Whether in a large factory, or small scale workshop, is the value of people's contribution to the economy and their society reflected in their income?
Meanwhile a member of the political class questions Indonesia's slow economic growth:
President Jokowi spends New Year's Eve at the Bogor Palace, with fireworks going off in the background. (Twitter.com/Jokowi/N/A)
Anton Hermansyah
The Jakarta Post
Jakarta Sat, January 6, 2018
President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo has questioned the reasons behind Indonesia’s sluggish growth despite receiving praise from various international organizations for its efforts to improve the economy.
Indonesia received an investment grade status from all global rating agencies, including a recent upgrade to BBB from Fitch Ratings Inc., the President said, adding that the World Bank had also improved Indonesia’s ranking in the ease of doing business (EODB) to 72 from 140 in 2014.
Meanwhile, the Jakarta Composite Index (JCI) broke its record several times in 2017, increasing by 19.99 percent to 6,355.66.
However, Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati estimated the economy to grow by 5.05 percent last year, lower than the 5.2 percent target stipulated in the 2017 state budget.
"[Indonesia’s] EODB ranking jumped, its stock market index skyrocketed, inflation was low, the state budget is safe and ratings have gotten better. Everything is good. What should we do?" he said in the front of ministers during a Cabinet meeting at the State Palace in Jakarta on Friday.
“I compare [Indonesia’s] condition to that of a sick person who does not have any symptoms — cholesterol levels are good, there is no heart problem [...] and the lungs are good,” Jokowi said.
He then instructed the ministers to find out what the problem was so that Indonesia “could [grow] faster.”
Jokowi promised during his 2014 presidential campaign to boost Indonesia’s economic growth to 7 percent. (bbn)
Is it all about growth in profits? Or, is it all about growth in wages?
Workers stage a rally on International Labor Day at the Bank Indonesia traffic circle in Central Jakarta in May 2017.
Two months earlier workers in Jakarta were on the streets demonstrating for a higher minimum wage.
News Desk
The Jakarta Post
Jakarta
Fri, November 10, 2017
Hundreds of members of various labor organizations gathered in front of City Hall on Friday afternoon to protest the new provincial minimum wage.
The labor unions, including the Indonesian Metal Workers Federation (FSPMI) and the Indonesian Workers Union Association (Aspek), planned to march to the Presidential Palace after Friday prayers.
They demanded Jakarta’s 2018 minimum wage be revised, the revocation of Government Regulation (PP) No 78/2015 on wages and lower electricity rates. The minimum wage was set at Rp 3.6 million (US$266) last week.
Confederation of Indonesian Workers Unions (KSPI) deputy president Muhamad Rusdi said the minimum wage was not in line with the campaign promise of Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan.
Rusdi said the minimum wage for Jakarta should be much higher than that of Karawang and Bekasi in West Java, which were Rp 3.5 million and Rp 3.6 million, respectively
"It's weird because the living cost here is more than in those two regions," he said. Labor unions have demanded that the minimum wage in Jakarta be set at Rp 3.9 million.
Rusdi said the government regulation was not in line with Law No. 13/2003, which stipulates that the basic cost of living, inflation and economic growth be taken into account in the setting of the minimum wage.
Update
Jakarta's 2019 minimum wage set at Rp 3.9 million
Minimum wage! Maximum profit!
The pressure on workers wages to maximise competitive margins for the sake of profits for business ownership is just the way things are in any capitalist economy.
What we are told, what we are supposed to "understand", is that the differing levels of wage earner income, say between a bus driver in Liverpool and a bus driver in Bandung, is determined by the relative levels of productivity in a competition that takes place in a free market.
But there is NO SUCH THING as a FREE MARKET!
Ha-Joon Chang says in the introduction to his book 23 THINGS THEY DON'T TELL YOU ABOUT CAPITALISM:
We do not live in the best of all possible worlds. If different decisions had been taken, the world would have been a different place. Given this, we need to ask whether the decisions that the rich and the powerful take are based on sound reasoning and robust evidence. Only when we do that can we demand right actions from corporations, governments and international organizations. Without our active economic citizenship, we will always be the victims of people who have greater ability to make decisions, who tell us that things happen because they have to and therefore that there is nothing we can do to alter them, however unpleasant and unjust they may appear. (p. xvii)
And the first "Thing" he tells the reader is:
Thing 1.
There is no such thing as a free market
What they tell you:
Markets need to be free. When the government interferes to dictate what market participants can or cannot do, resources cannot flow to their most efficient use. If people cannot do the things they find most profitable, they lose the incentive to invest and innovate. Thus, if the government puts a cap on house rents, landlords lose the incentive to maintain their properties or build new ones. Or, if the government restricts the kinds of financial products that can be sold, two contracting parties that may both have benefited from innovative transactions that fulfil their idiosyncratic needs cannot reap the potential gains of free contract. People must be left 'free to choose', as the title of free-market visionary Milton Friedman's famous book goes.What they don't tell you:
The free market doesn't exist. Every market has some rules and boundaries that restrict freedom of choice. A market looks free only because we so unconditionally accept its underlying restrictions that we fail to see them. How 'free' a market is cannot be objectively defined. It is a political definition. The usual claim by free-market economists that they are trying to defend the market from politically motivated interference by the government is false. Government is always involved and those free-marketeers are as politically motivated as anyone. Overcoming the myth that there is such a thing as an objectively defined 'free market' is the first step towards understanding capitalism.
On the Re:LODE Methods & Purposes page there is an article on Economism where Ha-Joon Chang's ideas are juxtaposed with those of David Harvey.
In the LODE project of '92, the emerging thread linking people in 22 places along the LODE-Line that links the two cities of Liverpool and Hull was the fact of the increase in productive power pressing on population. People were losing livelihoods and the purposes of these economic environments were not structured around the needs of people, of wage earners.
Unless you are a landlord or an owner of a means of production, having a job is a basic necessity for survival in the economic environments most of us inhabit.
The lack of a job is for the majority of people on the planet undermines everything that people require. In the "rich" countries of the world (richer for some), and, according to some (see below), it is only the control of immigration that maintains the difference in wages between rich and poor countries.
Ha-Joon Chang in chapter 3, or Thing 3, in his book 23 THINGS THEY DON'T TELL YOU ABOUT CAPITALISM
Most people in rich countries are paid more than they should be
What they tell you
He writes:
In a market economy, people are rewarded according to their productivity.This is followed by:
What they don't tell youThe wage gaps between rich and poor countries exist not mainly because of differences in individual productivity but mainly because of immigration control.This is the "elephant in the room".
The main reason that a bus driver in Liverpool, or Hull, is paid many times more than a bus driver in Bandung, is, as Ha-Joon Chang says; "to put it bluntly, protectionism".
Our story of bus drivers reveals the existence of the proverbial elephant in the room. it shows that the living standards of the huge majority of people in rich countries critically depend on the existence of the most draconian control over their labour markets - immigration control. Despite this, immigration control is invisible to many and deliberately ignored by others when they talk about the virtues of the free market.
I have already argued (see Thing 1) that there really is no such thing as a free market, but the example of immigration control reveals the sheer extent of market regulation that we have in supposedly free-market economies but fail to see.
While they complain about minimum wage legislation, regulations on working hours, and various 'artificial' entry barriers into the labour market imposed by trade unions, few economists even mention immigration control as one of those nasty regulations hampering the workings of the free labour market. Hardly any of them advocates the abolition of immigration control. But, if they are to be consistent, they should also advocate free immigration. The fact that few of them do once again proves my point in Thing 1 that the boundary of the market is politically determined and that free-market economists are as 'political' as those who want to regulate markets.
(pages 26-27)
The comparison we might make between the wages of a bus driver in Liverpool, or Hull, and the bus driver in Bandung, follows from a comparison that Ha-Joon Chung makes between a bus driver in Sweden and a bus driver in India.
"Sven is paid fifty times more than Ram."
Later in this chapter on Thing 3 Ha-Joon Chang asks the question:
Are poor countries poor because of their poor people?
This is his answer:
Our story about the bus drivers not only exposes the myth that everyone is getting paid fairly, according to her own worth in a free market, but also provides us with an important insight into the cause of poverty in developing countries.
Many people think that poor countries are poor because of the poor people. Indeed, the rich people in poor countries typically blame their countries' poverty on the ignorance, laziness and passivity of their poor. if only their fellow countrymen worked like the Japanese, kept time like the Germans and were inventive like the Americans - many of these people would tell you, if you would listen - their country would be a rich one.
Arithmetically speaking, it is true that poor people are the ones that pull down the average national income in poor countries. Little do the rich people in poor countries realize, however, that their countries are poor not because of their poor but because of themselves. To go back to our bus driver example, the primary reason why Sven is paid fifty times more than Ram is that he shares his labour market with other people who are way more than fifty times more productive than their Indian counterparts.
Even if the average wage in Sweden is about fifty times higher than the average wage in India, most Sweded are certainly not fifty times more productive than their Indian counterparts. Many of them, including Sven, are probably less skilled. But there are some Swedes - those top managers, scientists and engineers in world-leading companies such as Ericsson, Saab and SKF (at the time of writing - correct) - who are hundreds of times more productive than their Indian equivalents, so Sweden's average national productivity ends up being in the region of fifty times that of India.
In other words, poor people from poor countries are usually able to hold their own against their counterparts in rich countries.
It is the rich from the poor countries who cannot do that. It is their low relative productivity that makes their countries poor, so their usual diatribe that their countries are poor because of all those poor people is totally misplaced. Instead of blaming their own poor people for dragging the country down, the rich of the poor countries should ask themselves why they cannot pull the rest of their countries up as much as the rich of the rich countries do.
The BBC ran this story about rich people in a poor country
The masters of ceremonies at this charity gala in a flashy suburban Jakarta mall are in top form tonight, entertaining hundreds of orphaned children.
They laugh and applaud as a troupe of brightly coloured Sufi dancers swirl and twirl to Arabic music blaring from the speakers.Surrounding the children are various stalls of food and sweet treats and a long table filled with goodie bags.
This is "Jakarta with Love", a breaking of the fast event, organised by some of Indonesia's richest wives and girlfriends."We collected 360m rupiah ($30,000; £18,000) for this event," Heidi, a beautifully made-up Indonesian socialite tells me, as she fans herself with her Gucci clutch bag."We want to give the joy we have in our lives to these little children," she says.'It's not a bank'
This grand get-together is an "arisan" - a ladies club that combines saving with socialising. It is a unique part of Indonesian culture, especially for those in the country's ultra-rich set.Wulan and her friends are members of at least four of these ladies clubs. "We collect money from all the members of the club on a monthly basis," she explains. "Then when it's your turn to draw the lottery, you win the pot. So it's like putting your money in a bank - but it's not a bank, it's a ladies club!" But it's not just any old ladies club. Membership can come with a hefty price tag."The monthly amount you put into the pot can vary, from 1m rupiah to around 100m rupiah," says Wulan with a picture perfect smile. "Imagine the winnings then - each member walks away with $100,000 a month." That's a fortune in this country where the minimum wage is around $250 a month.
But the women in this gathering are from some of the wealthiest families in Indonesia. Spending this kind of money is not a luxury for them - it's an expectation.Bag ladiesAt this event, they take selfies of each other with their blinged out mobiles. Others keep reapplying their makeup, as the bewildered children who this event is for look on. The number of billionaires and super-wealthy are expected to swell in the coming decade but who will make it and how?The BBC's global news teams go in search of the next generation of extreme wealth makers and find out what their emergence means for our changing world. All of the women have one thing in common - they are well-dressed, well-heeled and beautifully bagged.The socialites carry some of the trendiest and most expensive handbags in town - worth tens of thousands of dollars. This love for indulgence among Indonesia's wealthy set is helping other businesses grow.
"These women love to buy Hermes bags, or Chanel, or Louis Vuittons," Dini Indra tells me. She is the chief executive of Butterfly Republic and buys, sells and rents luxury handbags to Indonesia's aspirational set."My bags can cost you anywhere from $1,000 to $6,000, or even $50,000," she tells me in her studio in central Jakarta. "I know it seems ridiculous but this kind of extravagance exists in Indonesia. A branded bag is not simply a luxury item for these women. It's a status symbol. "We could buy a car or a decent house in Jakarta for that price - and sometimes it doesn't make sense to me, why they want to spend that kind of money, but they do. But it's great for my business.
Indonesia's new rich appear to be good for a lot of businesses, including legendary sports car maker Lamborghini. It opened its doors in Indonesia in 2009 and since then the country has become its third largest market in the Asia-Pacific region. "I think in a big city like this, maintaining the image of a good lifestyle is really important for young professionals," Johnson Yaptonaga, the owner of the Lamborghini showroom told the BBC. "And owning an expensive car has become a trend for this group. Once you're in this community, you have to keep up with this lifestyle."
Surviving on $2 a day
But for many in Indonesia, life moves on a different track.Rohma lives in a small slum near a railway track just a few kilometres from Dini Indra's branded bags studio. Like most of Indonesia's poor, Rohma finds it hard to make ends meet.
It is one of hundreds of slums peppered across Jakarta. The cheapest handbag in Dini's studio could pay Rohma's rent for a year. She lives in a tin shack with her husband and seven children.
She has seen the fancy cars and houses that have cropped up just a few hundred metres away from her slum - but they might as well be on a different planet. Her reality is filled with feeding seven mouths. "My husband used to drive a taxi, and now he does odd jobs," she says as she cradles a one-month-old baby in her arms - her first grandchild from her eldest son.
"I cannot see a good future for us, because my husband doesn't work that often while we have to eat every day. For me as a woman it's been very tiring because I have a lot of kids, and my husband doesn't make a lot of money, and I feel really tired." Life by the railway tracks is grim and Rohma's story is not unique.
Two-thirds of Indonesia's population lives on $2 a day - perilously close to the poverty line. The ranks of Indonesia's mega-rich may be growing, but so too is the gap between the rich and poor.
Four Indonesians richer than poorest 100 million
IMF data shows $101bn flowed from Indonesia into tax havens in 2015
Gap between rich and poor has grown faster in Indonesia than in any other country in Southeast Asia, Oxfam reports.
Al Jazeera 23 Feb 2017
A report on inequality in Indonesia says its four richest men now have more wealth than 100 million of the country's poorest people.
The report by Oxfam said Indonesia, with a population of more than 250 million, has the sixth-worst inequality in the world. Within Asia, only Thailand is more unequal.
It blames "market fundamentalism" that has allowed the richest to capture most of the benefits of nearly two decades of strong economic growth, concentration of land ownership and pervasive gender inequality.
In 2016, the wealthiest 1 percent of the population owned nearly half (49 percent) of total wealth, the report said.
In just one day, the richest Indonesian man can earn from interest on his wealth over one thousand times more than what the poorest Indonesians spend on their basic needs for an entire year.
The investment returns on the wealth of just one of the four richest, which according to the Forbes rich list include cigarette tycoons Budi Hartono, Michael Hartono and Susilo Wonowidjojo, would eliminate extreme poverty in a year.
The report said extreme poverty of less than $1.90 a day in income has declined sharply since 2000 but 93 million Indonesians still live on less than $3.10, which is defined by the World Bank as the moderate poverty line.
Oxfam said social instability could increase if the government doesn't tackle the gap between rich and poor.
President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo has said that reducing inequality is a top priority for his government.
A 2015 World Bank survey showed high levels of public concern about the wealth gap.
The report said Indonesia's tax collection is the second-lowest in Southeast Asia and the tax system is "failing to play its necessary role in redistributing wealth."
To increase the tax take, so low spending on public services such as education and health can be increased, Indonesia needs a higher tax rate on the top incomes, higher inheritance tax and a new wealth tax, it said.
Tackling tax evasion is also crucial, Oxfam said, citing International Monetary Fund data that shows $101bn flowed from Indonesia into tax havens in 2015.
The OXFAM International report
Oxfam introduces the report with this text:
The gap between the richest and the rest in Indonesia has grown faster in the past two decades than in any other country in South-East Asia. The four richest men in Indonesia now have more wealth than the poorest 100 million people. Inequality is slowing down poverty reduction, dampening economic growth and threatening social cohesion.
President Jokowi has made fighting inequality his administration’s top priority for 2017. This report shows how he could achieve this by enforcing a living wage for all workers, increasing spending on public services, and making big corporations and rich individuals pay their fair share of tax.
When a Non Governemental Organisation like Oxfam shows how a government, in a post-colonial developing country, can effectively address this level of inequality in its society, this advice may be interpreted, understandably, as an example of neocolonialism.
But it is not!
When it comes to addressing the fact of inequality in the society of a developing country and, furthermore, seeking to change this fact, then many of the usual scenarios as suggested, or imposed, by the IMF or the World Bank, avoid any and all actions that might threaten to disturb the assumptions of their economists.
In our present age, with the globalisation of the capitalist system, there are many of these assumptions, often authoratatively presented as being - just the way it is.
Of the 23 Things they don't tell you about Capitalism, in Ha-Joon Chang's book, Thing 7 discusses the belief that what poor countries need in order to become rich is to adopt free-market policies, thereby replacing state intervention, trade protectionism, industrial subsidies and state ownership of the banks and some industries. Chang's considered view is very different, and, as we have seen, his Thing 1 of the overall 23 begins with a de-bunking of the idea that there is, in fact, any such thing as a free market.
Free-market economists are, he says, thankful that "most of these countries have come to their senses since the 1980's and come to adopt free-market policies." He says:
Contrary to what is commonly believed, the performance of developing countries in the period of state-led development was superior to what they have achieved during the subsequent period of Market-oriented reform.
Moreover, it is also not true that almost all rich countries have become rich through free-market policies. The truth is more or less the opposite.
With only a few exceptions, all of today's rich countries, including Britain and the US - The supposed homes of free trade and free market - have become rich through the combination of protectionism, subsidies and other policies that today they advise the developing countries not to adopt. Free-market policies have made few countries rich so far and will make few rich in the future.
Another thing Ha-Joon Chang discusses, in his chapter Thing 15, and that relates to poor people in poor countries, is the patronising view, held by some, who then tell us that: "Unless all those people who aimlessly loiter around in poor countries change their attitudes and actively seek out profit-making opportunities, their countries are not going to develop." What they don't tell us is that:
People who live in poor countries have to be very entrepreneurial even just to survive. For every loiterer in a developing country you have two or three children shining shoes and four or five people hawking things. What makes the poor countries poor is not the absence of entrepreneurial energy at the personal level, but the absence of productive technologies and developed social organisations, especially modern firms.
Asset stripping NOT wealth creation!
Much of the wealth produced in Indonesia has not come from productive technologies but the exploitation of fossil fuels, natural mineral resources and the destruction of pristine rain-forest for timber and the production of palm oil from vast plantations of a monoculture. These rich "entrepreneurs" who have benefited from this plundering of the natural environment are not entrepreneurs.
UpdateStripping natural resources, valuable assets taken from an environment that is often shared as well as owned, is not an entrepreneurial activity. What has actually happened is more akin to the process of accumulation by dispossession, a process identified by David Harvey and currently taking place across the developing world.
The three cigarette tycoons mentioned in the Al Jazeera piece on the Oxfam report on inequality in Indonesia, gain their profits in a country that The Conversation dubs the 'Disneyland for Big Tobacco'.
Indonesia has been called the tobacco industry’s playground due to the country’s large number of smokers and unrestricted tobacco marketing. In the latest example, Indonesian tobacco giant PT Djarum has placed billboards promoting its L.A. Lights cigarettes with the shameful slogan “DON’T QUIT.” If discouraging smokers from quitting isn’t bad enough, the ad appears to mock efforts to reduce smoking by instead encouraging smokers to “DO IT” and using the slogan “Let’s Do It!” Left unsaid is the fact that half of all smokers who follow these directions to keep smoking instead of quitting will die prematurely as a result. It’s only the latest example of deplorable tobacco marketing in Indonesia.
Access to free education and equal opportunities
Other widespread assumptions, including the idea that more education will make countries richer, and that equality of opportunity is a benefit to societies, are also challenged in Ha-Joon Chang's chapters on Thing 17 and Thing 20. His challenges concern the matter of productivity, and the consequences of increases in productive power have been at the heart of the LODE and Re:LODE research project from its beginning in 1991. Chang says:
What really matters in the determination of national prosperity is not the educational levels of individuals but the nations ability to organize individuals into enterprises with high productivity.
And as regards the policy of ensuring equal opportunity for all, in order to make a society fairer, Chang says:
If a child does not perform well in school because he is hungry and cannot concentrate in class, it cannot be said that the child does not do well because he is inherently less capable.
Unless there is some equality of outcome (i.e., the incomes of all the parents are above a certain minimum threshold, allowing their children not to go hungry), equal opportunities (i.e., free schooling) are not truly meaningful.
That is why a minimum living wage is so important, in Indonesia and across the world.
Globalisation and the workplace environment
Indonesia is a significant textile producer supplying garments worldwide for the fashion industry. The relationship of Indonesian based factories and workshops with global brands across the world has mixed blessings. One multistakeholder organisation, the Fair Wear Foundation is trying to make a difference. Its website section "OUR VISION" says:
At Fair Wear Foundation, we know there’s a better way to make clothes. A fairer way.
We want to see a world where the garment industry supports workers in realising their rights to safe, dignified, properly paid employment. This is why we focus on the most labour intensive parts of the supply chain, to find answers to problems others think are unsolvable.
We partner with brands and support workers. We take practical steps and test new solutions to show that it’s possible to make clothes in a fairer way. With other industry influencers, we push towards a new normal - creating change that goes far beyond our reach.
Together, we’re making fashion fair for everyone.
The Wikipedia article says:
Fair Wear Foundation (FWF) is an independent multistakeholder organisation that works with garment brands, garment workers and industry influencers to improve labour conditions in garment factories.
The FWF Code of Labour Practices contains eight labour standards that are based on the conventions of the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. The Fair Wear Code of Labour Practices is known for its strong provisions on freedom of association, hours of work, and a living wage. It is important to note, however, that none of these practices are mandated for claiming association with FWF.
FWF's eight labour standards are:
Employment is freely chosen
There is no discrimination in employment
No exploitation of child labour
Freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining
Payment of a living wage
No excessive working hours
Safe and healthy working conditions
Legally binding employment relationship
A recent report: Indonesia, country study 2018, by the Fair Wear Foundation on the broader situation in Indonesia, but with a focus on working conditions in the Indonesian textile industry, makes for informative reading.
The report recognises that:
In industrial terms, Indonesia’s trade union confederations are relatively weak, with much of the power at the national level residing in the KSPI-affiliated federations, and some of the federations associated with KSPSI. Union activity is concentrated in Indonesia’s key industrial centres in Greater Jakarta, Greater Surabaya, Greater Medan and Batam, with a significant presence in smaller manufacturing hubs in West, Central and East Java. Politically, the confederations (and in particular, KSPI) have taken a proactive role on the national stage, in some cases very successfully, on issues like social security, but campaigns are sporadic and incidental. All three have backed candidates in the 2014 and 2019 presidential elections. Some of the federations have also taken advantage of the opportunities offered by decentralisation to supplement their factory-based activities with strategic lobbying as part of the local electoral cycle. No union has formal ties with a particular political party at this time, with electorally active unions preferring to run candidates for a range of parties in the absence of a purpose-specific labour party. Forming a purpose-specific labour party has proved difficult, as there are high barriers placed against registering new political parties.
Since the "Tragedy of 1965", when the Indonesian Communist Party, the PKI, was all but exterminated by the Indonesian army and the "communitarian" groups associated with the landowning and Muslim clerical classes, there has been no political party to represent the working classes. Political organisation has increasingly tended to become identified with nationalist and religious identity, with "communities" that are, in fact pseudo communities, militants struggling to recover the loss of identity when identity has been taken away, but not necessarily representative of any supposed community, apart that is, from themselves.
Nationalist and religious groups struggling with a sense of the loss of identity, adopt increasingly desperate and sometimes violent methods, in a futile attempt to recover the unrecoverable. And, of course, provides just the distraction from the real and present issues, and thus helps maintain the status quo, or just the way it is!.
In Samir Amin's article for the MONTHLY REVIEW - Political Islam in the Service of Imperialism, he primalrily addresses the situation in the so-called "Middle" East, but his analysis also applies to the situation of this, the most populous Muslim nation in South East Asia. His article begins:
All the currents that claim adherence to political Islam proclaim the “specificity of Islam.” According to them, Islam knows nothing of the separation between politics and religion, something supposedly distinctive of Christianity. It would accomplish nothing to remind them, as I have done, that their remarks reproduce, almost word for word, what European reactionaries at the beginning of the nineteenth century (such as Bonald and de Maistre) said to condemn the rupture that the Enlightenment and the French Revolution had produced in the history of the Christian West!The presence of international organisations, we know as NGO's, has been instrumental in filling some of this gap. This includes FWF, and in its country study identifies a number of local NGOs that have had a long history of involvement in the garment industry in Indonesia. These include Akatiga, LBH Jakarta, Sedane and TURC. International NGOs include Oxfam, which until recently was the major player in relation to the garment industry, and the Clean Clothes Campaign (CCC), which has recently appointed an Indonesian representative.
On the basis of this position, every current of political Islam chooses to conduct its struggle on the terrain of culture—but “culture” reduced in actual fact to the conventional affirmation of belonging to a particular religion. In reality, the militants of political Islam are not truly interested in discussing the dogmas that form religion. The ritual assertion of membership in the community is their exclusive preoccupation. Such a vision of the reality of the modern world is not only distressing because of the immense emptiness of thought that it conceals, but it also justifies imperialism’s strategy of substituting a so-called conflict of cultures for the one between imperialist centers and dominated peripheries. The exclusive emphasis on culture allows political Islam to eliminate from every sphere of life the real social confrontations between the popular classes and the globalized capitalist system that oppresses and exploits them. The militants of political Islam have no real presence in the areas where actual social conflicts take place and their leaders repeat incessantly that such conflicts are unimportant. Islamists are only present in these areas to open schools and health clinics. But these are nothing but works of charity and means for indoctrination. They are not means of support for the struggles of the popular classes against the system responsible for their poverty.
On the terrain of the real social issues, political Islam aligns itself with the camp of dependent capitalism and dominant imperialism. It defends the principle of the sacred character of property and legitimizes inequality and all the requirements of capitalist reproduction.
Is the problem capitalism dressed in imperialist clothing?
Q. Is imperialism the highest stage of capitalism?A. Yes! According to Lenin, back in 1917!
In his Prefaces, Lenin states that the First World War (1914–1918) was "an annexationist, predatory, plunderous war" among empires, whose historical and economic background must be studied "to understand and appraise modern war and modern politics".
According to Wikipedia, Lenin's socio–political analysis of empire as the ultimate stage of capitalism derived from Imperialism: A Study (1902) by John A. Hobson, an English economist, who, after covering the Second Boer War as a correspondent for The Manchester Guardian, condemned British actions as being under the influence of mine owners. Another influence was Finance Capital (Das Finanzcapital, 1910) by Rudolf Hilferding, an Austrian Marxist, whose synthesis Lenin applied to the new geopolitical circumstances of the First World War, wherein capitalist imperial competition had provoked global war among the German Empire, the British Empire, the French Empire, the Tsarist Russian Empire, and their respective allies. The Wikipedia article summarises Lenin's thesis thus:
In order for capitalism to generate greater profits than the home market can yield, the merging of banks and industrial cartels produces finance capitalism—the exportation and investment of capital to countries with underdeveloped economies. In turn, such financial behaviour leads to the division of the world among monopolist business companies and the great powers. Moreover, in the course of colonizing undeveloped countries, business and government eventually will engage in geopolitical conflict over the economic exploitation of large portions of the geographic world and its populaces. Therefore, imperialism is the highest (advanced) stage of capitalism, requiring monopolies (of labour and natural-resource exploitation) and the exportation of finance capital (rather than goods) to sustain colonialism, which is an integral function of said economic model. Furthermore, in the capitalist homeland, the super-profits yielded by the colonial exploitation of a people and their economy permit businessmen to bribe native politicians, labour leaders and the labour aristocracy (upper stratum of the working class) to politically thwart worker revolt (labour strike).
The influence of Lenin's work continued throughout the twentieth century, and continues now, as the Wikipedia article points out.
The core–periphery model of global capitalist exploitation, developed by Lenin in the early 20th century, exerted much intellectual influence upon world-systems theory. World-systems theory was developed by the social scientist Immanuel Wallerstein and emphasises world systems of international labour, that divide the world into core countries, semi-periphery countries, and periphery countries. Samir Amin, quoted above, also held to this view. The core–periphery model also influenced dependency theory, whose proponents Raúl Prebisch, Andre Gunder Frank and Fernando Henrique Cardoso propose that natural resources flow from a periphery of poor and underdeveloped countries to a core of wealthy and developed countries, enriching the latter at the expense of the former, because of how the poor countries are integrated to the global economy.
Is what we are looking at, here and now, a continuance of imperialism/capitalism via new methods - neo-imperialism/neocolonialism?
The term neo-colonialism was first coined by the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in 1956.
Colonialism is a system
I would like to warn you against what may be called the "neo-colonialist hoax".
It was the Bandung Conference of 1955 that brought together representatives of countries newly independent from European colonial powers, along with representatives of countries still under colonial control. The conference's stated aims were to promote Afro-Asian economic and cultural cooperation and to oppose colonialism or neocolonialism by any nation. The conference was an important step towards the eventual creation of the Non-Aligned Movement.
One of the countries participating, still a British colony, was Ghana, then known until independence in 1957 as Gold Coast. This name "Gold Coast" had long been a name for the region used by Europeans because of the large gold resources found in the area, but it was the slave trade that was the principal exchange and major part of the economy for many years.
It was Kwame Nkrumah, the first Prime Minister of Ghana, and the first President of Ghana, who used the term neo-colonialism in a way that connects directly to Lenin's understanding of the way imperialism is a form, or stage, of capitalism. He used the term in the 1963 preamble of the Organisation of African Unity Charter, and it was used as part of the title of his 1965 book Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism (1965), which signals a direct relationship to Lenin's 1917 work. Nkrumah theoretically developed and extended to the post–War 20th century the socio-economic and political arguments presented by Lenin in the pamphlet Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917). The pamphlet frames 19th-century imperialism as the logical extension of geopolitical power, to meet the financial investment needs of the political economy of capitalism. In Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism, Kwame Nkrumah wrote:
In place of colonialism, as the main instrument of imperialism, we have today neo-colonialism . . . [which] like colonialism, is an attempt to export the social conflicts of the capitalist countries. . . .The result of neo-colonialism is that foreign capital is used for the exploitation rather than for the development of the less developed parts of the world. Investment, under neo-colonialism, increases, rather than decreases, the gap between the rich and the poor countries of the world. The struggle against neo-colonialism is not aimed at excluding the capital of the developed world from operating in less developed countries. It is aimed at preventing the financial power of the developed countries being used in such a way as to impoverish the less developed.
Ideology turns the world inside out and upside down!
According to this business strategy website, and telling only the "good news" story:Some of Uniqlo’s key brand success factors include its unwavering commitment to innovation and its company culture. Its Japanese founder, Tadashi Yanai is famous for his quote “Without a soul, a company is nothing”. This soul is reflected in the 23 Management Principles that Tadashi Yanai has created and indoctrinated in each and every Uniqlo employee. The essence of these principles includes putting customers first, giving back to society and being self-disruptive.
Uniqlo’s brand message encapsulates a clear vision: “Uniqlo is a modern Japanese company that inspires the world to dress casual”. The corporate strategy that has worked for Uniqlo so far is to “totally ignore fashion” instead of chasing fast-fashion trends like its other competitors. The brand philosophy “Made for All” positions its clothing to transcend age, gender, ethnicity and all other ways to define people. Contrary to its name “Uniqlo”, its clothes are simple, essential yet universal, enabling the wearers to blend them with their individualistic style.
Here is a story to change the way we see!
The "copy" in this UNIQLO advertisement introduces us to "Stories to change the way we see. Clothes to change the way we live."
UNIQLO - putting customers first and workers last.
This story on the Clean Clothes Campaign website is just one among many in this era of neo-colonialism.
Following the actions on International Women's Day in Hong Kong, two Indonesian unions protested at the Japanese Embassy in Jakarta on Thursday, March 23, 2017 at 10.00 A.M. They demand justice for workers at the shuttered factory PT Jaba Garmindo in Indonesia, which supplied Japanese retailer Uniqlo.
The Indonesian factory closed without providing workers with US$10.8 million in legally required compensation. PT Jaba Garmindo entered bankruptcy in April 2015 without providing final wages and severance benefits to 4,000 workers at multiple locations.
The actions are supported by Clean Clothes Campaign, War on Want, People and Planet, SACOM, Globalization Monitor and Yokohama Action Research. Last week protests took place in Japan, targeting UNIQLO stores.
As this report details, the buyers have, to date, refused to make the workers whole. Failure to provide legally required severance pay is a very common form of wage theft in the garment industry; owners often simply abandon factories, leaving the country without making any arrangement for workers’ severance or payment to other creditors. Over the past five years, an increasing number of international apparel brands have taken responsibility for ensuring that these workers are paid, often by directly providing funds to workers.
Over the past decade, student and consumer pressure has successfully pushed international apparel brands to take responsibility for funds denied workers when their factories close. In a landmark case in 2013, after significant pressure from the CCC network, United Students Against Sweatshops, U.S. universities and SumOfUs, adidas directly compensated workers for legally required severance owed by a supplier factory in Indonesia. Since then, in response to demands by workers and international advocacy organizations, Disney, Fruit of the Loom, Hanesbrands, adidas, Nike, H&M, and Walmart have either directly compensated workers denied severance or required their supply chain partners to do so in Honduras, El Salvador, Indonesia, and Cambodia.
UNIQLO, your supplier - your responsibility!
published 23-03-2017 re
A time to act?
This article provides much of the standard advice for a developing country reliant on cheap labour, informal work, where working conditions are not regulated, and the export of natural resources are the main source of national income.
Vested interests dominate the political agenda and the political classes are unlikely to adopt the policy of a progressive and effective taxation system to allow the types of industrial activity and organisation, and a scale of investment, capable of generating the levels of increased productivity required.
Why? Because that's just the way it (capitalism) is! But don't you believe them!
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