The rescue and search operation at the Rajput polyester plant in the Sunder Industrial Estate werr officially concluded in the early hours of Tuesday. The authorities confirmed that 45 people, mostly workers, died in the four-storey building collapse while 103 were evacuated. The wounded are not mentioned in the official press release. The figures given by the workers and eyewitnesses are much more. Dozens of families are still searching for their loved ones.
The investigators have blamed negligence on the part of the owner of the factory and the government departments responsible for regulating industrial activities for this gruesome tragedy. Workers had warned the owner a few days ago about severe vibrations in the building when newly installed machines were switched on. On Wednesday, a witness said that workers had again expressed their fears to the factory owner but he took them inside the building to show them that their apprehensions were unfounded.
Disasters like this are common in so-called ‘emerging’ economies or the undeveloped, ex-colonial world, resulting in deaths or permanent disablement. As if this were not enough, workers are subjected to assassination by the owner’s goons or the reactionary bourgeois state. The elite and their stooges shed crocodile tears. Such events get minute and distorted coverage in the corporate media and then disappear from screens soon after, with other non-issues concocted to diffuse any possibility of mass revolt or a spontaneous outburst of the workers against such heinous crimes of the greedy and callous capitalist class.
None of the commentary in the media touched the real causes behind these frequently occurring fatal accidents: a collusion of the owners, bureaucracy responsible for factory inspections and industrialists who are only interested in extracting maximum profit. No amount of sorrow, tears and compensation by these filthily rich politicians and ‘philanthropists’ for the families of the dead and wounded can ease the sorrow, pain, daily misery and drudgery faced by the workers. In the Sunder Industrial Estate there are 435 factories, and not in one do the workers have any right to organise or form unions.
There are hardly any permanent employees in these factories and almost all the labour comprises of contract workers with no rights whatsoever. The maximum wage of the victims of this tragedy was Rs 9,000, when the official minimum wage announced by the ‘democratic’ regime is Rs 15,000. The vast number of children and women who work in these industries get between Rs 3,000 and Rs 6,000 in wages per month. No provisions for medical insurance, health facilities, accident compensation, pensions, provident funds, living quarters or other basic human safety needs are present in this setup.
It is not just the small industrial units where workers toil under coercion in such harrowing conditions but now, increasingly, huge multinational corporations like Nestle or Lever Brothers are resorting to contract labour and other anti-worker practices. With the crumbling economy, rapidly falling investment and increasing deprivation, the labour market is glutted and unemployment is surging with catastrophic consequences. Even with interest rates at almost zero the bourgeoisie is reluctant to invest. They have lost any trust in their own system. With the undocumented and criminal black economy burgeoning at three times the size of the formal economy, it is nearly impossible to genuinely assess and analyse Pakistan’s actual economic condition. This black economy of crime, drugs and the arms trade, terrorism and other sinister businesses manifests into a corrupt state run by an evil nexus of criminal politicians, judges, generals, landed aristocracy, drug barons, mafia cartels and many other exploitative facets of this decaying system.
In the 68 years of its existence, Pakistan has been a combination of extreme primitiveness featuring islands of the most advanced technology and machinery. The weak economic and financial basis of the bourgeois has ruled over such patterns of socioeconomic development where infrastructure is based on the imperialist patterns of earning maximum profits with minimal investment. The capitalists have neglected the social conditions and structures totally inadequate for developing and modernising society. The workers call these rustic and fragile industrial units ‘factories of death’.
This factory collapse, above all, shows weak investment in the structures of fixed and constant capital. Electricity supplies, power generation, water resources, canals, transportation and other sectors of the physical infrastructure necessary for modern industrialisation are in decay. The social infrastructures of health and education are even worse and are deteriorating rapidly. The bourgeois, on the one hand, does not invest the necessary amounts to develop modern industry, while at the same time this capitalism is so sick and sclerotic that they cannot garner suitable rates of profits by running their enterprises. Hence they plunder the state, evade taxes, steal power and gas, and get their bank loans written off through various regimes, military or civilian, which they pamper and sponsor for their existence.
Their exploitation and robbery knows no bounds. They have plundered the state and society for generations and yet their lust for more seems to be insatiable. They have completed none of the demands of the national democratic or the industrial revolution. In fact, this primitiveness, instead of being eliminated, has been vulgarised by modernisation under the rotten and debilitated Pakistani system of capitalism. This has created a cultural, moral, ethical and social disaster in society. The hyped rise of Islamic fundamentalism is the product of this sick modernisation and the political vacuum created by the collapse of the Left. The betrayal of the PPP and trade union leadership has further aggravated the plight of the working classes. However, there have been innumerable struggles of the workers after the democratic counter-revolution of the PPP leaders in the wake of Benazir’s assassination and the withering of the mass uprising of 2007. There is no political party that represents the workers, peasants and the oppressed classes even in name.
The masses have lost all faith in this incumbent political superstructure. The workers and the youth in general despise politics. Yet there is a seething anger and revolt in the womb of society. Sooner rather than later this is bound to erupt with volcanic explosions. Events such as this gruesome corporate murder of the workers in this polythene factory by greedy and callous capitalists can trigger a mass revolt. Such events are bound to occur more often. The question is not whether the youth and workers will rise in revolt. The issue is whether there will be a revolutionary force strong enough to provide a leadership and destiny to such an upsurge. The lack of any illusions in any political party will make the character of such a movement much more militant and furious. Such a mass revolt shall carve out a new political leadership. But what is needed is to build a Marxist leadership and party, hardened and tempered in this arduous period, which can lead revolutionary youth and workers to victory by overthrowing capitalism and transforming their destinies.
The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and international secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at [email protected]