The Foxconn plant in China, which assembles iPads among other things, has made headlines recently with its incredibly high rate of worker suicides. Working for $132 per month, Foxconn workers are on their feet on the job for 12 hours a day, six days a week. Conversing with coworkers is strictly forbidden and bathroom breaks are relegated to ten minutes every two hours.¹

One worker described how his favorite activity was dropping stuff because squatting down to pick up the object is the only way to get any rest.² Another worker said of his job, “Every day, I repeat the same thing I did yesterday. We get yelled at all the time… Life is meaningless.” A worker suffering from insomnia simply stated, “I feel no sense of achievement, I’ve become a machine.”³

Foxconn employs nearly 600,000 workers at its Shenzhen facility, almost all of which are young migrants from the Chinese countryside.⁴ “Hukou” (Household Registration System) laws make internal migration in China illegal. These laws deny migrant workers access to any social services and the risk of deportation back to the countryside makes them especially vulnerable to exploitation.⁵ In the city of Shenzhen super-exploited migrant workers make up over 80% of the population.⁶

As tragic as the story at Foxconn is it is hardly unique in the new China. A 2007 article in the China Daily noted that 287,000 people kill themselves in China each year. It has become the leading cause of death for people between ages 15 and 34. A study done by Peking University found that 20% of Chinese high school students considered committing suicide and 6.5% had made plans to do so.⁷

The current economic downturn has only exacerbated the issue. In 2009 the London Telegraph reported that suicides were surging among Chinese college graduates. They connected this rise in suicides to the fact that one-third of graduates are unable to find work after graduation.⁸

Suicide and Capitalist Economy
are Connected

The link between suicides and the capitalist economic system has long been acknowledged. A 1976 Congressional report in the U.S. even commented that, “The national rate of suicide in the U.S. can be viewed as an economic indicator.”⁹ A recent study from Oxford University confirmed this finding that a 3% raise in unemployment resulted in a 4.5% raise in the suicide rate.¹⁰

Indeed in the U.S. the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline reported an 18% increase in phone calls in early 2010.¹¹ And the BP Gulf oil spill that destroyed the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people has also now seen a corresponding increase in suicides on the Gulf Coast.¹²

The linkage between suicide and capitalism seems to be a universal one. The Aokigahara Forest in Japan has become known as the “suicide forest” due to the large numbers of people who have gone there to kill themselves. In 2009 Japan saw a 15% increase in suicides over the previous year. One man who attempted to kill himself in the forest after losing his job stated, “My will to live disappeared. I’d lost my identity, so I didn’t want to live on this earth. That’s why I went here.”¹³

Fall of Communism Leads Workers to Despair

The harsh working conditions, long hours, and terrible wages brought on by China’s reversion to capitalism are only part of the suicide puzzle there. Another factor not discussed by the Western news media is the despair brought on by the fall of communism in China.

The connection between the collapse of communism and worker suicides is most evident in the former Soviet Union. According to the World Health Organization the five highest suicide rates in the world all belong to former Soviet states (Belarus, Lithuania, Russia, Kazakhstan, and Hungary).¹⁴ The dissolution of the Soviet Union led to a surge in suicides in Russia that began in the mid-1980s leading one World Health Organization official to state, “The reasons are complex but the suicide rate is obviously linked to social and economic disintegration.”¹⁵

Along with having the third highest suicide rate in the world, Russia also has the highest rate of alcoholism in the world. Recently the Russian Public Chamber reported that 500,000 Russians die every year from alcohol abuse.¹⁶ The combination of alcohol abuse and suicide has helped to lower the life expectancy of Russian men to 59, causing Pravda to remark that Russian men are becoming “extinct.”¹⁷

Nets Won’t Save Chinese
Workers

Embarrassed by the suicide scandal Foxconn has devised a plan to increase pay by 20% and has begun installing anti-suicide nets around all the worker dormitories (most workers have committed suicide by jumping from buildings).¹⁸ Workers have even been forced by management to sign pledges not to kill themselves.¹⁹

Despite these measures the suicides at Foxconn continue.²⁰ One worker who admitted to contemplating suicide, and already made well above the proposed pay raise, summed up the real problem, “I do the same thing every day; I feel empty inside. I have no future.”²¹

The half-measures taken by Foxconn bosses to stop the worker suicides are all window dressing. The real problem at Foxconn, and in China and the world as a whole, is the alienation and despair caused by the capitalist system. Workers do not want to toil as slaves for the bosses’ profits while only getting crumbs for themselves. The only solution to the suicide problem in China is the overthrow of the capitalist class and the victory of communist revolution. Until that point, anti-suicide safety nets won’t solve anything. J

Sources:

1 Business Week, “Foxconn Workers in China Say ‘Meaningless’ Life Sparks Suicides,” 6/2/10.

2 Gizmodo, “Undercover Report from Foxconn’s Hell Factory,” 5/19/10.

3 Business Week.

4 Open Letter from Chinese Sociologists, “Address to the Problems of New Generations of Chinese Migrant Workers, End to Foxconn Tragedy Now,” http://sacom.hk/archives/644 , dated 5/18/10, retrieved 8/1/10.

5 Christian Parenti, The Nation, “Chinese Struggle Over Resources Under a Quasi-Maoist Capitalism,” 5/18/08.

6 Open Letter from Chinese Sociologists.

7 China Daily, “China’s Suicide Rate Among World’s Highest,” 9/11/07.

8 The Telegraph, “Wave of Suicide Sweeps China’s Graduate Class,” 7/25/09.

9 CHALLENGE, “Unemployment: Capitalism’s Killing Fields,” 3/17/10; NYT, “US Study Links Rise in Jobless to Deaths, Murders and Suicides,” 10/31/76.

10 Bloomberg, “Murder, Suicide Rates Climb When Jobs Vanish and Economy Slows,” 7/7/09.

11 AOL News, “Amid Lack of Jobs, Suicide Hot Line Calls Surge,” 7/6/10.

12 Mother Jones, “Depression, Abuse, Suicide: Fishermen’s Wives Face Post-Spill Trauma,” 6/25/10; Washington Post, “Apparent Suicide by Fishing Boat Captain Underlines Oil Spill’s Emotional Toll,” 6/24/10.

13 CNN, “Desperate Japanese Head to ‘Suicide Forest,’” 3/20/09.

14 WHO, “Suicide Rates per 100,000 by Country, Year, and Sex,” 2009. Sri Lanka would be 4th highest but was omitted because the most recent numbers were almost 20 years old (1991).

15 The Lancet, Suicide Rates in Russia on the Increase,” 7/19/03.

16 Ria Novosti, “Alcohol Abuse Kills 500,000 Russians Annually,” 6/16/09.

17 The Guardian, “No Country for Old Men,” 2/11/08; Pravda, “Russian Men Become Extinct,” 11/3/05.

18 The Guardian, “Foxconn Offers Pay Rises and Suicide Nets as Fears Grow Over Wave of Deaths,” 5/28/10.

  19 Sydney Morning Herald, “I Promise Not to Kill Myself: Apple Factory Workers ‘Asked to Sign Pledge,’” 5/26/10.

  20 ABC News, “Worker Death Tally Rises at Foxconn China,” 7/21/10.

  21 Business Week.

SOUTHERN ISRAEL, JULY 27 — Some 1,500 heavily-armed Israeli cops, backed by choppers and bulldozers, demolished the “unrecognized” Palestinian-Bedouin village of Al-Araqib in southern Israel (the Bedouin Arabs are former nomads who have established their villages in the desert), leaving 40 impoverished working-class families stranded in the desert without a roof over their heads. The villagers’ olive orchards, chicken coops and sheep pens, used to supplement their meager incomes, were also destroyed.

Even before its demolition, Al-Araqib’s residents — like the residents of numerous other “unrecognized” Palestinian-Bedouin villages in the Negev — were denied even the most basic infrastructure and services. They lived without modern sewage facilities, with no local medical care or schooling, and had to use expensive on-site generators and plastic tanks to provide their electricity and water. The Israeli government conquered the Negev in 1948 and made it a part of Israel, claiming that the Bedouin — who have lived there for centuries — established the village “illegally” on land now belonging to the state. At the same time the Israeli government easily grants land, infrastructure and services to small Jewish settlements in the area and even to single-family “individual settlement farms” owned by rich ranchers (generally ex-Israel Defense Force ranking officers). Recently, one of these racist ranchers shot and killed a Bedouin; needless to say , he was found not guilty by the bosses’ Zionist court, thus giving the green light for others to follow suit.

Demolition U.S.-Financed

The aim of this racist demolition was to pave the way for a planned ruling-class gated settlement, Hiran, A Religious–Jews Only enclave. It is financed by U.S. billionaires, including Ron Lauder, in conjunction with the racist JNF (the Zionist Jewish National Fund, which controls all the land grabbed in the 1948 and 1967 wars). In other words, the Israeli Zionist police force erased an entire village off the land as a service to real-estate tycoons .

The destruction of Al-Araqib is not an isolated incident. It is another step in the Israeli ruling class’ ongoing attack on workers’ housing in the service of real-estate capital, both local and foreign. This is a racist and colonialist policy — ethnic cleansing to serve the rich. The racist, ultra-nationalist Israeli regime also wants to guarantee a Jewish national supremacy in every part of the country.

Recently, thousands of Palestinian workers living in the ancient city of Jaffa (part of Tel Aviv today), and super-exploited Jewish workers in the Kfar Shalem neighborhood (established on the ruins of a Palestinian village demolished in 1948) in south Tel Aviv are threatened with eviction to make way for massive real-estate development projects in the areas. The Miami-based real-estate tycoon, Irving Moscowitz, is using the Israeli state-machine to evict many Palestinian families from the villages of Sheik Jarah and Ras al-Amud in order to clear the land for real-estate development.

The fascist Israeli state, as well as its racist ideology of Zionism, serve only the capitalists, is more than willing to act with extreme brutality and cruelty against workers when it is deemed necessary by the tycoons’ interests. This government uses racism as a tool to divide the workers and turn them one against the other, all while blatantly ignoring the most basic needs of entire populations of workers.

The interest of the Israeli and Palestinian workers is, therefore, to unite and smash this fascist state-machine and place the working class in power. Only workers’ communist rule would be able to provide for the needs of each and every worker in this part of the world, be that housing, education, healthcare or adequate infrastructure. Only the seizure of power by the working class will do away with all tycoons and their rotten system that breeds racism, poverty and war.

UPDATE - AUGUST 10, 2010 - Al-Araqib was demolished again by the fascist Israeli police force, for the third time in two weeks. Several Jewish and Arab activists who tried to resist the destruction were arrested. But the workers and peasants of Al-Araqib have not given up, and will continue fighting against the racist government and its capitalist masters.

In New York the city administration is planning a 10% cut in the already under-funded public hospital system. In Chicago they already laid off hundreds of doctors, nurses and other frontline providers from the Cook County Hospital system and closed half of the County’s public clinics, with further cuts planned. In Los Angeles they downsized, then closed Martin Luther King Hospital, leaving thousands without care.

All these facilities serve largely black and immigrant working-class patients, but their existence means that there is a safety net for all workers who get thrown out of work by the inevitable ups and downs of the capitalist economy. Now the politicians in the big cities are dismantling public health, just like they are destroying public schools, public housing and public transportation. They use racism of different kinds to blunt the fight-back against their attacks.

The capitalist TV and newspapers create the myth that anything with the word “public” in the name is for black people. That’s one of their tricks to confuse white workers. Then they try to get black workers to go along with Obama’s “health reform” with the lie that “only” immigrants will be left out in the cold when the public hospitals close. That’s to build anti-immigrant racism, especially among blacks. Racism is the cutting edge of fascism, and a black “liberal” is now swinging the axe.

But many workers already see through these tricks. Demonstrations involving thousands of people have opposed these racist attacks. Workers have denounced the cuts in public meetings as well as picketing and marching outside as the rich “civic leaders” solemnly try to “save our public institutions” by downsizing and privatizing them. In California nurses’ strikes have forced the politicians to make concessions by improving the ratio of nurses to patients. But like most reforms, the bosses then turned this victory into its opposite by simply reducing beds and kicking out the patients.

The unions can be a useful place to organize fight-back, but the reforms they fight for will never satisfy workers’ healthcare needs. There is lots of anger about these attacks and workers need a stronger and more far-reaching counter-attack.

  The public services under attack are the remnants of the “welfare state.” Public hospitals and other things workers need to survive were created when millions of workers in the U.S. and Western Europe started getting ideas of revolution  from Russian and Chinese workers in the early to mid-20th century. At that time the Soviet Union (now “Russia”), and later the People’s Republic of China, were the only countries that guaranteed jobs and healthcare to all.

The capitalists in the West were scared to death of revolution in their own countries. They fought the threat of communist revolution in the West in two ways. First, they allowed a few reforms so that revolution wouldn’t seem like the only alternative to the misery of capitalism. Reforms silence the workers and further bar the workers from uniting as one. Then they fired, blacklisted, arrested, beat up and killed communists who led the workers in fighting for reforms.

These measures defused and tamped down the revolutionary energy that had been building in the working class. Now, the capitalists are under more pressure to cut costs as they prepare for bigger and bigger wars. And with the return of Russia and China to capitalism, the pressure is off for making reforms, at least for the moment.

Workers need a two-pronged counterattack. We need to sharpen the contradictions of the reforms wherever we can, and we need to recruit more and more workers into the PLP. The working class needs to go all the way to communist revolution. We need to understand that anything short of destroying capitalism and replacing it with communism will not offer the future we and our children and grandchildren desperately need.

Reforms will ultimately lead back to fascism. Revolution, not reform, is the only solution to the horrors of capitalism. Fight for communism!

“We did our job and now we’re going home,” says a GI. This is the theme of “Restrepo,” a National Geographic documentary which describes the 15-month tour of duty of an Army platoon whose job was to secure a valley in a mountainous area of Afghanistan so that a road could be built there to “help” the people of the valley.

“Restrepo” follows in the footsteps of the Oscar-winning film, “The Hurt Locker” which tells the story of caring, capable men assigned to a U.S. Army bomb-disposal unit. It brings to life the U.S. ruling-class slogan to “support the troops even if you oppose the war.“ But the only way to support working-class troops is for PLP to organize in the military to turn the guns around on the warmakers. The only way the working class wins is when we build a Red Army to fight for a communist revolution.

In this film we are asked to feel the camaraderie of men at war,  the grief they feel at the death of one of their platoon members and their joy at the death of one of the insurgents. They all “have a job to do” and they do it without any questioning of the Afghan war or their role in it. It recalls the oft-repeated line in “The Godfather” movie that “it isn’t personal, it’s just business.” The ruling class needs soldiers to believe this so they will continue killing their working-class brothers and sisters, in the bosses’ widening wars for profit and control.

In the film, one of the Army’s strategies is to win over the people in the village near their camp. The Army must apologize for the mass destruction of the villagers and their resources. The Army replaces the officer held responsible for the atrocities. His replacement meets with village elders and tells them that he won’t make the same mistakes as the previous officer and that the elders should trust him.

This pushes the idea that the military as a whole is doing the right thing, and is for the villagers. By replacing the one “bad” officer, we are to believe the villagers will be protected.

After their 15-month tour of duty, the soldiers go home, but the village and its elders are still there with the insurgents and a new group of soldiers who they are supposed to trust. The U.S. troops eventually withdraw from the valley after 50 U.S. soldiers have been killed. The documentary neglects to document how many civilians and insurgents were killed or how much destruction the U.S. military caused.

“Restrepo,” like “The Hurt Locker,” is a description of U.S. military duty as “just another job.” The men are shown as accepting the necessity of fighting imperialist wars for control of oil, oil pipelines and new-found mineral wealth. Neither the men nor the documentary questions the politics or morality of the war. Couched as “objectivity,” this allows ruling-class justifications for the war to go unquestioned and therefore dominate the discussion.

We need to bring CHALLENGE’S understanding of U.S. imperialism to high school students who will be joining the military and we need to win soldiers to PLP so that these wars will not be “business as usual.” Then we can make new documentaries that will tell the story of working-class rebellions and communist victories.