Leaflet distributed in Belgium at a mass rally for VW Forest workers Layoffs, increases in productivity, flexibility, contracts that do not guarantee work ... All that is presented to us as if it was fated, as the result of competition with workers at another factory site, or from a country where wages are lower, or with underpaid immigrants.
But this "fate" is that of the logic of capitalism which seeks profits at any price. And these profits are wrung from the exploitation of the workers : workers that it threatens, squeezed like lemons to be thrown out when they are dry. Competition between workers has only two objectives: to hide the real cause of exploitation and layoffs and to break the solidarity which links the exploited.
The cause of the massive dismissals is in the functioning of the system where the search for profits causes massive overproduction, alongside an impoverishment just as massive.
Today, the VW Forest factory is attacked full force and perfectly reflects this double movement of overproduction/ layoffs/impoveri shment of workers. And tomorrow, whose turn will it be?
As usual, the ruling class tightens the belts to contain any overflow and to hurl the workers into discouragement. Police officers placed around the Forest factory site; employers who, as if by miracle, propose 30 jobs here, 400 there; models of reconversion, already created by the authorities, though no official decision is on record; promises of new production in... 2009: all to install a cordon sanitaire to prevent revolt.
A central pawn in this smothering of any worker's reaction are the trade-unions. As usual, they are presented in the form of specialists in running a strike, and deprive the workers of their capacity to decide on their own actions and on their future, whereas the only possibility of reaction by the workers is the organization of general assemblies to discuss together their actions and the modalities of their struggle. To send the workers home means preventing them from organizing together; to organize pseudo contacts with other companies means preventing any real spontaneous extension; to ratify and negotiate the layoffs means allowing capital to carry out its projects: here is the well known role, repeated a 1000 times, of those organs for the containment of the working class that are the trade unions.
The capitalist system is a machine to crush humans. Only profit counts and man is only one commodity among others, a useful tool, for a time, in production. No perspectives are possible in a system which always creates more overproduction and unemployment, more violence, famines, wars, ecological destruction. Our only power to oppose this logic is our class solidarity: the workers of the whole world, unemployed or employed, have the power to reject the existence to which the capitalist system condemns them.
Another world is possible: the capacity to produce what is necessary for the life of all exists. Together, we can create the bases for a society which restores to the human being his/her right to a human existence, a society in the service of the satisfaction of human needs.
Internationalist Perspective
December 2, 2006
http://internationalist-perspective.org/
