Over the past number of weeks, Detroit’s auto bailout has been in the news. However, the media refuses to frame the debate as “class conflict” despite obvious parallels. Recently, The New York Times published an article about how some auto workers were approaching the bailout. Here’s an excerpt:
DETROIT — The Sunday service at Greater Grace Temple began with the Clark Sisters song “I’m Looking for a Miracle” and included a reading of this verse from the Book of Romans: “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.”
Pentecostal Bishop Charles H. Ellis III, who shared the sanctuary’s wide altar with three gleaming sport utility vehicles, closed his sermon by leading the choir and congregants in a boisterous rendition of the gospel singer Myrna Summers’s “We’re Gonna Make It” as hundreds of worshipers who work in the automotive industry — union assemblers, executives, car salesmen — gathered six deep around the altar to have their foreheads anointed with consecrated oil.
While Congress debated aid to the foundering Detroit automakers Sunday, many here whose future hinges on the decision turned to prayer.1
Today I found an article on the World Socialist Web Site about the apparent class conflict involved in the bailout:
It is now clear that the central issue in the debate over whether to extend a bailout to the US auto industry is the destruction of the conditions of auto workers. Whether it takes the form of a government loan or the bankruptcy of one or more of Detroit’s Big Three carmakers, the aim is to create conditions which will rip up existing labor agreements and drive auto workers back to conditions of poverty and ruthless exploitation which existed prior to the industrial battles that built the United Auto Workers union in the 1930s.2
Unless I am mistaken, Mr. White’s concern that the auto bailout will drive auto workers “back to conditions of poverty and ruthless exploitation” comes right out of the Marxist playbook. Here’s how it works:
The only retort that Marx, Engels and all their followers down to the Russian Bolshevists and the European and American professorial admirers of Marx knew to advance against their critics was the notorious ideology doctrine. According to this makeshift a man’s intellectual horizon is fully determined by his class affiliation. The individual is constitutionally unfit to reach out and to grasp any other doctrine than one that furthers the interests of his own “class” at the expense of other “classes.” It is, therefore, unnecessary for a proletarian to pay any attention to whatever bourgeois authors may say and to waste time refuting their statements. All that is needed is to unmask their bourgeois background. That settles the matter.
This is the method to which Marx and Engels and later Marxians resorted in dealing with all dissenters. They never embarked upon the hopeless task of defending their self-contradictory system against devastating criticism. All they did was to call their opponents stupid bourgeois and to ascribe their opposition to their bourgeois class affiliation.3
Why should you care if the auto bailout is in fact mostly about class conflict? And why should you care if the media is not framing the story this way?
Simply because Communist China owns a significant portion of U.S. debt - some estimate approximately $1.4 trillion worth. If China precipitated the financial bailout (see China and the Bailout), the fact that the debate over Detroit’s auto bailout is being played out as class conflict between the auto workers and management/shareholders is significant. Perhaps this was just one part of the socialist agenda.4
After reviewing The $1.4 Trillion Question, I wonder if the citizens of the United States are being played for suckers. What’s your take?
Sources:
- Bunkley, Nick. “Detroit Churches Pray for ‘God’s Bailout’“. 7 December 2008. The New York Times. 10 December 2008.↩
- White, Jerry. “The US Auto Bailout and the Socialist Alternative to Concessions“. 17 November 2008. World Socialist Web Site. 10 December 2008.↩
- von Mises, Ludwig. “Bettina Bien Greaves, ed. “The Marxian Class Conflict Doctrine“. Economic Freedom and Interventionism: An Anthology of Articles and Essays. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007.↩
- For example, see Strachey on Keynesian Economics; Keynesian Economics and Savings; and, John Maynard Keynes and Communism.↩


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