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The Sinking of the West |
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by Robert Kurz
Email: mbatko (nospam) lycos.com (verified) |
07 Dec 2004
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The wave of plant closures and mass layoffs rumbles and no end is foreseen..A process of de-industrialization occurs..The West, the destructive logic of industrial work pressure, is itself the error and its own downfall. |
THE SINKING OF THE WEST
By Robert Kurz
[This essay originally published in: Neuen Deutschland, October 29, 2004 is translated from the German on the World Wide Web, http://www.exit-online.org/html/druck.php.]
The wave of plant closures and mass layoffs rumbles and no end is foreseen. Karstadt, Opel and VW are only the tip of the iceberg. The restrictive measures of transnational corporations are thematized spectacularly in the media while most dismissals in smaller firms and on the regional plane only appear in small print. The problem already has a history even if this history disappears in the short memory of the media fixated on “events”. Who still remembers the defensive battle of the English miners against the massive mine closures of the Thatcher era? The unsuccessful manifestations of the dockworkers followed later in Germany and elsewhere. Despite street battles and burning barricades, the same game is now repeated in Spanish Cadiz. The steelworkers were next in line. Wherever one looks, demoralized rearguard actions are everywhere.
A process of inexorable de-industrialization occurs. As everybody knows, jobs are melting away on a large scale in the 3rd industrial revolution through automation and informational reorganization. Insufficient jobs not equal to past jobs arise in the service sector in the Ruhr area and the English industrial district. Therefore over-capacities form for want of social purchasing power in the relatively labor-poor, high-tech production and in the great traditional mail-order companies and department store chains, the last symbols of the economic wonder that long faded away. After the technological thinning of personnel, growing parts of the rationalized production and distribution are shut down on account of the shriveling purchasing power and markets.
The traditional industrial structure together with purchasing power, markets and consumer palaces is not simply emigrating to China or Eastern Europe. Only relatively narrow sectors of a pure export industrialization are built there with the help of western capital at the cost of a runaway closure of unprofitable domestic industries. What arises as growth in the export economy zones is caused by financial bubbles as earlier in Japan and the tiger states and turns out to be speculative over-investment. It is only a question of time until the seeming boom of de-industrialization in China capsizes and investment ruins and industrial museums are also seen there.
All past crises and industrial revolutions flowed into a further expansion of industrial employment. The struggles of the assimilated unions and social movements are so blindly oriented to sharing in the industrial scent of capital valorization even in the derived sector5s of the services and infrastructures. No one wants to know that this paradigm has struck its absolute limits. Therefore people believe the absurd protestations of the German government that “individual cases” and “management errors” are responsible. “Karstadt managers are the sinking of the West”, declared a Verdi poster at a Karstadt branch. The search for scapegoats will not help further but will promote radical rightwing ideologies. The system is central, not individual “mistakes”. The “West”, literally the destructive logic of industrial work pressure, reproduction through money income and goods consumption is itself the error – and ultimately its own downfall. |
See also:
http://www.mbtranslations.com
http://www.corpwatch.org
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