Patrick Pleul/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images
Tesla employees attend the opening of the Berlin-Brandenburg Tesla factory, March 22, 2022.
Elon Musk’s recent one-day visit to Beijing confirmed his status as China’s fair-haired American capitalist. Tesla, the Chinese government said, has become the only foreign-owned company that is fully compliant with their data security laws. Accordingly, it has given Musk the go-ahead to build lots and lots of self-driving cars in the company’s Chinese factories.
Musk’s next move, The Wall Street Journal reports, is to get Chinese government approval to transfer the data that its cars collect, with the help of the Chinese search-engine company Baidu, to the U.S. in order to upgrade its self-driving-car technology here. That may just lead to U.S. security concerns similar to those which led officials to ban companies from using technology from Huawei here in the States.
But then, Musk’s politics seem a lot closer to China’s than they are to America’s. After all, we don’t know if the Tesla/Baidu traffic-monitoring technology won’t also prove to be a boon to China’s “social credit” surveillance, which monitors the pro- and anti-government sentiments of China’s citizenry. Even if it is put to that use, though, it will also likely boost Tesla’s revenues, which could use some boosting these days.
Musk’s dependence on China has been growing for years. Tesla’s factory in Shanghai, at least for now, sells more cars and brings in more revenue than any elsewhere, and much more profit than any elsewhere, too, as Chinese workers come cheap when compared to their U.S. or European counterparts. In turn, Musk has repaid his debts to Beijing with a host of policy pronouncements that could have been drafted by the CCP’s press office.
At a conference in Los Angeles last September, Musk opined that China’s “policy has been to reunite Taiwan with China. From their standpoint, maybe it is analogous to Hawaii or something like that, like an integral part of China that is arbitrarily not part of China mostly because … the U.S. Pacific Fleet has stopped any sort of reunification effort by force.” This Elon-ism prompted Taiwan to start building a company that could rival another Musk enterprise, Starlink.
And just in case his nondefense of Taiwanese independence got lost in the shuffle of his outrageous tweets, Musk has also told one interviewer that before blaming China for its oppression of Uighurs, we need to realize that this situation has “two sides” that may be susceptible to blame.
JUST AS CHINA IS HIS SWEET SPOT, so Europe has emerged as Elon’s battleground. In Sweden, he has refused to bargain with a union of Tesla mechanics who’ve been on strike since last October. Musk’s adamant anti-union stance is completely at odds with Swedish norms, where unionization is as omnipresent as the summertime sun. Fully 90 percent of Swedish workers are represented by unions, which has facilitated, rather than impeded, Sweden’s rise as one of the most competitive nations on the planet. The scope of unionization means that companies can’t compete by paying lower wages than their competitors, but rather by making better products, which is why Swedish goods do well on the world market.
By Swedish (and more broadly, Scandinavian) standards, then, an employer’s refusal to sit down with employees who seek to unionize is, in several senses of the word, antisocial. Musk’s subsequent decision to hire workers to replace the strikers (the technical term is “scabs”) has posed an even greater affront to the nation’s social contract.
Musk’s anti-union stance has rankled not just the Swedes but their neighbors as well. Tesla only employs a little more than 100 workers in Sweden—almost all of them mechanics who tune up the cars—but once the strike began, independent mechanics began refusing to tune up Teslas, dockworkers refused to unload new Teslas at the ports, and transport workers in adjacent nations also impeded the delivery of Teslas to Sweden.
Musk’s politics seem a lot closer to China’s than they are to America’s.
Tesla’s main European factory is located in the German state of Brandenburg, and Musk has encountered more worker pushback there as well. IG Metall, the German autoworkers union, is in the midst of a multiyear campaign to unionize the plant’s 13,000 workers, and its slate of candidates has already won election to the factory’s works council—a consultative body of worker and management representatives required by law in all large German workplaces. (In the plant’s first years, Tesla management had handpicked “friendly” workers to run for council seats, but the union-backed workers subsequently prevailed.)
And it’s not just those pesky workers who are undermining Tesla’s management autocracy. On Friday, environmentalists protesting the factory’s expansion demonstrated outside the plant and clashed with police, who arrested a number of them. No such outbursts would be permitted in China, of course. Indeed, when one worker in Tesla’s Shanghai factory was killed in an industrial accident, the government quickly took down the one social media report of his death.
That’s the kind of business-friendly climate that Elon appreciates.
IT’S NOT JUST ELON, OF COURSE. The main reasons why American corporations shuttered their Midwestern factories and hightailed it to China following Congress’s 2000 enactment of “permanent normal trade relations” with the nation was that labor was cheap there, and the government didn’t take kindly to autonomous worker organizations.
Nor is it just China. Just last week, as Vietnam sought trade preferences from the U.S., Human Rights Watch issued a report documenting how that nation’s claims that its workers were free to organize were patently untrue.
In fact, there have been no Leninist nations that have permitted autonomous worker organizations once the Communist Party is in control. Lenin himself laid the groundwork for that policy in his 1902 pamphlet “What Is to Be Done?,” where he wrote, “The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, that is, the conviction that is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labor legislation.”
And further down in the text, he added, “There could not have been socialist consciousness among the workers. It would have to be brought to them from without.”
In and of itself, the insufficiency of worker consciousness wouldn’t necessarily lead to a ban on unions. But to this belief, Leninists also added their defining belief in the necessity for a governing vanguard party, whose correctness on all questions obviated the need for and desirability of other autonomous institutions, which could challenge the party’s policies and, worse yet, its rule.
Combined, those beliefs led the Bolsheviks in 1917 to conclude they should govern not in coalition with other socialist parties, but by themselves. In a few years’ time, during and shortly after the ensuing civil war, it led them to outlaw other parties and other autonomous organizations.
No Leninist nations have permitted autonomous worker organizations once the Communist Party is in control.
At the end of the civil war, in early 1921, with the country in shambles, party leaders proposed to retain a militarized economy, with workers accorded no more rights than soldiers. An opposition group—the Workers Opposition—rose within the party ranks, led by Alexandra Kollontai, the only woman in the party’s leadership. Confronting the rise of an increasingly all-powerful party bureaucracy headed by Joseph Stalin, Workers Opposition proposed that workers’ unions be given control of their factories and large workplaces. The party responded not only by condemning the Workers Opposition as not socialist, but by also banning all future open caucuses and tendencies.
The Bolsheviks did permit party-controlled unions, which eventually came to mean Stalin-controlled unions. That model became the norm in Communist-controlled countries. When American corporations began flocking to China in the first years of this century, they encountered unions, which to their relief were controlled by the Communist Party. Often the local “unions” were headed by officials whom the party had installed as the plant managers. One of the lessons that China’s party leaders took from the collapse of communism in the USSR and Eastern Europe was that the establishment of organizations not controlled by the party—including initially underground unions like Poland’s Solidarity—had paved the way to communism’s end, and thus were to be prohibited at all costs.
Thus, China followed the path that Lenin laid down in the early 1920s, when he decreed a New Economic Policy to revitalize an economy that a decade of wars (both international and civil) had all but destroyed, but simultaneously clamped down on any genuine workers’ organizations. That was the policy that Deng Xiaoping followed when he opened China’s economy to foreign investment but forbade the formation of unions and most autonomous groups, as the Tiananmen Square massacre made bloodily clear.
IT IS ONE OF THE SUPREME IRONIES of 20th-century history that communists in noncommunist nations moved heaven and earth to build unions, even as communists in communist nations suppressed them. This paradox also explains why leading American capitalists who’ve fought any trace of worker power here in the States have cheerfully opened factories in Communist nations.
Before Musk went to China, Henry Ford went to Moscow. They both had plenty of company from their respective generations of fellow American CEOs. The ideology that threatens rule by capitalists isn’t communism, or at least, not the communism of communists in power. It’s social democracy, still alive if not entirely well in Europe, and having something of a modest American resurgence in Biden administration labor policies and in the victories of the United Auto Workers and, provisionally, the Starbucks baristas.
But social democracy is the outlier; the synergies of capitalism and communism remain all too prevalent. When it comes to organized worker power, Lenin, Mao, and Xi are indistinguishable from Musk, Howard Schultz, and Samuel Alito: They all hate and fear unions. Today’s Republican Party often accuses Democrats of being way too soft on the Chinese Communist Party, but in matters concerning workers’ ability to shape the conditions of their work, the Republicans and the Chinese Commies are two peas in a pod.
A postscript: If Elon thought that by seeking refuge in China he would secure endless and ongoing profit, he made a miscalculation. By the end of last year, the Chinese auto giant BYD had surpassed Tesla to become the world’s largest electric-vehicle company, part of a surge of EV activity and exports from China that have been buoyed by state subsidies, tax breaks, and the abundance of cheap and unempowered labor. Tesla’s recent layoffs are due in part to the crush of Chinese competition. Musk apparently believes that China’s support for Tesla’s further development of self-driving technologies will revive Tesla’s fortunes—at least, until China’s mercantilism and cheap labor swamp that market, too.
