Wildcat strikes in Vietnam. There's some lessons here for us all

For a while, Vietnam was looking good for the owners of capital as the Stalinist regime there provided international investors with a cheap and stable workforce.  The price of a human being's life activity was even cheaper than China's and coupon clippers and other wasters were itching to get a piece of the action.  Capitalists that were making millions with cheap Chinese Labor power were moving production further south, especially after numerous strikes increased wages for Chinese workers.

But as long as there are workers who sell our Labor power and capitalists who buy it, the class struggle will always exist and Vietnamese workers are no exception, the capitalist economic system, based on exploitation,  drives us in to struggle. But fighting to obtain living conditions marginally better than caged animals is referred to as "economic instability" by the capitalists or "Labor unrest". "Markets crave certainty" says Peter Coy, a strategist of global capital.

Vietnamese workers are looking to set a new record for strikes this year.  In the first four months there have been 336 strikes, on a path to beat last year's record of 762 according to Business Week.  "Every day somewhere in the country there is a strike." says one Labor commentator.  The inflation rate in Vietnam is 19% which is eating in to what are already poverty wages and brutal conditions.  Readers may remember the workers that visited the US from Vietnam, I think they were Nike employees.  Michael Jordan refused to meet with them if my memory serves me correctly, he was earning big bucks promoting products they made but couldn't buy. This video is from 2010.



What is important for us to consider is that a huge percentage of these strikes are illegal wildcat strikes. The response from investors is to take their capital somewhere else, somewhere where they can buy the use of a human being for less and escape to "certainty", the certainty of making profits. A Japanese company that was considering building a plant in Vietnam that would have created 5000 jobs has built it in Cambodia where Labor is cheaper.  "A strike would be trouble" says a spokesperson, "Labor is the key focus for us choosing Cambodia."  Japanese capitalists aren't the only ones changing their minds about investing in Vietnam, foreign direct investment fell 48% in Vietnam in the first four months of this year. 

This is the dilemma we workers face and it raises some important issues that we need to confront.  If we accept that we have to compete with other workers as the capitalist class (and the Union leaders) tell us, we have to make the price of our Labor power and the conditions under which it is used, more favorable to the capitalist, to those who buy it.  This is what nations based on the so-called free market do, that is why Cambodia wants to keep its workforce cheaper than the Vietnamese do, so that the owners of capital will invest there.  It is what states within nations do as Californians are told we have to compete with other states otherwise capitalists will move production there as they already have to the non-unionized South and right to work states like Arizona.

But this can only go so far.  "The price of everything--food, gas, electricity--has gone up more than my pay raise.......I can't even afford to start a family. I wouldn't have enough to buy milk for my baby." says one Vietnamese worker, and these conditions force us in to struggle.  The same occurs in the US as more and more people are finding it harder to make ends meet and put off getting married or having children.  Having a cell phone isn't freedom. The other crucial element in worker's struggle is political leadership or the absence of it, that can determine the outcome of this struggle as the earlier blog on Greece points out.

So competition between workers within a country or between workers from competing nation states is not good for us; it is a recipe for disaster as we all go down together.  Marx's famous statement "Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains" is the answer to this problem.  Yes, there are differences between us, language, culture, religion, gender, even skill levels and such.  But these are secondary differences, they are not differences that "inherently" determine whether we eat or live a decent life.  The capitalists accentuate these differences.  They pay men more than women, whites more than blacks, Protestants more than Catholics or Hindus more than Muslims; they divide skilled workers from the unskilled.  They divide us any way they can as we are unbeatable if united and armed with a conscious program and strategy. We can change the world for the better; this is not a Utopian concept.

In the struggle to win market share from their competitors in their never ending search for profits, capitalists in one firm or one region or one country often appeal to us to unite with them and help them compete with their class brethren and drive them from the marketplace.  After all, they may all be capitalists but they are in a permanent state of war with each other for the ability to exploit workers and accumulate capital but unite when this set up is threatened by a conscious united working class.  They tell us we are all on the same team, United We Stand.  Whether its loyalty to "the firm", the state or the nation. When things get desperate, they increase their infusion of racism, nationalism, gender discrimination and religious sectarianism in to society, despite the dangers.

But all workers, no matter what our nationality, color, religion or language, or skill level, have the most important thing in common, we are all sellers of Labor power, we are all exploited by the owners of capital.  We are all exploited by those who do no productive Labor but live off of those that do.  If a Janitor or a truck driver or a clerical worker moves to another country, we wouldn't live in the same neighborhoods as those who own the factories and workplaces in that country. They would be happy if we married their daughters or sons.  Of course there are exceptions, but classes tend to stick together, its what we have in common. The language might be diferent but we live similar lives, we talk about the same things, getting up and going to work, low pay that barely cover's the rent and not enough time off; losing the job, the rotten boss etc.

So Worker's of the world unite is sound advice.

There are a couple of other issues that this situation in Vietnam raises as do all such situations; the nature of capital.  What is it?   Capital isn't some magical thing.  It is actually a process Marx explained. But suffice it to say, in the way they use it with regards to investment and such, it is wealth, the product of past Labor power that is necessary to set production in motion. It is, in the case of the building of the factory in Cambodia, productive capital that, when combined with Labor power through the production process ends up producing more value than was laid out.  This added value exists because the capitalist pays the worker less in wages than the value we produce, so the capital that is used for further production, has its source in Labor power that the boss doesn't pay us for.  This stolen added value belongs to the capitalist.  Some of it they spend on their luxuries and some they put back in to the production process.

The point is that if the reserve capital that a bank lends to a group of investors to build a plant has its origins in collective human Labor, then that capital is collectively ours.  We have the right to own it and to allocate it. Labor productivity is such that we produce, or can produce a surplus.  The problem is that we don't own that surplus, the capitalists do. We would allocate that surplus and use it in such a way that could easily provide a decent life for all workers and in harmony with the natural world in which we live.  We have a right, and if we want life as we know it to continue on this planet, an obligation to take the right of capitalists to own the Labor process and the wealth generated from it away from them.  It is freedom for us, it is the denying of freedom to them; the freedom to exploit.  What we won't deny them, is the right to food, shelter, productive work and a future as healthy creative human beings.

Lastly, look at the media.  In Vietnam, a former Stalinist dictatorship in some sort of transition to a capitalist economy (that's a whole other issue), workers are engaged in illegal work stoppages almost daily.  Why do we not hear about this? We hear about Bin Laden.  We hear constantly about a corporate politician who sends lewd pictures of himself on Twitter.  We hear day in day out about the sex lives and antics of drunken and drug addicted actors, artists and others who are driven nuts by a perverse industry that, just like any workplace, treats them as a commodity to be bought and sold and deprives them of their humanity.

No, workers in struggle is exciting and when expressed in art and music, stage and film, would be an inspiration to us all, proof that we can change the world around us. And more importantly, workers in a dictatorship going on illegal strikes would make US workers think a little more about what sort of "democracy" we live in and what we can do to change it.

But we don't own and control the media either.  The capitalists defend the garbage they produce that they call entertainment, sport or art as "what workers want".  But the opposite is true.  Humans are inquisitive, collective and creative animals.   That's why this economic system makes us sick.

We can learn a thing or two from our Vietnamese brothers and sisters.