Steve's Jobs

A moan goes through the hipster centres of this world; Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg, London’s Shoreditch and Manchester’s Northern Quarter. The mastermind behind a number of Apple products, including the iBook, the iPhone and the iPod, Steve Jobs, is dead! While some of his fans mourn, as if their own child had died, we want to put the focus firmly on the dark side of the success of the Apple brand.

In November 2010, all operations at the Deutsche Post mail distribution centre in Berlin-Mitte collapsed. The reason for this was the inquiry notice of a woman in a city newspaper for a “man in his early 20 with “retro glasses” who had worked in a cafe in Mitte on a Mac-Book and was telling her about his new project.

No fewer than 13 800 men felt addressed and answered the advert. That not only says something about the taste in glasses of many Berlin men, but already points out what kind of a cult status Apple products have reached, especially in the better-off, “creative” circles. Now there are photos appearing on the Internet from San Francisco, Sydney and Beijing, where people lay flowers in front of Apple stores and thank the deceased for the iPhone.

Apple and the “workshop of the world”

Speaking of the iPhone, since the first generation, the popular mobile phone has been produced in China, originally in the Xiamen Special Economic Zone. Today, Apple employs the Taiwanese company Foxconn to produce the iPhone, as well as other products.( in China) Foxconn is one of the world’s leading and largest manufacturers of electronic and computer parts. Foxconn’s Shenzhen City, in south China, is the largest single electronics company in the world and has approximately 130,000 employees.

It’s not only Apple that produces its products in Shenzen, other companies such as Intel, HP, Dell, Sony and Nintendo also take advantage of the easily exploitable workforce. There, in the so-called Pearl River Delta, where 5% of all global goods are made and, so it is said, where there is a strike with at least 1,000 workers involved every day, lies the “workshop of the world”.

And, like in 19th Century England, the former “workshop of the world”, the conditions in the Chinese electronics industry are appalling. After a series of suicides by desperate workers at Foxconn in 2010, even the mainstream international media became interested. A study by an institute in Hong Kong showed, among other things:

Although the monthly maximum amount of overtime allowed by law is only 36 hours, a large number of workers were working 60-80 hours per month more.

When there was a particularly high demand for the iPad, workers were allowed to take only one day off every two weeks.

During their 12-hour shifts, the workers are not allowed to talk to each other and have to stand throughout the whole shift.

“Bad” workers have been degraded and humiliated by the heads of department in front of their colleagues.

Such conditions are now ubiquitous in China’s economy, the local media even speaks of “Guolaosi”, death by overwork. In our brochure, “China on the path to world power,” we describe in detail the working conditions in China’s free trade zones, where about 70% of the workers are women.

The mostly very young workers have to contend with, not only 12-15 hour working days, forced overtime and enormous health and safety deficiencies, but also degrading disciplinary measures and sexual assault.

It would be wrong to portray China’s young workers solely as poor helpless victims, as “Western” media and NGOs like to do. Whilst, for example, the suicide series at Foxconn got a lot of media attention, the bourgeois media hardly reported on the strike of 7000 Foxconn workers for higher wages in November 2010. This selective reporting follows, consciously or unconsciously, a certain agenda. Namely that the Chinese working class should be depicted as a bunch of poor slaves, and not as a combative and self-conscious social force. The Left and the labor movement in Europe should not fall into this trap and should, according to their resources and capabilities, report on the struggles of the Chinese workers.

Should I boycott Apple?

What can we do if we are shocked by the ways in which Apple does manufacture its “lifestyle” products? Must people now no longer have iPhones (if they can afford them at all)? Do they have to throw away their old iPods? No! Individual consumer boycott has never been a solution to any problem. And if one does not want to renounce the comforts that have been brought to us by the mechanization of our society, one will hardly find ethically viable alternatives. All major electronics companies produce under similar conditions.

Change of consumption means change in production!

Rather than worrying about how we can individually, with abstention from consumption, get out of this society, we should talk about how we can change this society. Even if parts of the establishment always want to hand the responsibility to the consumers, the real responsibility lies at the level of production.

It is the way the capitalist economy works: the means of production (factories, raw materials ...) are privately owned by a small class of capitalists. These capitalists compete with one another and are forced to, if they want to survive in a market economy, constantly strive to increase profits and thus increase their capital. They have no other choice than to make as much profit as possible. Only in a society where the means of production are no longer in the hands of a small class of capitalists, but where the production is organized and controlled by the whole of society, will it be possible to really produce for the needs of mankind and in a way that does not inflict suffering upon another part of society.

For Steve Jobs, who was also said to be extremely ruthless when dealing with his own staff, we shall shed no tears. Our sympathy and solidarity is with the workers in the supplier companies of Apple, and all workers in the Chinese electronics industry. And the best way to show that solidarity with the Chinese workers is doing the same thing here as they are trying to do in China, although under way more dangerous conditions; bring communist ideas back to the workplaces and organize resistance!