Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century. John Smith

TABLE 3.2: Complexity Ranking FIGURE 3.2: Annual Growth in Manufacturing Value-Added Percent for Selected Developing Nations FIGURE 3.3: MVA vs. Manufactured Exports, 1980–2007 FIGURE 3.4: MVA Growth and Export Growth, Selected Nations FIGURE 4.1: Global Industrial Workforce TABLE 4.1: Migrants in Imperialist Countries, by Countries of Origin (millions) FIGURE 4.2: Global Economically Active Population (EAP) FIGURE 4.3: Waged and Salaried Employees as a Percentage of EAP vs. GDP Growth Rates TABLE 4.2: Informal Employment FIGURE 5.1: The Soaring Price of Food, 2000–2012 (Food Price Index: International Price of Major Food Commodities) FIGURE 5.2: Purchasing Power Anomaly vs. GDP per Capita FIGURE 5.3: The Purchasing Power Anomaly, Developing Nations, 1980–2015 FIGURE 5.4: Share of World Labor Income in World Gross Output, 1980–2011 FIGURE 5.5: Output/Worker—Developed and Developing Countries FIGURE 5.6: Hourly Wages, Textile Production Workers TABLE 5.1: Hourly Wages, Textile Production Workers, 2008 TABLE 5.2: Real per Capita GDP Growth FIGURE 6.1: Labor Productivity and Labor Cost, 1995–1999 TABLE 6.1: Value-Added vs. Labor Cost, 1995–1999 FIGURE 10.1: Japanese Deflation FIGURE 10.2: The Descent into Deflation

      Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators.

      *Purchasing Power Parity.

       Instead of the conservative motto, “a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work!” … the revolutionary watchword, “abolition of the wages system!” ¹

       1

      The Global Commodity

      The collapse of Rana Plaza, an eight-story building housing several textile factories, a bank, and some shops in an industrial district north of Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital, on 24 April 2013, killing 1,133 garment workers and wounding 2,500, was one of the worst workplace disasters in recorded history.² This disaster, and garment workers’ grief, rage, and demands for justice, stirred feelings of sympathy and solidarity from working people around the world—and a frantic damage-limitation exercise by the giant corporations that rely on Bangladeshi factories for their products yet deny any responsibility for the atrocious wages, living, and working conditions of those who produce all their stuff. Adding to the sense of outrage felt by many is the fact that, the day before, cracks had opened up in the building’s structure and an initial inspection resulted in its evacuation and a recommendation that it remain closed. Next morning a bank and shops on the ground floor obeyed this advice, but thousands of garment workers were ordered back to work on pain of dismissal. When generators illegally installed on the top floor were started up the building collapsed. Jyrki Raina, general secretary of IndustriALL, an international union federation, called it “mass industrial slaughter.”

      The screams of thousands trapped and crushed as concrete and machinery cascaded down upon them unleashed a full-spectrum shockwave, amplified by the anguished howl of millions around the world. The calamity made instant headline news. Consumers of clothes made in Bangladesh’s garment factories were confronted by their palpable connection to the people whose hands made their clothes, and about their miserable existence on this earth. Like an intense x-ray beam, the shock-wave from Rana Plaza lit up the internal structure of the global economy, throwing into sharp relief a fundamental fact about global capitalism that is normally kept out of sight and mind: its good health rests on extreme rates of exploitation of workers in the low-wage countries where production of consumer goods and intermediate inputs has been relocated. The attention of the world was drawn in particular to Bangladesh’s poverty wages—the lowest factory wages of any major exporter in the world, even after a 77 percent pay increase in November 2013; to its death-trap factories—just five months earlier a fire at nearby Tazreen Fashions killed 112 workers, who were trapped behind barred windows and locked doors while working long into the night; to the violent suppression of union rights—union activists are routinely blacklisted, beaten up, and subject to arbitrary arrest; and to the incestuous relations between factory owners, politicians, and police chiefs in Bangladesh—no employer in Bangladesh’s garment industry has ever been convicted of an infringement of health and safety laws.³ What makes all of it particularly relevant to this study is that the garment industry is “the quintessential example of a buyer-driven commodity chain … [where] global buyers determine what is to be produced, where, by whom, and at what price.”⁴ As such, Bangladesh’s garment industry distils the export-oriented industrialization strategy pursued by capitalist governments across the Global South. As British Trades Union Congress General Secretary Frances O’Grady said in response to the Ran Plaza disaster, “This appalling loss of life proves that, in the global race to the bottom on working conditions, the finishing line is Bangladesh.”⁵

      The starvation wages, death-trap factories, and fetid slums in Bangladesh are representative of the conditions endured by hundreds of millions of working people throughout the Global South, the source of surplus value sustaining profits and feeding unsustainable overconsumption in imperialist countries. The people of Bangladesh are also in the front line of another calamitous consequence of capitalism’s reckless exploitation of living labor and nature: “climate change,” more accurately described as the capitalist destruction of nature.