Low Prices, Widespread Torture-Our new system of global production

[Clara T]

Powerlines
Low Prices, Widespread Torture
Our new system of global production
by HAROLD MEYERSON



Whatever its virtues, the United Nations isn’t the first place you’d turn to if you wanted to expose some nefarious internal practices of its more powerful member states. So it came as no small surprise when a U.N. investigator last week documented the “widespread” use of torture in China. Manfred Nowak, who is the special rapporteur of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, noted that electric shock, sleep deprivation and submersion in water or sewage are still common practices in China when the state seeks to obtain confessions and suppress the political dissent it delicately terms “deviant behavior.”

This is hardly the image of the new, improved capitalist China that the neo-Communist regime and American business have teamed up to convey. As they depict it, China is a bustling, modern society that offers everything a company could possibly want to do business. They’re right — and that’s just the problem.

Because if China offers anything to the corporations of the world, it’s a diligent, skilled — and intimidated — work force. Nowak noted the prevalence of torture in China’s labor camps, where the inmates have been imprisoned for their political or religious beliefs and activities. The ultimate crime in China, after all, is to seek to establish autonomous centers of power — churches, parties, unions — not under the control of the Communist Party. Workers who have led strikes or tried to organize unions are still jailed and tortured in the new-model China, as democracy advocate and union activist Harry Wu — a veteran of the state’s gulags — can attest.

This is a story that implicates all of us. Torture, and fear of torture, are factors in holding costs down in our new-age globalized production system. Take just-in-time delivery, add a touch of submersion in shit, fear of beating, fear of drowning, and voilà! You get Wal-Mart’s everyday low prices.

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