Re: Junkyard dog hits Motown
On May 16, 2007, at 8:28 AM, Russell Grinker wrote:
Could it be because they failed to invest sufficiently to redesign and retool and stay abreast of the hungrier foreign competition, =
producing only what someone once called “40 foot behemoths with kiddie-car breaks and rubber- band suspension”? Isn’t this sort of thing your area Doug? =
Why did they fail to innovate?
Yeah, the first part of what you say is true, but why did they fail =
so badly? I don’t know the answer to this. They failed to “March! =
March!,” as Marx put it in that famous passage from Wage Labor and =
Capital.* I”m tempted by some cultural explanation about the erosion =
of manufacturing skills in our embrace of the post-industrial. But in =
every interview with auto execs I’ve seen they come off as meatheads.
Doug
*We thus see how the method of production and the means of production =
are constantly enlarged, revolutionized, how division of labor =
necessarily draws after it greater division of labor, the employment =
of machinery greater employment of machinery, work upon a large scale =
work upon a still greater scale. This is the law that continually =
throws capitalist production out of its old ruts and compels capital =
to strain ever more the productive forces of labor for the very =
reason that it has already strained them =96 the law that grants it no =
respite, and constantly shouts in its ear: March! march! =