National Public Radio covers up U.$. prison slave labor

Every time the bourgeois media reports on slave labor in 
other countries, it is not necessarily newsworthy according 
to MIM. But when they use these reports to contrast 
international prison labor to the U.$. system and to cover 
up the exploitation of labor in U.$. gulags, we have to 
protest. In early March, on National Public Radio's Weekend 
Edition, host Scott Simon reported on the explosion in a 
Chinese fireworks factory that killed 41 schoolchildren in 
Wanze County.(1) Calling the factory a case of slave labor, 
Simon explained "It is a business run by the school. 

Villagers say their children are not paid for their work, 
and that their families are fined if they don't let their 
children work." While Simon conceded that Amerikan prisoners 
also work for industry, they are paid ("not a lot"); and 
that Amerikans buy running shoes and other clothing made 
from the labor of Asian children, but those children are 
also paid (again, "small wages"). But central to Simon's 
distinction between these scenarios and what happened in the 
Wanze school-based factory is that in all these other, 
albeit unjust, cases, people have a "choice" whether to 
work. MIM is decidedly not part of the "China lobby" Simon 
dismisses, the lobby that supports the current state-
capitalist regime in China. But neither are we part of the 
"Amerikan prison industry lobby" that Simon represents in 
his report. In fact, prisoners in Amerika do not have a 
meaningful choice about their participation in prison 
industry. Work, for pennies a day if that, is tied in many 
states to parole and good time credit. What kind of choice 
is that? Put in Simon's term, if they don't allow their 
family members in prison to work, families of U.$. prisoners 
are punished by increased sentences for their loved ones. 
But the issue of prisoners or children doing productive 
labor is not an issue of bourgeois notions of "choice," nor 
is anything revealed by simply saying work was done by a 
child, or by a prisoner. It is about the mode of production. 

In revolutionary China (1949-1976), children as young as 
four were engaged in productive labor, as part of their 
revolutionary education and part of their participation in 
the health of their local economy.(2) Similarly, Chinese 
prisoners worked as part of their genuine rehabilitation. In 
the United Snakes today, prisoners are not working as part 
of any rehabilitation (and those imprisoned are not 
necessarily the real criminals). In China today, the 
children in Wanze were not working as part of any 
revolutionary education. Their labor is just lining the 
pockets of capitalist profiteers. Simon did correctly point 
out the hypocrisy of Amerikkkan condemnation of Chinese 
humyn rights abuses when he said, "more than half of the 
fireworks now sold in the United States are made in China. 
On the Fourth of July, many Americans will glorify freedom 
by gleefully lighting up rockets, twizzlers and cherry bombs 
made by slave labor." All the sanctimonious Simons out there 
pointing fingers at state-capitalist China would do well to 
honestly apply the same standards to Amerika -- "Before you 
take the speck out of your neighbor's eye, take the log out 
of your own," as the christian bible says. In terms of 
prisoners per capita and perhaps even in absolute number of 
prisoners the united $tates is the world's biggest police 
state. And that's not even counting Amerika's monetary and 
military support for repressive dictatorships in the Third 
World...

Notes: 1. Weekend Edition Saturday, March 10, 2001. 2. Ruth 
Sidel, Women and Child Care in China. 1973.