Apple Offers Chinese Workers' Money to Help Rebuild Notre Dame

Steve Jobs and President Obama at a dinner in 2011. Drink up boys and girls

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

Member DSA

I would like to offer my condolences to the workers at Apple’s I-phone City factory in Zhengzhou, China where some half of the world’s IPhones are made. And where workers “work six days a week, see their spouses once weekly if they are lucky, and frequently work dozens of hours of overtime.” I'll tell you why in a minute. But first a few details.

Apple’s I-Phone Factory run by Taiwan’s Foxxconn has made billions for its owners and their colleagues in Japan, that supply parts for the factory that turned out 500,000 I phones a day in peak periods. It is no wonder our brothers and sisters working there were committing suicide at alarming rates.

Apple has made it clear these jobs are not coming back here. In China, the Stalinist bureaucracy ensures as best it can that production for the US is not hindered by unions and safety rules, the only way the filth in the White House can get these jobs back in the US is to create the same conditions that the Chinese work under. Concerned with suicides, Foxxconn was forced to place nets outside the windows at one point to catch those who could take the pace no more, who could not withstand the madness trapped like hens in a poultry farm in the US South, and leapt to their death for relief.

Steve Jobs was a barbaric human being like all of his class brethren. He made billions from the suffering of Chinese workers as has Tim Cook, his successor at Apple. Cook received a handy $300 million or so the year he took over.  And the beatings will continue until the Chinese workers, hundreds of millions of them, settle accounts with the Chinese bureaucracy masquerading as socialists or communists. Threatened with revolt the Stalinists in Beijing will be able to count on the US capitalist class to help them out if threatened by workers en masse.

An Apple manager explains clearly why the jobs won’tcome back, “They could hire 3,000 people overnight…..What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?”  Jennifer Rigoni, former Apple’s worldwide supply demand manager until 2010. Yes, convince is a nice word isn't it? They convinced them like Don Corleone convinced people, an offer they couldn't refuse.

“The entire supply chain is in China now,” said another former Apple executive. “You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That’s the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away. You need that screw made a little bit different? It will take three hours.”

US capitalism is not interested in investing in this sort of production, it’s expensive, takes a lot of constant capital, buildings, concrete, Steel. And it has to deal with disruptions for workers fighting back or building independent unions. Like their British counterparts, it’s much easier and much more lucrative to become a rentier society, to divorce oneself from production and engage in mere coupon clipping. In Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism Lenin describes it somewhat:

“The export of capital, one of the most essential economic bases of imperialism, still more completely isolates the rentiers from production and sets the seal of parasitism on the whole country that lives by exploiting the labor of several overseas countries and colonies.”

But I started this with condolences and I’d better finally get to it. I hear that Apple is offering millions of dollars to help rebuild Notre Dame Cathedral and the real source of this generous offer (I wonder if the Vatican will oppose it as I think Tim Cook’s gay. It’ll be tainted “gay” money.) is the surplus value created by those very workers I describe above. They had no say in the matter of course as that value is stolen from them but perhaps the French might want to recognize where that money comes from if they accept it. Other big capitalists are offering money too, all money that belongs to someone else.

I have been to Notre Dame and am saddened about the fire, but might the Vatican sell one of its priceless works of art, I sure it would be enough to cover it. And I have to give credence to a comment on Facebook the other day that pointed out not one American dollar should go towards renovating Notre Dame until we can get the people of Flint drinking water that’s not poisoned.