Eight die in Bangladesh garment factory fire as 18 more factories are closed down

Mass murder continues in Bangladesh as Eight die in Bangladesh garment factory fire as 18 more factories are closed down.

Nearly a thousand workers have been killed in recent weeks. And the response is:

The government at the weekend in a joint statement with the ILO and factory owners promised a labour law reform package that would allow "the right to collective bargaining" and provide for "occupational safety and health".

A United Nations expert group Wednesday urged international clothing brands not to pull out of the country but to work together with the government, international organisations, and civil society to address working conditions.

The reason companies moved production to countries like Bangladesh is because there were no unions and the lack of safe working conditions. This made production costs lower, and profits larger.

At least, the criminals have been arrested:

A preliminary government investigation blamed the collapse on the vibrations of giant electricity generators and police have arrested 12 people including the complex's owner and four garment factory owners in connection with the disaster.

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Hawkings joins Academic Boycott of Israel

Juan Cole reports that Hawkings joins Academic Boycott of Israel.

Physicist Stephen Hawkings’ decision to boycott the annual President’s Conference in Jerusalem this year has been confirmed by Cambridge University. The university initially attempted to deny a political motive and said Hawkings was not going because of his health. It acknowledged the political motive when [t]he Guardian newspaper provided it with a copy of Hawkings’ May 3 withdrawal letter

This campaign of BDS has been going on for several years. Samah Sabawi wrote, in 2011, that:

Supporters of the non-violent global boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement — especially members of the Greens — have been subjected to abuse in a deliberate national campaign of misinformation and slurs orchestrated against them. It has questioned their values and integrity and falsely accused them of anti-Semitism.

A great evil, the Holocaust, is being used to justify another evil, the occupation of Palestine.

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And Then There Was One

Tom Engelhart riffs on And Then There Was One: Imperial Gigantism and the Decline of Planet Earth.

Engelhart writes that:

The present capitalist model (the only one available) for a rising power, whether China, India, or Brazil, is also a model for planetary decline, possibly of a precipitous nature. The very definition of success -- more middle-class consumers, more car owners, more shoppers, which means more energy used, more fossil fuels burned, more greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere -- is also, as it never would have been before, the definition of failure. The greater the “success,” the more intense the droughts, the stronger the storms, the more extreme the weather, the higher the rise in sea levels, the hotter the temperatures, the greater the chaos in low-lying or tropical lands, the more profound the failure. The question is: Will this put an end to the previous patterns of history, including the until-now-predictable rise of the next great power, the next empire? On a devolving planet, is it even possible to imagine the next stage in imperial gigantism?

Human survival and Capitalism cannot continue to co-exist. We must make a choice.

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Suffering of Aboriginal people continues

John Pilger says that the Suffering of Aboriginal people continues.

In Western Australia, the brutal past of Rottnest Island is hidden away from the tourists who visit it.

What was done was the torture, humiliation and murder of the First Australians. Wrenched from their communities in an insidious genocide that divided and emasculated the indigenous nations, shackled men and boys as young as eight endured the perilous nine-hour journey in an open longboat. Cold, sick and terrified prisoners were jammed into a windowless "holding cell", like an oversized kennel.

Today, an historical plaque refers to it as The Boathouse. The suppression is breathtaking.

This suppression continues today:

During the boom, Aboriginal incarceration has more than doubled. Interned in often rat-infested cells, almost 60 per cent of the state's young prisoners are Aboriginal — out of 2.5 per cent of the population. While their mothers hold vigils outside, aboriginal children are held in solitary confinement in an adult jail.

A former prisons minister, Margaret Quirk, told me the state was now "racking and stacking" black Australians. Their rate of incarceration is five times that of apartheid South Africa.

The Aboriginal stereotype is violent, yet the violence routinely meted out to black Australians by authority is of little interest. Deaths in custody are common. An elder known as Mr. Ward was arrested for driving under the influence on a bush road. In searing heat, he was driven more than 300 miles in the iron pod of a prison van run by the British security company GSL. Inside the mobile cell the temperature reached 50 degrees centigrade. Mr. Ward cooked to death, his stomach burned raw where he had collapsed on the van's scorching floor.

Yet Australians condemn Indonesia for its treatment of prisoners (only if they are young, white women).

And people wonder why Australia is violent and racist because that is what the governments practice daily against the Aborigines. State violence becomes normal behaviour.

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Notes on defining the working class (2)

Continuing on from yesterday's Notes on defining the working class.

I suppose the biggest threat to a Communist revolution is the loss of the social nature of work as automation increases. Workers will find themselves devoting more time to tending machines rather than interacting with other workers.

This interaction would have been about how to survive on the job. Now, it is not uncommon for a worker to get killed in a factory without anyone noticing that it has happened. There was even one case where a worker disappeared into a pool of water and no one noticed for several hours.

There is a contradiction in the increasing automation of the workplace. The development of the productive forces has to reach a certain level before a Communistic society becomes sustainable. Yet, the isolation of workers in the workplace means that the solidarity of workers is dissolved.

Yet, the proletariat is now garvitating to Department I. MacMillan seems to say that anyone else but the workers of Department II leading the revolution would deform it because they are not part of the productive process.

But the workers in Department I are developing the class consciousness about where they are in the economic process. Unfortunately, they are adhering to the petit bourgeiose view of the world.

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Notes on defining the working class

Stephanie McMillan posts some Notes on defining the working class.

McMillan insists that:

The point that is often forgotten though, and which I am insisting upon, is that productive workers, the working class, as the ones who are at the core (or foundation) of the entire capitalist economy, who produce the surplus value that allows the existence of profit and its re-investment as new capital, is the only class in fundamental antagonistic contradiction to capital. By emancipating themselves as workers, they have to destroy all the myriad social relations (in the economic, political and ideological fields) that make up capitalism. This puts them in a unique position.

From MacMillan's description, I assume she means that these workers are in Department II. It is these workers alone that produce the surplus value that Capitalists turn into profits.

This poses an interesting problem with the decline in absolute and relative numbers of productive workers. If the whole of Department II were to be automated, would McMillan say that a proletarian revolution would be impossible because the true proletariat no longer exists?

MacMillan goes on to say that:

Workers who produce surplus value are the only ones who, by asserting their interests and following them through to their endpoint–stopping exploitation–can end the production of surplus value, and thus the reproduction of capital. Only they can follow through to the goal of overturning capitalism. No other classes will go that far (and that has been shown, historically, time and time again). This is why the working class must lead the revolutionary process, if we are to achieve the defeat of capitalism. They have to build an alliance with all the other dominated classes, who will together overturn the system. But their line must lead, or capitalism will be quickly reproduced/restored (as occurred in the Soviet Union and China).

This would mean that the proletariat (workers in Department II) have a limited time in which to launch a true proletarian revolution before their class is annihlated through automation.

The problem for advanced economies like Australia, revolutionary consciousness is more likely to arise among the intellectual working classes: professionals; artisans; relatively privileged ones. This consciousness is driven by the precarious nature of the working life. And it would tend to be conservative in nature in order to keep the status quo.

This is probably why advanced economies would tend to go Fascist rather than Communistic in times of crises.

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