I would argue that while we don't need more combustion engines polluting the world. That autoworkers deserve our support because what is being done to them will be done to us. They deserve our solidarity and they have a rightful place and all the skills needed to start producing cleaner forms of transportation. They deserve our solidarity because they are our fellow workers and fellow human beings. Today the autoworkers, next the teachers, then the state workers...everyone is going to take a hard hit as the economy recovers through permanent reductions in wages and living standards.
The unions are clearly management tools. In the case of the UAW, usually ruled by family dynasties. That's right-hereditary union "leadership". It is impossible for me not to sympathize with people who have been screwed by the bosses, the union apparatus and the state. As someone who gets laid off on a regular basis due to the nature of my work I can only express solidarity with workers who are seeing their wages cut in union negotiated deals. What is happening to them is happening to everyone, it's all a part of one great social disaster. Capitalism itself is a tragedy, it was flawed and doomed from the start despite its ability to revolutionize production, despite all its clever financial adaptations. Capitalism itself was doomed from the start to destroy the world environment and itself.
We have all become too docile. We prefer cults and leaders to collective action. Even a little narodnik style revenge killing of individual bosses would be a step forward from the suffocating silence among US workers. Then there are examples of workers in South Korea and at FIAT in Italy. Egyptian workers are fighting back. Chinese workers are fighting back. It isn't as if workers in the US couldn't do the same but there is real fear here along with a lack of experience waging strikes and struggles that prevents workers from getting a glimpse of how much power they actually have if they chose to wield it. Workplaces have shrunk in size so that the workers in them don't even have the physical numbers to wage a struggle in the old way-one workplace at a time-union style.
Commenting by HaloScan
