Sunday, 28 April 2013

A Factory As It Is: Dhaka, Bangladesh

Should the William Morris Society not have something to say, publicly and collectively, about the collapse of that 8-storey building housing garment factories in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in which at least 350 people have been killed? Well, yes, in my view it most certainly should. First, because Morris himself wrote a series of articles for Justice in 1884 on ‘A Factory As It Might Be’, and the utopian projections there imply an angry concern for the actual state of factories under capitalism in his own present. Second, because – in the light of his analysis of the ‘world market’ in News from Nowhere and elsewhere – he would very readily have understood the threats to Third World workers’ lives (makeshift buildings in this case) posed by the First World’s current insatiable appetite for cheap goods.



But will any of the Morris websites (other than this one), official or unofficial, say anything at all about the ghastly tragedy we have just witnessed in Dhaka? I doubt it. In late nineteenth-century debates about whether English Literature was or was not a proper subject for university study its opponents argued that it could not possibly be a rigorous discipline because it amounted to nothing more than ‘chatter about Shelley’. And it seems to me that rather too much of what both the Morris Society itself and other Morris websites offer us is, analogously and disappointingly, just ‘chatter about the Pre-Raphaelites’.

14 comments:

  1. The Dhaka death toll just keeps growing. The BBC website now gives "at least 382 dead", and here's a snippet from the rest of its commentary: 'Bangladesh has one of the largest garment industries in the world, providing cheap clothing for major Western retailers that benefit from its widespread low-cost labour. But the industry has been widely criticised for its low pay and limited rights given to workers and for the often dangerous working conditions in garment factories'.

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  2. I presume that the recent discussion about whether to stock toy wombats in the gift shop on the Red House website would be a good example of the kind of Pre-Raph drivel that you're talking about at the end of your post!

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  3. In the final pages of "The Frock-Coated Revolutionary", his biography of Friedrich Engels, Tristram Hunt describes a Chinese factory today and notes that it is not very different from a Manchester factory of the 1840s as described by Engels.

    Globalisation has brought these conditions too to a state claiming to be based on Marxism.

    Time for a re-read of The Communist Manifesto!

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  4. Thanks, Ian. The Dhaka death toll is now over 600, I believe, and still rising. China is a great conundrum to us all, I agree - must get out there myself soon and take a look.

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  5. Death toll now around 900 ...

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