Firestone tire recall hits the middle-classes

By now the whole world has heard about the Firestone tire recall 
involving millions of tires, mostly from a Decatur, Illinois 
plant. 88 people have died because of defective Firestone tires on 
Ford Explorer vehicles.(1)

The bourgeois media has launched shallow article after shallow 
article, most of them so poorly thought out that they failed to 
show that Firestone tires failed more often than other tires. For 
now the Ford Explorer with Firestone tires has had its tires 
recalled, but the capitalist media is leaving the impression that 
the killing of less than 100 people by negligence and profiteering 
is a stupendous crime, as if many more were not killed all the 
time by capitalism in countless similar situations.

People who buy Ford Explorers are no proletarians. They are labor 
aristocracy, solid labor aristocracy or higher in social class. 
For this reason, the tire failures on Ford Explorers are no 
ordinary matter to the bourgeois press.

On the other hand, none in the bourgeois press draw any real 
lessons from the deaths of 88 innocent people. The press pundits 
are arguing about whether Firestone or Ford knew what was 
happening or whether they simply did not follow up on their own 
statistics.

This is the kind of situation that Joseph Stalin (leader of the 
Soviet Union 1924-1953) was perfect for. Had any factory managers 
claimed not to know about such problems or allowed them to happen, 
Stalin would have severely disciplined them -- under some 
circumstances he would have justifiably had them shot. It matters 
little whether the cause was incompetence or intentional 
downgrading of consumer safety.

People who want to be industrial leaders in products meaning the 
difference between life and death should not put their careers or 
profits first. Under socialism, such becomes possible because no 
one owns the means of production to make profit off of and no one 
must fear losing jobs.

Still some incompetent or lazy people wormed their way into 
leadership roles in life-and-death matters and Stalin was right to 
shoot such opportunists when the situation demanded it. Shooting 
one such persyn can easily save hundreds or thousands of people 
who would have been killed by faulty products.

Whether or not Firestone or Ford people knew that tires at one 
plant in Decatur were nearly 10 times more defective than in 
another plant using more standard procedures in Oklahoma City,(2) 
it does not matter. Either way, these industrial leaders are 
responsible for the deaths of innocent people, and should suffer 
the consequences. People in the tire business should make it their 
business to know such things and people who want to be leaders 
better be good or avoid worming their way into power.

The reformists and a peculiar type of persyn calling him or 
herself Marxist but who is really "economist" as Lenin would say--
these people take a different message from this Firestone tire 
problem. They conclude that workers at tire plants in Amerika 
should be paid more money at the expense of turning the screws on 
the Third World workers even further.

Between 1994 and 1996, Decatur had a strike of 1,400 workers that 
affected tire quality because the company hired replacement 
workers. MIM does not deny that such an economic conflict causes 
damage to tire quality. However, our solution is different than 
that of the reformists and economists. The phony "Communist Party" 
of the USA says that replacement workers in strikes should be 
outlawed as the solution.(3)

Strife between capitalists and between capitalists and the middle-
classes will be eliminated under socialism and then communism. It 
is not only the economic conflicts between proletarians and 
capitalists that should be resolved by socialism. Socialism also 
resolves the other dangerous economic conflicts, none more 
dangerous than those amongst capitalists leading their countries 
to world war. Firestone negligence is just one of millions of ways 
in which profit comes before people under capitalism.

Notes:

1. http://www.usatoday.com/news/washdc/ncstue10.htm

2. New York Times 15 Sep 2000

3. People's Weekly World 19 Aug 2000