A-Infos (en) Italy, FDCA, Cantier #27: The Stellantis case is a paradigm of how the commercial and competitive war of the capitalist economic system is the logic of war - Cristiano Valente (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

The chaos of the capitalist economic system, solely aimed at higher 
shares of profit, continues its inexorable trajectory. Centralization 
and 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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