One of the great things about capitalism is that its benefits are not self-evident. Capitalists have to continually trumpet its merits to a workforce that knows, through bitter experience, what a hellish existence wage-labour is.

Which is why, when a piece of popular culture shows factory labour as it is, the capitalists get antsy. Coronation Street is an English soap opera about working class life in a Manchester suburb. Unlike American soaps, the characters actually have to work, and a factory figures prominently in the show. Apparently this is putting young people off factory work.

Sexual harassment, violence, injury and wage gaps are reality for most people, particularly young people who view Coronation Street as an accurate reflection of reality, "working-class people doing repetitive badly-paid work at the mercy of an autocratic sexist boss".

Autocratic, sexist, well-coiffured factory owner Mike Baldwin

The capitalists' response is to shoot the messenger. Prof. Mike Scott says soaps "should have a look at how clean and efficient most factories are now, and the real opportunities they offer for career advancement and international travel."

And why not? Factories are so clean, American workers are bringing home radioactive and heavy metal toxins, making their children sick, according to those well-known subversives at USA Today. And think of all the immigrants fleeing poverty & war - er, travelling internationally for a chance to be exploited in first-world factories, vilified and occasionally murdered for going where capital wants them to.

But Prof. Scott has a better idea. "It would make a great storyline watching [Coronation St. characters] Danny Baldwin and Janice Battersby getting to grips with lean manufacturing techniques, or planning export tactics into other countries."

Come on, work isn't all bad...

These would be the same lean manufacturing techniques that squeeze more profit from workers, making them work harder and faster, and destroy unionized workplaces by outsourcing production. This would also include 1st world export tactics that have dumped commodities into poor countries, devestating their economies, while refusing to accept their exports? Hey, how about Danny and Janice kick Africans off their land and chortle while Africa starves because of our export policies? Wait, George Monbiot says that's already been done:

Canada had paid for the ploughing and planting with wheat of the Basotu Plains in Tanzania. Wheat was eaten in that country only by the rich, but by planting that crop, rather than maize or beans or cassava, Canada could secure contracts for its chemical and machinery companies, which were world leaders in wheat technology. The scheme required the dispossession of the 40,000 members of the Barabaig tribe. Those who tried to return to their lands were beaten by the project’s workers, imprisoned and tortured with electric shocks. The women were gang-raped. For the first time in a century, the Barabaig were malnourished. When I raised these issues with one of the people running the project, she told me, "I won’t shed a tear for anybody if it means development."

But, of course, the 'educated' professors are neither Barabaig tribespeople nor working in the factories. They're well-paid flunkies of the ruling class, whose job is to gloss over the brutal exploitation of workers in poor & rich countries alike. At least they don't have Coronation St. to help them do it.

Pro-immigrant marchers against racist vigilantes, Mexico-US border, July 2005. From San Diego indymedia.org.

Iraqi Resistance Yawns, Stretches and Stands Up

I could write about how the Iraqi Resistance is a popular insurgency, supported by the majority of Iraqis, and that Zarqawi and the Islamists are a tiny piece of it. But why bother when Lenin does it so well?