We can only imagine what the world's largest cement factory will do to Missouri

Sainte Genevieve Cement Plant

The Sainte Genevieve cement factory is a wonder to behold. It is the largest cement factory in the world in 3900 acres of woodland above the Mississippi River. It’s raw material storage space sits under a huge aluminum dome holding “65,000 tons of limestone”. The productive capacity of the plant is such that this is only two days output.

It’s an impressive structure and facility, the cost of a $1.6bn investment. The plant’s service area extends from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico. The problem is that the US is not building too much these days. The Financial Times reports that due to the economic crisis US cement consumption has declined from 128 million tons in 2005 to 65 million, the greatest decline since the great depression.

Reading that reminded me of the tour I did through the Hoover Dam some years ago after a Union convention in Vega. I remember being told there was some 750,000 tons of cement, one solid block that went in to building that dam. A few workers ended up in that concrete too. Cement makers have been shutting plants and reducing capacity due to the slowdown, who knows what capacity utilization was before the recession.

Was the environment their first priority you think?

Sainte Genevieve is an impressive monster. It is so automated it only has 250 employees, something the Times describes as “groundbreaking”. I have to think about this for a moment; this plant will consume 65,000 tons of crushed limestone which amounts only to two days of concrete output which means it will consume over 23 million tons of limestone a year; who knows how much cement that is. And it will do this with the labor power of just 250 people. What an incredible example of the productivity of human labor in modern times this is. The plant will eat up the surrounding raw materials of Missouri earth with its quarries; there are two centuries of raw material supply in them. It is a staggering figure when you think of it and contemplate the productive capacity of the plant.

Labor productivity due to automation means that Sainte Genevieve is able to produce cement at $30 a ton compared, half the cost of older plants. That’s a 50% improvement which is incredible. The plant is next to the Mississippi which means it can transport its product cheaply by barge just like the old days. Part of the project was also the construction of a $100 million harbor.

So, as the Times points out, the plant is “starting to deliver just as cement has dried up.” So it’ll sit relatively idle for a while. The owners figure that housing will increase which will mean demand for cement will grow. There is also the US infrastructure, what some call the “Third Deficit”, a crumbling mass of highways and bridges that optimists believe will be replaced in order for the US to regain its global competitiveness.

I was reading about Charles Rangel and his so called ethics hearing in Congress. What a joke this is. They are all corrupt; Rangel is even a small fry in the scheme of things. These people make the laws that allow their class to rape and plunder the economy and the land. The massive wealth our Labor creates and the incredible resources of the natural world are expropriated by the capitalists in their rapacious quest for profit. If we take capital itself, money capital, we have no control over that resource even though our Labor power is its source because in a capitalist economy the capitalist is the legal owner of I; so much for laws. That $1.6 billion belongs to the working class and whether we spend it on a cement plant or not should be our collective decision.

I cannot help thinking about what the land around this plant will look like when all the raw material has been extracted from it. Without planning and the market the driving force; it won’t be good. We only have to look a little further down the road to the Gulf of Mexico to see the effect of the so-called free market on the environment, “dead zones” in the water, sterile fish with two sets of genitals, oil balls on the beaches and watery graves for oil workers.