For the occupation of factories!
For expropriation without compensation, and state-ization under workers’ control of the transnationals Nissan and Renault in France, in the Spanish State and at continental level!
We are all Nissan-Renault workers!
The same class, the same fight against the same enemy!
Globally, the transnational Nissan has planned an retrenchment of production, the closure of several plants that will mean the layoff of 20,000 workers, especially in Europe, and the cut of 15% of its workforce worldwide. This restructuring plan is accompanied by a joint plan of the alliance of Nissan with Renault and Mitsubishi, which seek to relocate their production to focus on the United States and Asia. Some of the victims are the Nissan plants in Barcelona, which will be replaced by the Renault plants in France. This will mean that in Barcelona the employers will leave 3,000 direct workers and 20,000 indirect workers from supply companies unemployed.
The response of the workers at the Montcada, Zona Franca and Sant Andreu plants in Barcelona has been an indefinite strike. The employers have refused to dialogue with the workers and also to create a feasibility plan for the different plants. To avoid layoffs in the face of the global economic and health crisis, Nissan could have converted its production to make artificial respirators for hospitals in the face of the pandemic. But it has not.
What is happening in this new world crisis, in which the Coronavirus has only been the cherry on top, is a new restructuring in which the transnational corporations are concentrating in a context in which the market is shrinking even more. There is a reconversion of transnational companies like in 2009, which is now also technological, as is the dispute over electric cars. In fact, Nissan, merged with Renault, as automotive transnationals, regroup within and from the EU to compete with transnational companies in the US sector and with Toyota and the rest of the Japanese automakers.
The victim this time will be, above all, the working class in the industrial centers of the metropolises of the imperialist powers, mainly in the European Union.
This concentration plan means increasing production with high technology for the development of electric cars, making 50% less workers work to produce a thousand times more than the current workforce of those companies and under conditions of absolute slavery. Capitalists need to dispute the market, invest in new technology, destroying what does not rend them profit and laying off workers mercilessly, who will become chronically unemployed.
Nissan does not fire or reorganize its production in Spain and the rest of Europe depending on what it decides in Barcelona. On the contrary. Everything is decided in the merged board of Nissan-Renault that is both in Paris and Tokyo.
The struggle of the Nissan workers is a great challenge, first of all, for the entire working class of the Spanish State and also of the whole European continent. Transforming the European proletariat of Western countries into maquila workers is the immediate objective of finance capital. The attack with labor flexibility on workers in France, Belgium, Portugal, Italy and throughout Europe is part of this Nissan-Renault offensive against its workers. The battle of the Nissan workers is that of all the European workers against the transnational companies and imperialist Europe, who concentrate their businesses and their attacks against the working class.
This struggle that the workers have undertaken has incredible potential. They are not alone, as we see in the combats that are taking place in more than 50 US cities, in Paris, in Greece and those that are waged by all the most precarious sectors of the European cities, as is the case of the Black Vests that march now in Paris. Nissan workers are now immigrants in their own nation... with no job papers, laid off and no life ahead.
The working class of Europe and the whole world must adjust the program to regroup their forces to strike hard at the class enemy on the continental and global level. GM workers from Silao, in Mexico, have made an international appeal to all workers in the automotive industries to fight together to stop the layoffs and to end labor flexibility and the jail-factories. A combative regrouping of international fighting by the working class to fight for their most immediate demands has become a matter of life or death.
This is opposed by the union bureaucracies and the social-imperialist parties, which betray the workers because they live on the coins that fall out of the pocket of the millionaire shareholders of the transnational corporations and the imperialist bankers.
There is an urgent need to update this program of the international proletariat in the face of this crisis of capital concentration, which occurs at a time when the world market has fiercely shrunk due to a new crisis of overproduction, which is a great blackmail to the working class that will suffer this great recession. Every worker in each factory will receive the entire concentrated weight of this crisis.
Years ago, the workers of the Renault of Romania (Dacia factory, NT) revolted demanding that they wanted to earn like the workers of the Renault of Paris. The union leaders prevented this unity and a common fight to hit the big bosses everywhere and at the same time. The war cry of the workers of the Renault of Romania was not heard. Today there are thousands of layoffs at the Renault in France... and in Romania... and at the Nissan in Barcelona.
Let’s unite the struggle of Nissan-Renault workers across borders! Capitalists come for all our conquests, for our work, our life and our dignity. Let’s strike together! They are not in crisis. They merge based on a new accumulation of wealth and capital extracted from the sweat and blood of all the workers. We workers do not have to pay for their conversion and their new and good businesses.
The unions of the regime and the bourgeois “left” of the Crown represent the interests of Nissan and the transnational corporations against the working class
In the face of this huge Nissan attack on the Barcelona plants, the union bureaucracies of CCOO and UGT have proposed a new ERTE. This measure, promoted in the midst of this pandemic by the bourgeois government of PSOE-Unidas Podemos, guarantees the benefits of the capitalists through the state, that is, the own workers, paying payrolls almost completely, instead of the businessmen. Because we are facing a government representing the big capitalists and the financial capital of the Bourbons, which only defends the interests of the imperialist transnationals and bankers under a benevolent disguise, these subsidies to the capitalists would save Nissan the costs of all the subsequent layoffs that the company and the government are preparing.
The other proposal for Nissan by the collaborationist union bureaucracy of CCOO and UGT, is requesting that the central governments and the Generalitat aid the company. Everyone seeks to support the company and not the workers, whom it is firing. The company will put the money of the subsidies in its pocket and leave thousands of exploited people on the street, as they did openly in 2008. The CCOO and UGT directorates have not even thought of calling a minimum solidarity strike in the automotive and metal sector as a whole. Their leaders are only there to divide our struggles.
The rest of the trade union left, like CGT, unfortunately, has limited itself to calling for the nationalization of factories and machinery, but they do not defend that it has to be an expropriation without compensation and under workers’ control, nor does it place on the table the obligatory occupation of the factories to defend the jobs of thousands of workers. Neither does it speak of the international perspective of such nationalization or of expropriation, or the demand for the opening of the accounting books and the liquidation of the trade secrecy of the entire industry at European level, issues to which we will refer further below.
The union leaderships have managed to encircle for now the struggle of the Nissan workers and the tragedy is that if they lose, this will mean a hard blow to the working class of the entire Spanish State.
The resolution of any workers’ organization that really wants to defend the interests of all workers is that any factory that closes, furloughs or dismisses its personnel must be taken over and put into production under the control of its workers, uniting its struggle with that of the workers of all the branch of production that, as with the automotive industry, is organized and centralized around imperialist Maastricht or the City of London, Tokyo or Wall Street.
Every serious fight must appeal to solidarity, coordination and unity, along with the millions of workers who can no longer bear unemployment, the wages of misery or live risking their lives in the factories for the profits of the capitalists.
It is a lie that there are no conditions to coordinate and extend Nissan’s workers’ fight. There is not a single sector of the working class or youth of the oppressed nations that does not have accounts to settle with this infamous regime of the monarchy and the politicians representing the capitalists and bankers. There are plenty of conditions to prepare and organize a great fight, as in the USA, as in France, as in Lebanon, as in Iraq, as in Chile and as yesterday in Catalonia.
The reformist “left”, hanging on the coattails of the monarchy, closes the way for the internationalist struggle of the working class in the Spanish State
The government of the PSOE, the Podemos and the traitors of the PCE-Izquierda Unida today centralizes the attack of the transnational corporations and the capitalists against the working class. All of these parties are spokespersons for the bosses and representatives of the Ibex 35 and an infamous regime that controls the union bureaucracy of the CCOO and UGT. On their shoulders the Bourbon monarchy rests, which is nothing more than the “conductor” of the financial capital of the Spanish State, associated with imperialist Maastricht.
Nor can we place much hope in what the alternative left, located to the left of Unidas Podemos, proposes.
If the position of Podemos and the PCE-Izquierda Unida is shameful, bowing to the designs of a PSOE totally handed over to the bosses and the Ibex 35 and to the proposals of the unions of the regime that controls the union bureaucracy in CCOO and UGT, we cannot either place high hopes on what the alternative left proposes, situated to the left of Unidas Podemos.
Neither the ultra-Stalinists, such as the PCPE, “Red Roja”, “Iniciativa Comunista” or PCTE, nor the ex-Trotskyists, such as Anticapitalists, “Izquierda Revolucionaria” (The Militant), “Corriente Roja” or CRT (Izquierda Diario), propose a position that is not social-imperialist and nationalistic; nor do the various anarchist groups. In all their declarations, a proletarian internationalism is conspicuous by its absence.
Neither is the false Catalan “independence” of the party of the petty bourgeoisie of the ERC going beyond proposing, in the Commission for the Social and Economic Reconstruction of the Spanish courts a timid concept of nationalization, void of content, without any support for the Catalan workers in fight.
Let us take as an example the “Left syndicalists” fraction that ex-Trotskyists of the “Izquierda Revolucionaria” have within the CCOO. They demand from the government of PSOE-Unidas Podemos and the Generalitat the immediate nationalization of the company under the control of the workers and also they call for extending the fight at the regional level within the Spanish State and for this they say that pressure must be put on the CCOO and UGT. But achieving this is only a starting point.
None of these currents says anything about coordinating the struggle of the workers of the transnational Nissan and Renault from Barcelona to Paris to Tokyo, which would make the working class invincible and allow it to fight as equals against the great bosses of monopolies. They turn a deaf ear to the appeal of the workers of General Motors in Mexico who call for a coordinated international struggle. And what is more serious, after the workers of General Motors in the US had won the streets to recover their wages, pension fund and health insurance that in 2008 the employers and the Obama administration had taken from them; union bureaucracies like these have now signed agreements to reduce wages to 75% for workers in the 4 factories of GM in Brazil.
Like the entire working class during and after the exit of the pandemic, and in the midst of a deep recession, it is the union bureaucracies sold to the companies that say to the workers, in a true blackmail: “accept the reduction of wages or you will be fired.” Thus, in the hands of these traitors, the workers’ organizations turn against us. Divided and betrayed country by country we cannot win.
Like the rest of the union and political left, they do not even call to coordinate with the Renault workers in the EU. It cannot be ignored that the Renault of France has been taken over by its 5,000 workers; neither the huge mobilizations such as that of Maubeuge (France) with more than 8,000 people who took to the streets to protest against the Renault relocation plan, which means 4,000 layoffs, can be put aside.
They complain that the CCOO, UGT and CGT do not even call to coordinate the struggles within the Spanish State and accuse them of treating the struggle as isolated conflicts. But they don’t go much further. They refuse to see that this is going to a situation with no way out, towards the final closure of Nissan, without turning back. This policy leaves the workers with no way out. Like the rest of the union and political left, they seem to be unaware that Nissan and Renault are going to merge in Maastricht Europe.
Proposals of nationalization in a single country or in several plants have a limitation in the imperialist Europe of Maastricht
The slogan of nationalization of a factory in a single country, as also maintained by Miguel Urban, the MEP for Anticapitalists, is impossible in the European Union of imperialist Maastricht. A conjuncture of factory takeover and factory-to-factory nationalization can only be a conjunctural way out and it will be brought to failure unless a single fight and protest throughout Europe is organized. The fight to disclose trade secrets and a workers’ claim to the entire branch must be European and international, not state-by-state or regional. If three plants of a transnational company like Nissan are nationalized in Barcelona, the company will take the production to other plants in another country or to another transnational company with which it merges, as is the case of Renault. That is why the perspective and the solution must be international, towards the expropriation without compensation and under worker control of the transnational company as a whole. And, for this reason, the demand to request the accounting books and settle the commercial secrecy must not be from a transnational company but must extend to the entire automotive branch because the workers are not interested in accounting for bankrupt or loss-making companies, but rather the accounting of all operators.
There are few voices that suggest a coordination of Nissan of Barcelona workers with those dismissed from Alcoa in the region of A Mariña, in Lugo (Galicia), which has left 534 workers unemployed and which may lead to the total closure of the aluminum plant of the American multinational. The workforce has been on the warpath for years and its economic impact represents 30% of the GDP of the province of Lugo.
Under these conditions, a single list of demands must be one drawn up to unify the claims of all sectors of the class. Workers control is key, but it must one of the entire production branch of the transnational Nissan.
We revolutionary Trotskyists know that in order to face the threats of factory closures, we must defend the factories, occupy them, prevent the bosses from taking the machinery, put these factories to produce under the control of the workers themselves and demand their expropriation without compensation from an international perspective.
The accounting books must be opened and the trade secrecy of the entire industry on a European scale
(including in the maquilas of Eastern Europe) must be liquidated!
End with Nissan’s trade secret!
For a sliding scale of wages and hours of work on a European scale to break the scheme of concentration of monopolies that will leave a trail of layoffs across the continent!
For the occupation of factories!
Out with the union bureaucracy from
CCOO and UGT!
For the expropriation without compensation and nationalization under workers’ control of the transnational Nissan on a continental level!
For a list of demands against layoffs and for wages and health!
Let’s organize a workers’ counteroffensive to stop the capitalists, who are coming all the way at the coming out of the pandemic!
For a coordinator of labor movement assemblies throughout the state, with one delegate for every 1,000!
Everyone to Nissan!
For the reinstatement of all those fired! The pandemic must not be paid for by the working class!
Nationalization without compensation of any factory that closes or lays off!
Equal pay for equal work for migrants! As the Black Vests say:Fear has changed sides!
For a day of struggle and strikes across the old continent!
Get out, Maastricht’s imperialist Europe! For the workers’ unity of the continent!
For a revolutionary and internationalist workers’ pole!
Everything is at stake in the European metropolises!
For a Federation of Socialist Republics
of the Iberian Peninsula!
For the Socialist United States of Europe!
Democracia Obrera - Spanish State
adherent to the Collective for the
Refoundation of the Fourth International / FLTI
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05/28/2020
In the face of plant closure and layoffs
The working class engages in battle
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Protest in France
Protests in EEUU
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