OUTSIDER
Johnstone, Diana
OUTSIDER Diana Johnstone Converts to Conversion Conversion is an idea whose time has come. Although the idea was pioneered by such Americans as Seymour Melman, credit must go to Mikhail Gorbachev...
...Only Sweden took this seriously and actually commissioned a study, published in 1984...
...Appropriations are increasingly drained by research costs and maintenance of sensitive equipment...
...The State, which created the demand for arms, must create an alternative demand to stimulate conversion...
...Since World War II, the DGB has fought for and won a signficant measure of "codetermi-nation" (Mitbestimmung) rights...
...The 1976 codetermination law gives labor representation on the supervisory boards of the major industrial giants...
...Recognition is spreading that the dominant "throw-away" economic development model, with its massive pollution, cannot be exported to the whole world without quickly destroying life on the planet...
...Growth is no value in itself...
...Economic Commission for Europe to study conversion of military industry to civilian production...
...Today, workers' control no longer looks like a realistic option...
...At first there was a rosy view of conversion, of the positive effect of conversion on the economy...
...Their existence depends on political decisions...
...In response, the U.N...
...But capitalism and arms have always gone together, he maintained...
...But turning the idea into reality promises to be as difficult as it is necessary...
...Margaret Thatcher's response to this threat to capitalist decision-making was to abolish local government...
...Many studies have established that the same amount of public spending creates more jobs in civilian sectors than in arms production...
...a political price which the system has to pay, and is quite prepared to pay...
...What's more, the fate of conversion in the East depends on what happens in the West, and vice versa...
...If the arms economy is so absurd economically, why do British and French leaders stick with it...
...The United States is always ready to use its armed might for this cause, known as "freedom...
...Alternative production has to be based on a democratic decisionmaking process, with thorough public discussion to define what is socially useful...
...The central aspect of political conversion is the demand for socially useful products and not for any given civilian jobs," said Szell...
...Gorbachev is cutting the Soviet military budget by more than 14 per cent and arms production by almost 20 per cent to shift resources to consumer goods, notably food processing...
...In the Soviet Union, conversion is a response to unmet consumer demand...
...In West Germany, the environmental argument is central to a program for "ecological restructuring of industrial society" drawn up for the Social Democratic Party (SPD) by Oskar Lafontaine, the Saarland prime minister and probable candidate for chancellor...
...Development costs have risen enormously for the next wave...
...Conversion is certainly an idea whose time has come...
...In Strasbourg last July, he urged establishment of an East-West work group under the auspices of the U.N...
...They make conversion a concrete alternative and present political decision-makers with real choices...
...General Assembly passed a resolution in 1982 calling on member states "to plan and prepare for a conversion process which could be implemented in a disarmament situation...
...To save the environment, vast reorganizations of production are required— and not merely a shift away from armaments...
...While the jobs argument motivates plant-level conversion planners, it is not sufficient to win political support and to fund the alternatives they dream up...
...Arms industry executives are attached to the high, secure profits of military contracts...
...But a new category of strong arguments has come along, in addition to jobs and disarmament: ecology...
...Enforced competition is a likelier explanation than "apocalyptic vision...
...Its armed forces are all inside NATO and devoted exclusively to countering Warsaw Pact forces...
...At that time, the arms race seemed unstoppable...
...In the Soviet Union, conversion involves an attempt to enable the consumer market, instead of the State, to stimulate production...
...Certainly, the problems of conversion are quite different in East and West...
...One of the early political themes in conversion was workers' control...
...and even French and British forces for Third World missions, for West Germany the changes in the East can be the occasion for a parallel reduction of military spending...
...According to Szell, the weakness of "economic conversion" is that its case rests on the economic absurdity of the arms economy...
...Policymakers in France and Britain aspire to secure a place in the global command sectors, arms, and financial services, and don't mind seeing the proletarian sectors of the economy move to some other place they can hope to dominate from afar...
...In the West, it began largely as a slogan aimed at military-contractor employees concerned about their jobs...
...As for the arms race with the Soviet Union, Szell argued that it was primarily a U.S...
...Whatever the practical differences, the political impact of the Soviet example is Diana Johnstone is based in Paris as the European editor of In These Times...
...The biggest difference concerns the market...
...Such support must be built on the merits of the alternatives themselves...
...The stubborn attachment of the old Atlantic imperial states, Britain and France, to the arms economy supports Szell's view...
...They can have influence only through the political process...
...undeniable...
...Conversion gets strong support from the German trade-union confederation DGB...
...At a conversion conference in March 1987, sponsored by the British Transport and General Workers Union, Gyorgy Szell of Osnabruck University argued for what he called "political conversion" over the "economic conversion" associated with Melman...
...In Britain, Lucas Aerospace employees worried at the prospect of layoffs pioneered in designing alternative products...
...When management refused to discuss such alternatives, the growing conversion movement found support from local Labor-dominated municipal governments such as the London Greater Council...
...Labor should start demanding a say "not only in how things are produced and how the results are shared, but also as to what is produced," she said...
...In Germany, it is already being felt, and it comes at a time when the high-tech arms-production spiral risks being toppled by the weight of unmanageable complexity and astronomical cost...
...Perestroika is profoundly linked to conversion, Soviet political specialist Margarita Bunkina told the Soviet-German conversion roundtable in Bonn...
...Conversion has long been fostered mainly by activists linked to both labor and the peace movement...
...Big military projects like the Leopard tank are running out...
...Third World countries are no longer content to import superpower surplus, but are building arms industries of their own...
...A large unsatisfied demand exists for basic consumer goods...
...However, Lafontaine is primarily interested in gaining support from business and finance that could bring foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher's Free Democratic Party into a coalition for "ecological restructuring...
...At the same time, he has been trying to convince the world that "transition from the arms economy to a disarmament economy" is an international problem...
...Environmentally sound industrial techniques and energy sources could provide West Germany with new lines of export products...
...At a Soviet-German conversion roundtable organized in Bonn last May by German Green Bundestag member Christa Vennegerts, Bremen economist Jorg Huffschmid warned that alternative plans always run up against bitter opposition from management...
...In the 1970s, the critique of state socialism and the Soviet bloc took the form of enthusiasm, especially among Left intellectuals, for workers' control (autoges-tion in France) as a democratic alternative...
...We ran up against the obstacle that many markets are political...
...Such a program could be the basis for a coalition with the Greens...
...Alternative production work groups have developed a range of socially useful new products, including environmentally sound energy sources and public transport systems...
...In the hands of military regimes often put in place by the friendly superpower as part of the deal, any number of Third World states are threats to their populations, their neighbors, and even to the interests of the superpowers, whose inability to control client regimes is becoming more obvious all the time...
...There are many reason for this, but the most decisive is that social needs must be democratically defined by society as a whole...
...Military contracts at his company, Blohm & Voss, were running out...
...The answer has something to do with their historic experience in using military force to secure their economic interests far from home...
...Not the Protestant ethic but the sword caused worldwide capitalism to be established because of its technical superiority," he said...
...The need is acute for an exportable development model...
...But the surprise Soviet conversion to conversion changed everything...
...As long ago as 1981, a report by a special group of United Nations experts on the relationship between disarmament and development concluded that the world had come to a crossroads where it must choose between the arms race and development, since it could not have both...
...Alternative products were designed by employees to save jobs...
...Brusis and other German unionists insist that jobs can never be an argument in favor of manufacturing armaments...
...Whereas radical Soviet and Warsaw Pact disarmament may merely free U.S...
...This is true but controversial...
...They show both workers and consumers what could be done...
...The metalworkers' union IGMetall uses the slogan, arms ruin the economy...
...But this carries little weight with employees of arms manufacturers until their own jobs are threatened...
...At a 1985 Hamburg conversion conference, Use Brusis of the DGB leadership criticized labor's concentration on quantitative issues and its confidence in management and the market to provide socially useful production...
...And even today the superiority of the capitalist system is based on armed force...
...This is a decisive moment...
...political strategy, "successful insofar as it prevented the Soviet Union from productively accumulating the capital necessary to compete successfully with the United States on an economic and technical level...
...Unless there is a political decision in favor of drastic arms cutbacks, the mid-1990s will bring a huge rise in military spending to finance a new round of programs...
...Conversion plans, the panel suggested, could be "confidence-building measures" to show seriousness in disarmament talks...
...Workers engaged in production (whose numbers are dwindling) might be able to control supply, but they cannot create demand...
...Military Keynesianism exists in the East as well as in the West...
...It's when it's on the agenda that the difficulties and social obstacles appear," she said...
...The half-billion-dollar B2 Stealth bomber is another step toward making the joke come true...
...Company-level conversion experiments have shown that government support is necessary...
...Ten years ago we set up a conversion work group," Hamburg union activist Oswald Pietzsch recalls...
...However, the labor representatives deal with questions directly affecting labor, not choice of products...
...West Germany's military-industrial complex, largely excluded from global command by defeat in two world wars, has less decisive influence...
...In the West, with basic consumer-good markets saturated, large-scale conversion requires public intervention...
...There is a military-industrial joke that by the year 2010, the United States will be able to afford just one airplane, which will be obsolete before it's produced...
...However reasonable conversion may be, powerful vested interests will fight it as hard as they can...
...It is undeniable that armed force has been used to "open markets" and keep them open all around the world...
...Another incentive for the advanced industrial nations to move fast against the arms economy is their own security...
...And, he noted, "in our society, workers have no say as workers in production...
...However, the alternative-product studies worked out by employees at the plant level are an indispensable contribution to winning broad political support for conversion...
...Although the idea was pioneered by such Americans as Seymour Melman, credit must go to Mikhail Gorbachev for transforming it into the official policy of a superpower...
...But the market...
...This is especially so since alternative products developed by arms-industry engineers often tend to be suited for sectors requiring state funding, such as health or public transport...
...Her Outsider column appears in The Progressive four times a year...
Vol. 53 • October 1989 • No. 10
