23.03.2000

Occupy and nationalise

BMW's decision to off-load Rover to the venture capitalists Alchemy Partners will cost many thousands of jobs throughout the car industry and the west Midlands as a whole. Estimates vary. At least 6,000 workers are facing the sack at Longbridge alone. The knock-on total will be far greater. Figures start from a low 20,000 and go to a high of 80,000. A human disaster on a scale not witnessed in Britain since the decimation of the coal industry by Thatcher's government.

To make matters worse for New Labour's beleaguered trade and industry secretary, Stephen Byers, Ford is making dark noises about shedding 1,500 workers at the Dagenham plant in Essex. Byers refuses to intervene. You can't buck the market - here we have official New Labour's pro-business doctrine. That, and the empty gestures directed at BMW, highlight the extent to which this government has embraced the inhuman logic and cynicism of Thatcherite capitalism. In thrall to the 'blind hand of the market', Blair's government will do nothing to jeopardise "Britain's reputation as a good place for foreign companies to invest" (Financial Times March 20).

Purely in market terms Rover cannot be saved. Though a big employer in Britain, Rover is in reality small fry. To be profitable the manufacture of non-luxury cars long ago necessitated huge volumes of production. Britain's home-owned car industry was in visible crisis from at least the early 1960s onwards. Transnationals such as Ford and Vauxhall (General Motors) could achieve significantly higher levels of efficiency. Competition from France, Italy, Germany, and Japan also steadily ate into the British market. That is why the Labour government of Harold Wilson oversaw the state-sponsored merger of the British car companies in 1967.

Massive subsidies merely delayed the inevitable. British Leyland went bust in the mid-1970s. However, in order to preserve Britain's dwindling industrial base and to placate a still potent trade union movement the company was promptly nationalised. This was the last gasp of state capitalism. The limits of pure trade union militancy were also reached.

To keep the concern afloat, the unions, including the formerly militant shop stewards committees, allowed themselves to be embroiled into the mire of class collaboration. One compromise after another followed. Derek Robinson -'Red Robbo'- led the way and in the end paid the price with his own job.

As a component part of their programme to break the back of working class power the Tories privatised Leyland. Trade union militancy was a spent force. Amidst rumours of corruption and back-handers, British Aerospace bought the Longbridge, Cowley, Swindon, and Solihull plants for a song and in turn got £800 million from BMW for what is now Rover.

Of course, BMW is beset with its own intractable problems. The world car industry is experiencing chronic overproduction: there is, reports The Guardian, "25% overcapacity" (March 18). Moreover, compared with other car companies BMW is no giant. It is a medium-sized producer still controlled and half-owned by the Quandt family. They hold 48% of the shares.

Through acquiring Rover BMW was seeking to achieve economies of scale which would allow it to withstand the giants and emerging supergroups - Daimler-Benz and Chrysler are in alliance, so are General Motors and Fiat, Renault has a big stake in Nissan, and Volvo recently became part of Ford. Obviously BMW has now been forced to retrench. Rover's losses were said to amount to £2 million a day. So the Land Rover plant in Solihull is to be sold to Ford for £1.85 billion and Rover abandoned to Alchemy. Industry insiders speculate about a BMW takeover by Volkswagen.

For its part Alchemy has as much chance of rescuing Rover as a serious player in the world car market as the medieval alchemists had of turning base metal into gold. The plan is clear. Alchemy will oversee a massive wave of sackings, sell tracts of Longbridge land for housing and light industry and then after two or three years move on. Rover, if it survives, will be left a mere niche producer. MG sports cars are supposed to be the future. Instead of turning out 180,000 cars production is expected to be reduced to no more than 40,000.

Tied to New Labour and under conditions of overproduction, the TUC and trade union bureaucracy exposes its utter bankruptcy over Longbridge. Negotiating retraining and regional aid packages with the government are sure signs of surrender. True, some trade union officials have spoken of strike action. But in today's circumstances that would save, not cost, the bosses money. Protest strikes can, of course, be used to galvanise and make propaganda, but are no substitute for a coherent fighting strategy.

Nor do calls to bring Britain into line with European legislation on "consultation" organise effective resistance. "It is a disgrace that British workers get less protection from mass redundancy than their European counterparts," moans MSF's Roger Lyons (The Times March 20). Consultation is one thing, protection another. The former can come via the EU and still end in mass sackings. The latter must be based on effective trade unionism and solidarity - banned under Tory legislation, carried on and defended by New Labour. Yet the trade union bureaucracy steadfastly refuses to challenge, let alone defy, the anti-trade union laws. Ending business secrecy would be excellent - not that EU law allows for that. But what Longbridge and other workers want is to maintain their livelihoods in the here and now.

Trade union delegations to Munich pleading for Joachim Milberg, BMW chair, to continue with British operations only serve to defuse and disorganise. They are completely misdirected. The bottom line for BMW is profits, not workers' jobs. Appealing to capitalist morality, or advising them on how to make Rover profitable, is to sow illusions and encourage passivity.

Even worse are the "Battle for Britain" slogans coming from the lips of Sir Ken Jackson, AEEU general secretary, the TGWU's Bill Morris, and GMB's John Edmonds. Demands from them, and various Labour MPs, for a boycott of BMW cars and for British people to buy British is little more than crude chauvinism. Such campaigns unite all classes in Britain as a nation and at the same time put the blame on all classes in Germany. Our principle should be class, not nation. We do not want to see BMW workers in Germany suffer - soon they too could, after all, face mass sackings at the hands of Volkswagen.

Our lodestar ought to be international workers' solidarity. Nationalism, no matter how it is cloaked in leftwing or trade union language, is poisonous for our cause.

German car workers, above all those in BMW, should be the closest allies of Longbridge and other Rover workers in Britain. Why, given the takeover of Rover, did the trade unions in Britain not strive for industrial unions uniting all BMW workers? That is what communists called for, crucially at a rank and file level. The CPGB has pointed out again and again that workers need to organise into a European Union trade union centre and European-wide industrial unions. For us this parallels our call for a fully democratic federal EU and a Communist Party of the EU.

Communists agree with those Longbridge workers who oppose moves by the AEEU and TGWU bureaucracy to trade off terms and conditions for a marginal reduction in sackings. We say, no selling of conditions and no sackings.

The most effective tactic at this moment in time must be to occupy Longbridge and all other Rover offices and plants. That way workers instantly gain leverage both over BMW and Alchemy. Buying what you cannot take possession of becomes very problematic financially, to say nothing of being potentially suicidal. There is another major advantage - the workforce is not whittled away by layoffs and redundancy deals, but acts together as one. In occupation of the plants mass meetings can be organised and democratic control from below instituted. An army of rank and file agitators can thereby be trained and sent not only throughout Britain - including to Ford Dagenham, Harland and Wolff, and other workplaces under threat - but to Germany and its BMW workers.

Above all the fight to save the rights and conditions of Rover workers has to be politicised. That is vital. The UK state must immediately nationalise Rover without compensation. We must also insist upon workers' control. Through mass pressure and mass action Blair's government can be forced, on behalf of collective capital, to take responsibility for the inability of BMW or any other capitalist company to keep Rover running.

Such a demand has nothing whatsoever to do with taking a step on the road to some national socialist utopia. That is the statist programme of left social democracy, Scargillism, and 'official communism'. Socialism is not universal nationalisation. Socialism is revolutionary working class power and the beginning of human liberation on a world scale. Our demand for nationalisation is entirely concerned with workers' rights, conditions, and ability to organise today ... and therefore its ability to act decisively tomorrow.