Morning Comrades and welcome back to a slightly delayed start to a new week of being a better cog in the machinery of capitalist fuckery.
I am going to try and and not pre-write this week despite another crushing work week so there is the potential of off-schedule dispatches from this end to yours but that just as a heads up. There is obviously a slew of topics to cover as the last few days proved yet again that the bullshit machine is running at top speed and I will pick a few of those apart today. There is a little story I will share from the weekend that I found humbling and potentially valuable for you, but for the time being, here are some new tunes for you.
Daily Marxism - Notes From The Weekend
To start off this week, a little story from the weekend, that for once didn’t involve wage labour. I am extremely fortunate to be surrounded by great crew of people that allow me to care for them and we meet regularly for shit talks, venting, planing and things that don’t belong on the internet. In passing, one such friend relayed a funny comment from another friend who jokingly said “Hell yeah, I read theory, I go drinking with Vogel” - and whilst I was initially a little embarrassed for clearly being that dude that 3 drinks down will just be that dude, it is in retrospect something I wanted to share with you. Too often, the study and hope of understanding of philosophy remains utterly academic, especially in the case of Marxism, when in reality it is a wonderful guidebook, a training to perceive your manifested reality differently than your capitalist propagandized mind has been shaped to see it. It is acutely materialistic and dialectical, meaning that, similar to capitalism it doesn’t ram rod an idea into every possible reality but rather allows you to see the world differently and asks of you to work according to your reality. There are many of you that write occasionally expressing fatigue and frustration at the world around us and I thought this episode of reality could offer some motivation. It is not about memorizing theory, being active online - and I’ll get to that shortly - but rather understanding your world as it is, and doing what you can, in real life, to make it better. The goal that we are working towards involves disrupting and ultimately breaking this cycle of brainwashed servitude towards capitalism and all its offshoots, re-imagining relationships between us and the rest of the world in non-competitive, mutually beneficial way. One of the ways this can be done is by wanting to understand how all this nonsense work and by the means of meeting, talking and discussions help your comrades in their path towards unlearning and relearning. More importantly, this helps and ultimately should lead to actual plans to change our passivity towards our exploitation and oppression, as this is what ultimately what is being done.
In the excruciating generational deep run of enforced servitude to people with no intention of doing other than accumulating more wealth than ever necessary one of the greatest acts of rebellion is offering guidance and stability when asked for. So much of the work we do entails just that, listening, learning and showing, or in other words from the early days: educate, agitate, organize.
The Fuckening. Part 1.
To explain, over the last few days I have boomarked a number of ideas that I wanted to explore and that turned into too many stories to genuinely fit into one story today, so rather than just scratching the surface, let’s serve a purpose and dig a little deeper. I am going to dig into the whole Musk / Zuck / twitter / meta / US government insanity over the next few days, as well as what is happening in Brazil but today let’s have a look into the other adidas scandal that is being ignored for the sake of another circus show with a celebrity that has real life consequences for people.
Obviously, this above statement applies to essentially all manufactors of goods, especially when it comes to the textile industry, but since adidas is on everyones mind, whether they asked for it or not, let’s dip into this one. To be absolutely clear, wage theft, violent union suppression, modern slavery, exploitation and the destruction of any and all social AND ecological infrastructures are the bare knuckle backbone of the fashion and sport industry. As some of you may know I worked for a few of these big brand bastards for nearly 20 years and the few insights I got were enough for me to do something else.
In any case, in addition to the most brutal exploitation of workers in the global south being the backbone to not only owning 20€ t-shirts but these brands making billion dollar profits so that they can afford bullshit like YEEZY, now comes the pandemic related extra level of exploitation of workers already existing in precarious realities.
Textile workers in Cambodia who produced garments for adidas, among other brands, were deprived of an estimated $109 million (USD) in wages in April-May 2021 alone, according to a comprehensive inventory by unions in 114 factories. adidas is linked to the largest wage theft in the factory sample despite high profits during the pandemic.
In eight adidas supplier factories in Cambodia, workers are owed at least US$ 11.7 million in unpaid wages. When workers protest, adidas suppliers get them arrested.
Adidas and its suppliers also rob workers when they fire them. Workers of the Hulu Garment factory in Cambodia who were laid off in 2020 were never paid $3.6 million in legally-owed severance. This wage and severance theft stretches far beyond Cambodia, across adidas’ global supply chain.
Despite the pandemic, adidas’ revenue increased 15% in 2021 to €21.234 billion (up from €18.435 billion in 2020). In the first quarter of 2021 alone the sporting goods giant earned $650 million in profits. The brand benefitted from short-term tax-funded Covid-19 aid from the government, and adidas and its shareholders have a responsibility to invest a decisive share of the company’s profits to protect workers’ wages and severance yet the losses inflicted on 30,190 workers across eight adidas supplier factories since the beginning of the pandemic adds up to $11.7 million (or $387 per capita).
This wage theft is not confined to Cambodia. The financial fallout from the COVID pandemic has been felt globally and cases of wage and severance theft have increased exponentially since. However wage theft is nothing new in the garment industry. The rights of garment workers have always been violated in favour of profits.
Again, this is systemic across the entire industry, certainly not a result of “just doing business” but precisely what this business, if not all, are based on. Our fairy tale of believing that consumption equals freedom is ultimately based on the enslavement of others. So next time some useless celebrity is ushered in and broken down in an endlessly repeating circle of clickbait on the backs of EVERYONE not as rich as they are, let’s focus on the real scandal here.
Yours, aiming to serve whilst scratching the surface,
V.