Bangladesh, April 2013: The Latest Victim of Multinational Capitalism

Bangladesh is now splashed across the front pages of the Western newspapers as they discover, with hypocritical horror, the appalling working conditions which exist in the clothing industry there; something which only became ‘newsworthy’ following the tragic catastrophe in April 2013, when a factory building collapsed killing over 1,200 workers, for the most part women.

Let us briefly recall the history of Bangladesh, a country situated in the Indian sub-continent to the north of the Gulf of Bengal and almost entirely surrounded by India. It was one of the poisoned fruits of the division of British India in 1947, when it became the eastern part of the Dominion of Pakistan, founded on the basis of its Islamic majority. Bangladesh gained its independence in 1971 when it was abandoned by the central government during a natural catastrophe and after a war of independence backed by India and its Soviet ally. Its 144,000 square kilometres are home to 152 million people, a population density of 1,052 per square kilometre, the highest in the world. It has few mineral resources and is frequently lashed by cyclones and floods. Its politicians, organised around a pseudo-republic, are amongst the most corrupt in the world. 40% of the inhabitants live below the poverty line (it is 146^th in the list of 182 countries rated according to the index of human development).

Bangladesh is the latest ‘host’ to the garment industry in its chequered tour of the world in search of factory-countries where it can make the biggest profits, i.e., where the wages are lowest. What has allowed this remarkable mobility is the low investment needed to start up in this industry. All you need is a workforce which is large, unqualified and – of course – hungry. Such mobility is far more costly and difficult to achieve in heavy industry, although we can count on capitalism trying to overcome these difficulties, impelled as it is by the economic crisis and the drive for profit.

In any case, the life-cycle of the garment industry has repeated itself in one country after another: a phase of frenetic growth, set in motion on the backs of a super-exploited working class, produces enormous profits for the capitalists, which are then reinvested in other sectors. The sector then declines, due to improvements won by the local proletariat, and the capital which has been squeezed out of the workers, whether by small entrepreneurs or the multinationals, is moved off to another country where production costs are lower.

The origins of this modern saga are to be found in the textile industry of the United Kingdom in the 18^th century, which became the spinning and weaving workshop of the world, thanks to the cotton imported from its Indian colony. In the 19^th Century, this production shifted to the north-east of the new American democracy and at the start of the 20^th to the south of that country, where the black slave was by now transformed into a wage labourer. Eighty years on and it is now in the Asian countries, such as Cambodia, Vietnam, India, Sri Lanka and China, where this powerful mechanism is concentrated. Numerous Asiatic countries have thus been linked in to world industrialisation.

In Bangladesh, which now has the dubious honour of offering the cheapest labour on the planet, the clothing industry appeared in the 1970s and experienced a major boom during the 1990s.

In Europe, capitalism has more or less abandoned its textile industry and considerably reduced its garment industry. Protectionism has been ended and ‘under-developed’ countries have been offered access to the markets of the European Community, with no taxes or set quotas. It is another example of the imperialist phase of capitalism: no matter how much capitalism supports the institutions of ‘its’ nation, it still destroys places of work there and sacks ‘national’ proletarians in the dash towards more alluring opportunities for profit-making elsewhere, where the proletariat is still defenceless.

By 2011 Bangladesh was already a major supplier of garments to Europe, just behind China and Vietnam, but by 2013 it had overtaken Turkey and India! In 2011 clothing manufacture formed 13% of the country’s GNP. By 2012 this key sector of the economy represented 80% of the country’s exports, 80% of which ended up in the European Union. Indeed Bangladesh is now competing with China, where workers’ wages have gone up faster, due to their combativeness, and where companies are already moving into other sectors. For the big brand names in the clothing industry, China is no longer the happy-shiny-factory-land it once was; its workforce is now demanding more, and as a consequence profits from these big monopolies are lower. Thus Bangladesh has now become one big factory for these predators: with three to four million workers spread across 5,000 factories it has now overtaken its Indian, Pakistani, Vietnamese, Cambodian and Indonesian neighbours. American experts predict that clothing manufacture in Bangladesh will have doubled by 2015 and tripled by 2020!

The country isn’t however equipped with solid infrastructures, particularly in transport, electricity and health, and the rights of workers are even less ‘diffused’. There is also widespread use of child labour (13% of those between 7 and 14 years old according to UNICEF). The elegant designer labels feign astonishment, brandishing their fake codes of conduct and guarantees of working conditions, and dispatch inspectors to soothe the ‘ethical’ consumers’ associations. But the long chain of subcontractors and suppliers conceals the product’s journey from the workers, who make them, to the buyers, making any fancy ideas about controlling working conditions mere wishful thinking. Fortunately, the proletariat in Bangladesh doesn’t entrust its self-defence to ‘good intentions’ from the West! And that scares capitalism.

The proletariat in the clothing industry, which chiefly consists of women, represents 40% of the country’s industrial workforce. The first to volunteer for this kind of work are those rejected by Islamic society, those who have been disowned, widows, divorcees; then come people driven to it by poverty, the majority of the population; and this in the face of hostility from the traditionalist Muslim environment, where women in work represents a clear challenge to patriarchal structures, since it allows women to dictate the conditions under which they marry, by bringing their own dowry and choosing their own marriage partner. This is one of the emancipating features of capital which has always been recognised by Marxists.

Each morning, millions of workers set off to work in the 4,000 factories and workshops in the industrial belt of the capital, Dhaka, and more than three quarters of them are women (tracers, cutters, seamstresses, porters). The buyers are the big western brands which have ‘relocated’ their production here, either directly or via intermediaries.

The working conditions are so unendurable, the fires in the over-crowded factories so frequent, the wages so low that every now and again the country is convulsed by protest movements, up to and including full scale hunger riots like those back in 2008. The wage earners stand opposed to the entrepreneurs grouped together in the BGMEA, the Bangladesh Garment Manufactures and Exporters Association. During demonstrations, which are systematically repressed by the armed forces, many workers have been killed and hundreds wounded. And the trade unions and their militants are systematically repressed. In 2011 there were demonstrations in response to the increased cost of basic necessities caused by inflation. The demonstrators demanded 51 euros per month, as opposed to the 17 euros they were actually getting (and in contrast with the 75 euros and 112 euros per month which Vietnamese and Indian workers are getting). Working hours are around 80 hours per week with the working day as long as 18 hours when there are urgent deadlines to be met. The workers are calling for better working conditions as well. In November 2010 an agreement was reached on raising the minimum wage to 30 euros per month (after the Asia Floor Wage, a regional association calling for decent wages for workers in the sector, estimated that 144 euro per month was needed as an absolute vital minimum). But this law won’t be respected of course, same as previous ones.

The catastrophe on April 24^th 2013, in which a large building that housed five garment factories and over 3,500 workers collapsed, was an accident waiting to happen. Workers had frequently complained about the decrepitude of the building and reported the widening cracks in the walls, but all to no avail. Chronicle of a massacre foretold. More than 1,200 victims sacrificed on the altar of capitalist profit! Surely not even the most hardhearted can close their eyes to this hecatomb!

But proletarians, for the most part women, have once again made their position clear, and demonstrations on an almost daily basis have prevented the factories from functioning on any kind of a regular basis. In the industrial zone of Ashulia, near Dhaka, 80% of workers walked out in order to press for wage increases and the death penalty for the owner of the building. At the beginning of May the BGMEA closed down those factories which were notoriously working for the big brands (American Wal-mart and Gap; English M & S and C & A; Swedish H & M; Spanish Zara; French Carrefour, Auchan and E. LeClerc; Italian Benetton). This was apparently due to ‚industrial unrest‘, and an agreement was hastily signed by the ‘worldwide’ trade union confederations, the Industrial All Global Union and Uni Global Union, and 31 western clothing brands with a view to guaranteeing the security of the textile factories. (In fact, this agreement was supposed to have been signed back in September last year, but the multinationals prevented it with obstructionist tactics.) It would take until the 17^thMay for the factories to reopen, although the agreement actually covers only around a fifth of them.

All that Capital is worried about, whether huge and concentrated or small and dispersed is its dividends, and maybe now it will have to find another country, with another proletariat, which can offer labour costs which are at least as low as in Bangladesh. Neighbouring Burma perhaps? Or Ethiopia or Kenya? Probably not Africa in fact: the New York Times reckons the cost of living there is too high for wages to be lower than in Bangladesh, and the political stability of Africa is another consideration. In a nutshell: either profits have to be cut or prices raised.

The European Commission’s specialist in economic affairs in Dhaka would have cause to exclaim: ‚Everything points to the responsibility of the factory owners, the buyers, and in the end, the consumers. Anybody who buys a sweater for six euros should suspect it was made by people working in bad conditions‘. So, is it ‚consumers‘ who are really to blame? Such puritan rhetoric is typical of the bourgeoisie, and it is aimed at the wage earners rather than those making the profits! They would love to see the proletariat in the West, which is seeing its standard of living dropping, divided from, instead of joining together with, its Asian brothers. A portion of the western proletariat, the part with some reserves, is intoxicated by the delusion of wealth, with its computer gadgets, its mountains of ‘cut price’ clothes, but all in order to cover its malaise, its insecurity, its daily frustrations.

But the plethora of ‘cut price’ merchandise is actually a symptom of overproduction, which capital is unable to control. The economic crisis advances with giant strides, the mole burrows. The western proletariat has to get back on the path of class struggle and fight its common enemy, global capitalism; global capitalism which lives off the labour power of the workers, in the west as in the rest of the world; this is its only way forward, the only way it can rediscover its humanity and its self-sacrificing and generous spirit.

Like the monopolies, known as multinationals these days, these big industrial enterprises, supported by the big banks, know no frontiers: the proletariat of the entire world is available for them to be exploited at their convenience. And that is why the proletariat, if it wants to overthrow the bourgeoisie, a class of parasites, and abolish capitalist relations of production, has to organise internationally, on both the trade union and the political level. Only then, after the work of the dictatorship of the proletariat has taken effect, will classes, and class oppression, finally disappear.