[Marxism] auto sales down . . .down . . . down ... and FIAT gambles to build a new international car builder

[Lüko Willms]

On Fri, 1 May 2009 20:49:33 EDT Waistline2 at aol.com wrote:
> 
> 
> Uncertainty around General Motors Corp. (GM) and Chrysler LLC, which  
> entered bankruptcy protection on Thursday, helped drag sales down toward 
the  
> month's end and erased a strong start to the month, auto makers said. 
Chrysler  
> finished with a 48% decline for April. 

  Today, Sergio Marchionne, the CEO of FIAT in Italy, is in Germany for talks 
about FIAT taking control of GM Europe and building out of FIAT, Chrysler, 
and the European (and possibly Korean and Australian) operations of General 
Motors a new international car maker which could compete by production 
numbers with Toyota and Volkswagen. 

  Marchionne has a date with Mr. Guttenberg, the federal minister for 
economic affairs in Berlin, the foreign minister Steinmeier (who is also the 
social-democratic candidate for federal prime minister in the September 
federal elections) and Klaus Franz, the chairman of the Opel works council 
and all-european GM works council, member of the metal workers union IG 
Metall. Opel is the core brand of GM in Europe, and the name of the German 
car maker acquired by GM in 1929. 

   GM/Opel operates three assembly plants in Germany, plus a power train 
and parts factory plus the 6000-strong development center in Rüsselsheim, 
where the Opel carmaker originated from. In total GM has ten assembly plants 
in Europe, from Spain to Poland, plus St. Petersburg in Russia and the latest 
in Kazakhstan, Central Asia. 

  Read more about Marchionnes plans in todays "Financial Times":
> 
<http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e6380ca8-380a-11de-9211-00144feabdc0.html
?nclick_check=1>
and
> 
<http://www.ft.com/cms/s/a4a4767a-380d-11de-9211-00144feabdc0.html> 

  The FIAT boss is encountering quite some resistance from German 
politicians and trade unionists. Over the last months, Klaus Franz was 
dreaming loud about a revived "Opel AG" which would not take orders from 
Detroit, but be still linked to the GM mother company. 

  Another company being interested in taking a stake in Opel or the whole of 
GM Europe is Magna, the Canadian/Austrian car parts manufacturer, which 
also builds cars for GM, BMW, Mercedes and other car makers in their former 
Steyr-Puch assembly plant in Graz, Austria. Magna's Bos Stronach had 
formerly tried to take control of Crysler from Daimler, but lost to a "financial 
investor". 

  FIAT already had a cross-capital sharing with GM and had commonly 
developed power train and car platforms, but the partnership was dissolved a 
few years ago. Some of the common platform development and power train 
manufacturing remains. 

  The big problem is that the capitalist car market actually suffers from 
over-capacities (in relationship to the solvent and profitable demand on the 
market, not the actual needs of humanity), and in order for an economic 
recovery requires to "cull" a large part of the worldwide car manufacturing 
capacities. 

  While from the view of the capitalist market, the FIAT gamble makes more 
sense than any other solution, because it aims at creating _larger_ units 
instead of trying to go back to smaller companies with less leverage on the 
international capitalist market for cars, the workers solution would still be 
different. 

   The best solution from the worker's standpoint would be a compulsory 
cartel of all car makers, throwing open their books and sharing their 
technical capabilites. Only such a cartel could cut the production capacity by 
shortening the workweek instead of throwing hundreds of thousands of 
workings jobless in the street and to intiate a conversion of production 
capacities to other needs. 

  

Yours, 
Lüko Willms
Frankfurt, Germany
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