Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Bangladeshi workers including children found chained like dogs.

We have written numerous blogs here about the situation in Bangladesh.  There have been many violent strikes there, particularly by women factory workers.  When I use the term, violence,  I mean violence committed by the employers against workers who go on strike or protest their horrific working conditions. Many American apparel and trendy sports or outdoor activity corporations have their ware made in Bangladesh. 

Capitalism, bad as it is here in the US where 400 people have more wealth than 155 million of us and 44 million of us need government assistance for food, is a horrific existence in places like Bangladesh and Vietnam. Al Jazeera has a report on a brick factory where bonded laborers were kept in brutal conditions much like chattel slavery in the American south.  The police just raided a place and child labor is illegal in Bangladesh but so is racism in America, that doesn't mean sh*#t.  It's not laws on the books that protect workers but self organization.

The Bangladeshi authorities just rescued people who were actually chained up like some sort of sexually deviant hovel that we read about in the news.  Al Jazeera approaches a young 11 year old who is promised $2 a day to work but the bosses have snuck off and are nowhere to be found (see the video below.)  This is an extreme case but in Bangladesh, like most of the former colonial world, workers in the so-called legitimate factories that produce goods for the advanced capitalist countries are also treated brutally.

Just think about it. Here in the US, in the belly of the beast, where in 2006 25 human beings earned $25 billion dollars between them, two of them over $1 billion apiece.  Where, in 2007 and 2009, the speculator and social parasite John Paulson earned a combined total of $10 billion while 44 million people need government assistance to eat. If in a country like this capitalism cannot provide a decent life, it will never offer anything but a brutal and cruel existence for the people in places like Bangladesh.

We have to accept then that the only solution to this misery for so many of our brothers and sisters throughout the US and particualarly the former colonial world is to take control of the productive forces of society and the governence of society and manage the production of the necessities of life collectively.
Society needs new managers.


Some might say this is Utopian but I don't agree.  As Marx said, the only thing that is constant is change, that's what history is. Now praying, that's Utopian.  Here is Al Jazzera's report on this issue on video:

http://english.aljazeera.net/video/asia/2011/03/20113233523891929.html

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