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Title: Workers’ Paradise Author: Kevin Carson Date: November 10, 2005 Language: en Topics: China, state capitalism Source: Retrieved on 4th September 2021 from https://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/11/workers-paradise.html
In the past, I’ve noted neoliberal portrayals of Red China as an
exemplar of the “free market.” Its so-called “market reforms” and
“liberalization” have made it the promised land for offshored production
by American corporations. To add some substantive content to those
cliches, just consider the Chinese government’s repression of
independent labor activists, and of local resistance to “rampant
industrial pollution” and “widespread evictions and land seizures by
corrupt local governments in cahoots with increasingly powerful property
developers....” (“Land of 74,000 Protests”).
Here’s another story on the same topic. From Independent World
Television Blog: “China’s New Activists”
Rural unrest throughout China is on the increase. The government says
3.6 million people took part in 74,000 “mass incidents” last year, up
from 58,000 in 2003. In April, villagers in Huankantou, in Zhejiang
province, beat off 1,000 riot police in a dispute over pollution from
chemical factories built on disputed property. In June, six residents of
Shengyou village, in Hebei province, 125 miles south of Beijing, were
killed by 300 government-hired men seeking to seize farmland from
villagers. Last month, hundreds of farmers in Meishan county in Zhejiang
staged a demonstration against a battery factory. Hundreds of smaller
incidents are thought to go unreported every week.
The natives are also restless in the workplace. Here’s how the rules of
labor organization work in the “dictatorship of the proletariat”:
The country’s only legal union, the All-China Federation of Trade
Unions, is an 80-year-old Communist Party institution that for decades
has aligned itself more closely with management than workers; in some
cases its local branches are even headed by factory owners. Independent
unions are banned, and workers suspected of organizing strikes are
routinely jailed.
The collusion between Western sweatshop employers and the Chinese
“people’s state” reminds me a lot of that scene in Animal Farm, when the
pigs hold a summit conference with the neighboring farmers: “If you’ve
got your lower classes, we’ve got our lower animals!”