2/21/2012

THE GLOBAL MONOPOLIST GULAG

Spanish
Lockuptown y Foxconn, flagships of neoliberal Gulag

Two days after the most anti-labour labour reform in history the president of the employers federation stated that, “we are on the right road” " but a week later he was already complaining that the “the labour reform was conceived incompletely and is insufficient”. ". Where are we headed??

Human rights, and amongst them, labour rights, lie at the heart of the nation state. The objective of monopoly capitalism is the systematic reduction of these rights throughout the planet. Neoliberal globalisation generates emigration between nations and the breakdown of the nation state. It is rapidly making the relationship between citizens, their rights, obsolete. Neoliberal monopolist production chains are increasingly turning people into expatriates: workers are being reduced to immigrants within their own countries (as in the special zones inside emerging countries or immigrants to the penal industrial complex). .

The Nazis denationalised their victims so that their human rights expired and ceased to exist. They were converted into pariahs whose human rights disappeared in the absence of a functioning state. The only substitute for their lost nations was the concentration camp. Neoliberalism is following in their footsteps, but on a global level. Workers of the XXI Century, products of the extreme global flexi-precariation, the ideal workforce of neoliberal monopoly capitalism, are workers to use and then throw away, in the same way as the Nazi Gulag used them in private German monopolies.

Precedents


The colonialist empires, particularly the British Empire, systematically employed concentration camps to combat and crush anti-colonial resistance. In the mid-1950’s, to put down and punish the Mau-Mau rebellion of the Kikuyu, the British organised the extermination of 100 000 people in concentration camps (in spite of a diligent British programme to destroy the evidence, the brutal genocide of the British Gulag in Kenya is sufficiently documented). GULAG británico de Kenia.

The colonial empires promoted and extended the penal colony system of forced labour for criminals and political dissidents. During the XVIII and XIX Centuries they were sent to North America, Norfolk Island, Tasmania and the Andaman Islands. The penal colonies were intended to achieve a number of objectives at the same time: to get rid of the prisoners, to make their escape more difficult, to achieve economic self-sufficiency and to colonise new territories. Prisoners were often placed amongst free colonists in a state of semi-slavery.

The Tsarist penal system (katorgas) combined concentration camps with colonies, fusing the punitive and colonising functions, providing forced labour (criminals, POW’s and political dissidents) for the state timber and mining (gold and silver) industries and the construction of roads and infrastructure. The prison officials combined rewards with harsh punishment to stimulate the productivity of the prisoners. In the mid XIX Century the convicts were branded with the (Cyrillic) letters ‘C’ on one cheek, ‘O’ on the forehead, and ‘K’ on the other cheek (member of the Katorga) to prevent them from escaping. In spite of this, it is calculated that some 50 000 escaped prisoners lived on the Siberian taiga over the 19th Century, often organised in gangs of brigands.

The Stalinist GULAG


The Soviet Union used Siberia in the same way as the Russian Empire had done, as a colony for common criminals and political dissidents. The Soviet penal system was organised along similar lines and was institutionally regularised as the GULAG from 1929. In 1928 there were 30 000 internees. After the mass arrests of the Great Purge (basically of anti-Stalinist leftists accused of counter-revolution) at the beginning of the 1930’s, the population of the GULAG multiplied. .

The growth of the Gulag corresponded with the centralised industrialisation campaign. The Gulag was the terrorist leverage of soviet burocratic capitalism and participated in the exploitation of natural resources, colonisation of remote areas and the construction of infrastructure and industrial projects. .

In 1931-32 there were some 20 000 prisoners in the camps. In 1935 there were 800 000 in the camps and 300 000 in the colonies. In 1939 when World War II was looming there were a total of between 1.2 and 1.5 million in the camps and colonies of the Gulag. After the war, the number of prisoners in the Gulag increased considerably with the incorporation of POW's and convicts from the new purges, reaching 2.4 million at the beginning of the 1950's, of whom 456 000 were political prisoners.

After the death of Stalin in 1953 there were revolts and uprisings in the Gulag (the Bitch Wars) and uprisings in the colonies of
Kengir and Vorkuta). By the end of the 1950's virtually all the work camps had been closed down but the colonies continued in existence for a few more years until the Gulag system was officially dissolved on 25 January 1960.

The Baltic-White Sea Canal, the Baikal-Amur road, parts of the Moscow metro network and the University of Moscow itself were built with forced labour from the Gulag. Secret laboratories (sharashka) also existed, where convicted scientists worked on developing new technologies.br />
Generally speaking, the Gulag officials combined punishments with incentives to increase productivity (better rations, cash prizes, wages, reduced sentences both individually and collectively and preferential treatment for the most productive workers).


The Color GULAG. Slavery hire



W. E. B. Du Bois: "The slave was freed, stopped for a brief moment in the sun, and returned again to slavery". 

James Boggs (Black Political Power, 1963): "The U.S. crime is that it is the first and only country, having legally freed his slaves, enslaving continued from infamous 1877 treaty that allowed employers to maintain de facto southern blacks into slavery to allow time for the nascent industrialization north could compete with British manufacturing."

 While American media denounced the horrific Soviet GULAG, the USA slave GULAC continued to operate till the 2nd W.W.

In the amendment to the constitution, passed in 1865, abolishing slavery, contained a clause: " except as punishment for a crime".


After the defeat in the civil war, southern businessmen and planters managed to keep hundreds of thousands of blacks in slavery until the mid-twentieth century. Reconducieron southern courts freed slaves to their old plantations ( Jim Crow Laws). In late 1865, every Southern state had passed laws outlawing vagrancy, defining it so broadly that virtually any freed slave not under the protection of a white could be arrested for such a crime. It was a crime for a black change jobs without permission, talking loudly in the company of a white woman walking along a railroad track, sit next to a white on a train, having sex with a white woman, ...




Blacks could be arrested, claiming any trifle or falsity, and sold to labor camps. Those convicted could be rented to white employers. In times of labor shortage, the arresting agents claiming that black citizens were committing crimes and, without even judging them, were "rented" to businessmen or planters. In the absence of prisoners, many young people and teenagers were simply kidnapped and sold directly to the capitalist slave twentieth century.

In the labor camps thousands died from disease, abuse and poor diet. In some years, mortality exceeded 40%. The new hire slavery generated millions of dollars to states and local governments. For many years the slave trade was the main source of income for the state of Alabama.

In 1903 several slave bosses (Edward McRee,congressman from Georgia, and others), a sheriff (Mc Clelland) and a lawyer (William F. Crawley) were prosecuted for keeping in slavery thousands of black workers (the sheriff take them, the lawyer judged and rented them to the employers). They were fined $ 1,000. Her lawyers argued that there was no federal law that specifically make a crime of slavery.

After the outbreak of the 2nd GM, participation of black soldiers in the war, the tightening of federal action and probably because of the reduced need for unskilled labor, marked the true end of black slavery in the USA.

The Nazi Gulag


In contrast to the Stalinist state Gulag, the Nazi Gulag was organised by common agreement. The Nazi state used the SS to provide a constant flow of captive workers to the companies in exchange for a certain sum per unit provided.

If, in 1939, the opinion of German capital was divided, the initial successes of the Wermacht led to the immense majority of industrialists warmly and definitively embracing Nazism. With the imminent invasion of the USSR in sight, the large companies with knowledge and experience in the area (IG Farben, Siemens, and AEG) offered themselves as experts for the immediate exploitation of resources and seizure of the Soviet factories and industrial installations. Members of the 100 main corporations (Siemens, Krupp, Maresmann, Rheinmetall, Flick, GHH, IG Farben) participated with interest in the committees created for the project.

As new territories fell into German hands, the concentration camps followed. In the case of counter-attacks, factories and their labour forces were evacuated. A programme of forced labour was initiated under SS Gauleiter Sauckel who press-ganged over 5 million ostarbeiters from the occupied territories into work.

German production and management in the Nazi era

. Leistungsernaehrung (food for productivity)

As food became scarcer and the Germans protested about the cutting of their rations which were being diverted to forced labourers, German businessmen devised a scheme to stimulate productivity worthy of the top businesses schools, the leistungsernaehrung. The workers were divided into three classes A, B and C. Group B received a normal ration provided that their production was’ normal’. Group C was penalised for its lack of productivity by ceding part of its ration to group A.

. Destruction through work What was unique about the Nazi Gulag was the discovery and systematic application of the ‘destruction at the end of work’ method “ ”( Vernichtung durch Arbeit). ). It operated by constructing concentration camps next to the large industrial plants to provide forced labour to the companies according to demand at the time. It was a type of human “RENTING” . The SS of the concentration camps were paid a sum per prisoner by their clients with the understanding that the prisoners would be replaced in event of collapse, labour accident or falloff in productivity. In contrast to the Stalinist Gulag, in the Nazi Gulag the concentration camp was not a stock, but a flow, of labour. The SS did not provide their clients with individual workers but with specific units of workforce. They were treated as workers to use and throw away. Whenever productivity was seen to drop they were murdered and rapidly replaced. The system worked well whilst the SS could continue offering their capitalist clients an apparently endless flow of new prisoners. .

The first concentration camp to provide forced labour to the German industrialists was Auschwitz, for the construction of the chemical-industrial complex (IG Farben) of Auschwitz Monowitz in Silesia which finally rivalled the Ruhr complex. The camp at Oranienberg provided workers to Heinkel, Ravensbruck supplied women to Siemens, Mauthausen provided Steyr Daimler Puch, the camp at Sachsenhausen provided Daimler-Benz, the camp at Dachau provided BMW…. After 1943 each and every one of the large German industrial plants had at least one SS concentration camp attached to it. Over-exploitation, bad treatment, lamentable living conditions and lack of food, turned the camps into death traps for their inmates..

The global monopolist Gulag


Monopoly capitalism has never, ever renounced the advantages which a Gulag possesses. New forms of Gulag are beginning to proliferate at the hands of monopolist neoliberalism intent upon owning the planet.

In contrast to the previous Gulags, in the global monopoly Gulag, the initiative comes from the businessmen and although their participation in the manipulated public sector is limited, the participants, suppliers and clients are the large private corporations.


1. “Lockuptown”

Lockuopown is the second biggest city in the USA in the number of inhabitants. 6 000 000 prisoners inhabit the largest prison system in the world. A mass-imprisonment on a scale never before reached in history. A Gulag that keeps more Afro-Americans behind bars (2, 4 million) than had been slaves in 1850.


Whilst the majority of cities suffer from decrepit infrastructure and sub-prime finances, Lockuptown is living in an age of splendour and progress. We are dealing here with prisons which, for the large part, are privatised. Two big monopolist corporations (CCA y GEO Group) share this particular market with an income of nearly $3 000 000 000 in 2010. CCA (Corrections Corporation of America) operates 65 penal establishments, whilst the GEO group controls 118 detention centres shared between the USA, South Africa, the UK and Australia.



These are not rehabilitation units but a sophisticated prison-industrial complex with the intention of making money and a monopoly income. The number of prisoners has increased 772% between 1970 and 2009. CCA and GEO Group have consistently lobbied the legislators to punish recidivism in petty crime with long sentences (zero tolerance), to imprison immigrants and to condemn minors to life sentences (more than 500 minors are serving life sentences in its Texas establishments), with the unmistakable intention of increasing its volume of business.

A widely used strategy  for such companies is to select areas and cajole economically depressed county administration with promises of new jobs, money and economic rejuvenation, thanks to the construction of a private detention center in the area. This is a speculative maneuver committed to materialize the hope of the arrival of prisoners to fill beds. The bonds issued for financing must be endorsed by the local government that becomes additional support in the lobby to arrest and detain more and more people.




Whilst unemployment grows in the USA, the large monopolist multinationals have converted the North American Gulag into special de-localised zones within its own borders. The multinationals Lockheed and Raytheon Corporation subcontract the assembly of war material to the Gulag. This includes the sophisticated electronic components that guide the Patriot anti-missiles, paying wages of 17 cents an hour to prisoners without Trades Unions or medical insurance, working under a militarised regime without any protection measures. These workers live in minute cubicles the size of a toilet and 'enjoy’ an hour a day for exercise.

Conglomerates like IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, ATT, Wireless, Texas Instruments, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3 Com, Intel, Northern Telecom TWA, Nordstrom, Revlon, Macey's ,have decided to emulate Krupp, Heinkel, Daimler Benz, BMW, IG Farben, Siemens, the efficient German monopolies of the Third Reich who exploited Jews, Ostarbeiters, (Poles, Czechs, Bulgarians) and Soviet POW's of the NAZI Gulag relocating their factories and assembly plants to Lockuptown.

In this modern American Gulag forced labour is not a flow but a stock. Whilst the Nazi Gulag was able to use a continuous flow of prisoners through war and occupation, Lockuptown exploits a permanently growing stock thanks to the fact that the expenses of maintenance and lodging falls to the taxpayer.

2. The program USA visa H-2B, a variant of neoliberal slavery  

Washington politicians and corporate lobbyists have redesigned a legal slave framework (circling the 13th Amendment of the Constitution) to exploit immigrant labor. A "localization" of usual business model of multinational corporations, which supply chain uses captive labor.
In theory it is a program designed to fill jobs that nationals reject. To certify that there is no local demand for such jobs, slave firms place their advertisements in low circulation publications for the nationals without work not notice.

The H-2B visa program imported 83,000 "guest workers" to the U.S. in 2011. Receptionists and cleaning staff in hotels along the Gulf of Mexico (Four Seasons, Biltmore, Ritz Carlton, tourist resorts Nantucket Island ....), welders and pipe fitters in shipyards, fish processors, harvesters strawberries, vegetables, sugarcane, environmental janitors, gardeners, forestry workers.

Features

• Recruiters intermediaries charge fortunes for the visa and papers, so that immigrants are over-indebted and dare not return before for fear of reprisals.

• Exclusion from the labor market. Under the program H-2B visas, immigrants are not allowed to work for anyone other than the contracting firm.

• systematic restriction of movement. The employer confiscates the passports, visas, identity cards (Brand Candy recruiters in Mexico, retained the passports of their guests workers demanding $ 1,000 additional to return them). The isolation of the victim reaches the point of not revealing the location or address of the place where he lives and works.

• harmful living conditions, such as poor diet, denial of access to medical care, denial of free time, not enough time to sleep ...

• The slave working conditions: The salaries are cut by deductions for board and lodging. The shifts are unusually long with little or no interruption. A few days of rest. Frequent cases of withholding of wages.

• Intermediaries contractors retain immigrants' remittances to their relatives as "collateral".

• Often, the Applicant is not more than a intemediate firm that subcontracts immigrants to other companies.Five Star Contractors LLC imported Brazilian welders, housing them in containers, charging $75/week while founding customers shipyards to arrend them. Welders had yet paid Brazilians contractors $ 7,000 .

WalMart providers, pressured by the monopsonist, are likely to hire this type of slave labor. 12 companies supplying fish, flowers, vegetables and other foods, were denounced by repeated abuses and sexual harassment of workers.

The shipyards Signal Internacional hired 590 Indians welders through an Bombay intermediary contractor who charged them between $ 11,000 and $ 18,000 apiece. Workers staying in trailers crammed into narrow groups of 24. Signal International deducted $1050 per month from the salary of each employee in respect of accommodation and food. Signal International threats with deportation gainst any protest (four immigrants where deported and one attempted suicide)

3. Foxconn City Foxconn City is another flagship of the monopolist global Gulag which emulates or replicates the US penal system or the Nazi concentration camp. Foxconn has factories in Asia, Africa, and Latin America in which are concentrated 1.2 million workers who assemble 40% of the electronic products of the planet.

One of the principal entrance barriers is the speed of variation in global models (innovation) that is promoted in their poisonous marketing campaigns. The multinationals in the electronics and computing sectors (and the same in motor industry companies, IKEA or Zara) demand an inhuman level of flexibility (just in time) to their suppliers, mainly at the end of the production and assembly chain. Changing the global model every few months, as the electronics multinationals do, requires the functioning of gigantic assembly plants, with hundreds of thousands of workers capable of reorganising and reopening the production processes in a few weeks, using intensive 24 hour shifts 7 days a week. The global monopolist system of production and marketing demand levels of labour flexibility so high that they can only be provided by the global monopolist Gulag.

In its star factory Foxconn City there are 450 000 workers paid a few cents an hour. As in the case CCA and GEO Group, Foxconn has specialised in the savage exploitation of the workforce and offers its depersonalised, delocalised services to the same multinationals ACER Inc., Amazon.com, Apple Inc., Cisco, Dell, Gateway, Hewlet- Packard, Intel, Microsoft, Motorola, Nintendo, Nokia, Samsung, Sony, Toshiba, Vizio, which also contract with the former.

Foxconn City (also known as iPod City) is a city without houses, schools or childcare, a crude complex to exploit undocumented workers. (nongmingong). This is not one of the thriving old industrial towns. Foxconn City is designed for the pitiless exploitation of labour by externalising the cost of reproducing the labour force. The Longhua factory in Shenzhen is an enormous fenced compound which covers 3 square kilometres 2 and includes 15 factories with anti-suicide nets, dormitories (with anti-suicide nets), internal television (Foxconn TV) and a recreation zone with shops, a bank, restaurants, kiosks and a hospital.

There are no Unions or work committees. There, workers, young emigrants from the impoverished agricultural areas of the interior, without valid work documents (nongmingong) , without residence permits ( Su hukou rural - carnet de identidad_residencia - les impide el acceso a bienes y servicios subsidiados, tales como atención médica, vivienda, pensiones y educación para sus hijos, lo que limita su capacidad para integrarse en la sociedad), are purposely mixed with co-workers that work different shifts, come from different areas and speak different dialects with the intention of avoiding or minimising social interaction. They are young workers without human rights, without the right to consume or reproduce, thrown into a militarised system of shifts in which they are required to work without stopping whilst their productivity is satisfactory. They can be fired and replaced immediately by new recruits (less than 2% continue to work for more than 5 years). Rapid rotation ensures maximum productivity and dilutes the responsibility of the effects of overwork and the continued exposure to pollution.




Apple (seguramente inspirado en "Tiempos Modernos" de Chaplin) adoctrina a los mánagers de Foxconn en la utilización de cronómetros y sofisticados dispositivos informáticos de ingeniería industrial para poner a prueba la capacidad de sus trabajadores aumentando paulatinamente el ritmo/cuota, hasta averiguar el límite máximo de explotación que puede aguantar un empleado.

Obediencia, obediencia, absoluta obediencia

At the entrance gate to Dachau, the cynical slogan ‘work makes you free’ was displayed “Arbeit macht frei” (work makes you free’). “Vernichtung Durch Arbeit“ (“Death through work”) was the real programme “.General Oswald Pöhl head of the WVITA check Central Economic and Administrative Office of the SS organised the liberation through work in the following way “ The hours of work were unlimited. Anything that could cut down work time should be reduced to a minimum. Any interruptions or breaks at midday which were not geared to feeding would be prohibited. ”.


Al general Oswald Pöh se le ha de perdonar no estar a la altura de sus colegas de Foxconn en el tema de las relaciones públicas

The Dachau ‘programme’ ought to feature in the work management course for the CEO’s of Foxconn, given its evident similarities and objectives. General Oswald Pöhl may be forgiven for not being quite up to the same level as his colleagues at Foxconn in the field of public relations.

Cuando un obrero/obrera es castigado, se le obliga a leer en voz alta una declaración de autocrítica. Como en el caso de WalMart, los mánagers de planta dan "conferencias" al principio y al final de cada jornada de trabajo. Es decir, tras un turno de 12 horas, los empleados son sometidos a una terapia mental para que rindan hasta la extenuación  (lo mejorcito del totalistarismo comunista/fascista en los manuales del management neoliberal)

Although Foxconn houses its workers in miserable conditions and pays rock-bottom wages, as do CCA and the GEO Group, a good part of the expenses of construction and installation is borne by Chinese state subsidies and when the multinational clients require production points, the Chinese state provides, in exchange for a small sum, per head, hundreds of thousands of young students engaged in 'work experience'. They are obliged to work 12 hour shifts, nights included, for months, with the threat of possibly not being allowed to graduate.

Foxconn's imitators

KYE produces microchips for Microsoft. It also employs thousands of students on 'work experience projects' to reach production targets. The workers (women between 18 and 23) the majority of whom do not have identification documents,earn 52 cents an hour for 88 hours a week on the production line (97 hours in the factory). The workers and students sleep in narrow dormitories in the same factory. They are responsible for cleaning the dormitories and the factory without any cost to the company,

Metal Plastics and Electronics produces keyboards for Microsoft, IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Dell. The shifts are 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. In the production chain the keyboard to be assembled circulates before the worker every 7, 2 seconds (500 keyboards an hour). During theses 7, 2 seconds each worker has to assemble the keyboards and components at a rate of 1, 1 seconds per piece, 3 250 times an hour, 37 750 times a day 252 250 times a week. The net wage is 41 cents an hour. As in KYE the workers sleep in the same factory.

Yuwei Plastics and Hardware Product Company produces components for Ford. The shifts are 14 hours a day, 7 days a week. At times of peak demand they work 30 days a month. The employees have to assemble couplings at the rate of one every 12 seconds, 3 600 a day.

Pou Chen Group makes footwear for PUMA. The average age of the workers is between 20 and 22 at 31cents an hour. They work shifts of between thirteen and a half to sixteen and a half hours a day. From 7.30 to 9 or 11 at night, with a day or two a month for rest. A pair of shoes sells for $70. The labour cost is $1.16. Net profit to PUMA is $34.09 per pair. Puma makes a profit of $12.24 for each hour, $38 188, 80 for each worker per year.

El Gulag global

Monopolist exclusion

An essential part of the capitalist Gulag is the provision of a continuous flow of workers whose reproduction cost is externalised (they come free). Workers to use and discard. Workers ‘without’. Without human rights, labour rights, rights to medical treatment education, housing, heating. Workers who are denationalised, immigrants without papers, Trades Unions, contracts, organisation, resistance, self-esteem…… br />
The neoliberal monopoly system is generating levels of inequality and polarization never reached by any previous civilisation. Under capitalism, extreme inequality and lack of demand (under-consumption) result in over-capacity, crisis and unemployment.

Where there are no major social differences, the majority of the population constitutes a market and stimulates production and the extraction of profit in competitive enterprises and monopolies. But where there are abysmal differences, in monopolist business as opposed to the competitive model, then profits can be maximised by fixing prices only within reach of the rich minority.

The cruel thing about this equation is that the poor segment of the population remains excluded from consumption (e.g. for AIDS drugs) given that the monopoly (thanks to barriers such as patents or intellectual property) impedes the possible provision of goods at prices less than those of competing enterprises.

As the monopoly divides the market and only produces for the rich minority, factories close down and those excluded from consumption now become excluded from work. The neoliberal monopoly system is an infernal machine of exclusion, unemployment and under-consumption.

Demand for the Nazi Gulag was ensured by the needs of the armament industry and the war. Nazi extermination, apart from its paranoid racist element, was dictated mainly by the scarcity of food. The Holocaust, from its beginnings in the Warsaw Ghetto, was set in motion because the diversion of food to the Gulag workers led to a decrease in German rations. When the plans for the invasion of the Soviet Union were laid, a separate sinister “


Hunger Plan”, was hatched which intended the death by starvation of 30 million Soviets.

The Stalinist Gulag was inseparable from the inicial estart up of the system but after Stalin’s death the USSR functioned for another 30 years without a Gulag. br />
In contrast, the unstoppable advance of the neoliberal Gulag is just a part of the functioning of the capitalist system in its current phase. Crisis, depression and stagnation let loose the most virulent and sadistic instincts of the system. In conditions of overproduction and depression, maintaining monopoly incomes requires a paroxysm of exploitation (exploitation Gulag) whilst the liquidation Gulag (slums) operate as a safety valve to absorb the collateral damage of exclusion and growing misery. .

Slums

Of the 3000 million city dwellers over 1000 million live in slums, which like the Nazi extermination camps don’t provide numbers or statistics. However, the number of inhabitants does not stop growing. 30 million country-dwellers immigrate to the cities every year, expelled by the overwhelming advance of the agrarian multinationals, speculative finance funds in collaboration with international agencies, and it is calculated that the number will reach 3000 million by 2050 (Mike Davis: Slums planet).

Wikipedia needed 29 pages to the list of slums on the planet .




Google Earth allows us a birds-eye view of the extermination camps of the global Gulag.

3000 million country-dwellers remain in the world. Following the route taken by the multinationals and their agents they will soon (in a couple of decades) be substituted by 20 million 'modern farmers' who will expel the rest from the land.

Will there be work for all of them? When something like this on a small scale occurred in 19th Century Europe, the industrial revolution absorbed some of the former country-dwellers and others were relocated to America, Australia etc. in lands stolen from the indigenous population.

In the 21st Century the destination of the dislocated and excluded will be the slums, the true modern concentration and extermination camps. The 21st Century will go down in history as the century of slums.

The Northern Gulag

Ravi Kanbur: “ All the official poverty indices have one characteristic in common, to maintain constancy. The death of a poor person reduces poverty. If the poor die the poverty index goes down. .”

Boris Nemtsov ( diputado primer ministro de Yeltisn, 1997): "Rusia habría de entrar en el siglo XXI unicamente con gente joven"

If we look at the list of slums all the countries affected belong to the south. Does this mean that in the north there is no exclusion or that the levels of exclusion are not as absolute as exist in the Third World?

Until the 1990’s, prior to the capitalist penetration into Russia and Eastern Europe, the levels of exclusion in the north were nowhere near those of the Third World. The old Second World countries soon began to suffer, however, stupefied by the blows of poverty and exclusion in place of the promised abundance as the new and illustrious guests at the table of arrogant and triumphant capital.

" The ‘Transition’ was marketed as a sort of crossing of the desert to the Promised Land of abundance of liberal market capitalism. The Transition would have to be taught and supervised. This would be the first experience of ‘teaching' which shortly afterwards would affect other European states not in a stage of transition

‘The Transition', from its inception, took on almost biblical proportions in political and institutional discourse. La "Transición", merecía ser tutelada, acelerada y supervisada por el FMI y el Dep. de Estado norteamericano. Se impusieron "terapias de choque" que provocaron una hiper depresión más profunda y grave que la gran depresión de los años 30. Entre 1991 y 1995 el PIB ruso se contrajo en un 34%, los salarios reales se redujeron a la mitad  y el 85% de la población quedó bajo el umbral de pobreza.

‘The Transition', from its inception, took on almost biblical proportions in political and institutional discourse. Today, 20 years later, with Eastern Europe and the Balkans forming a deprived sub-periphery of the global market, totally dependent on the multinationals (banks and corporations), and without any other perspective but to submit to the designs of an essentially destructive system, the official line continues to insist that the ‘transition is incomplete’ in spite of the fact that the long journey through the desert in pursuit of the mirage has left an endless trail of corpses.

All the ingredients of the cocktail for the re-entry into the system (financial bubbles, devaluation, privatisation of public services, liquidation of the protection and pension schemes, social polarization, crime) have led to misery and exclusion for hundreds of millions of people and an incomparable increase in the death rate. Not a single country escaped the bloody guidelines imposed by monopoly penetration.



Today, 20 years later, with Eastern Europe and the Balkans forming a deprived sub-periphery of the global market, totally dependent on the multinationals (banks and corporations), and without any other perspective but to submit to the designs of an essentially destructive system, the official line continues to insist that the ‘transition is incomplete’ in spite of the fact that the long journey through the desert in pursuit of the mirage has left an endless trail of corpses.

The northern Gulag is scattered and silent. Disconnection and exclusion have led to a nosedive in the population of entire nations. It is a dispersed Gulag ( crime, alcoholism, hypothermia, suicide, domestic violence) that goes on silently claiming its victims that in the end make up a cold statistic which does not merit mention in the media.


Russia has lost more than 14 million people (its population could remain below 111 million in 2050). The zone which made up the old USSR has lost more than 30 million people since the capitalist re-entry (23 million were lost during World War II). Rusia ha perdido más de 14 millones de personas, Ucrania ha perdido casi 7 millones (un 13,2% de su población en 1991). La zona que abarca la antigua URSS ha perdido más de 30 millones de personas desde la rantreé capitalista (23 millones durante la II GM).

Recognised demographers (Murray Feshbach) project a sharp decrease in the Russian population over the next decades (110 million in 2050)..


The population graphs of the old Second World countries follow the Russian model, an ascent until 1991 and a pronounced decline after this date.





The murderous Gulag of the North is creeping unstoppably south. An epidemic of suicides accompanies the new religion of austerity as the financial crisis destroys increasing levels of the population. In Greece 5 500 people committed suicide in 2011, an increase of 45% from the previous year. In Portugal the suicide rate in 2009 was double that of the start of the decade. In Ireland the suicide rate of those less than 65 years of age grew 13% between 2007 and 2008. In Italy suicides for economic reasons increased 52% in 2010 alone.



The other archipelago


The planet is being converted into an immense Gulag, an ocean of misery and exploitation with extermination camps dotted here and there. There is, however, another parasitic archipelago of gated communities where the rich isolate and hide themselves away as they desperately try to consume all the products of the earth during their short lifespan (and to hell with them). .

The monopoly capitalist system intends to survive in an archipelago of paradise islands behind unassailable parapets, guarded and protected by expensive and sophisticated security services in the middle of a vast ocean of misery and crime. Whilst the monopoly depression destroys more jobs, they are armed with lawyers protecting intellectual property and patents, private guards and armies, security and vigilance companies and a coterie of jewellers, architects, decorators, majordomos, beauticians and vintners, who work outside the global Gulag to guarantee them the comfort and security to enjoy their monopolist incomes.

Next to a decadent, decrepit and unsafe Buenos Aires is the prosperous and resplendent Nordelta, a secure city, privately guarded, fenced and wired, with exclusive golf courses and sports marinas, with luxury hospitals and schools, a dream city for rich tax-evaders who live as expatriates from an Argentina which they exploit, only paying taxes in their new private city..

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Artículo censurado

ZZR said...

¡Venga ya! Hace siglos que España hace grandes esfuerzos por desnacionalizar a sus víctimas (y ya lo hacía Castilla anteriormente) sin que ello parezca haber preocupado a casi nadie.

Ahora resulta que se convierte en un gran problema a resultas de la reforma laboral y de ciertas actividades de entidades privadas.

No puede hacerse crítica solo cuando conviene si lo que se pretende es que resulte convincente.

Anonymous said...

Muy bueno, felicidades por el artículo.

Anonymous said...

Como siempre geniales tus entradas.
Gracias

Matapuces said...

Tus análisis son realmente notables.

Saludos!

Anonymous said...

Agradecido...una vez mas.

Anonymous said...

Es la pura realidad. La gente todavía no se da cuenta de la gravedad de lo que está ocurriendo y mide todo con una vara de medir que se antoja ya antidiluviana, sin saber que su sueño ya no existe y que su pesadilla crece a pasos agigantados.

Anonymous said...

Excelente artículo campeón, tu si sabes!!

Anonymous said...

Siempre espero ansioso la actualización de tu blog.
La prolongada espera, siempre vale la pena.
Lo desafortunado es que estos pantallazos de realidad son desalentadores.

frank said...

Puffff. He aprendido mucho en este rato.
Fantástico documento.

Tarcoteca said...

compañero, muy buenos artículos, sigue así. Se hecha de menos el correspondiente a marzo! A lo dicho, muy buenos.

IdT said...

Escalofriante. Felicidades por este tremendo trabajo.

Sin embargo sigo sin entender por qué se quieren cargar, aquí en España, a la clase media. No les somos útiles como consumidores?
Hasta dónde nos quieren empobrecer?
Un saludo

Anonymous said...

MAGNIFICO TRABAJO.