The Evening Star (December 19, 1945)
ON THE RECORD —
Motor strike involves more than pay raise
By Dorothy Thompson
The motor strike involves more, I think, than the matter of a 30 percent wage increase. There is a mounting class struggle; the war accelerated it. as wars always accelerate social developments. We have had a generation of war and revolution, periodic economic collapse, widespread poverty and unemployment, war booms and post-war slumps, and deflation – inflation – deflation – inflation.
The memories of wage workers are long and apprehensive. The revolt is deep and profound everywhere. It lies at the root of war itself. The root is fear – fear of unemployment; fear of the periodic descent from a dispossessed status with wages to a dispossessed status without income. Combined by agitators with nationalism (Germany and Italy are coolies of the plutodemocracies and without colonial outlets or financial Independence, hence our poverty and insecurity), it flamed into Nazi-Fascism. Fascism was the promise of a social revolution. Not to realize that is to be unable to explain it at all.
The revolt of the masses is the chief fact of the 20th century. The fear of the fact produces ugly reactions among the more secure; the ugly reactions inflame the revolt; the revolt is articulated by the outcamp intellectuals who hope to ride on the shoulders of the masses to power; the struggle for the leadership of the masses splits trade union ranks, and when the situation is ripe passes the power of the closest knit and most fanatical minority, whose strategy is to prevent pacification until the power is in their own hands, and the masses are, as always, mere pawns in the struggle for power.
Reactionaries pose as radicals to capture a mass following (Hitler), and radicals become revolutionary-reactionaries (Communists). In the end, after bloody massacre, the struggle only confirms the proletarian status of the workers, minus political liberty, which ever wins.
If General Motors admits the principle that agents of labor may audit the books of the company and settle the price of labor, management resigns a prime function of administration. What is involved is the capitalist system itself. The capitalist system, as it has developed, may not be a good system, built as it is on the concept that a man’s work – i.e., his life – is a market commodity.
But labor (labor leaders) assuming the functions of management within a capitalist system is no system at all. It must eventually lead to a transfer of the responsibilities of ownership and eventually of ownership itself. Transfer to the state is very easy, given capture of political power. With ownership transferred to the state, labor becomes as taxpayer the compulsory financier; managers become state functionaries backed by the police power; errors in management are borne by financiers and consumers (labor); labor loses its collective bargaining power by becoming, purely metaphorically, the owners.
This evolution of private capitalism into monopoly state capitalism, pleasantly called “socialism,” or “economic democracy,” finally confirms the worker’s status as a working beast of burden for state exploitation. Its premise is the supreme German fallacy that the state (by its nature an instrument of oppression) and the people are the same thing.
The worker continues dispossessed of his tools – the primary cause of the great rebellion. His proletarian status is eternally ratified because the possibility of rebellion is permanently removed once ownership is combined with police power.
This is why state capitalism appeals so strongly to certain types of managerial brains. The so-called dictatorship of the proletariat is a state dictatorship over, not by, the proletariat through a political-managerial class of bosses who exercise total power.
The antidote to the evils of capitalism is the abolition of the proletariat by the increase to the people as individuals and families of productive property – the aim of the cooperative common wealth and the American revolution. This, however, is more difficult considering the present drift than merely to transfer corporate ownership to the super-corporation of the state and offers neither politicians, labor leaders, nor professional intellectuals access to supreme power.
Really freeing the workers would remove from their backs the parasites of the financiers, who take a commission from their labor; the parasites of their own agents, who do the same thing, and the parasite of the state, which takes the people’s earnings to give them back in the form of “social securities” – minus a commission to the bureaucrats.
The workers must know that the present “revolution” is merely a means of confirming their dispossessed condition in return for that ultimate of equality, security and continuity of employment which is always in slavery.
It is the 20th century formula for the suppression of rebellion, the supreme reaction, called “progress.”