man Walter Briggs slashed the wages of some male workers to .10 an hour or $1 for a ten hour day and .04 for some female workers. During one year of part time employment Wyndham Mortimer, drill operator and later Vice-President of the UAW earned only $53.65. It would be when the employed workers threw in their lot with the unemployed head way could be made in fighting starvation. This took shape as the formation of Unemployed Councils and marching on the corporations and government demanding wages or income. Transformation - change in the economy driven by technological advance defines the "Roaring Twenties." At the heart of the advance of the industrial revolution emerged the new and enlarged form of the industrial proletariat dependent upon and manifesting the new assembly line driven mass producing industries. The sound of Jazz erupting from Louisiana's peculiar French, Indian, slave and Anglo European heritage was carried country wide through a new communications device called "radio." Radio began to give our proletariat a common heart, sound and soul. This new era of proletarian revolt, women's emancipation and flapper skirts was being woven together through building telephone lines, indoor plumbing and new citywide sewer systems defining urbanizations. For the first time, more Americans and Canadians lived in cities of 2,500 or more people than in small towns or rural areas. The automobile, movie, radio, and chemical industries skyrocketed during the 1920s. The automobile industry and the workers connected directly and indirectly to automotive production stood at the heart of the revolution. Before the war, cars were a luxury. In the 1920s, mass-produced vehicles became common throughout the U.S. and Canada. By 1927, Ford ended the Model T after selling 15 million of them. Only about 300,000 vehicles were registered in 1918 in all of Canada, but by 1929, there were 1.9 million, and automobile parts manufactures sprung up in Ontario Canada near Detroit. The automobile effect drove such industries as highway building, motels, service stations, used car dealerships and new housing outside the range of mass transit. A new form of the working class was being built with each car cranked out by Detroit's assembly line. A new industrial middle class was being formed world wide with its center of gravity Detroit. In whose interest would the new technology wave serve: capitalist or proletarian? The problem casting the proletariat as "starving Marvin" is that growth of wages of the industrial worker - paychecks, perpetually lags behind the growth of the means of production, causing more commodities to be produced than the starvation wages of the workers can buy. When this accumulation of commodities reaches a critical point of "stacking up," waiting for purchasers, we get banged up and thrown into the streets. The industrial wheels of production grind to a halt due to lack of sells. Workers are laid off because there are too many products, which increases the lack of buyers and cause more lay-offs. The capitalist system becomes caught in the vice grip of another circle of crisis of overproduction. Or as it is called in polite conversation of our capitalists, "another business cycle." This is not to say crisis is not first expressed as financial crisis. It is to say the bottom line of cyclical crisis is "overproduction" as described by Marx and Engels. end part 1 Waistline
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