Bangladesh tragedy: the terror of capitalism

Made in Bangladesh: The Terror of Capitalism
by Vijay Prashad

[quote]On Wednesday, April 24, a day after Bangladeshi authorities asked the owners to evacuate their garment factory that employed almost three thousand workers, the building collapsed. The building, Rana Plaza, located in the Dhaka suburb of Savar, produced garments for the commodity chain that stretches from the cotton fields of South Asia through Bangladesh's machines and workers to the retail houses in the Atlantic world. Famous name brands were stitched here, as are clothes that hang on the satanic shelves of Wal-Mart. Rescue workers were able to save two thousand people as of this writing, with confirmation that over three hundred are dead. The numbers for the latter are fated to rise. It is well worth mentioning that the death toll in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City of 1911 was one hundred and forty six. The death toll here is already twice that. This "accident" comes five months (November 24, 2012) after the Tazreen garment factory fire that killed at least one hundred and twelve workers.

The list of "accidents" is long and painful. In April 2005, a garment factory in Savar collapsed, killing seventy-five workers. In February 2006, another factory collapsed in Dhaka, killing eighteen. In June 2010, a building collapsed in Dhaka, killing twenty-five. These are the "factories" of twenty-first century globalization – poorly built shelters for a production process geared toward long working days, third rate machines, and workers whose own lives are submitted to the imperatives of just-in-time production. Writing about the factory regime in England during the nineteenth century, Karl Marx noted, "But in its blind unrestrainable passion, its wear-wolf hunger for surplus labour, capital oversteps not only the moral, but even the merely physical maximum bounds of the working-day. It usurps the time for growth, development and healthy maintenance of the body. It steals the time required for the consumption of fresh air and sunlight…. All that concerns it is simply and solely the maximum of labour-power that can be rendered fluent in a working-day. It attains this end by shortening the extent of the labourer's life, as a greedy farmer snatches increased produce from the soil by reducing it of its fertility" (Capital, Chapter 10).

These Bangladesh factories are a part of the landscape of globalization that is mimicked in the factories along the US-Mexico border, in Haiti, in Sri Lanka, and in other places that opened their doors to the garment industry's savvy use of the new manufacturing and trade order of the 1990s. Subdued countries that had neither the patriotic will to fight for their citizens nor any concern for the long-term debilitation of their social order rushed to welcome garment production. The big garment producers no longer wanted to invest in factories – they turned to sub-contractors, offering them very narrow margins for profit and thereby forcing them to run their factories like prison-houses of labour. The sub-contracting regime allowed these firms to deny any culpability for what was done by the actual owners of these small factories, allowing them to enjoy the benefits of the cheap products without having their consciences stained with the sweat and blood of the workers. It also allowed the consumers in the Atlantic world to buy vast amount of commodities, often with debt-financed consumption, without concern for the methods of production. An occasionally outburst of liberal sentiment turned against this or that company, but there was no overall appreciation of the way the Wal-Mart type of commodity chain made normal the sorts of business practices that occasioned this or that campaign.

Bangladeshi workers have not been as prone as the consumers in the Atlantic world. As recently as June 2012, thousands of workers in the Ashulia Industrial Zone, outside Dhaka, protested for higher wages and better working conditions. For days on end, these workers closed down three hundred factories, blocking the Dhaka-Tangali highway at Narasinghapur. The workers earn between 3000 taka ($35) and 5,500 taka ($70) a month; they wanted a raise of between 1500 taka ($19) and 2000 taka ($25) per month. The government sent in three thousand policemen to secure the scene, and the Prime Minister offered anodyne entreaties that she would look into the matter. A three-member committee was set up, but nothing substantial came of it.

Aware of the futility of negotiations with a government subordinated to the logic of the commodity chain, Dhaka exploded in violence as more and more news from the Rana Building emerged. Workers have shut down the factory area around Dhaka, blocking roads and smashing cars. The callousness of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers Association (BGMEA) adds fire to the workers' anger. After the protests in June, BGMEA head Shafiul Islam Mohiuddin accused the workers of being involved in "some conspiracy." He argued that there is "no logic for increasing the wages of the workers." This time, BGMEA's new president Atiqul Islam suggested that the problem was not the death of the workers or the poor conditions in which workers toil but "the disruption in production owing to unrest and hartals [strikes]." These strikes, he said, are "just another heavy blow to the garment sector." No wonder those who took to the streets have so little faith in the sub-contractors and the government.

Attempts to shift the needle of exploitation have been thwarted by concerted government pressure and the advantages of assassination. Whatever decent lurks in Bangladesh's Labour Act is eclipsed by weak enforcement by the Ministry of Labour's Inspections Department. There are only eighteen inspectors and assistant inspectors to monitor 100,000 factories in the Dhaka area, where most of the garment factories are located. If an infraction is detected, the fines are too low to generate any reforms. When workers try to form unions, the harsh response from the management is sufficient to curtail their efforts. Management prefers the anarchic outbreaks of violence to the steady consolidation of worker power. In fact, the violence led the Bangladeshi government to create a Crisis Management Cell and an Industrial Police not to monitor violations of labour laws, but to spy on worker organisers. In April 2012, agents of capital kidnapped Aminul Islam, one of the key organisers of the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity. He was found dead a few days later, his body littered with the marks of torture.

Bangladesh has been convulsed this past months with protests over its history – the terrible violence visited among the freedom fighters in 1971 by the Jamaat-e-Islami brought thousands of people into Shanbagh in Dhaka; this protest morphed into the political civil war between the two mainstream parties, setting aside the calls for justice for victims of that violence. This protest has inflamed the country, which has been otherwise quite sanguine about the everyday terror against its garment sector workers. The Rana building "accident" might provide a progressive hinge for a protest movement that is otherwise adrift.

In the Atlantic world, meanwhile, self-absorption over the wars on terror and on the downturn in the economy prevent any genuine introspection over the mode of life that relies upon debt-fueled consumerism at the expense of workers in Dhaka. Those who died in the Rana building are victims not only of the malfeasance of the sub-contractors, but also of twenty-first century globalisation.[/quote]

[quote]

The reaction in the global north to the latest "accident" in Bangladesh has been to talk about boycotts – to break the global commodity chain at the point of consumption. But that is not enough. What is needed is robust support for the workers as they try to build their own organisations at the point of production. Pressure on north Atlantic governments that mollycoddle multinational firms would create a breathing space for workers who otherwise suffer the full wrath of firms that couch their repression in the syrupy language of hard work and growth rates.

The Bangladeshis are capable of doing their own labour organising; what they need is political backing to do so. What is also needed, then, is clear-cut opposition not to this or that retailer, but to the system that produces pockets of low-wage economies in the south in order to feed a system of debt-fuelled consumption in the north. None among us is against global connections, but it is high time we put our minds to work to reject neoliberal globalisation.[/quote]

More here.

While this was a disastrous event, I think it's highly deplorable to advance your anti-capitalist agenda in the name of the deceased unless you can establish a causal relationship between the principles of capitalism and the collapse of this building. How did capitalism influence or impact building codes?!

Originally posted by: K.Universe.

While this was a disastrous event, I think it's highly deplorable to advance your anti-capitalist agenda in the name of the deceased unless you can establish a causal relationship between the principles of capitalism and the collapse of this building. How did capitalism influence or impact building codes?!

It's called having an analysis of structural conditions. Mine is rooted in a pro-social justice critique of capitalism and a reading of political economy which looks at workers and the social impact of economic forces historically and in the present. You disagree I take it. But beyond your knee-jerk reaction, do you have a competing analysis you can provide? Hopefully it's a bit deeper than "the building codes were insufficient." Okay, so they arrested the owner of the building for negligence. Now what? Can we just resume our regularly scheduled programming?

I believe that a society which protects at all costs the profit-driven elites that rely on cheap labour with no safety standards across the world is going to see more and more tragedies like this, particularly in countries where large amounts of people are moved from traditional economies into precarious forms of work.

This isn't the first building that has collapsed and killed workers -- Rana Plaza (collapsed in 2013), Spectrum (collapsed in 2005), and Tazreen Fashions (burned in 2012). Why don't workers have the right to refuse to work in unsafe factories? Why aren't there global standards of safety and regulations that hold corporations to task instead of hiding behind the excuse that it was the subcontractor's fault? Why don't workers in Bangladesh have freedom of association -- whether it is to unionize or organize? Gee, that must really have nothing to do with capitalism. And it must have nothing to do with capitalism that workers in Apple factories in China have to sign pacts saying they won't kill themselves.

Capitalism and neo-liberalism must really not have anything to do with aggressive trade deals, constant downward pressure on wages and working conditions, the assault on unions and effective means of advancing workers' rights, or governments blindly pursuing foreign investments regardless of the social and environmental damage it causes to the poorest and most vulnerable people. It's not just in the global south. Migrant workers die from unsafe conditions in Canada and the employers are never brought to justice. If someone kills a worker, they should go to jail. Then they should hold all the different institutions accountable that profited from those standards and therefore turned a blind eye. But the Canadian government has simply created more programs for the continued exploitation of migrant workers in every industry who are paid 15% less than Canadian workers, and aren't allowed to actually live here with full status so they are too afraid to even stand up for their rights lest they get deported. I think these things are all related. Maybe you don't. Again - anytime you want to share your own analysis for why these conditions exist, go ahead.

Whatever your analysis is, it is disingenuous to suggest that this is a way of "using" the deaths of the workers. Millions of them are out on the streets protesting the conditions in which they work. And millions of others across the world - people like you and me - are benefiting from their poverty and desperateness to work jobs that are unsafe and pay poorly. I think it's shameful to not have a thoughtful response or analysis of the conditions that led to such a tragedy.

Would you characterize those who highlighted the brutality of British imperialism when those in Jallianwala Bagh were massacred? The point is that the terror of these things, whether it is forms of imperialism of the past or capitalism in our present, is so commonplace that we are not supposed to question it. We don't all pay the price in the same ways, so it is easier to stick to our classist and exclusivist assumptions and think that these kinds of things happen to "other" people, perhaps those who didn't go to university and earn degrees and learn good tea manners. So somewhere down the line, when the shock of the event passes, it is excused and accepted. A couple of arrests are made. Those who are really responsible never have to pay. Nothing changes. And that way we can all go on with our lives, buying $5 t-shirts from Joe Fresh.

Originally posted by: --arti--

It's called having an analysis of structural conditions. Mine is rooted in a pro-social justice critique of capitalism and a reading of political economy which looks at workers and the social impact of economic forces historically and in the present. You disagree I take it. But beyond your knee-jerk reaction, do you have a competing analysis you can provide? Hopefully it's a bit deeper than "the building codes were insufficient." Okay, so they arrested the owner of the building for negligence. Now what? Can we just resume our regularly scheduled programming?

I believe that a society which protects at all costs the profit-driven elites that rely on cheap labour with no safety standards across the world is going to see more and more tragedies like this, particularly in countries where large amounts of people are moved from traditional economies into precarious forms of work.

This isn't the first building that has collapsed and killed workers -- Rana Plaza (collapsed in 2013), Spectrum (collapsed in 2005), and Tazreen Fashions (burned in 2012). Why don't workers have the right to refuse to work in unsafe factories? Why aren't there global standards of safety and regulations that hold corporations to task instead of hiding behind the excuse that it was the subcontractor's fault? Why don't workers in Bangladesh have freedom of association -- whether it is to unionize or organize? Gee, that must really have nothing to do with capitalism. And it must have nothing to do with capitalism that workers in Apple factories in China have to sign pacts saying they won't kill themselves.

Capitalism and neo-liberalism must really not have anything to do with aggressive trade deals, constant downward pressure on wages and working conditions, the assault on unions and effective means of advancing workers' rights, or governments blindly pursuing foreign investments regardless of the social and environmental damage it causes to the poorest and most vulnerable people. It's not just in the global south. Migrant workers die from unsafe conditions in Canada and the employers are never brought to justice. If someone kills a worker, they should go to jail. Then they should hold all the different institutions accountable that profited from those standards and therefore turned a blind eye. But the Canadian government has simply created more programs for the continued exploitation of migrant workers in every industry who are paid 15% less than Canadian workers, and aren't allowed to actually live here with full status so they are too afraid to even stand up for their rights lest they get deported. I think these things are all related. Maybe you don't. Again - anytime you want to share your own analysis for why these conditions exist, go ahead.

Whatever your analysis is, it is disingenuous to suggest that this is a way of "using" the deaths of the workers. Millions of them are out on the streets protesting the conditions in which they work. And millions of others across the world - people like you and me - are benefiting from their poverty and desperateness to work jobs that are unsafe and pay poorly. I think it's shameful to not have a thoughtful response or analysis of the conditions that led to such a tragedy.

Would you characterize those who highlighted the brutality of British imperialism when those in Jallianwala Bagh were massacred? The point is that the terror of these things, whether it is forms of imperialism of the past or capitalism in our present, is so commonplace that we are not supposed to question it. We don't all pay the price in the same ways, so it is easier to stick to our classist and exclusivist assumptions and think that these kinds of things happen to "other" people, perhaps those who didn't go to university and earn degrees and learn good tea manners. So somewhere down the line, when the shock of the event passes, it is excused and accepted. A couple of arrests are made. Those who are really responsible never have to pay. Nothing changes. And that way we can all go on with our lives, buying $5 t-shirts from Joe Fresh.

All I wanted to see was a causal connection between capitalism and the collapse of the building in Bangladesh. All I see is a tailor made speech replete with poorly defined variables ("satanic shelves of Walmart?", "classist and exclusivist assumptions?"), grandiloquence ("profit driven elites!", "neoliberalism!"), misdirection, a deliberate attempt to establish spurious relationships between completely disconnected events, and an appeal to emotion rather than fact or logic.

People have died; we pay our condolences and keep the surviving families and friends in our thoughts and prayers. Beyond that, you want to make it political and play the blame game, then identify the real culprits instead of flailing wildly at capitalism. Drag in the constructors, the regulators, the architects, the subcontractors, the facility managers, I don't have a problem. You want to pin it on the local authorities there or even the governmental agencies, that is acceptable too. But faulting a system of economics and attributing these deaths to that system only because you have a preconceived bias is stooping low.

yeah lets all become communists, look how west bengal PROSPERED under 32 years of commie rule!

Originally posted by: K.Universe.

All I wanted to see was a causal connection between capitalism and the collapse of the building in Bangladesh. All I see is a tailor made speech replete with poorly defined variables ("satanic shelves of Walmart?", "classist and exclusivist assumptions?"), grandiloquence ("profit driven elites!", "neoliberalism!"), misdirection, a deliberate attempt to establish spurious relationships between completely disconnected events, and an appeal to emotion rather than fact or logic.

People have died; we pay our condolences and keep the surviving families and friends in our thoughts and prayers. Beyond that, you want to make it political and play the blame game, then identify the real culprits instead of flailing wildly at capitalism. Drag in the constructors, the regulators, the architects, the subcontractors, the facility managers, I don't have a problem. You want to pin it on the local authorities there or even the governmental agencies, that is acceptable too. But faulting a system of economics and attributing these deaths to that system only because you have a preconceived bias is stooping low.

Wanting to hold building owners, retailers, the lack of labour law accountable does not preclude an engagement with the systemic forces at play, which include a global erosion of workers' rights brought on by governments that facilitate or promote capitalist interests with few meaningful environmental or social safeguards. It's like saying that having an analysis of patriarchy while talking about sexual violence is somehow superflous and "offensive," because we should really just talk about how we can punish rapists and not actually the ideological and social underpinnings of sexual violence.

It's okay to have complex and multifaceted responses to things in the world, you know. We don't need to just stick to the very surface of every issue as if our brains can't comprehend a deeper analysis.

The above was actually my response to who the "real culprits" are. In the real world, the "real culprits" aren't just a handful of people who participate in a system. This is why we sometimes have a systemic analysis or ask for systemic solutions. Public policy does that all the time. The point is that it is too threatening and too disconcerting to people to actually point to the structural inequalities in the economic system we all participate in. I would say that there exists an ideological push to prevent us from actually blaming capitalism and instead just name a few of the smaller players and be done with it. And as I already detailed, that way nothing has to really change.

I've pretty much spelled out what I think the issues are and how they are causally linked to the exploitation of workers in more than just this factory. Your response: I'm "flailing wildly" at capitalism. Other than an ideological opposition to my stance, do you actually have anything meaningful in response to the series of inter-connected economic conditions and systemic pressures I have clearly laid out above? I've certainly encountered others who disagree with such an analysis, and usually they have something more substantial to say because they put some of their own positions out there rather than pretending to discredit the opposing argument without any contributions of their own.

As I've pointed out, workers all over the world work in hellish conditions, and this story isn't the only tragic one out there. I have pointed out how those factors are connected. If you disagree, the least you can do is explain why. And maybe in concrete ways, using facts and historical evidence, rather than simply point to some of the phrases I used as if it's somehow self-explanatory how wrong I am simply because you say so. I have made an argument. If you want to refute it, you'll have to do better than that. Maybe try responding to some of the specific things I have stated.

And of course it's political. How can one claim to have any understanding of the economic forces that shape our world without an analysis of the political history of these forces? Are you really that naive to believe that economic agendas are disconnected from geopolitical interests?

If everything I've written above simply seems like rhetoric to you, then I have to say I'm shocked that you might find any content in your own post. All you have demonstrated is that a) you think it is offensive if anyone suggests we dig deeper than the very surface of the problem, b) that you think it is absurd to question capitalism when it so obviously informs so many things in our lives, and c) your laziness to actually respond to the content of someone's post.

Originally posted by: mr.ass

yeah lets all become communists, look how west bengal PROSPERED under 32 years of commie rule!

I'm not going even explain why having a critique of capitalism or finding value in marxism does not make one an apologist for communist regimes. If something like this doesn't get people to pause and think about the conditions of our world, then what hope is there for the future of the world? Other than demonstrating the most simplistic response one can possibly have to anyone who questions the status quo, do you have anything else to say about the actual points I raised? Or about the Bangladeshi workers who died? Or anything at all on this subject? Guess not.

Sadly your smug and disingenuous response is not unique. It is all too common and it prevents one from having a meaningful dialogue on any subject beyond the obvious black and white.

"If you're a feminist, prove you don't hate men then I'll actually respond to what you're saying," or "if you dare criticize capitalism, first apologize for everything Stalin did." Give me a break.

^^

Well, sorry to disappoint you but this particular backdrop (of people who have died in a building collapse in Bangladesh) doesn't warrant a discussion on the merits and demerits of capitalism or socialism. Correlation doesn't imply causation. The building didn't collapse because "capitalism" packed it with garment factory workers. As recently as last month, a building has collapsed in Thane Mumbai. Scores have died. If you go further back into the most recent history, there were cases of building collapses in Andheri, Mumbai and Ramnagar, Delhi. Did you direct your ire at capitalism then? Why not?

It is not as simple as blame it on capitalism and wash your hands of all those other factors that really brought about this tragedy. The systems of governance in place has proved a total failure which succumbed to the greed.