Meet Iron Eaters

by das monde Mon Jul 21st, 2008 at 06:58:02 AM EST

This is a lazy photo-diary about people who are not allowed to be lazy.

A documentary about them won several film awards recently. The title is "Eisenfresser" ("Iron eaters").

The location is Chittagong, Bangladesh. It is very near in our globalized world.

A big sea-port, long beaches... stranded ships...

Pictures worth a thousand words - Diary rescue by Migeru

The story (of Chittagong native Shaheen Dill-Riaz) is about ship-breaking in Bangladesh.

The industry started in 1969 with a first stranded ship. Now hundreds of ships are being dismantled there to metal scrap, with nothing but bare hands of desperate workforce.

For the hellish work of moving and breaking ships in the mud, workers get paid late pennies. No work safety to speak about, fast growing debt for food and rent... that's the buisiness model.

"It's not only the work procedure which makes this world so unique, but also the admirable strength of the workers. Superhuman figures with primitive tools recycling everything to the very last screw stand before the refuse of civilisation. It is exhausting, dangerous and basically impossible work. And yet they manage to do it and have been doing so for years." (Shaheen Dill-Riaz)

(I took most pictures from this blog. Alexius gives a whole series of photo links.)

Meet Iron Eaters | 28 comments (28 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

Re: Meet Iron Eaters (none / 1)

European Tribune - Meet Iron Eaters

(I took most pictures from this blog. Alexius gives a whole series of photo links.)

And I bet he ripped these images off from Waterworld or Mad Max.

... all progress depends on the unreasonable mensch.
(apologies to G.B. Shaw)

by marco on Sun Jun 22nd, 2008 at 07:13:35 AM EST

Re: Meet Iron Eaters (none / 0)

National Geographic did a piece on this a few years ago.

you are the media you consume.

by MillMan (millguy at gmail) on Mon Jul 21st, 2008 at 12:59:19 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Meet Iron Eaters (4.00 / 2)

The best the capitalist beast can offer...

who said we did not need to control the beast?

A pleasure

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude

by kcurie on Sun Jun 22nd, 2008 at 07:57:05 AM EST

Re: Meet Iron Eaters (none / 0)

What these pictures show is not the horrors of capitalism, but thee very fact that these people voluntarily do this work shows how unimaginably awful subsistence farming is.

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.

by Starvid on Mon Jul 21st, 2008 at 08:41:49 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Meet Iron Eaters (4.00 / 3)

Actually, it shows both.

by Colman (colman at eurotrib.com) on Mon Jul 21st, 2008 at 08:43:27 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Meet Iron Eaters (none / 1)

That these men came from terrible conditions of poverty is clear. That they even had a choice between subsistence farming ("awful" or not) and this work is less clear. Have either you or Starvid any evidence of a link? (I've looked and haven't found anything more than a mention of "poor villages on the other side of India" in alexius's blog that Das Monde links to.)

by afew (afew(a in a circle)eurotrib_dot_com) on Mon Jul 21st, 2008 at 09:12:09 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Meet Iron Eaters (none / 1)

No. It occurred to me that I should add a footnote to the effect that he was assuming that they had such a choice, but Christopher decided to wake up ...

by Colman (colman at eurotrib.com) on Mon Jul 21st, 2008 at 09:44:18 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Meet Iron Eaters (none / 0)

Alright, alright.

But I bet the spin is "how horrible these awful transnational corporations/capitalists are!" and not a word said about how these people would rather break up ships by hand than farming the land they have farmed for thousands of years.

And it wouldn't surprise me in the least if the question "would these people have better lifes if these ships weren't sent to Chittagong?" isn't asked.

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.

by Starvid on Mon Jul 21st, 2008 at 09:14:11 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Meet Iron Eaters (none / 1)

OK, OK!

But it seems to me you're the one who's projecting a lot here: farming the land they have farmed for thousands of years. How do you know this?

There's overpopulation, as linca says. There are quite probably social distinctions that mean some families may have too little land or animals to live off. And there may well be - as was for long the case in Europe - a family structure in which some sons at least have to go off to "seek their fortune" or more prosaically go where they hear you can get $1.50 a day shipbreaking.

Generalising about subsistence farming on this basis seems a stretch. (And my comments are not meant to defend dirt-poor subsistence farming either: just that subsistence farming on which you can subsist is surely not "unimaginably awful").

by afew (afew(a in a circle)eurotrib_dot_com) on Mon Jul 21st, 2008 at 09:25:23 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Meet Iron Eaters (4.00 / 2)

some families may have too little land or animals to live off.

Some don't have any at all. Not all lower castes were for farmers...

_{*Lunatic*, n.

One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

by DoDo on Mon Jul 21st, 2008 at 10:02:21 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Meet Iron Eaters (none / 1)

...not to mention disappropiation.

_{*Lunatic*, n.

One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

by DoDo on Mon Jul 21st, 2008 at 10:03:24 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Meet Iron Eaters (none / 0)

Oh come on, even in places where population growth has gotten under control, like in China, people leave farming for industry. It might be awful, but it's still less awful than the life of the romanticised third world farmer.

We can also look back at our own history. In 19th century Europe people left the countryside en masse for the horrible industrial cities, because the cities were less horrible than the alternative.

And eventually, things got better.

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.

by Starvid on Mon Jul 21st, 2008 at 10:31:34 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Meet Iron Eaters (4.00 / 3)

Those that left the countryside en masse during the 19th century were not the subsistence farmers, but their domestics and various hired hands. Much of the rural exodus was actually a redistribution from small scale, decentralised artisans to large scale industries, too.

Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères

by linca (antonin POINT lucas AROBASE gmail.com) on Mon Jul 21st, 2008 at 10:48:32 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Meet Iron Eaters (4.00 / 3)

Still more projection on your part.

What's meant by "romanticising" the third world farmer, and who do you believe is doing it?

The C18 Agricultural Revolution began in England, where the move to the cities was not a flight of peasants from the land that they were desperate to get away from, but a result of the Enclosures, which destroyed by privatisation the previous mode of agricultural production.

The idea that "things got better" when heaps of people were living in exploited filth in C19 industrial cities, compared to rural poverty, is so potty I think you're just trying to stir it up. Right?

by afew (afew(a in a circle)eurotrib_dot_com) on Mon Jul 21st, 2008 at 11:40:34 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Meet Iron Eaters (4.00 / 3)

It's hard to tell objective benefits of leaving farming for industry, or taking other such "best" choices. What people do is they follow each other: they solve their hardships by looking at apparently successful decisions, or where everyone is moving. What else would you know?

And then there is the promise of opportunity. Capitalism is indeed good in providing great opportunities, to relatively few eventually. People apparently like to make a lottery choice, even with substantial life-size risks. Concentrating on success stories while ignoring silent evidence of loosers is one of those logical fallacies that Taleb talks in "The Black Swan".

by das monde on Mon Jul 21st, 2008 at 10:17:31 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Meet Iron Eaters (none / 1)

And it wouldn't surprise me in the least if the question "would these people have better lifes if these ships weren't sent to Chittagong?" isn't asked.

Because it's largely irrelevant. The gangster-capitalist argument of "all else being equal, would you prefer a job with a trans-nat to no job" is nonsense, because all other things need not be equal. Assuming that they are denies the power of political progress. So no, I don't want to stop sending shipwrecks to India, full stop. I want to stop sending shipwrecks to India and instead pay the then-unemployed workers with some of the largesse captured by the trans-nat fatcats.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Mon Jul 21st, 2008 at 09:28:46 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Meet Iron Eaters (none / 0)

Exactly how are you going to get political progress without first getting economic progress and an educated middle class? And in a place like Bangladesh, of all places?

Look at South Korea, Taiwan, and Europe for that matter. And then contrast it with all the countries that never got anywhere, and look at the ones that are now at last moving forward, and ask yourself what they have done to get moving.

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.

by Starvid on Mon Jul 21st, 2008 at 10:37:31 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Meet Iron Eaters (none / 1)

I'd bet France in 1880 or the US in 1780 were less developed than Bangladesh is now...

Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères

by linca (antonin POINT lucas AROBASE gmail.com) on Mon Jul 21st, 2008 at 10:49:28 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Meet Iron Eaters (4.00 / 3)

I don't know the specifics of the former two, but Europe raped the rest of the world to get rich. Oh, and we had laws regulating the flow of goods and capital to such an extent that it's doubtful that any modern trans-nat could have survived - much less prospered - in the regulatory environment of 19th cent. Europe. The closest we got to a genuine trans-nat was the British East Empire Company. And a fat load of good it did for East India...

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Mon Jul 21st, 2008 at 11:09:19 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Meet Iron Eaters (none / 1)

Beg to differ to some minor extent: we did have transnats, certainly in the railway sector, but they went away with the wave of nationalisations. (For example, there were large French companies owning privately built and run railways across Europe, and some locomotive builders expanding or buying rivals.)

_{*Lunatic*, n.

One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

by DoDo on Mon Jul 21st, 2008 at 12:50:11 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Meet Iron Eaters (none / 1)

"what they have done to get moving" : that shipbreaking industry is an example?

You're really now in danger of endorsing that exploitation as some kind of necessary step on the road to all-industrial progess.

by afew (afew(a in a circle)eurotrib_dot_com) on Mon Jul 21st, 2008 at 11:47:52 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Meet Iron Eaters (none / 0)

Would make a nice pair of argumentations with redstar's.

_{*Lunatic*, n.

One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

by DoDo on Mon Jul 21st, 2008 at 12:51:47 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Meet Iron Eaters (4.00 / 3)

Fat chance. Big difference, ideologically, between those running the show in the one place versus those running the show in the other. You can actually manage this transition and cushion some of the excesses (though not all).

But there is some truth in what you two are complaining about: we will not all be equal until economically we are equal, and we won't get there without letting the developing world develop. We keep talking about gini coefficients and applying them haphazardly (to countries, for instance, rather than regions or, ultimately, the world itself). We will not achieve peace, imho, until we are thinking about gini in terms of global equality, and not intra-national equality. And we don't get there by blinking our eyes, and tapping our feet, and wishing liberal christian democracy and euro-centric values on the developing world.

The question then becomes which development models are the most humane and effective and here, there is room for a lot of argument.

The Hun is always either at your throat or at your feet. Winston Churchill

by r------ on Tue Jul 22nd, 2008 at 09:50:46 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Meet Iron Eaters (4.00 / 2)

Subsistence farming on much less land than is necessary to survive. A rather significant difference : India is overpopulated.

Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères

by linca (antonin POINT lucas AROBASE gmail.com) on Mon Jul 21st, 2008 at 09:16:29 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Meet Iron Eaters (4.00 / 4)

seems to me that rather a lot of people might enjoy and/or benefit from a (re)reading of The Making of the English Working Class... lest we replicate that "enormous condescension of posterity" which the author deplored and which motivated him to underatake a major opus.

most of the migrating rural people, at the time of the Enclosures, weren't flocking joyously, spontaneously from farmsteads to the cities... They Wuz Pushed. with intent. so that others could consolidate the land into vast private estates, so that others could exploit the labour of the dispossessed -- who were now abjectly dependent on the money economy for the barest necessities of life and hence forever under the thumb of the money-lords. same process still going on today as the tide of Enclosure and the cash-crop plantation system reaches all around the world.

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

by DeAnander (de_at_daclarke_dot_org) on Tue Jul 22nd, 2008 at 03:02:34 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Meet Iron Eaters (4.00 / 3)

And as though it's not heartbreaking enough already, they SMILE for the photos.

There's not a hell hot enough for those who profit the most from such injustice.

Karen in Austin

'tis strange I should be old and neither wise nor valiant. From "The Maid's Tragedy" by Beaumont & Fletcher

by Wife of Bath (kareninaustin at g mail dot com) on Mon Jun 23rd, 2008 at 10:53:09 PM EST

Re: Meet Iron Eaters (4.00 / 2)

On the other hand, smile is the best they can do. They came there as if taking the best option. That's the engine of exploitation - taking away all other options.

The Hindu fate attitude surely "helps" in Bangladesh. Even if a worker gets killed, fellow workers are not horrified.

A direct way to counter no-choice scenarios (with knowingly paying late and running workers into debt, so they could not go back to harvest in home villages) is to offer alternative choices. But would profiteers allow government to do that easily?! What entrepreneurs would do their share of charity by offering better wages and conditions?

by das monde on Tue Jun 24th, 2008 at 08:22:25 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Meet Iron Eaters (4.00 / 2)

i haven't been in india since '72, but already back then i remember being very impressed by the capacity of local workers to scavenge anything of value from anything at all. not a pretty sight at all, especially when it's children crawling over fly-ridden mountains of garbage looking for something to eat.

then living in hawaii there used to be quite a culture of dump-cruising. people with pickups often came home as loaded as when they arrived. fridges, washing machines, you name it, often in perfect working order, wrong colour i guess!

anyways, it was fun, something for nothing always is, plus a virtuous glow of saving energy. in a 'throwaway' society, it is truly appalling how much waste there is...

i'd compare in my mind and see the many things no-one bothered to pick up, and often think back to india, marvelling at what they would do with all this.

i even thought it would be generous of us westerners if we shipped great tankers full of crap we don't want and gave it away, to be turned into something useful. we could even pay them to do it...

then i felt aghast at that attitude...

utilitarian, yes, but scabrous, somehow, in its inherently implied racial superiority.

and that's where i'd run out of pc thoughts about putting good materials into the hands of very creative deconstructors.

it things keep going this way, maybe we'll grow out of throwing away so much, and/or get really good at it ourselves.

oh, btw, under the reagan reign, they started banning people from grabbing stuff, it became a finable misdemeanour, sometime even guards were put on the bigger dumps.

bad for bizniz...

germany has a great system, where one night a month, people put out furniture-size stuff they no longer need, and for one night before it gets picked up by the dumptrucks, anyone can cruise by and help themselves, with no social opprobrium at all.

we soundproofed a studio in hamburg in '69 getting all the eggboxes and mattresses for sfa!

i always wonder why garage sales don't happen in yurp, or italy anyway, maybe you need huge middle-class suburbs for that.

sorry, sure have dragged anchor aways from those grimy heroes on the bangla beach...

great diary and comments, y'all-

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

by melo (melometa4(at)gmail.com) on Mon Jul 21st, 2008 at 12:48:57 PM EST

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