Like U.S. Billionaire Rulers, the Rulers of China, Russia, India and Iran ALSO Treat Their Own Have-Nots like DIRT
We need international solidarity of the have-nots of the world against ALL the people who oppress them. Oppressors--BRICS or not--have no "national sovereignty" right to oppress the have-nots.
U.S. billionaire rulers oppress the have-nots in the United States
The ruling billionaire plutocracy in the United States treats the have-nots in the United States like dirt. I explain why the rich must do this and give many concrete examples of it here.
Chinese Communist Party leaders oppress the have-nots in China
Some Facts about How the Chinese Government Oppresses the Chinese Have-Nots
“On September 23 [2012], a siren pierced the night at the 80,000-worker Taiyuan plant as rioting erupted. Zhonghong recalled, “During the previous month workers had clocked as many as 130 hours overtime.” Overtime was compulsory. This was more than three times the maximum 36-hour limit of overtime per month allowed under Chinese law. Put another way, workers were subjected to 13-to-1, and under extreme conditions, 30-to-1 work-to-rest schedules, that is, just one day off every two weeks or one day off a month in the pressure-cooker months preceding the release of the new iPhones.
"Fatigue and bodily pain aside, workers experienced being severely ill treated. “Over the past two months,” Zhonghong continued, “we couldn’t even get paid leave when we were sick.” The ever-tightening production cycle pressured workers to speed up. Days off were canceled and the sick were pressed to continue to work. The upgraded iPhone was hailed as a thinner, faster, and brighter model. In stark contrast, workers experienced some of their darkest days on the production floor. Worker fury was fueled by security staff brutality at the male workers’ dormitory. Zhonghong explained:
“At about 11: 00 p.m., security officers severely beat two workers for failing to show their staff IDs. They kicked them until they fell to the ground.”
"This beating of workers by security officers touched off the riot. By midnight, thousands of workers had had enough. They smashed company security offices, production facilities, shuttle buses, motorbikes, cars, shops, and canteens in the factory complex. Some grabbed iPhone back-plates from a warehouse. Others broke windows, demolished company fences, pillaged factory supermarkets, and overturned police cars and set them ablaze. The company security chief used a patrol car public address system in an attempt to get the workers to end their “illegal activities.”
"But as more and more workers joined the roaring crowd, managers called in the riot police. By 3: 00 a.m., five thousand riot police in helmets with shields and clubs, government officials, and medical staff had converged on the factory. Over the next two hours, the police took control of the dormitories and workshops of the entire complex, detaining the most defiant workers and locking down others in their dormitory rooms. More than forty workers were beaten, handcuffed, and sent off in half a dozen police cars. The factory was sealed off by police lines on all sides, so that workers were contained and onlookers were prevented from joining in. While police repression could demobilize, defuse, and crush worker actions, such methods could also highlight the depths of conflict and might even intensify it.
"In emergency mode, Foxconn announced “a special day off” for all workers and staff at the Taiyuan facility. Local officials were sensitive to the fact that riots could undermine economic goals, thereby provoking the wrath of higher authorities if grievances were not quickly resolved and worker insurgency suppressed. The iPhone parts factory reopened after a one-day lockdown. The timely shipment and continuous flow of products appeared to have remained Apple’s overriding concerns. On the same day that the riot occurred, Apple CEO Tim Cook assured the world that retail stores would “continue to receive iPhone 5 shipments regularly and customers can continue to order online and receive an estimated delivery date.” 18 But as international news headlines blared “China Apple Factory Riot” 19 and “Riot Reported at Apple Partner Manufacturer Foxconn’s iPhone 5 Plant,” 20 Apple was compelled to reassure consumers around the world, including Chinese consumers, that it was not running sweatshops.”
— Dying for an iPhone: Apple, Foxconn, and The Lives of China's Workers by Jenny Chan, Mark Selden, et al.
“In a long-awaited response to intern abuse, the Chinese central government in 2016 belatedly took some of the first steps to protect the basic rights of student interns. Specifically, vocational schools are instructed to manage student internships in accordance with the “Regulations on the Management of Vocational School Student Internships.”
"Under the new regulations, effective April 11, 2016, the duration of workplace-based internships should normally be six months. Vocational schools and enterprises are required to jointly provide interns with commercial general liability insurance. The regulations also require that student internships have substantial educational content and work-skills training provisions, along with comprehensive labor protections for student interns such as eight-hour working days, no overtime, and no night shifts.
"Above all, no more than 10 percent of the labor force at “any given facility,” and no more than 20 percent of the workers in “any given work position,” should consist of student interns at any point in time. 16
"However, the government left intact incentives for corporations to continue to prioritize student interns as cheap and expendable labor.
"The 2016 regulations stipulate the statutory minimum level for paying interns: “Wages shall be at least 80 percent of that of employees during the probationary period” (emphasis added). 17
"In other words, interns are to be paid for their labor, but employers are permitted to pay them just 80 percent of the minimum income offered to employees. Employers save further since interns, defined as students rather than workers, receive no corporate payments toward retirement.
Fundamentally, the interests shared by companies and local governments are intertwined to the detriment of student interns.
"In 2019, Foxconn Hengyang in Hunan province, whose primary contracts were with Amazon, reportedly violated limits on the number of intern and dispatch workers (also known as agency workers), who made up, respectively, 21 percent and 34 percent of the 7,435 workers. Under the law, dispatch workers should not exceed 10 percent of the company’s workforce.
"The proliferation of “flexible” employment has adversely impacted not only dispatch workers. Regular workers would also encounter greater difficulty in making collective demands on employers as they now must compete with contingent laborers in the workplace.
"Worse, student interns were illegally required to work 10-hour shifts, day and night, including two hours of forced overtime. 18
"The super-exploitation of Chinese student labor has in fact gone far beyond Foxconn to e-commerce giants such as JD.com, and from manufacturing to the services industry. 19”
— Dying for an iPhone: Apple, Foxconn, and The Lives of China's Workers by Jenny Chan, Mark Selden, et al.
Extract from https://globaldialogue.isa-sociology.org/.../class... March 22, 2018:
"Production and social reproduction of Chinese rural migrants”
"China’s rapid capital accumulation was spurred in part by its heavy reliance on a rural-to-urban migratory workforce over the past four decades. By official reckoning some 282 million rural migrants have been drawn into the manufacturing, service, and construction sectors in towns and cities all across the country, an increase of more than 50 million following the economic recovery since 2009, and accounting for one-fifth of China’s total population. City governments have adopted a “points system” granting certain rural migrants, particularly big entrepreneurs, an urban household registration based on criteria such as their ability to buy a house, specialized job skills, and educational attainments. However, even after years of working in the city, the great majority of moderately educated migrants and their children remain second-class citizens, retaining rural residential status and lacking equal access to public education, subsidized health care, and retirement benefits, making possible the suppression of labor costs.
"Low-paid migrant workers are often housed in dormitories, which are cost-effective for the employer and conducive to ensuring that workers spend most of their off-hours preparing for the next shift. The socio-spatial boundary between work and life is blurred, helping to ensure that production deadlines are met by facilitating overtime work. The all-in-one, multi-functional architecture of production workshops, warehouses, and residential places was typical of early industrial districts, and is still common in contemporary cities where migrant settlers are concentrated.
"In the search for limited personal freedom over their private lives, workers leave the management-dominated collective dormitory to rent private apartments as soon as they can afford to. These are often inexpensive rental rooms with no windows, or only a small window, which are at least a link to the outside world. Some complexes are infested with mosquitoes, rats, and cockroaches. Utilities and property management fees vary widely. As private housing prices have reached sky-high in megacities, workers’ earnings have been eaten up by the landlords.
"Blue-collar migrants are selling their labor in food delivery, package delivery, car-hailing and home cleaning services, to name only a few examples, fueling the growth of China’s GDP and the shift from manufacturing to service work. With the continued expansion of the digital economy, tens of millions of new “flexible” jobs mediated by platforms and apps are created. As independent contractors, however, they are not adequately protected by the national labor law; their job security and income stability are minimal. With the shutdown of unlicensed workplaces and unregistered dormitories after the deadly fire, the vulnerability of informal service workers, and their children, as well as many working people from other sectors, came to the fore. Some of them had to pay higher rent for a temporary housing to withstand the freezing cold, while the others had no choice but to leave.
"Chinese internal migrants have long been targets in urban governments’ “clean out” efforts. From the city to the countryside, under the accelerated pace of “development” and economic transformation, encroachment of cities on rural farm land and villages has been intensified. Scores of villagers have been displaced, bereft of the ability to return home to till the land. Landless laborers, who have lost their access to household plots in their natal villages, face an added burden: employers are reluctant to hire villagers who have lost the contracted land that supported subsistence, thus requiring employers to increase wages. Rural project contractors, particularly in the construction industry organized through localistic networks, refuse to hire dispossessed peasant workers because they have to pay up-front to maintain the basic livelihood of these workers before they are paid for work, which typically occurs at the completion of the project. Among the jobless, landless migrants are the lowest of the low."
The Chinese Myth versus Reality
We often hear that the Communist Party of China has lifted the Chinese people up out of poverty. To understand how false this claim is, read "Bill Gates Says Poverty Is Decreasing. He Couldn't Be More Wrong" by Jason Hickel (also see this same point made about Africa here). As Hickel explains, moving people from living in a rural society, where money is a relatively unimportant way of obtaining one's needs and people have less money, to an urban society where money is the only way of obtaining one's needs and people have more money, makes it easy to misleadingly say, "See, people were lifted out of poverty when they went from rural to urban living," even when the actual conditions of life for the urban people--working as horribly oppressed wage-slaves in huge factories--make their lives arguably worse than those of rural peasants. Millions of rural Chinese peasants have been forced to leave the rural countryside and immigrate to cities to work in the cheap labor and extremely oppressive factories, as described in some detail here.
In particular, the Communist Party of China in 1999 eagerly signed an agreement with the United States leading to China's accession to the World Trade Organization, which resulted in the reduction of tariffs on agricultural products and new limits on how much the Chinese government could subsidize farmers as discussed here and here [2003] ("Farmers of land-intensive products--particularly cotton, sugar crops, oilseeds, corn and soybeans--will be among the most adversely affected".) Life prospects for farmers, especially for their adolescent children, were made bleak and this motivated them to migrate to the cities for urban wage work.
In the rural homes they left, these farmers did not have very much money, nor did they need to rely solely upon money to get what they needed to live; but in the city they relied totally on their wage to buy what they needed to live--and it provided an abject poverty standard of living. The fact that their city wage was higher than whatever small amount of money they obtained in the countryside does not mean their standard of living was higher in the city than in the countryside; the opposite was the case. But apologists for the Communist Party of China point to the wage to assert that the peasants were "lifted out of poverty."
An indication of the terrible poverty--in terms of standard of living rather than magnitude of an urban wage compared to a rural wage--of China's urban factory workers who migrated to cities from their rural homes is this: these factory workers cannot even afford to raise their children (69 million as of 2018 or "1 in 5 children in China") with them in the city and so must leave their children to be raised by their grandparents in their rural home, which the parents can only typically afford to visit "a few days over the holidays every year." "By 2006, migrant workers comprised 40% of the total urban labor force.[51]"
Read here about the enormous economic inequality in China today.
The Communist Party of China oppresses and represses the working class much the same as Western capitalist governments do. Read about the repression here and here and here and here.
IN SHARP CONTRAST TO HOW IT IS IN CHINA, READ HERE WHAT INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTION IS LIKE WHEN THE WORKERS REALLY ARE IN POWER
The billionaire ruling plutocracy of Russia oppresses the have-nots in Russia
Regarding Russia, I invite you to read my article titled, “Ukraine and Egalitarianism: Why I support the Russian soldiers in Ukraine but do not support Putin in Russia.” In that article I provide the following information about why I do not support Putin (or the Russian ruling billionaire plutocracy) in Russia.
Here are some facts about how the Russian government, at the top of which is Vladimir Putin, of course, sides with capitalist owners against their workers by making it difficult or even illegal for the workers to go on strike, and how strikes are often for basic things like getting paid any wages at all. Solidarity strikes (sometimes called sympathy strikes, carried out to support other workers) are illegal; this is an attack on working class solidarity the only purpose of which is to enforce class inequality. The following indented words are excerpted from a rather academic article, "Labor Under Putin: The State of the Russian Working Class" December 2016 Paul T. Christensen, at
During the Soviet period, virtually all workers were members of a trade union, but the primary function of Soviet-era unions was not to defend workers’ interests. Trade unions were an arm of the Party-State system, designed to help enact Communist Party policy at the workplace and distribute social services.[18] All Soviet trade unions belonged to the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions (VTsSPS), which was a powerful bureaucratic apparatus, controlling “substantial property . . . as well as considerable financial resources.”[19] Most Soviet workers were trade union members by default, not conviction, since union membership was automatic.
In response to this situation, in the late Soviet and early post-Soviet periods a series of new, independent trade unions emerged. The most prominent of these was the Independent Union of Miners; others followed, including the Union of Locomotive Engineers, the Union of Longshoremen, the Airline Pilots Union, the Air-traffic Controllers Union, and the Union of Seamen. These unions were made up of skilled workers who could not easily be replaced. This gave the unions leverage in collective bargaining, but prevented them from easily expanding their membership. Still, by the end of the Soviet period, Russia had two separate and competing trade-union structures.
In 1990 the VTsSPS was replaced by the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia (FNPR), which was fundamentally the same organization with the same apparatus. In order to get the FNPR leadership and bureaucracy to support him—and control labor unrest—Yeltsin gave the FNPR control of almost all of the resources of the old Soviet trade union system on the territory of the Russian Federation. The FNPR has retained that control ever since, as the current regime finds the organization a convenient tool for managing labor issues.[20] The independent unions retained their separate organizational structures, but in 1995 most of them came together to form the Confederation of Labour of Russia (KTR).[21]
The FNPR remains the umbrella organization of the “official” unions in Russia.
...
Membership in the independent unions can be dangerous for workers: union organizers and members have been fired and physically assaulted on more than one occasion. As a result, the independent unions do not publish definitive numbers. The generally accepted range for membership in the independent unions collectively is between 2 and 2.5 million, although that does not include workers who are “unofficially” affiliated or sympathetic.
The trade-union movement is hampered even more by the Russian Labor Code that went into effect in 2002. This law severely restricted the rights of trade unions: They lost their right to block the firing of a worker by the initiative of management; they lost the right to call a strike (which now must be approved by the employees of an enterprise as a whole); the number of sectors where strikes are illegal was increased; and solidarity strikes were prohibited.[27] An almost comic illustration of this is found in the annex of the 2015 Russian statistical yearbook, in which the entry for “number of organizations where strikes took place” drops from 11,162 in 1998 to 80 in 2002, and then drops to an average of four per year from 2008 to 2014.[28] This number is only possible because the Russian state only counts “legal” strikes; according to sources collected by the Center for Social and Labor Rights, in recent years the number of labor protests is more than one per day. The Code also makes it difficult for the independent unions to establish union locals in factories, particularly when one of the “official” unions is already present, since the FNPR unions actively work with management to prevent independent union organizing.[29]
...
In spite of a hostile political environment and restrictive labor legislation, labor protests in Russia are common and increasing in number and intensity. According to the Center for Social and Labor Rights, the average number of labor protests per year from 2008 to 2014 was 241; in 2015 it was 409, and for the first eight months of 2016 it was 251. Up to the middle of 2016, the “intensity” of protests also increased markedly from previous years.
...
Labor protests in Russia are almost all either wildcat actions or actions by independent unions.
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The most striking thing about labor protests in Russia today is the cause of most of these protests, whether stop-action or not. Since 2011, the overwhelming reason that workers strike or protest is non-payment of wages.
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Objectionable decisions by owners and management is by far the second largest declared reason for labor protests, at 34 percent. This category includes a number of different issues that vary from case to case, but they usually involve “changes in the social-labor sphere of the enterprise” that worsen the workers’ position, which might include everything from a reorganization of the enterprise to outsourcing of jobs to bankruptcy. Protests arise in most of these cases because “these actions are taken without the agreement of the workers, but are presented as a fait accompli” by the management.[38] The fact that management acts in this way is not surprising, considering that the “politics of production” is constructed in such a way that the “social partnership” model is heavily skewed toward the interests of capital. Olimpieva puts it succinctly: “That is why, according to the expression of one trade union committee chairman, today it is not possible to speak about a social partnership in Russian enterprises, but about a ‘social coexistence if the employer wants it.’”[39]
Given all of this, it should come as no surprise that only nine percent of labor protests since 2010 have been carried out according to the stipulations of the Labor Code. The rest have been technically illegal.
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Russia’s workers have used myriad strategies in an attempt to defend their interests, but as the evidence above suggests they face significant obstacles organizationally, legally, and politically. For a large majority of Russia’s workers, trade unions have proven to be an ineffective mechanism for the advancement of their interests due to the “official unionism” of the FNPR and the massive roadblocks faced by independent unions and activists.
...
It is unclear whether this recent wave of labor protests will continue, or whether some new forms of labor organization will emerge from it. The Russian state is not generally sympathetic to social activism. That said, it seems that for the time being the patience of Russia’s workers is wearing thin.
As this rather academic article makes clear, there is a basic conflict inside Russia between the working class on the one side and the capitalist owners and government on the other. I side with the working class, and consider those who side with or are part of the capitalist class/government to be on the morally wrong side, on the anti-egalitarian side. This is why I say that Putin is a bad man.
But Putin is a skilled politician who succeeds in making many Russian workers who are suppressed by his government nonetheless think that he is "on their side" (the way many Russian serfs famously thought the Tsar was on their side against the nobility who oppressed them and would come to their aid "if only the Tsar knew" how bad they were being oppressed.) This is shown in the above article as follows:
Given all of this, it should come as no surprise that only nine percent of labor protests since 2010 have been carried out according to the stipulations of the Labor Code. The rest have been technically illegal. At the same time, these protests have not been political in any direct way, except insofar as they reflect on the system’s inadequacies in terms of representing workers’ interests. Indeed, it is not uncommon for the workers involved to appeal to the Russian state or to Vladimir Putin personally to intervene on their behalf. For example, a group of workers in the Amur region wrote Putin a “letter” on the roofs of their dormitories with the phrases “Save the Workers” and “four months without pay. We want to work.”[40] In this case, the protest worked: A spokesperson for the workers talked to Putin on one of his famous scripted call-in shows, and the workers were paid.[41] This singular event has to be seen in the context in which, in spite of the publicity, an increasing percentage of Russia’s population view strikes as either ineffective or unacceptable.[42]
Until September 30, 2022, Putin's anti-egalitarian nature was evident in the rhetoric with which he conducted his foreign policy. Instead of championing the egalitarian values and aspirations of the people of the world and allying with them against the anti-egalitarian rulers of the world who oppress ordinary people in their own countries, Putin ignored the egalitarian values and aspirations of the people of the world and--even worse!--referred to the oppressive anti-egalitarians rulers of other nations in the West as "our partners"! Read here how Putin did this on February 24, 2022 and read here how he still does this as of July 19, 2022 despite these "partners" (the U.S. in particular) having overthrown the Russian-friendly government of Ukraine in 2014 and installed a government in Kiev that launched an ethnic cleansing violent war against the ethnic Russian Ukrainians in the Donbass region of Ukraine.
On September 30, 2022, however, Putin gave a remarkable speech on the occasion of the people in four eastern sections of Ukraine having just voted overwhelmingly in referenda to join the Russian Federation and thereby become Russian citizens. In this speech, Putin spoke differently than he had ever before spoken; he said things that were clearly intended to communicate egalitarian values: he explicitly condemned extreme economic inequality, and he sharply denounced (as colonialists oppressing ordinary people of the world) the very Western government leaders whom he had always previously referred to as "our partners."
This speech does not mean that Putin is now an egalitarian (evidence for THAT would require that Putin actually use his power to support egalitarians in Russia in their struggles against the anti-egalitarians in Russia), but it does mean that he feels obliged to appear to be something close to an egalitarian because he knows that the vast majority of people in Russia, as well as the vast majority of people in the world including in the Western nations, are overwhelmingly egalitarian in their values.
The anti-egalitarian nature of Putin's foreign policy, despite its "tipping of the hat" to egalitarian values, is evident in the fact that Putin does whatever is required to maintain friendly relations with the notoriously anti-egalitarian rulers of India and China and Saudi Arabia and all the other governments that are not overtly supporting the West's sanctions on Russia.
For example, to the great frustration and annoyance of the Russian general public, Putin, until October of 2022, greatly limited Russian support for the ethnic Russians in Ukraine (the terms of Special Military Operation meant fighting Kiev forces with one hand tied behind its back) and delayed holding the referenda in the four areas of eastern/southern Ukraine to join the Russian Federation, in order not to lose the support of these anti-egalitarian governments (India, China, etc.) that--like all anti-egalitarian governments--fear any thing (such as secession of a region of a nation) that sets a precedent for people being allowed to break away from the authority of the central government. Putin had to first persuade these nations that the circumstances in Ukraine for the ethnic Russians were so exceptional that Russia (due to the demands of its population!) had to do what was necessary to protect those ethnic Russians from Kiev's ongoing violence against them.
To the argument that Putin had no choice but to accommodate the anti-egalitarian governments of India, etc., I reply this way. An explicitly pro-egalitarian government can, and would, gain the enthusiastic support of the vast majority of the people (i.e., the have-nots) of the world, in ALL nations, regardless of the fact that they were ruled by anti-egalitarians. With this kind of support from the general public of a nation such as India (etc.), a truly pro-egalitarian government of Russia would be able to implement an egalitarian foreign policy by making the anti-egalitarian government of India (etc.) fear losing control of their own population if they acted with too much hostility to the Russian government.
This article is about the unequal availability of health care in Russia due to economic inequality: https://thegroundtruthproject.org/health-care-disparity-reveals-russias-income-inequality-crisis/
The billionaire ruling plutocracy of India oppresses the have-nots in India
Please read my article about India titled, “In India 30 Farmers Per Day Commit Suicide Due to Onerous Debt to Rich People Like Mr. Ambani Who Lives In His 27-Story Mansion by, As the NYT Reports, "the Grace of God.” Methinks such gross inequality is actually by the grace of mortals such as India's Modi, Russia's Putin and the USA's Biden as well as others in that class.”
The billionaire rulers of India are just as much the ‘bad guys’ as the billionaire rulers of the Western nations. For example, the rulers in India treat people like dirt this way:
India's Rulers Remove Women's Wombs So they Can Work More Hours of Hard Labor
Hundreds of woman in one cane producing district were agreeing to the surgery, say activists, in order to keep working long, physically punishing hours
Women working in sugar cane fields are still being “pushed” to undergo surgery to remove their womb and enable them to work longer hours without period pain, activists in India’s state of Maharashtra have said.
Large numbers of women undertake long hours of manual work harvesting, gathering, lifting and loading large stacks of cane to trucks and tractors. A combination of poverty, low pay of less than £4 a day, and the threat of fines for missing or incomplete work days, was putting pressure on women to agree to hysterectomies, despite promises of reform, said labour rights’ campaigners.
They say women have been told that surgery would “release them from the monthly problem” of period pains and allow them to work longer hours.
What’s next in India? Solving the problem of inadequate child care by just killing the children?
The Supreme Leader of Iran enables the billionaire class in Iran to oppress the have-nots inside Iran
I write the following in my article titled, “Iran's Rulers Could Destroy the Zionist Project Without Firing a Single Missile, But They Refuse to Do So Because It Would Strengthen the Have-Nots of the World and In Iran. Peace requires a revolution by the have-nots to overthrow the haves of Israel and Iran and Jordan and Egypt and all the other nations.”
Iran’s rulers are an upper class of the haves who want to keep the have-nots of the world (and in Iran) out of power. Read here how they are not working to make Iran egalitarian. Listen to a lecture about this:
A ruling class that does this (locks up its labor activists), that fears the have-nots taking the real power in the world, does not want to defeat Zionism by creating solidarity of the have-nots against it. Absolutely not! Instead, it attacks its own have-nots and tries to control them and make them obey and be loyal to the ruling class by, in the case of Iran, posing as the supposed enemy of Zionism and, in the case of Israel, posing as the supposed protector of Jews from Palestinians.
Off topic but might be of interest- a review of this year's bilderberg meeting, where the world's wealthiest billionaires, presidents, arms dealers, prime ministers, government officials, corporate CEOs and monarchs, all got together. All the who's who of the ruling class, and what was on their agenda https://21stcenturywire.com/2025/06/20/review-of-bilderberg-2025-ai-drones-technocracy-and-the-transatlantic-alliance/