[GAR companies which has tried to solve its…]

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GAR companies which has tried to solve its market problems by dumping (selling below. cost of production) on foreign markets. For instance, sales of the Marina in the United States (where it sells for $320 less than the British price) rose by 64% in the first three months of this year.

A committee of the US Congress is now trying to initiate a government investigation of this dumping, especially from Leyland, Volkswagen and the Japanese companies. This may reinforce pressures towards protectionism which in other countries has already taken root.

Italy has imposed a quota of 1000 cars a year against Japan. British producers are pressing for similar controls against Japanese dumping. And the same reactionary call has been taken up even by some Labour MPs including Ray Carter (Birmingham Northfield).

In "Australia, where British Leyland has already been forced out of business, the government has imposed controls limiting the import of cars to 20% of the market, following threats from the General Motors subsidiary, GM Holden, that it would sack 5000 workers if this was not done.

FALL-OFF

After the oil crisis the fall off in sales was not at first matched by a reduction in production. This is clear from the information available about stock of cars held by the major manufacturers.

By the end of 1974 the US producers had the unprecedented level of over 100 days of sales in stock (Chrysler exceptionally had as much as 132 days). The figure fell to 69 days in February after the rebate scheme but by April was back again to about 80 days and was still rising. US importers had 6 months of stocks. These were ironically concentrated in the low petrol consumption models which the manufacturers had hoped would provide their way out of the crisis.

In Italy Fiat, the major producer, had 300,000 cars in stock in December which is three months sales. In Britain stock figures are normally the most closely guarded secrets for fear that information will strengthen the workers at the expense of the management.

As soon as it became clear to the producers that the unacceptable levels of stocks were not likely to be reduced by restoration of demand then almost universally companies introduced programmes of redundancies and short-time In the US General Motors and Ford both partially or completely closed about half of their assembly plants for periods of 2 to 4 weeks at the end of 1974. Between them the American motor corporations had by December indefinitely laid off 205,000 workers. Only 40,000 of these have since been taken back and the rest have come to the end of their lay-off pay.

In Italy in October 1974 Fiat put 70% of its workforce on a 3-day week; this move was replaced in December with an agreement with the unions involving an equivalent cut-back in production by extended shut-downs at Christmas and Easter.

In Germany during 1974 Volkswagen laid off 10,000 workers and lost 60 days of production through short-time working. Ford and Opel also had extensive shut-downs, stopped recruitment and encouraged early retirement.

This summer US Ford has made plans to close most of its plants for two weeks in June and Chrysler US is planning to close four of its six US assembly plants for up to six weeks at a time.

British companies, especially British Leyland, have had considerable success with schemes of voluntary redundancies through which they hope to reduce their BLMC Marina track at labour force with the of organised resistance.

In Germany Volkswagen, too, have introduced a voluntary redundancy programme through which they hope to dispense of 10,000 workers out of their proposed total reduction by the end of 1976 of 25,000 of their workforce.

Voluntary redundancy, a new development in the employers' struggle for speed-up is being facilitated by the reformist trade union leaderships who prefer to "avoid confrontation" and who do not challenge the employer's right to reduce his labour force.

Opposition to voluntary redundancy must centre on exposing the way in which it whittles down the numbers of those employed and is then used as a lever to force speed-up and break manning agreements, and must concentrate on bringing the strength of the unions against such schemes. Those who take voluntary redundancy must be made aware that they risk long-term unemployment as the slump develops.

PROFITS DOWN

the world's major car Cowley; Leyland are dumping Marinas in the panies, except Renault, have in the last year declared huge declines in profit (for example, US Ford and General Motors down 60%; American Motors down 84%). In fact they are virtually all now operating at a loss, that is they have been failing to sustain their elementary function as viable parts of the capitalist system.

Where car companies declare a profit it is merely because company accounts have been compiled without considering the effects of inflation. Inflation makes apparent profits into real losses because companies count as part of their profits the increase in the value of TABLE I Declared Profit Real Profit TABLE II Money owed Money owed Difference which they can never realise.

This also means that companies which have actually declared losses like Volkswagen, Fiat, BLMC, Chrysler US and UK and Toyo Kogyo, have really been making even bigger losses. In order to survive at all the car companies have been forced into radical changes in their financial policy -going into debt on a large scale to the banks; delaying the payment of bills due to their suppliers and demanding rapid payment of debts due to them; and running down their cash balances.

This process is not limitless for in the end an inability to pay debts causes bankruptcy. Nearly all the major companies would by now be bankrupt if it were not for the resort to various desperate measures. And as these run out then one by one they are being forced to turn to the state for financial assistance.

British Leyland is the best known example of this. But in France the state aided and partly financed a merger with Peugeot which rescued the enormous Citroen company from otherwise certain death. This was combined with another merger between the two lorry producing firms of Berliet and Saviem which involved partial nationalisation. Initially the Frenct government provided £130 million to finance these two mergers.

In Germany the Federal government has refused to bale out Volkswagen (of which it owns 40%) from its last year's £90 million declared loss. The Finance Minister has asserted that "We don't want any British Leylands here" • The sheer size of the motor industry in all major countries will however force all kinds of governemnts to intervene rather than allow the dramatic volumes of unemployment which would otherwise result.

The case of British Leyland is a perfect illustration of this increasingly general problem for capitalist governments. BLMC is the largest private employer in Britain (204,00( workers) and until last year (when it was overtaken by ICI) was the country's largest exporter.

It is a company which until 1974 always declared a profit which, when adjusted for inflation, was always in reality a loss. As the Ryder report made clear it was able to declare a profit only at the cost of a rapid run down of its productive assets.

Leyland declared and real profit figures since 1972 are in Table 1.

The case of Leyland shows that in spite of the increasing difficulties since 1973 its problems long predated the oil crisis. In these circumstances bankruptcy up to now has only been avoided by increased borrowing, the running down of assets and not paying bills, which has made the company notorious.

It only gets away with this because so many of its suppliers depend on it alone for their sales, and perhaps (as a lot of its debts must be to nationalised industries -steel and fuel) because the state has been willing to give Leyland concealed subsidies. The figures in Table 2 illustrate this graphically.

Before finally succumbing to the pressures which led to state intervention and the Ryder report, Leyland tried namerous other methods of ensuring its survival: it launched a major attack on the unions in the company, culminating in the unsuccessful attempt to victimise Alan Thornett in Cowley in April 1974; it tried to negotiate sufficient loans from the banks who refused, fearful for their own profits; it negotiated for a purchase of the company by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Iran During all this time Leyland had been secretly negotiating with Wedgewood Benn and when the Ryder committee was finally estab21.1 10.9

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60.1 00.0 39.9 1973 27.9 -24.6 1973 188.7 297.5 -119.8 SOCIALIST PRESS, Thurs lished its immediate reason was not that Leyland was down to its. last penny but because someone inside the management leaked the negotiations.

With Leyland, as in all similar cases, the implementation of the Ryder report will not solve the basic problem of the company in capitalist society - its incapability generating stable profits. State participation of this kind in no way takes the company outside the laws of capitalism.

For the motor industry the economic outlook is worsening. While the current rate of inflation is ripping into the employers' profits and running riot in his account books, any concerted government attempt to curb that inflation through cuts in the money supply or cuts in public spending can only strike at the financing and the markets of the car companies.

There is no capitalist answer to the question of closures and redundancies - if private ownership 1974 -22.4 -112.4 1974 180.9 373.9 -193.0 and private profit were to be maintained it would mean mass sackings and a much reduced car indsutry.

Nor can any of the problems be solved by nationalist measures such as import controls and protectionism. These simply shift the crisis from one section of workers onto another, and in any event simply hasten world wide protectionism, in which markets contract further still. The working class is an internationally oppressed class, and its programme of struggle must be one that does not cut across the fight of workers in other countries.

DEMANDS

The fight against redundancies must centre around the demand for work-sharing to be instituted, with-; out loss of pay, administered by trade union committees. The employer's right to cut his labour force in order to increase his profits must be challenged, and the worker's right: to employment at the pay-rates won by the unions must be defended.

By demanding that the reduced work available be shared out by trade union committees, the beginning of workers' control over manning and production are brought forward.

• If the employers refuse this then factory occupations must be called for, electing committees of trade unionists to organise and protect the occupation, and fighting for maximum local and national The occupation must demand access to the accounts and order books of the employers to examine both the claims of the employers and the real workings of the company. If the employer is shown to be bankrupt, then the case for his immediate nationalisation, without compensation except to small sayers is proved.

Such nationalisation must be seen as a part of a regeneration of the industry under a programme of government contracts as part of a developing planned socialist economy. The factory committees must manage the plants carrying out these contracts.

The continued development of inflation and the erosion of the value of the pound must be compensated by the fight for the sliding scale of wages, which under such conditions would maintain the value of take home pay by providing increases to compensate for the increase in the cost of living af working class families, as assessed by trade union committees.

Only on these demands can the ruthless logic of capitalism be ans wered in the car indsutry. Only in this way can the enormous productive forces be utilised for social need rather than forcibly cløsed and scrapped, throwing thousands on the dole and forcing enormous speed up on those still in work.

1975 We have received a letter from a member of the Workers Fight group, who also belongs to the Womens Liberation Movement, taking up some points in our article in Socialist Press 7 on the 'Woman Question' • She says* • • Firstly, by concentrating on the social relations within the family, which you seem to see as the cause of women's oppression you fail to examine the family in any historical context or to relate it to the relations of capitalist production. You have therefore failed to answer, or even to raise, many of the problems which the womens movement for the past year has been trying to come to grips with, namely why has capitalism been unable to fully socialise housework and has maintained the family and what is the relationship between woman's work in the home and the production of surplus value on the shop floor? ...

While we agree with the reader on the importance of tracing back the historical development of the bourgeois family, and as Socialist Press 7 explained, the article was merely the beginning of the discussion on the question of women's oppression, we will do this in order to explain how the social relations in the bourgeois family developed. We reiterate that it is these relations which must be replaced by overthrowing the economic material base that they exist on - the capitalist system of private ownership of the means of production -and replacing it by a planned socialist society in which no member is oppressed.

Marx: The modern family contains in embryo not only slavery but serfdom also...

In order to undertake this historical study we turn of course to Engel's Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State. Engels developed this study from the research of Lewis Morgan, the findings of which were published in 1877 in a book called 'Ancient Society.

Engels maintained that Morgan rediscovered in his own way the materialist conception of history, that is that in the last resort the production and reproduction of immediate life are the determining factors which condition the social institutions under which men live. Before the development of the productivity of labour, and with it the wealth of society, the social order appeared to be dominated by ties of sex only. As productivity of labour developed and with it private property, the possibility of utilising the labour power of others, and therefor the basis of class antagonisms, arose. So the old society based on sex groups was overthrown, the state based on classes appeared, and with it a new family system entirely dominated by the property system.

Morgan's work traced the development of society through the stages of savagery and barbarism to civilisation. He defined savagery as the period in which the use of natural products predominated and man only produced things in order to help him in this appropriation.

In the period of barbarism cattle breeding and land cultivation and hence methods of increasing natural productivity through human activity were learnt. Civilisation is of course the period of industry and culture.

The works of Morgan, and Bachofen the Swiss researcher, both supply evidence that the family form in the period of savagery was that of group marriage. Various types of groups are described, all based on the communistic common household but with different rulings on inter-marriage of natural brothers and sisters, etc. The strengthening of the stock seems to have been the motive behind banning certain pairings so that the development was towards more and more restriction and finally into 'pairing marriage'. This was still only a loose arrangement and could be ended immediately by either partner and so did not in any way weaken the communistic household.

DESC In the group marriage it was uncertain of course who the father of a child was and so descent could only be traced on the mother' side - i.e. the female line alone was recognised. Engels here adopts Bachofen's term of 'mother right' although as he says there was no such thing in the legal sense. Also in the pairing family due to the instability of the arrangement the children remained wíth the mother. In the communistic household the woman was highly respected as Engels describes: "That woman was the slave of man at the commencement of society is one of the most absurd notions that have come down to us from the period of Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. Woman occupied not only a free but also a highly respected position among all savages... and. "The division of labour between the sexes is determined by causes entirely different from those that determine the status of woman in society. Peoples whose women have to work much harder than we would consider proper often have far more real respect for women than our Europeans have for theirs."

So as we see it was the process of social selection with the motivation of strengthening the stock that led from group marriage to pairing marriage but in no way was the status of women in the society altered since the communistic household remained. As Engels said "If no new social driving forces had come into operation there would have been no reason why a new form of the family should arise out of the pairing family."

SU RPLUS

But these new social forces did begin to operate. We now enter into the period of barbarism and man began to discover ways of increasing the productivity of natur through breeding cattle and field cultivation. Human labour power began to yield a surplus over the cost of its maintenance and hence began to acquire an exchange value, and captives from war began to be used as slaves.

The division of labour then in the family was such that the man was responsible for the procuring of food and consequently the ownership of the means of providing food - the herds, slaves, land, tools, etc. became his. The woman owned the household goods and in case of separation the children remained with her. Consequently a man could not leave his possessions to his children but they went to his sister's children or the descendents of his mother's sister - following the female line.

WEALTH

Thus we have the new social driving force. - the accumulation of wealth. This elevated the status of man in the family and created the stimulus to overthrow tradition in order that a man's children might inherit his wealth. As Engels says, this revolution was "one of the most decisive ever experienced by mankind" and was the "world-historic defeat of the female sex." because the man thus became the master of the house. As Marx said "the modern family contains in embryo not only slavery but serfdom also ... it contains within itself in miniature all the antagonisms which later develop on a wide scale within society and its state."

Monogamy then was established with its predominant emphasis on fidelity on the part of the wife, because of the necessity of ensuring the undisputed paternity of children in order that wealth could safely be passed on. Monogamy was "the first form of the family based not on natural but on economic conditions, namely, on the victory of private property over original, naturally developed, common ownership".

The question now is - what about the working class who accumulate no wealth and are not concerned about inheritance - why do they conform to the laws of bourgeois marriage and succumb just as much as the ruling class to "a wedded life of leaden boredom, which is described as domestic bliss"

This is of course because it is the ruling class which determines the ideology of the state - as Marx and Engels say in The German Ideology: •The class which is the ruling material force of society is:at the same time its ruling intellectual force".

The ruling class controls the education system, and the ideas they put across are no more than the ideal expression of dominant material relationships. Consequently working class children are subjected in school to the ideas of the ruling class - that employers have rights to hire and fire workers and that in the home the man is dominant.

KEITH JOSEPH

We now have Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher in their 'Centre for Policy Studies' desperately trying to restrengthen the bourgeois ideology. As they say, the Conservative Party is the party of tradition, for conserving the family and the values "developed with the spread of independent property-owning from the late Middle Ages.. ." (Keith Joseph, Guardian 27.1.75). They say the family must be the centre of our thinking - "If the family weakens, society fails" (Keith Joseph, Daily Telegraph, 28.1.75) and abhor the moves towards comprehensive schooling which "destroys the traditional framework"

Religion also plays its part in the perpetuation of the bourgeois marriage - both for the working class and the middle class - by obscuring the basic fact that marriage is merely an economic arrangement with the mystique of "till death us do part" ". Advertising of course in the present day reinforces the role of woman and the family by presenting the ideal family in this.consumer society. However ever though the influence of the ruling class in these spheres is very great the social relations of production themselves in capitalist society are sufficient to ensure that the oppressed working class accept the dominance of the bourgeoisie. Oppression in the factory, in bad housing conditions, living on inadequate social security when unemployed - these material conditions in themselves, direct products of the established relations of production, are the biggest factor which prevent the working class from developing their own ideology.

Consequently it is impossible for working class family structure to change until the material conditions are gained for that change. Monogamy arose "out of the concentration of considerable wealth in the hands of one person - and that a man - and out of the desire to bequeath this wealth to this man's children and to no one else's". (Engels, Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State). The overthrow of the capitalist system and the building of socialism will provide the material base for a new social driving force to bring about new family structures based not on exploitation but on the freedom of all individuals to freely enter relationships.

SOCIALISED

As outlined in the article in Socialist Press 7 a socialist economy will involve women as well as men fully in the productive process and will provide a system of social dining rooms, laundries and child care facilities such that the tasks of the household become socialised tasks - undertaken for the community by the community in the most efficient way, and the care and education of children become the responsibility of the whole community and not just the burden of their mothers.

Capitalism therefore has been unable to fully socialise housework because it is not in its interest so to do. It needs to maintain the bourgeois family unit because segregation into individual families prevents the working class from feeling a sense of unity and acting as a class. As Engels said about animals, the collective feeling of the horde can have no greater enemy than the collective feeling of the family.

SEPARATI So we see that the reader, in separating the social relations within the bourgeois family from the social relations of production under capitalism, is led into separating the question of women's oppression from the oppression of the working class as a whole.

The question of the relationship between women's work in the home and the production of surplus value on the shopfloor seems to be explored in order to prove the necessity for 'wages for housework' which is a thoroughly reactionary demand which would only serve to isolate the housewife even further.

In reply to the remainder of the reader's letter we think that our interventions into the TUC women': rally and the National Abortion Campaign demonstration, which have been reported in Socialist Press, and the motions we are bringing up in the unions on maternity leave, creche facilities and abortion rights show that we are not passive in our fight on these issues and that it is not necessary to affiliate to various single issue campaigns in order to win women to the revolutionary movement.

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Jack Jones' role in preparing the ground for the Labour government to introduce state pay laws gave this year's T&GWU conference enormous significance. The proposals on support for the social contract and flat rate pay increases were orchestrated with the statements of Healey and Wilson and designed to create the best conditions for the imposition of massive wage cuts on the working class in the interests of capitalism.

The only consistent opposition at the conference based on an alternative programme, was the Workers Socialist League. The policies of a sliding scale of wages and a sliding scale of hours, were debated in front of a large and important conference for the first time. The votes for these resolutions, though small in number, are very important. For these reasons we have given full coverage to the conference. je FORTIRDI TRANSPORT & GENERAL WORKERS UNION UNITY IS STRENGTH ESS, Thursday July 10th, 1975 CONFERENCE