Vol. 80/No. 47      December 19, 2016

 

Trump move to keep Carrier jobs in US popular
with workers

 
President-elect Donald Trump is developing an “economic plan” and set of cabinet appointments he says will stimulate the economy and keep “American jobs” from going overseas. Fiscal moves like government spending on infrastructure repairs and construction may give a short-term boost to U.S. bosses’ profits and some workers’ jobs. But the propertied rulers and their politicians have no solution to the underlying capitalist crisis and coming crash, except continued attacks on the working class at home and abroad.

On a short “victory lap” in the Midwest, Trump visited the Carrier furnace factory in Indianapolis Dec. 1 to milk support from a deal with company bosses to keep 800 production jobs there that had been scheduled to move to Mexico. Vice President-elect Mike Pence, the governor of Indiana, helped make the deal possible with $7 million in state tax break largesse. Trump and Pence got a welcome response from workers in the plant.

The Carrier deal made Trump more popular with workers, including many who had opposed him in the election.

Most radicals and leftists find it impossible to explain Trump’s appeal. Instead, they argue workers are just getting more and more reactionary and racist and that’s why he gets support.

In his speech at the factory Trump lavished praise on the bosses at United Technologies, Carrier’s parent company. He talked up plans to reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 to 15 percent and end environmental and other government regulations adopted by the Barack Obama administration. “I just want to let all the other companies know that we’re going to do great things for business,” he said.

Trump made unemployment in the Midwest “rust belt” and opposition to the projected layoffs at Carrier a centerpiece of his election campaign. His nationalist demagogy for “American jobs” echoes the views of most union officials.

“The Socialist Workers Party is in solidarity with Carrier workers,” Dan Fein, then SWP candidate for U.S. Senate from Illinois, told workers at a union rally against Carrier’s job cuts in April. “But the nationalist, patriotic slogans raised by the speakers here today are not the answer. Divide and rule is the bosses’ trick to weaken the unions. We need international working-class solidarity. All workers need jobs.”

And the type of infrastructure jobs Trump is pushing are temporary. They don’t build new plants or expand the economy.

The president-elect also stopped in Cincinnati Dec. 1, demagogically telling several thousand people, “It’s time to remove the rust from the rust belt and usher in a new industrial revolution.” The next day Trump called on bosses at another Indiana manufacturer, Rexnord Corporation, to scrap plans to move some 300 jobs to Mexico.

Some figures from the left and right of bourgeois politics have criticized Trump for interfering with free trade. On Dec. 2 former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers called the Carrier deal “an act of ad-hoc deal capitalism”

“A business must have freedom to locate where it wishes,” wrote former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, a prominent conservative. She called the subsidies for Carrier “special interest crony capitalism.”

But the problem for workers isn’t “crony capitalism,” it’s capitalism.

Trump’s economic proposals and his nomination of investment banker Steven Mnuchin for Treasury secretary mark a shift by the propertied rulers from monetary to fiscal measures to try to stimulate the depressed capitalist economy.

President Obama’s administration used monetary measures — lowering interest rates to nearly zero and printing reams of money — in an effort to stave off a deeper crash during the 2008 financial collapse and continuing capitalist contraction of production and trade since, precipitated by the collapse of the housing debt bubble. But those measures failed to boost profit rates, lead to investment in new plant and production or create jobs.

The ongoing slow-burning depression conditions workers face produces widespread anger at the deepening devastation of their lives. That was a central factor in the recent election. And so was Hillary Clinton’s insistence that the capitalist economy was doing just fine, and her dismissal of workers of all nationalities who were attracted to Trump’s promise he would do something about jobs as “deplorables.”

Former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders hopes to rebuild the Democratic Party around himself and other radicals and reformers by emulating Trump in speaking for the working class.

Capitalist policy can’t solve crisis

Trump wants to claim credit for stopping some bosses from seeking higher profits by moving production to places where wages are lower. He projects government spending on infrastructure that he hopes will produce at least a small uptick in the business cycle. But such measures can’t change the reality that the capitalist system is in a historic crisis and, sooner or later, catastrophe is in the cards. No policies of the rulers or their political parties can reverse this reality.

“Such policies may be able to postpone or temporarily buffer the effects of the next breakdown, but they cannot and will not prevent it. Let alone ‘kick start’ economic growth and employment,” writes Socialist Workers Party leader Steve Clark in the introduction to The Clintons’ Anti-Working-Class Record: Why Washington Fears Working People by SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes. “Workers everywhere are looking for an explanation of capitalism’s grinding and destructive decline, and even more important, how to chart a way forward to combat its consequences.”

This book, Clark says, aims to arm workers to understand and to fight, and to introduce the Socialist Workers Party.  
 
 
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