Support the Grangemouth strikers!
Many more people have heard
of BP than have heard of Ineos, but the strike struggle against that company
which has broken out at the massive Grangemouth oil refinery goes right to the
heart of the overproduction crisis of capitalism.
Ineos is not primarily an
oil company at all, but rather a chemical business which has become the biggest
company of its kind in the UK by the expedient of acquisitions and
asset-stripping – as witness its annexation of Grangemouth from BP’s business
empire in 2005. As the merger frenzy of imperialism intensifies, it matters
less and less precisely what commodity is being produced, so long as the
concentration of capital and capacity in ever fewer hands succeeds in stealing
market share from rivals and screwing maximum surplus value out of the
workforce.
The absorption and gutting by Ineos
of the unwanted operations of better-known corporate giants like BP, ICI,
Unilever, Dow Chemicals and Union Carbide, using high yield bonds to finance
the deals, has secured its place as the world’s third largest chemical company,
employing over 16,000 workers in twenty different countries. It has an annual
turnover of £22.6 billion.
Unite’s national secretary Phil McNulty holds the
obvious moral high ground when he complains about Ineos robbing its workers’
pensions whilst coining £3 million a day out of the plant, but this directs
attention away from the political point.
As the crisis intensifies, it is not sufficient
that monopoly capital make a tidy profit. Only those players that can maximise
market share and make maximum profits will live to tell the tale to
their shareholders. And to achieve this, companies like Ineos are prepared to
put everything under the hammer – the deferred wages representing years of
unpaid labour sweated out of the BP workforce, the production units which are
summarily shut down as being surplus to requirement and, when push comes to
shove, the livelihoods of thousands of workers. For such an outfit as Ineos to
take McNulty’s advice and curb its own anti-social behaviour would simply be to
invite destruction by the competition. The successful capitalist must act as
capital personified – or risk expropriation by his less fastidious brethren.
Vote-grabbing crocodile tears from the local Labour
MP Michael Connarty about how “unacceptable” all this is should fool nobody.
It is the Labour government which promotes the interests of big business at
every turn and does its utmost to use the law to hinder organised labour from
mounting successful resistance against the vandalism of companies such as
Ineos.
The 1,200 Scottish workers who are rightly taking
this defiant stand in defence of their pensions, conditions and jobs, and the
hundreds of people in the Grangemouth community who rallied to their support on
the eve of the strike, deserve the support of the whole trade union movement,
not just in words but in coordinated action. What they least of all require is
the “sympathetic advice” of ‘left’ Labour imperialists.
It is imperialism itself which needs to be
identified as the enemy to be fought, along with all its placemen in the labour
aristocracy – the enemy within.