Reject deviation from the path

Centrals, unions and movements must organize the struggle for jobs, wages and public health
They must stand for the nationalization, without compensation, occupation and worker control of Ford

Masses 627, Editorial, January 24, 2021

Ford’s closure forced union leaders to stop standing idly by. Bureaucrats had to convene presential assemblies, set up vigils on the doors of factories, make protests, call parliamentarians, and promise unity against unemployment.

This striking event followed the closing of a Mercedes plant in the countryside of São Paulo. Other announcements for the closure of manufacturing units, such as 3M and Yoki, turned on more red lights. These cases are enough to verify the process of economic disintegration that Brazil is going through. But, the situation is much more serious. Studies indicate that, since 2015, 17 factories have been closed per day, totaling 36,600. In 2020 alone, 5,500 factories were extinguished.

The industrial crash raises unemployment, and increases underemployment. It reflects the regression of the national economy, in a world scenario of massive destruction of productive forces. This results in the mutilation of the workforce. According to Dieese calculations, just the deactivation of Ford in Brazil will result in more than 118,000 layoffs, direct and indirect. Thus, the army of unemployed and underemployed swells, which, since 2014, has been growing incessantly. Among other reasons, the average income of workers has fallen. That is why the exploited poverty and misery advance. Millions of young people do not see the possibility of employment. They are pushed into underemployment.

Disintegrating capitalism can no longer develop the productive forces. Industrial regression expresses the contradiction between advanced productive forces and capitalist relations of production. Worldwide, there was an excess of productive capacity, without a corresponding market, which narrows more and more, due to the exploitation of labor, the increasing concentration of wealth and, therefore, the regression of social development. The crisis in the auto industry is no exception, although it is more prominent. In Brazil, the installed capacity is 5 million units, today, it moves only half of that potential. The developmental plans of the past, as can be seen, run into the economic laws of capitalism. Much state resources were channeled to the automobile sector, in the belief that, through this path, national development and, with it, social development would be ensured.

The leaps ahead in certain monopoly sectors – the most expressive was the automotive sector – increased the concentration of wealth in one pole, and of poverty of the masses in another. They caused great imbalances in the general development of the national productive forces. Just look at the historical composition of the gigantic public debt, to see how much monopolies and financial capital plundered resources and ended up lifting powerful barriers to Brazil’s economic and social development. Ford’s closure marks a milestone in the regression of national productive forces and, in particular, the automotive industry.

The union leaderships were forced to break their long quarantine, to show that something should be done, in view of Ford’s great attack on the working class and the Brazilian economy. They started, however, by tracing a path that deflects the resistance of metallurgists and the proletariat as a whole. They conditioned the assemblies waiting for the opening of negotiations with the automaker. They presented the prospect of obtaining an indemnity agreement. They set up a vigil at the factory door, which can do little or nothing. And they set up an advertising campaign around deindustrialization, the need for an abstract national development plan, the call for attention from government authorities, and parliamentary criticism of the Bolsonaro government. These defeatist responses dampened the impact of Ford’s statement on the decision to leave Brazil, regardless of the trail of layoffs.

The worsening of the pandemic, the state of barbarism in the Amazon State, and the fraudulent start of vaccination covered the weak resistance of the metallurgists. Now, the Popular Brazil Front (PT) and the  People Without Fear Front (PSOL) have come out of the catacombs, to reopen the season for Bolsonaro’s impeachment, starting with a motorcade, suitable to the petty bourgeoisie.

The Revolutionary Workers Party calls on the workers, the oppressed youth and the class-conscious vanguard to reject this deviation, mounted by union bureaucracy and reformist leaderships. The task of the moment is to organize a national movement around the nationalization of Ford, without compensation, occupation of factories and workers’ control of production. Demanding nationalization from the Bolsonaro government and governors is the best way to show, from experience, that they are, above all, bourgeois, regardless of their political orientations at the time. It is the best way to show the proletariat and other exploited that bourgeois governments are servants of imperialism, multinationals and financial capital. The defense of factory occupation and workers’ control is the method of struggle objectively placed by the situation, and the condition for uniting the working class in defense of the nationalization of closed factories, jobs and against layoffs.