Wars
of the Laptop Bombers
Today's
Stories
January 29
/ 30, 2005
Gabriel Kolko
Wilsonian
and Neoconservative Myths
Linn Washington, Jr.
Con Job: Bush Pledges on Racism Lack Realism
January 28,
2005
Rachard Itani
Tsunami
Aid By the Numbers: the US Really is a Miser
Jensen / Youngblood
Iraq's
Non-Election
Patrick Cockburn / Elizabeth
Davies
Attacks on Polling Places Leave 13 Dead
Dave Zirin
The Great Donovan McNabb: Proud "Black Quarterback"
Dave Lindorff
Suicide by State Execution?
Karyn Strickler
A Corporate Death Penalty Act?
Jorge Mariscal
Fighting
the Poverty Draft
January 27,
2005
Seymour Hersh
We've
Been Taken Over By a Cult
Cockburn /
Sengupta
The
US's Bloodiest Day in Iraq
Dave Lindorff
Juke Box Journalism: Shilling for Bush
Ignacio Chapela
/ John F. Garc'a
The Laws of Nature
Mike Whitney
The Widening Chasm Among Conservatives
Dr. Teresa
Whitehurst
Those Liberal Southern Baptists!
Ray McGovern
Reining In Cheney
Russ Wellen
Marginalizing Bin Laden
Christopher
Brauchli
The
FBI's Carnival of Errors
Website of
the Day
Informed Eating
January 26,
2005
Saree Makdisi
An
Iron Wall of Colonization: Fantasies and Realities About the
Prospects for Middle East Peace
Scott Fleming
In Good Conscience: an Interview with Concientious Objector Aidan
Delgado
Dave Lindorff
Filling Saddam's Shoes: the Puppet Regime Return's to Torture
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Salazar and Obama: Two Dismal Debuts
Toni Solo
The
US and Latin America: a Not-So-Magical Reality
William James Martin
Condoleezza Rice: Confused About the Middle East
William A.
Cook
Bush's Second Inaugural Address: the Lost Ur-Version
Eric Hobsbawm
Delusions
About Democracy
Alexander Cockburn
The CIA's New Campus Spies
January 25,
2005
Brian Cloughley
Iraq
as Disneyland
Mike Roselle
Satan is My Co-Pilot
Josh Frank
/ Merlin Chowkwanyun
The War on Civil Liberties
John Chuckman
Freedom on Steroids
Paul Craig
Roberts
A
Party Without Virtue
Dr. Teresa
Whitehurst
The
Intolerance of Christian Conservatives
James Petras
The
US / Colombia Plot Against Venezuela
Website of the Day
Lowbaggers for the Environment
January 24,
2005
Fred Gardner
Last
Monologue in Burbank
Lori Berenson
On the Politicization of My Case
Uri Avnery
King
George
January 22
/ 23, 2005
Jennifer Van
Bergen / Ray Del Papa
Nuclear
Incident in Montana
Alexander Cockburn
Prince
Harry's Travails
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Company That Runs the Empire: Lockheed and Loaded
Stan Goff
The Spectacle
Saul Landau
Nothing Succeeds Like Failure
Gary Leupp
Official Madness and the Coming War on Iran
Fred Gardner
Is GW Getting the Runaround?
Phil Gasper
Clemency Denied: the Politics of Death in California
Stanley Heller
A Kill-Happy Government: Connecticut Chooses Death
Greg Moses
The Heart of Texas: an Inauguration Day Betrayal on Civil Rights
Justin Taylor
The Folk-Histories of John Ross
Daniel Burton-Rose
One China; Many Problems
Elaine Cassel
Try a Little Tyranny: Questions While Watching the Inaugural
Mike Whitney
Failing Upwards: the Rise of Michael Chertoff
Mark L. Berenson
My Daughter Has Been Wrongly Imprisoned
Christopher
Brauchli
It Doesn't Compute: a $170 Million Mistake
Gilad Atzmon
Zionism and Other Marginal Thoughts
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Day of the Rats
Mark Donham
The Secret Messages of Rahm Emmanuel
Ben Tripp
Adventures in Online Dating
Walter Brasch
Hollywood's Patriots: Soulless Kooks, Mr. Bush?
Poets' Basement
Wuest, Landau, Ford, Albert & Drum
January 21,
2005
Dave Lindorff
A
Great American Journalist:
John L. Hess (1917-2005)
Sharon Smith
The
Anti-War Movement and the Iraqi Resistance
Don Santina
Baseball, Racism and Steroid Hysteria
Ron Jacobs
Locked Out and Pissed Off: Protesting the Bush Inauguration
Kurt Nimmo
The Problem with Mike Ruppert
Don Monkerud
Once They Were Cults: Bush's Faith-Based Social Services
Alan Farago
Swimming Home from the Galapagos
Derek Seidman
An
Interview with Army Medic and Anti-War Activist Patrick Resta
Read How the
Press & the CIA
Killed Gary Webb's Career
January 20,
2005
Paul Craig
Roberts
Dying
for Sycophants
William Cook
The
Bush Inauguration: A Mock Epic Fertility Rite
Joshua Frank
The Democrats and Iran: Look Who's Backing Bush's Next
Eric Ruder
Why Andres Raya Snapped: Another Casualty of Bush's War
Mike Whitney
Coronation in a Garrison State
Robert Jensen
A Citizens Oath of Office
Peter Rost
Bush Report on Drug Imports: Good Data, Bad Conclusions
David Underhill
Is It Torture Yet?: the Eclectic Fool Aid Torture Test
James Reiss
Adieu, Colin Powell: Pea Soup in Foggy Bottom
CounterPunch
Staff
Voices
from Abu Ghraib: the Injured Party
January 19,
2005
Marta Russell
Social
Security Privatization & Disability: 8 Million at Risk
Mike Ferner
Marines
Stretching Movement: Protesting Urban Warfare in Toledo
Nancy Oden
The
Nuremberg Principles, Iraq and Torture
Tony Paterson
A Catalogue of British Abuses in Iraq
Dave Lindorff
Bush's Divide-and-Conquer Plan to Destroy Social Security
Doug Giebel
BS and CBS: When 60 Minutes Helped Promote WMD Fantasies
Alexander Cockburn
Will
Bush Quit Iraq?
January 18,
2005
Paul Craig
Roberts
How
Americans Were Seduced by War: Empire and Militant Christianity
Jennifer Van
Bergen
Federal
Judge: Abu Ghraib Abuses Result of Decision to Ignore Geneva
Conventions
Douglas Lummis
It's a No Brainer; Send Graner: a Rap for Our Time
Ron Jacobs
Syria Back in the Crosshairs?
Seth DeLong
Enter the Dragon: Will Washington Tolerate a Venezuelan-Chinese
Oil Pact?
Lance Selfa
Stolen Election?: Most Democrats Didn't Even Bother to Inquire
Paul D. Johnson
Mystery Meat: a Right-to-Know About Food Origins
Elisa Salasin
An Open Letter to Jenna Bush, Future Teacher
January 17,
2005
Heather Gray
Misconceptions
About King's Methods for Social Change
Robert Fisk
Hotel Room Journalism: the US Press in Iraq
Dave Lindorff
What the NYT Death Chart Omitted: Civilians Slaughtered by US
Military
Jason Leopold
Sam Bodman's Smokestacks: Bush's Choice for Energy Czar is One
of Texas's Worst Polluters
Gary Leupp
A Message from the Iraqi Resistance
Douglas Valentine
An Act of State? the Execution of Martin Luther King
Harvey Arden
Welcome to Leavenworth: My First Encounter with Leonard Peltier
Greg Moses
King
and the Christian Left: Where Lip Service is Not an Option
January 15
/ 16, 2005
James Petras
The
Kidnapping of a Revolutionary
Robert Fisk
Flying Carpet Airlines: My Return to Baghdad
Ron Jacobs
Unfit for Military Service
Brian Cloughley
Smack Daddies of the Hindu Kush: Afghanistan's Drug Bonanza
Fred Gardner
The Allowable-Quantity Expert
Dr. Susan Block
The Counter-Inaugural Ball: Eros Day, 2005
John Ross
Zapatista Literary Llife
Suzan Mazur
Unspooking Frank Carlucci
M. Shahid Alam
America's New Civilizing Mission
Frederick B. Hudson
Jack Johnson's Real Opponent: "That I Was a Man"
Mike Whitney
Bush's Grand Plan: Incite Civil War in Iraq
Tom Crumpacker
A Constitutional Right to Travel to Cuba
Bob Burton
The Other Armstrong Williams Scandal
John Callender
La Conchita and the Indomitable 82-Year Old
Lila Rajiva
Christian Zionism
Saul Landau
An Imperial Portrait: a Visit to Hearst's Castle
Doug Soderstrom
A Touch of Evil: the Morality of Neoconservatism
Poets' Basement
Davies, Louise, Landau, Albert, Collins and Laymon
January 14,
2005
Robert Fisk
"The
Tent of Occupation"
Lee Sustar
Bush's Social Security Con Job
José
M. Tirado
The Christians I Know
Dave Zirin
The Legacy of Jack Johnson
Sheldon Rampton
Calling John Rendon: a True Tale of "Military Intelligence"
Tracy McLellan
Under the Influence
Yves Engler
The Dictatorship of Debt: the World Bank and Haiti
Tom Barry
Robert
Zoellick: a Bush Family Man
Website of
the Day
Ryan for the Nobel Prize?
January 13,
2005
Mark Chmiel
/ Andrew Wimmer
Hearts
and Minds, Revisited
Joe DeRaymond
The Salvador Option: Terror,
Elections and Democracy
Greg Moses
Every Hero a Killer?...Not
Dave Lindorff
The Great WMD Fraud: Time for an Accounting
Jorge Mariscal
Dr. Galarza v. Alberto Gonzales: Which Way for Latinos?
Christopher Brauchli
Gonzales and the Death Penalty: the Executioner Never Sleeps
Gary Leupp
"Fighting
for the Work of the Lord": Christian Fascism in America
January 12,
2005
Robert Fisk
Fear
Stalks Baghdad
Josh Frank
The
Farce of the DNC Contest
Jack Random
Casualties
of War: the Untold Stories
John Roosa
Aceh's Dual Disasters: the Tsunami and Military Rule
Carol Norris
In the Wake of the Tsunami
Mike Whitney
Pink Slips at CBS
Alan Farago
Can
the Everglades be Saved?
Paul Craig
Roberts
What's
Our Biggest Problem in Iraq...the Insurgency or Bush?
January 11,
2005
Tom Barry
The
US isn't "Stingy"; It's Strategic: Aid as a Weapon
of Foreign Policy
James Hodge
and Linda Cooper
Voice
of the Voiceless: Father Roy Bourgeois and the School of the
the Americas
Linda S. Heard
Farah Radio Break Down: Joseph Farah's Messages of Hate and Homophobia
Derrick O'Keefe
Electoral Gigolo?: Richard Gere and the Occupied Vote
Gila Svirsky
A Tale of Two Elections
Harry Browne
Irish
"Peace Process", RIP
January 10,
2005
Ramzy Baroud
Faith-Based
Disasters: Tsunami Aid and War Costs
Talli Nauman
Killing
Journalists: Mexico's War on a Free Press
Uri Avnery
Sharon's Monologue
Dave Lindorff
Tucker
Carlson's Idiot Wind
Dave Zirin
Randy
Moss's Moondance
Dave Silver
Left Illusions About the Democratic Party
Charles Demers
Plan Salvador for Iraq: Death Squads Come in Waves
William A.
Cook
Causes
and Consequences: Bush, Osama and Israel
January 8 /
9, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Say,
Waiter, Where's the Blood in My Margarita Glass?
John H. Summers
Chomsky
and Academic History
Greg Moses
Getting Real About the Draft
Walter A. Davis
Bible Says: the Psychology of Christian Fundamentalism
Victor Kattan
The EU and Middle East Peace
John Bolender
The Plight of Iraq's Mandeans
Robert Fisk
The Politics of Lebanon
Fred Gardner
Situation NORML
Joe Bageant
The Politics of the Comfort Zone
Mickey Z.
I Want My DDT: Little Nicky Kristof Bugs Out
Ben Tripp
CounterClockwise Evolution
Ron Jacobs
Elvis and His Truck: Out on Highway 61
Saul Landau
Sex
and the Country
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Time to End the Blackout
Ellen Cantarow
NPR's Distortions on Palestine
Richard Oxman
Bageantry Continued
Poets' Basement
Gaffney, Landau, Albert, Collins
January 7,
2005
Omar Barghouti
Slave
Sovereignty: Elections Under Occupation
Kent Paterson
The Framing of Felipe Arreaga: Another Mexican Environmentalist
Arrested
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Old
Vijay Merchant and the Tsunami
David Krieger
Cancel the Inauguration Parties
Gideon Levy
New Year, Old Story
Dave Lindorff
Ohio Protest: First Shot Fired by Congressional Progressives
Christopher
Brauchli
Privatizing the IRS
Roger Burbach
/ Paul Cantor
Bush,
the Pentagon and the Tsunami
January 6,
2005
Brian J. Foley
Gonzales:
Supporting Torture is not His Greatest Sin
Greg Moses
Boot
Up America!: Gen. Helmly's Memo Leaks New Bush Deal
Petras / Chomsky
An
Open Letter to Hugo Chavez
Alan Maass
The Decline of the Dollar
Dave Lindorff
Colin Powell's Selective Sense of Horror
Jenna Orkin
The EPA and a Dirty Bomb: 9/11's Disastrous Precedent
P. Sainath
The
Tsunami and India's Coastal Poor
January 5,
2005
Alan Farago
2004:
An Environmental Retrospective
Winslow T.
Wheeler
Oversight
Detected?: Sen. McCain and the Boeing Tanker Scam
Jean-Guy Allard
Gary Webb: a Cuban Perspective
Fred Gardner
Strutting, Smirking, As If The Mad Plan Was Working
David Swanson
Albert Parsons on the Gallows
Richard Oxman
The Joe Bageant Interview
Bruce Jackson
Death
on the Living Room Floor
January 4,
2005
Michael Ortiz
Hill
Mainlining
Apocalypse
Elaine Cassel
They
Say They Can Lock You Up for Life Without a Trial
Yoram Gat
The
Year in Torture
Martin Khor
Tragic
Tales and Urgent Tasks from the Tsunami Disaster
Gary Leupp
Death
and Life in the Andaman Islands
January 3,
2005
Ron Jacobs
The
War Hits Home
Dave Lindorff
Is
There a Single Senator Who Will Stand Up for Black Voters?
Mike Whitney
The Guantanamo Gulag
Joshua Frank
Greens and Republicans: Strange Bedfellows
Maria Tomchick
Playing Politics with Disaster Aid
Rhoda and Mark
Berenson
Our Daughter Lori: Another Year of Grave Injustice
David Swanson
The Media and the Ohio Recount
Kathleen Christison
Patronizing
the Palestinians
January 1 /
2, 2005
Gary Leupp
Earthquakes
and End Times, Past and Present
Rev. William
E. Alberts
On "Moral Values": Code Words for Emerging Authoritarian
Tendencies
M. Shahid Alam
Testing Free Speech in America
Stan Goff
A Period for Pedagogy
Brian Cloughley
Bush and the Tsunami: the Petty and the Petulant
Sylvia Tiwon
/ Ben Terrall
The Aftermath in Aceh
Ben Tripp
Requiem for 2004
Greg Moses
A Visible Future?
Steven Sherman
The 2004 Said Awards: Books Against Empire
Sean Donahue
The Erotics of Nonviolence
James T. Phillips
The Beast's Belly
David Krieger
When Will We Ever Learn
Poets' Basement
Soderstrom, Hamod, Louise and Albert
December 23,
2004
Chad Nagle
Report
from Kiev: Yushchenko's Not Quite Ready for Sainthood
David Smith-Ferri
The
Real UN Disgrace in Iraq
Bill Quigley
Death
Watch for Human Rights in Haiti
Mickey Z.
Crumbs
from Our Table
Christopher Brauchli
Merck's Merry X-mas
Greg Moses
When
No Law Means No Law
Alan Singer
An
Encounter with Sen. Schumer: a Very Dangerous Democrat
David Price
Social
Security Pump and Dump
Website of the Day
Gabbo Gets Laid
December 22,
2004
James Petras
An
Open Letter to Saramago: Nobel Laureate Suffers from a Bizarre
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Omar Barghouti
The Case for Boycotting Israel
Patrick Cockburn / Jeremy Redmond
They Were Waiting on Chicken Tenders When the Rounds Hit
Harry Browne
Northern Ireland: No Postcards from the Edge
Richard Oxman
On the Seventh Column
Kathleen Christison
Imagining
Palestine
Website of the Day
FBI Torture Memos
December 21,
2004
Greg Moses
The
New Zeus on the Block: Unplugging Al-Manar TV
Dave Lindorff
Losing
It in America: Bunker of the Skittish
Chad Nagle
The View from Donetsk
Dragon Pierces
Truth*
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Patrick Cockburn
"Things Always Get Worse"
Seth DeLong
Aiding Oppression in Haiti
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|
Weekend Edition
January 29 / 30, 2005
"Blood on the Upholstery of Jeep Liberty"
A
Dialogue About Murder in Toledo
By
MANUEL YANG and PETER LINEBAUGH
Manuel: I still can't believe
the horrible, horrible homicide and suicide that took place at
the DaimlerChrysler Stickney Avenue plant last night, Wednesday,
26 January, on the second shift.
Peter: Yeh, say it. Let's try
to think about it.
Manuel: How Myles Meyers, 54
years old, came to work with a double-barreled shotgun hidden
under a long black coat and wrought terror in the body shop.
That he shot one of his supervisors, Roy Thacker, point blank
in the head and wounded another boss, an area manager. He wounded
a team leader as a third victim, before putting a slug into his
own head. This man, Myles, the shooter worked at Jeep for 31
years.
Peter: Yes, I read about it
in the paper, The Blade, and everyone was talking about
it after the evening news. It was horrible tragedy, so horrible
we couldn't discuss anything else at our Marxist study group
this morning when, originally, we were to talk about Sections
3 & 4 ("Branches of English Industry without Legal Limits
to the Working Day" and "Day and Night Work")
from Chapter 10 on the Working Day in Capital Volume One. During
our conversation, a Jeep worker told us that the media was circulating
the company's lie about Myles's motive for "going postal"
at the plant, as when the Toledo Blade says he "recently
faced disciplinary action by the company because he reportedly
argued with a supervisor"; in fact, Myles's fellow worker
told us that the bosses Myles shot were those who carried out
Daimler-Chrysler's policy of eliminating jobs by headcounts.
Manuel: And Myles's job was
his life. He was a skilled worker, a skilled metal worker: a
welder, a cutter, a sheet metal specialist. He was the fix-it
guy, the go-to guy. "Take it to the repair hole, Miles will
fix it." Last year, after the company got rid of the inspectors,
he fixed 300 hundred cars; he fixed the frames which had hairline
fractures in them. They made him a floater. That was a month
ago. Myles was a fisherman, a hunter, and a generous neighbor.
He was a model worker.
Peter: So why did this happen?
The company DaimlerChrysler wanted to say it was an individual
pathological accident. The police let it be known that Myles
Meyers was under arrest warrant to appear in court on a charge
of possessing a small amount of marijuana. The press, the corporation,
and the police are casting terrible story in a predictably, but
when we talk to other workers, their explanations seem insufficient.
Manuel: Well, friend from Jeep
has sketched in the deeper background of Myles's motive that
the media is not mentioning and the company is actively concealing
by already calling this killing and suicide on the shop floor
an "isolated incident." Ever since the new union leadership
in the UAW at Jeep had come into power last May, management and
those in the thoroughly corrupt, previous union regime have done
all they could to discredit and humiliate them. Democracy? The
Union contract a year ago was more or less rammed down the throats
of the 'collective bargaining members'. It seems to install for
the future a kind of domestic out-sourcing for everything except
final assembly.
Peter: Yes, so when the company
tried to fire Myles on false drug charges (allegedly for "smelling
of marijuana") and the new leadership succeeded in defending
him, the management went ferociously after Myles. Management
 moved
him from job to job taking his equipment and continually humiliating
him by putting up degrading signs and pictures around his workplace
to show him how to do his job.
Manuel: In fact, Myles was
constantly under surveillance for any mistake he made, any reason
that would serve as rationale for firing him. By the time he
was on his third job and accused of making a couple of mistakes,
management called Myles into the office and grilled him for five
hours. That was Tuesday night, the day before he took his shotgun
to work.
Peter: The third person Myles
was after was a young female foreman whom the company had newly
hired and ordered to keep an eye on him. Myles, a worker with
twenty-some-year seniority whose jobs kept getting chopped. "That's
how the company divides the workers: hire in younger people who
know nothing about what's going on and use them to cut off the
older workers' seniority, insurance, security, you name it,"
our friend told us.
I noticed the atmosphere in
Toledo has become poisoned with the usual suspects, particulate
pollutants, and also something more insidious to our memory and
our spirit.
Manuel: Yes, a week before
this shooting on 10 January a statute was unveiled of Governor
James Rhodes who was responsible for the Kent State shootings
of four students by the National Guard both by ordering the Guard
to the campus and by his inflammatory speeches in May 1970. And
if that wasn't bad enough, the U.S. Marines were invited into
downtown Toledo to practice urban warfare in preparation for
Iraq, or other cities. The governors of Toledo have put the city,
otherwise desperate financially, at the service of empire. Peter:
Reading such stories of death and torture under the regime of
terror reminded me of the pamphlet we put together several years
ago. Do you remember that?
Manuel: Yes, we wrote a pamphlet
in 1999. We began to explore the relationship between the acquisition
in 1998 of Jeep by the Daimler-Benz company and the resumption
of capital punishment in Ohio a year later in 1999. It was about
slave labor in the camps and in the plants of Germany. We uncovered
systematic working to death and the exemplary hanging to death
of workers in the slave labor factories of Germany. This was
back when the swastika and the Mercedes star symbol were virtually
interchangeable in company advertisements.
Peter: You recall how we searched
for graphic image of production in Daimler Benz plants during
the Third Reich, and couldn't find anything largely because the
archives are so closely kept. However, we did get a description
from a French slave, Ives Beon, of production of Dora where the
V-2 rockets were built: "In cadence, with little fingers
against their trouser seams, the men pass the SS man, and he
counts them by tapping his whip against their shoulders. The
column passes in front of the final control hall, which is very
deep and contains the V-2 set on their fins. Then the promised
spectacle meets the gaze of the prisoners. Just beyond this point,
a rolling bridge blocks the whole gallery. It is used to lift
the rockets from their cradles and bring them inside the hall.
For the moment, this rolling bridge is blocked halfway up, at
about twelve feet above the ground. All along is length dangle
an obscene bunch of hanged men, a dozen. Most of their bodies
have lost both rousers and shoes, and puddles of urine cover
the floor. Since the ropes are long, the bodies swing gently
about five feet above the floor, and you have to push them aside
as you advance. As you make your way through, you receive bumps
from knees and tibias soaked in urine, and the corpses, pushed
against each other, begin to spin around."
Manuel: I think this starkly
horrific image of death and terror on the shop floor perfectly
compressed the point of our pamphlet: we were arguing how Daimler-Benz's
use of death and terror in its labor camps had critical elements
of continuity with what was going in Daimler-Chrysler's Jeep
plant in Toledo. At the time it may have appeared as something
of rhetorical hyperbole to have made such a connection but, as
if to prognosticate a deadly future in the present, since then
death and terror did visit upon Jeep the plant, didn't they?
Peter: Yes, they certainly
did. 50-year-old Lazaro "Larry" Fuentes was crushed
to death between the transfer rails as he was repairing a robot
welder on May 17, 2000; and now Myles Meyers's killing and suicide
in the plant on Jan. 26.
Manuel: At the Marx study group
today, a UE union organizer succinctly summed up the latest tragedy
in Jeep: "lean production led to this working-class killing
and suicide" while a Jeep worker called the war in Iraq
"a lean production war" with the U.S. military use
of subcontracted torturers. Democracy in Iraq and in Ohio this
weekend is fraught with bombs or bullets. You told us that we
need to cultivate a politically parallax view that brings together
the war in Iraq and the war on the shop floor at Jeep. I'm wondering
how might we start developing such a view.
Peter: We can start by looking
at this morning's Blade. One headline shouts "2 killed,
2 wounded in Jeep plant shooting" and the other headline,
more muted, says "U.S. suffers its deadliest day in Iraq:
Helicopter crash, attacks claim the lives of 37 GIs" and
the President talks about "a global march towards liberty."
Our Jeep friend said, "Peter, tell them there is blood on
the upholstery of the Jeep Liberty!"
As the blood runs from the
upholstery of the Jeep Liberty, blood also flows in the wake
of this global imperialist march for securing oil and the running
of capitalist Liberties. As our Jeep worker friend said, "Lean
production is to work longer, harder, faster, for less."
Lean production at home, and lean warfare in Iraq: outsourcing,
private mercenaries, private contractors to help with the torture,
logistics and laundry and food preparation privatized, shoddy
equipment, jerry-built vehicles, the poverty-draft, stinting
on safety. The comparisons are easy to make.
Manuel: You know, one of the
co-authors of our pamphlet, Jeff Howison did his M.A. thesis
on lean production at Toledo Jeep in 2000. He has a telling quote
from a DaimlerChrysler worker at Jeep who associates the language
of team concept in lean production and prison: "They're
calling the teams 'cells'....It suggests working in a prison
environment...To a lot of people, working in a factory can be
pretty drudgerous. You wake up in the morning, you do your job,
and you go home. It's like being in prison. In some of the areas
where we work, there are no windows, you don't see the outside,
there is very little time to get away from your work, so they
think of it in terms of being in a prison, you know, where they
are making good money!"
Peter: Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo
Bay, Abu Ghraib, the Toledo Jeep Plant: daily degradation of
the proletarian prisoners and capital punishment, self-imposed
or otherwise. Michaela pointed out to me something interesting.
In the same issue of The Blade there was a story of humiliation
at one of the Toledo charter schools which if it happened in
Abu Ghraib would be called torture. A 17-year old student was
strip searched and forced to remove her underwear on suspicion
of stealing.
Manuel: I think your London
Hanged can help us considerably in illuminating these relationships.
In the new afterword you wrote how workers, atomized and divaricated
from their fellow workers, have been forced internalize ruling-class
terror as a means of dealing with their defeat and humiliation.
Myles appears to have done this.
Peter: "Lay then the axe
to the root," said Tom Paine, "and teach governments
humanity. It is their sanguinary punishments which corrupt mankind."
Or, as people say, shit rolls down hill. A generation has
grown up under capital punishment which teaches that death is
the punishment for crime. And youth now are coming of age during
war when the cerebral functions meet a tremendous set of obstacles.
Lean production is the pedagogical instrument that the ruling
class wields against the workers to teach this state terrorist
ethic of capital punishment. By the way, didn't lean production
originate in Japan?
Manuel: Yes it did; it was
developed by the Toyota auto company and known in Japan simply
as "Toyota seisan hÙshiki" ("Toyota production
system"). War, oil, and lean production. I believe there
is a certain historical logic in this unholy trinity of accumulation.
What prompted Japan to enter into World War II was the oil and
raw-material embargo that competing Western imperialist countries
imposed on Japan in the 1930s. This pressure of inter-imperialist
rivalry resulted in acute reduction of living standards among
Japanese workers and prompted their embrace of the country's
war as a pan-Asian "war of liberation" centering on
emperor worship. The Toyota automobile company was established,
in 1937. After World War II Japanese industrial capitalists,
impressed by the Fordist method of U.S. bomber manufacturing
that produced the B29s which razed their cities to rubble and
drove them to unconditional surrender, started to study U.S.
production and the Statistical Quality Control practices developed
by people like Ishikawa Kaoru, Edwards Deming, and Joseph Juran,
those postwar gurus of Quality Control or Kaizen celebrated so
sanctimoniously in business and management literature today.
Peter: You are describing the
post-war Japanese class relationship in production, the sort
of thing that Marty Glaberman brought to U.S. auto workers.
Manuel: Yes, the Japanese industrialists'
objective was to contain the insurgency of postwar Japanese workers,
whose struggles revolved around seisan kanri or "production
control" (workers took over the workplace and ran it under
their own control) to circumvent the U.S. Occupation's no-strike
rule. Japanese business finally beat this working-class strategy
in 1960 by repressing the Miike coalminers' struggle against
the "rationalization" of their labor process and the
anti-Ampo (U.S.-Japan Mutual Security Agreement) movement of
the same year, two struggles that gave birth to the first Japanese
New Left.
Peter: Go on.
Manuel: So repression of Miike
allowed capital to micro-manage the labor-process and the repression
of anti-Ampo for it to macro-manage the framework of Cold War
military industry (Korean and Vietnam Wars) through which the
accelerated rate of postwar Japanese corporate profit was achieved.
Yeah, and the Toyoto Production System offered an ideal model
of the "rationalization" initiated in Miike and it
was generalized throughout the Japanese economic system in the
1970s when the New Left was defeated and the oils shocks, along
with new use of the microelectronic technology, of that decade
enabled Japanese auto industry to force lean production down
their workers' throats with a vengeance.
Peter: this is very important.
Why don't we know about this?
Manuel: I think lean production
can be summed up in the seven "non-value added"--a
telling phrase!--(muda) wastes that Toyota Production System
designates itself to combat:
1) waste of overproduction;
2) waste of time on hand (waiting);
3) waste in transportation;
4) waste of processing itself;
5) waste of stock on hand (inventory);
6) waste of movement; and
7) waste of making defective
products.
Each of these non-value added
category, you notice, requires squeezing as much mental and physical
powers from the workers' labor process as it is possible to densely
pack their working time (chapter 10 again!) with the work of
adding (i.e. surplus) value. Namely, the imposition of faster,
harder, more concentrated work. I believe Iraq and Jeep are
a continuation of such a lean production strategy against the
working class through the bloody and fiery circuits of war, oil,
and terror.
Peter: Speaking of war, working
class, and terror, when I was driving down this morning from
Ann Arbor, I turned on the radio, and there was a story about
the holocaust survivors from Auschwitz. There was no memorial
yesterday in Toledo for the liberation of Auschwitz. But I do
remember a Polish Jew, a friend of mine, who was a survivor of
Auschwitz. I used to play chess with him even though he was
mainly a go player. He said he only survived because he had the
constitution of a boy and he was able to make some kind of deal
to obtain pieces of bread from a physician. He knew all about
the crumbs and scraps producing the 'lean and hungry look.'
He was anti-capitalist on the grounds that all human misery
produced by capitalism was stupid and inefficient. He was not
at all sentimental about it. It was a question of understanding
surplus value, he would say. This was in the days before the
extermination of the Jews, and the untermenschen, was known as
the holocaust. It was part of "the struggle," he'd
say. Getting bread in winter death camps, retaining your job
as systems analyst for IBM, learning English and political economy
from Trotskyist comrades in the 1950s, and refusing the war in
Vietnam: they were all part of "the struggle." He
and I heard Isaac Deutscher speak "On Socialist Man."
Manuel: Like Alex, my maternal
grandfather also played go at home when he was alive. He was
not political but his soldiering in the Japanese army during
World War II left a bitter taste in his mouth. Collective punishment
meted out in Japanese military, having to drink piss to survive
in the battlefield, being shot in the thigh and the leg. Once
he was ordered to kill a woman and her child; he couldn't do
it, letting them escape when the commander wasn't looking. He
was in China, from whence Mitsui and other Japanese businesses
captured people and, like Daimler Benz, forced slave labor on
them. My grandfather was not fond of talking about his war experience;
he opened up only after imbibing sufficient amount of sake.
Peter: Alex didn't like talking
about his experience in Auschwitz, though it was not what interested
him. He pointed to Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale when they
carried arms for self-defense into the balcony of the California
legislature in Sacramento. Alex said, "That's class war."
We parted company in 1969. That was the year of implosion,
that was the year of the Days of Rage and then the "suicidal"
SDS convention in Chicago. Perhaps similar phenomena happened
elsewhere? What about Japan?
Manuel: A passage that Marx
translated in 1846 from the writings of Jacques Peuchet, French
police administrator, economist, and statistician comes to mind
when I think of Myles: "Above all, there must exist a
kind of greatness of soul in these beggars who, fixed on death
as they are, destroy themselves rather than choosing the detour
of the scaffold on the way to suicide. It is true that the more
progress our economy makes, the more rarely do these noble suicides
occur, and conscious hostility takes its place and the unfortunate
recklessly chance robbery and murder. It is easier to get the
death penalty than to get work."
In 1969 suicidal implosions
were also underway in Japan. On May 13 of that year the radical
rightwing writer Mishima Yukio went to the student-occupied Tokyo
University to debate the radical leftwing Zenkyoto students there.
Mishima told the students that he would have willingly joined
their occupation if they had uttered the word "emperor,"
whom he viewed as the indigenous revolutionary principle of the
Japanese cultural unconscious, and, afterwards, affirmed his
belief in armed insurrection on the basis of Mao's notion of
"people's war." And there was Tanigawa Gan, the charismatic
Maoist poet and organizer at the Miike coalmine, who posed the
Asiatic commons as the utopian antithesis to capitalist rationalization
found in lean production.
Peter: Let me try to understand
this. You're saying that there was a tradition of political
suicide in Japan?
Manuel: Well, year later after
the Zenkyoto dialogue, in 1970, Mishima occupied the Ichigaya
headquarter of the Japanese Self-Defense Force with three members
of his private army and committed ritual suicide, decrying the
materialist culture of postwar Japanese capitalism. In 1969
as the Zenkyoto student struggle fragmented, many militant Maoist
workers and students came together to form the Red Army Faction
and Keihin Ampo Kyoto, combining their forces the year after
to establish the Red Army Union (Rengo Sekigun); in 1972 the
Red Army Union went into the Japanese South Alps mountains for
military training and, during its internal purges, fourteen of
their own members were killed, followed by a ten-day shootout
with the police at Asama-sanso in Karuizawa City. Sixteen members
of the Red Army Union were arrested, two of whom, Nagata Yoko
and Sakaguchi Hiroshi, were sentenced to death in 1982. Its
topmost leader Mori Tsuneo hanged himself in his prison cell
on New Year's Day in 1973.
Peter: What do you make of
these suicides?
Manuel: I think Mishima's suicide
symbolized the end of the emperor-based insurrection for the
indigenous commons; while the Red Army Union's organizational
suicide the failure of the Japanese New Left to confront the
historical legacy of the Japanese commons, striking a fatally
traumatic blow upon the movement as a whole.
Peter: How does this relate
to the murders at Jeep? Or to lean production? Manuel: On
the basis of these suicides, Toyota and other companies found
a way to turn the tide of our class to their advantage. In 1972,
the year of the Red Army Union's auto-destruction, a working-class
investigative journalist Kamata Satoshi went undercover for six
months as a "seasonal worker" in the Toyota auto factory
in Toyota Town in Toyota City ("the only place in Japan
where a city took on the name of a family, and where a town took
on the name of a company"). His vivid account of this experience
is translated into English as Japan in the Passing Lane (I much
prefer its original title, Jidosha zetsubo kojoóAuto Factory
of Despair). In this cutting-edge plant, hailed as the fatherland
of lean production, Kamata reveals that the innovative labor
process there consisted of nothing more than leaner, meaner,
and faster Fordism for less. Over thirty years later, in 2004,
Kamata revisited the company town and observed the increase of
morbidity, suicide, and depression in the Toyota "factory
of despair." Listen to what Kamata said,
"The conversation among
my friends turned to an accident one early morning in May, where
a 33-year old worker was crushed to death in a metal press, followed
by talk of suicides, some from overwork, among elite technicians
in the development division and among leaders of the labor union.
Over the last decade, they said, they've seen a dramatic increase
in depression among their coworkers."
So we find, not at all coincidentally,
a recurrence of suicide, death, and depression wherever lean
production is implemented, from the fatherland to its offspring
factories everywhere in the world, including Toledo Jeep. Peter:
We don't really have a name for the phenomenon of joint homicide
and suicide in combination. 'Going postal' gets at some of it,
but it is unfair to the post office. Working conditions play
a part in the context of the homicide-suicide. Speaking to a
Greek philosopher, he suggested "ergocide," or the
killing of work, and he compared it to the murderous rage which
possesses some guys who will kill their wives and then themselves
when their wife leaves them. The unspoken logic seems to be
if I can't have you no one else can either, or applying it back
to the situation at work, 'if I can't have this particular job,
no one else can either.'
Manuel: When Myles Meyers entered
the Liberty body shop he knew who he intended to kill, and it
was clearly with a horribly misplaced sense of redressing injury.
If one continues the analysis based on the work situation, we
would remember what Frederick Engels said at the beginning of
the industrial revolution, when he outlined the stages of working
class resistance to the unquenchable thirst of capitalisms for
more work. The first stage is individual resistance, a later
stage is organizing with fellow workers ñ union ñ
and still later is a politics to terminate the voracious appetite
of capitalism and bring to an end its social system that has
failed.
Peter: 'going postal' now is
a kind of struggle Engels didn't know about. One generation ago
people struggled to open up the plants and the Keynesian wage
to people of color. A generation before that people struggle
just to get union recognition, and before that they struggled
for safety on the job.
Manuel: The nihilism of multiple
suicides was a theme of Japanese kabuki drama in the Tokugawa
period. 'Star-crossed lovers' who were forbidden to marry by
the rigidities of class convention formed and carried out a mutual
suicide pact, jo-shi it was called. How does this compare to
the "ergocide" at Jeep?
Peter: The slaughter at Jeep
is unforgivable. It is individualistic, that is true. It is
also egocentric to the extreme. It represents the opposite to
class solidarity with fellow workers which includes the people
in your shop, during your shift, in your city, in your state,
in your family, in your children's school. Did you see that
the Union president recommended prayer? Who was it who said
'don't mourn, organize'? Going postal is an irrational, individual,
act of desperation. What is our species to become? That's the
question. The whole world knows that the governing class in Ohio
is incapable of fair elections. The capitalist class is also
proving itself in Ohio incapable of schooling, cooperative labor,
health care, or providing clean air and water. How can we bring
about, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson's plan for the Ohio Indians,
a termination of that class's history?
What happed at Jeep yesterday
represents a vast institutional failure. The plant has failed,
the government has failed, the union has failed. The plant has
installed lean production. Man cannot enter his true species
being. Once the Jeep was the engine of liberation. You can
still see the photographs of the Jeep at the gates of the concentration
camps. But those days are long gone!
Manuel: Instead of liberation,
we have aggressive cupidity, an unquenchable thirst for surplus
value that Marx compared to that of a vampire in Chapter 10.
Kamata has noted that Toyota is "the most profitable company
in Japan" and its net profit for the fiscal year 2004 was
"reported at 1.16 trillion yen ($10.5 billion)," occasioning
"for first time in the history of Japanese capitalism that
a company has passed one trillion yen in profits."
Peter: Daimler-Chrysler, too,
proudly proclaims that it has achieved record sales of commercial
vehicles for the year 2004, garnering "a 42% increase from
2003 (501,000 units), a new all-time high for the sale of trucks,
buses and vans" (according to its press release from Stuttgart,
Germany on January 27, 2005, the day after the tragic killing
and suicide in the Jeep plant).
Manuel: Between such triumphal
balance sheets of corporate profit and the seeping blood on the
shop floor lies the capitalist strategy of "lean production,"
blood of labor-power being squeezed into surplus value through
the seeming alchemical mediation of oil, making us realize more
than ever the salience of that anti-war slogan "No Blood
for Oil." But, of course, it's no alchemy, just the class
struggle, though the I believe latter can change the blood spilled
on Wednesday night into qualitatively something different. A
Jeep worker told me on the phone today, "Fear prevails among
management now; it's time the workers arm themselves collectively
in their workplace: 'bring your guns to work!' will be our new
slogan." What Alex Szejman immediately understood as the
"class war" that the Black Panthers were waging.
Peter: Marx, too said, "Suicide
reduces the most violent share of the difficulty, the scaffold
the rest. Only completely recasting our entire system of agriculture
and industry can sources of income and true wealth be anticipated."
Manuel: How do you think we
can help our class in Toledo take a step toward such a "complete
recasting" of our entire agricultural and industrial system?
Peter: Well Dr. Marx might
be able to help us after all. In his section on night work he
quoted Dr Strange in whose 1864 volume called Health we can find
this passage:
"The muscles of animals,
when they are deprived of a proper amount of light, become soft
and inelastic, the nervous power loses its tone from defective
stimulation, and the elaboration of all growth seems to be perverted...
In the case of children, constant access to plenty of light
during the day, and to the direct rays of the sun for a part
of it, is most essential to health. Light assists in the elaboration
of good plastic blood, and hardens the fiber after it has been
laid down. It also acts as a stimulus upon the organs of sight,
and by this means brings about more activity in the various cerebral
functions."
We need to be able to use our
cerebral functions in the day light, collectively, responsibly.
The city of Toledo, the State of Ohio, needs to take responsibility
for lean production and abolish it! It has proved itself dysfunctional.
That's just a start.
Manuel Yang can be reached at badmarxist@yahoo.com
Peter Linebaugh teaches history at the University
of Toledo. He is the author of two of CounterPunch's favorite
books, The
London Hanged and (with Marcus Rediker) The
Many-Headed Hydra: the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic.
He can be reached at: plineba@yahoo.com
SOME BOOKS
Bernard Bellon, Mercedes
in Peace and War: German Automobile Workers, 1903-1945 (Columbia
University Press, 1990)
Ives Beon, Planet
Dora: A Memoir of the Holocaust (Westview, 1997)
Jeffrey D. Howison, Explorations
in Lean Production at Jeep M.A. Thesis (University of Toledo,
2000)
Satoshi Kamata, "Toyota:
Suicide and Worker Depression at the World's Most Profitable
Manufacturer," trans. John Junkerman (November 1, 2004).
Karl Marx, Capital:
Volume One (Penguin)
Yukio Mishima and Todai Zenkyoto,
Bi to kyodotai to todai-toso (1969)
Tom Paine, The
Rights of Man (1792)
Eric A. Plaut and Kevin Anderson,
eds., Marx
on Suicide, trans. Eric A. Plaut, Gabrielle Edgcomb, and
Kevin Anderson (Northwestern University Press, 1999)
Manuel Yang, Jason Hribal,
and Jeff Howison, An Historical Sketch of the Class Struggle
at Daimler-Chrysler from 1905 to 1999: Some Materials for Thinking
Aloud (1999)
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