KOZHIKODE: CPM Politburo member S Ramachandran Pillai, while addressing the media here on Sunday, repeatedly reiterated that China was a Socialist state. However, the article ‘Marx at 193’ --written by British Journalist John Lanchaster and published in the London Review of Books on Thursday -- presents a stark contrast to Comrade Ramachandran Pillai’s statement. If the analysis on the so called ‘external proletariat’ in China is to be believed, then one must have to say that the China presents the ultimate victory of capitalism. For, according to the article, it has arguably become the proletariat capital of the world’s bourgeois.Describing the working conditions of the proletariat at the manufacturing companies in China, the author says: “I don’t think you can describe these as 19th-century labour conditions, but they come very close to fulfilling Marx’smodel of an alienated proletariat whose labour is sucked away from it and turned into other people’s profits. And all this, in an irony so large there is almost no word to encompass it, in the world’s biggest and most powerful notionally Communist state.”The article says, “Apple’s last quarter was the most profitable of any company inhistory: it made $13 billion in profits on $46 billion in sales. Its best-selling products are made at factories owned by the Chinese company Foxconn. (It makes the Amazon Kindle, the Microsoft Xbox, the Sony PS3, and hundreds of other products with other companies’names on the front).“The company’s starting pay is $2 per hour, the workers live in dormitories of six or eight beds for which they arecharged rent of $16 a month, their factory in Chengdu, where the iPad is made, runs 24 hours a day, employs 1,20,000 people and isn’t even Foxconn’s biggest plant: that’s in Shenzhen and employs 2,30,000 people, who work 12 hours a day, six days a week. These conditions are equal to or better than most of the equivalent manufacturing jobs in China, where most of the world’s goods are made, and that life is widely seen among Chinese workers as preferable to the remaining alternatives of rural life.” The article adds: “The company’s answer to a recent scandal about suicide rates was to point out that the suicide rate among Foxconn employees is actually lower than the Chinese average, and that it turns away thousands of applicants for jobs every day, and both of those facts are true. That’s what’s really shocking. The proletariat is queuing to get into Foxconn, not to organise strikes there, and the great danger facing China, which is in a sense where the world’s proletariat now is, is the inequality caused by fractures within the new urban proletariat and the rural poverty they’re leaving behind.”The London Review of Books (or LRB) is a fortnightly British magazine of literary and intellectual essays, which is considered one of the most reputed magazines in the world. John Lanchaster -- who regularly contributes to world’s most reputed publications such as Granta, The Observer, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, the Daily Telegraph and The New Yorker -- is the contributing editor of the LRB.
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