The chaos of the capitalist economic system, solely aimed at higher
shares of profit, continues its inexorable trajectory. Centralizationand concentration of capital, reduction of wages, financing of
national and supranational government groups in support of industrial
oligopolies, customs duties in a risk that is no longer figurative, but
which every day is turning into an atrocious reality; from Ukraine to
the Middle East, to the tormented African lands.
In our January 2021 issue regarding the merger between FCA and PSA we
wrote: "The merger between FCA and PSA,... represents an important and
exemplary characteristic of the capitalist economic mode of production,
particularly significant in the current economic phase: centralization
of capital. Centralization is in fact the enlargement of invested
capital through the acquisition or merger of capital...
Centralization allows you to adapt to the size and economies of scale
made necessary by the phase of capitalist competition.
The competitive clash, endemic to the capitalist mode of production,
increasingly accelerated by the economic crisis, seeks, through the
reduction of production costs, which in turn require increasingly larger
economies of scale, part of the recovery of declining profits and a
monopolistic dominant position in the market. Hence the need for
increasingly larger capital...
The merger between FCA and PSA creates a group of more than 8 million
cars , reaching the critical mass to achieve economies of scale that
allow it to counter competition, reducing production costs and therefore
increasing mass and profit rate. The new group, Stellantis, is in fact
in fourth place in the world in terms of production capacity, after
Wolksvagen Group with 10.97 million vehicles, followed by Toyota with
10.74 million, Renault, and Nissan with 10.06 million and first General
Motors with 7.72 million vehicles, Hyundai with 7.20 million, Ford with
5.39 million and Honda with 5.17 million cars produced. Furthermore,
what matters in today's automotive industry is the ability to reduce the
cost of investments for the technological and energy transition. ...
In practice, the merger allows, at the same time, FCA to overcome its
"green" technological backwardness, due to poor investments, and PSA to
internationalize, making the new group truly global.
For these reasons, the merger represented a necessity for both groups,
in such a difficult moment of transition for mass industry and in
particular for the automotive sector. The new Stellantis group, which
will maintain all the previous brands of the respective car
manufacturers, therefore presents itself as a multinational group of 400
thousand workers of which 86 thousand in Italy with production sites all
over the world: in France, Italy, Germany, Poland, Serbia, USA, Canada,
Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Turkey, India and China. At the head of the
group will be Carlo Tavares, former CEO of PSA, while John Elkann of FCA
will be president of a board of directors of 11 members. Once again the
fate of the workers is linked to yet another industrial plan that
Stellantis should present by the summer." (1)
It goes without saying that this phantom industrial plan was lost, like
all previous industrial plans, in the rooms of repeated and inconclusive
ministerial negotiations and with the various subsequent meetings with
the national union leaders. In the reality of events, from 2021 to today
Stellantis has encouraged early retirements and reduced production in
almost all national industrial plants, and in the latest meetings with
Minister Urso at the head of Mimit (formerly the Ministry of Economic
Development, now called the Ministry of Business and Made in Italy) and
the same union leaders in Turin on May 28th, has not yet clarified its
plans precisely. What appears certain, in fact, is that Stellantis
intends to assemble hybrid Fiat 500s, not just electric ones, in Turin
Mirafiori, while a Jeep also hybrid is planned for the Melfi factory;
"but these indications will not be enough to saturate the plants" is the
bitter observation of the union leaders following the meeting.
In fact, while in the Campania plant in Pomigliano, no electric model is
planned but exclusively the continuation of the production of the Panda
until 2029, in Cassino where a new electric model is apparently planned,
even if not yet better specified, luxury models would be assigned, whose
demand may not be high enough to justify maintaining employment. N o
coincidence, following the expected government resources defined for car
incentives, which will start in the first days of June and which amount
to one billion euros, Stellantis will add specific offers, with the
initiative " We give value to Made in Italy" , specifically for the Fiat
and Jeep brands. But even more concretely, CEO Tavares also announced
that from September Stellantis will operate as a distributor in nine
European countries, including Italy, of the Leapmotor brand, (the
formula is that of a 51-49 joint venture) a Chinese car manufacturer,
founded in December 2015 based in Hangzhou, specializing in building
low-cost electric cars. The Franco-Italian company will make its network
of service centers and dealers available to Leapmotor, which should
display six models with the Chinese brand by 2027. Last October
Stellantis became a shareholder of Leapmotor, taking over 20% with an
investment of 1.5 billion euros. As can be seen, competition,
particularly in the new electric car market, will be fierce and will
lead to further upheavals in national and international production
chains. In the face of this war, which is currently commercial, both the
USA and the EU are thinking of responding with the old and well-known
strategy of customs duties. The United States has already defined and
presented on May 14 new very heavy duties on a series of Chinese import
goods including electric vehicles. Last October, the European Commission
launched an investigation into state aid that makes cars produced in
China more competitive, which in theory should lead to an increase in
European duties, currently stuck at 10%. Clearly China promptly
responded with just as much money by also reviewing and raising the
duties on products imported from Europe and the USA themselves, bringing
them to 15% and expecting to reach up to 25% in line with the WTO rules,
the World Trade Organization. For now, the Chinese market is most
affected by this real trade war, especially European luxury brands such
as Porche, BMV and Mercedes Benz Group, on petrol-powered cars which
have so far suffered increases of up to 25%.In fact, in recent weeks
there has been an increase in positions taken by the auto industry,
especially the German one, and by political leaders, starting with
Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who indicate the need not to pursue a
tit-for-tat commercial response towards Beijing. The German auto
industry bases around a third of its business on the Chinese market. On
the contrary, France, which at the moment does not have large numbers in
the Chinese market, is openly in favor of a tightening. Instead, other
countries interested in Chinese investments in their territory fear
commercial retaliation from Beijing. The Hungarian case is exemplary.
Here the world leader in car batteries, the Chinese Contemporary Amperex
Technology Co. Limited, known by the acronym CATL, the world's leading
producer of batteries for electric vehicles (EV), supplier of Tesla, as
well as Volkswagen and BMW and the company automotive company, also
Chinese, BYD (Build Your Dreams) leader in the production of electric
and hybrid vehicles, the first company in the world to produce a plug-in
hybrid vehicle on a large scale, already in 2008, is building important
production plants. For CATL this is an investment of over 7 billion
euros, for the largest European gigafactory (100 GWh). There are also
EVE Power - again batteries, mainly for BMW, and investments of one
billion - and the car company Nio, active since 2014 with headquarters
in Shanghai, specialized in the design and development of electric
vehicles, which in Hungary produces in particular charging stations
battery exchange. As can be seen, the interests of some European nations
coincide with the interest and need of the Chinese automotive industries
to produce directly in Europe, precisely to circumvent any tariffs,
despite the falsely sovereignist narrative of the government parties,
which is good for electoral rallies and for the chatter on talk shows,
but totally contradictory of the real economic processes, which see,
soliciting the entry of foreign multinationals into their territories,
starting from Victor Orban's Hungary itself or as the Ministry of
Business and Made in itself Italy, which sponsors the entry of the
Ukrainian multinational in the mining and steel sector Metinvest for a
possible solution to the Piombino steelworks and the former Ilva of
Taranto itself, now Acciaierie d'Italia, also sending, just a few days
ago, an official delegation to China to verify the possibility of
launching a production chain in Italy by one of the dozens and dozens of
Chinese companies as a second producer, in addition to Stellantis.
Negotiations opened with Dongfeng Motor Corporation, a Chinese car
manufacturing company based in Wuhan, one of the top 4 car
manufacturers, in the hypothesis of ensuring that the production of cars
and commercial vehicles in Italy reaches the maximum installed capacity
of approximately 1.5 million vehicles per year. Dongfeng, among other
things, whose path had already intertwined with that of Stellantis,
having the Chinese state group purchased 14% of the PSA share package in
2014, sold by the Peugeot family, and which today maintains a 1% stake
.5% in the multinational born from the merger between the French company
and Fiat Chrysler, requested the Italian government "to have wide
availability of the ports of Brindisi and Taranto (the latter is a
historic Chinese objective), also to import batteries made in China for
Italian plants" , (2) ports where, in all likelihood, the Leapmotor
branded cars, marketed by Stellantis, will arrive. Economic competition
on a global level, in just one segment, albeit an important and
significant one such as the automotive sector, is harsh and harsh and
shakes up the interests and appetites of entire nations. Just think of
the interests that can move and intertwine the energy economic
strategies that were among the main motivations of the wars waged in the
Middle East and today in Ukraine, which coincided not by chance with the
sabotage and explosion of the Nord Stream gas pipeline, the main of
natural gas supply from Russia to Germany and the rest of Europe,
including Italy. Since each economic phase corresponds to its own
political and cultural phase, this struggle between nations, the
imperialist clash, the war waged, as an intrinsic consequence of
economic and commercial struggles, also generated and needed ideological
justification through the theory of " social Darwinism", as a sort of
natural legitimation of social and political phenomena with vital and
animal ones. Social Darwinism, a theory born at the end of the
nineteenth century in a Europe now on the eve of the catastrophe of the
first great war, borrowed from Darwin's "survival of the fittest" theory
of evolution , but in human society, sees in social inequalities and
wars of conquest nothing other than the application of the principle of
natural selection to the human species and on the political level it
served to justify colonialism, eugenics, fascism and above all Nazism,
which, not coincidentally, still represents the ideological substratum
of capitalism today. In fact, without any hesitation, not having to win
over any electoral audience, Tavares himself, in explaining the
intrinsic reasons for these economic and financial maneuvers of the
multinational he heads, states: " We are not discussing a Darwinian
period, we are living it. The price battle with Asian rivals will be
very tough ," adding that "when fighting to absorb a 30% competitive
cost advantage in favor of the Chinese, there can be social
consequences. But European governments do not want to face this
reality." (3) Faced with these lapidary arguments from one of the
greatest representatives of the global productive and financial
agglomeration and the immense web of economic and financial interests
that characterize the capitalist economy, it seems to us that nothing
can justify the conviction of finding ourselves in a new and varied
phase of the capitalist mode of production. Neither what is referred to
as a new "supplychain" i.e. a new supply chain, actually partially
modified following the pandemic, nor what is referred to as "reshoring"
i.e. the phenomenon of the different phases of production returning home
, these phenomena certainly present and active in the global economic
scenario, but which do not at all indicate particular new economic
strategies or new paradigms of the economic system, but only transitory,
partial and contingent strategies, for the purpose of greater capital
accumulation. What necessarily remains fundamental for capitalism are
always and only the costs of labor, the wages of the working class, the
maximum production of surplus value from human labor, as the CEO of
Stellantis, Tavares, reminds us with extreme frankness and boldness. For
the militants of the class struggle there is nothing other than
stubbornly reconnecting the threads of an economic, national and
international battle for better and egalitarian wage conditions, through
a new and real unity of workers. Economic struggle for better working
and living conditions for women and new generations; therefore political
struggle for overcoming the capitalist economic system, for a society
based on radical social reorganization based on the community of goods,
on the shared enjoyment of the fruits of common labor by producers,
without anyone being able to appropriate the social capital for its
exclusive interest. A society in which machinery and technology are not
intended to reduce the number of workers needed to manufacture the same
number of goods, or to produce more goods with the same number of hours
of work and workers, but at the service of society entirely human and
not a tool for greater productivity of invested capital. A society,
therefore with reduced working hours and functional exclusively to the
satisfaction of the communities and for the liberation and overcoming of
the most demanding and burdensome jobs and not for greater exploitation
of human labor; essentially for the achievement of the libertarian
communist project through the self-government and self-management of
producers.
Note
(1) https://www.comunismolibertario.it the CONSTRUCTION SITE January
2021 - Stellantis Group
(2) https://www.corriere.it Business economics Corriere della Sera -
14 May 2024
(3) https://www.ilsole24ore.com/art/auto-e-dazi-cina-avvisa-borsa-pa
ilcantiere@autistici.org
https://alternativalibertaria.fdca.it
_________________________________________
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