This latest massacre of textile workers in Dacca, Bangladesh, which now counts probably around one thousand dead (400 certain victims, 700 missing several days after the tragedy) and thousands of wounded, in a building housing several factories and which collapsed under their feet whilst they were obliged to keep working despite clear signs of subsidence, raises the numbers of the working-class holocaust to … how many? How many million workers have been murdered in the name of profit, year by year, by the butchers responsible for the production lines, the guards of the concentration camps that go under the name of business companies, by the executioners of capitalist progress called entrepreneurs, by the employers of death hypocritically known as employers of labour? How much humankind must still be sacrificed to the Moloch of Capital?
Enough! The lives of millions of proletarians sweating blood in the capitalist “Lagers” must find the path to reparative violence, the overthrowing of this bloody world order! The struggle of the international workers must not ask any bourgeois Government, Rights or Justice to repair their condition of slavery: it must bring onto the battlefield its own determination, its own organization, its own strength, in the class struggle that will have to be launched on the streets and in the squares, against the ruling class in any country. The battle cry of the new proletarian International will still be what it used to be: Proletarians throughout the world, unite!
In chapter V, Book III, of Capital, entitled “Economy in the Employment of Constant Capital”, Marx deals with the thousand and one ways in which our class is exploited, sacrificed on the altar of the “economy of Constant Capital”, in the mines, in the factories, in the workplace, quoting the figures at the time regarding accidents, “killings at work”, hygiene, the miserable living conditions, occupational diseases. The cross-section of a world which, then as now, is kept hidden from indiscreet eyes and, unfortunately, removed from the minds of fellow workers themselves, afraid of being noticed, kept on a chain not only by the bosses but also by those (union organizations, reformist parties) which, claiming to speak on their behalf, really want to gain possession of them and keep the chain in their own hands.
These are basically work prisons which, particularly today, in the midst of the economic crisis, turn into authentic death camps – places that are seen as a “shelter from poverty”, whilst they are, instead, the cause of human and proletarian poverty. The dozens of workers who have killed themselves over the past two years out of desperation looked around themselves before this final gesture: what they saw was solitude, absence of solidarity, the impossibility of defending themselves and fighting back; they took part in the ritual strikes at the appointed times; they mourned their comrades; but they did not have the courage or the strength, in the isolation and abandonment they were kept in, to turn their suffering and their anger into a fight – and all too often they went back to the factory in silence to wait … their own turn.
The statistics, capital’s war reports, are swallowed up in the great cauldron of the media, where these numbers, cleansed of their immense suffering, lose their meaning, to become material that ages rapidly: sacrifice in the name of … assumed progress.
Marx writes: “Just as the capitalist mode of production promotes the development of the productive powers of social labour, on the one hand, so does it whip on to economy in the employment of constant capital on the other. However, it is not only the alienation and indifference that arise between the labourer, the bearer of living labour, and the economical, i.e., rational and thrifty, use of the material conditions of his labour. In line with its contradictory and antagonistic nature, the capitalist mode of production proceeds to count the prodigious dissipation of the labourer's life and health, and the lowering of his living conditions, as an economy in the use of constant capital and thereby as a means of raising the rate of profit”.
He adds that, where the worker spends most of his life (the workplace), there he finds the conditions for his active living process, there the conditions of his existence become manifest; and further, that the economy of these conditions, accompanied by the excess work that transforms the worker into a work horse, is a way of raising the rate of profit, of accelerating the self valorisation of capital, the production of plusvalue. “Such economy extends to overcrowding close and unsanitary premises with labourers, or, as capitalists put it, to space saving; to crowding dangerous machinery into close quarters without using safety devices; to neglecting safety rules in production processes pernicious to health, or, as in mining, bound up with danger, etc. Not to mention the absence of all provisions to render the production process human, agreeable, or at least bearable. From the capitalist point of view this would be quite a useless and senseless waste”.
Yet for the bourgeoisie and the whole breed of the bosses these places are … proof of human genius! And there are those who would like to raise them to an exemplary level: place-symbols of devotion, of learning, the expression of human dignity!
In the same chapter of Capital, basing what he writes on chilling reports by the factory inspector Leonard Horner, Marx reminds us that the English manufacturers had created the National Association for the Amendment of the Factory Laws, which immediately took steps to prove that “killing was no murder when it occurred for the sake of profit”. Yes indeed, “killing is no murder”: it is just a collateral effect of the war against proletarian humanity. If this is THEIR PHILOSOPHY, THEIR DETERMINATION, THEIR ARROGANCE, THEIR VIOLENCE, proven over so many centuries, then THE ORDER MUST BE TURNED UPSIDE DOWN: KILLING IS NO MURDER – LET US PUT AN END TO THIS DESTRUCTIVE AND BLOODY MODE OF PRODUCTION.
International Communist Party