Indian workers are resorting to unnecessary surgical procedures in order to work longer hours, or eke out a little extra money on the side, literally sacrificing their organs on the altar of profit. It is hard to imagine a crueler metaphor for the vampiric nature of capital described by Karl Marx, which only lives by devouring living labour.
It has recently come to light that women sugarcane workers are undergoing hysterectomies to avoid pregnancy and period pain, in order to keep up with brutal working hours. These women endure the backbreaking manual work of harvesting, gathering and loading stacks of sugarcane in tractors, and are paid less than 450Rs ($5 USD) a day. They are also threatened with fines for any missing or incomplete work days, despite promises of reform.
These ultraexploited women face pressure to go under the knife to avoid losing income. While sugarcane contractors may not physically force them to undergo hysterectomies, they create conditions that push women into this procedure. For many who have already had children, it feels like the only way to keep working.
The rate of hysterectomies across India is 3 percent, but in Maharashtra’s Beed district, where the sugarcane fields are concentrated, the rate is a staggering 36 percent. Removing the uterus has potential lasting consequences, including abdominal pain, blood clots, and early menopause which increases the chances of heart disease, osteoporosis and so on.
The prevalence of this barbaric practice is related to the general, miserable oppression faced by working-class and poor women. Child marriage and early pregnance are still rampant. Girls as young as 12 are married off and accompany their husbands to areas where there is a demand for labour. In places like Beed, exploitation is so intense that these workers aren’t given a single day off even when heavily pregnant, or after miscarriages.
Many of these women are also involved in indentured labour, where they are permanently indebted to their employers. One worker named Ms. Chaure told the New York Times: “I had to rush to work immediately after the operation as we had taken an advance. We neglect our health for money.”
The sugarcane reaped in Beed is appropriated by massive multinationals like Coke and PepsiCo. These beverage companies have multiple factories in Maharashtra, where the blood and misery of the local populace is the price of sweetening their products, which are mostly sold to rich countries.
There are also chilling reports that powerloom workers in the textile sector, and unemployed victims from places like Bangladesh, have been selling their kidneys to corrupt organ trafficking brokers. These brokers operate by identifying workers caught in a severe debt trap, targeting the clientele of microfinancing agencies.
The broker then threatens the worker, telling them they must pay up or else “send their wife or daughter” as payment. The brokers then offer the alternative of arranging for the worker to sell their kidney, sometimes for thousands of dollars. Sometimes, they take this drastic action in order to pay to host their daughters’ weddings.
Usually these desperate individuals are duped into selling their organs without any written agreements, meaning they are often not paid the agreed sum. Three years ago, another story made the news of 13-year-old girls being forced to sell their ovaries by their own family.
All these monstrous cases reveal the rottenness of capitalism, which can only be resolved through socialist revolution. If we are to put these nightmares behind us, the working class must capture the means of production, build a workers’ government, and condemn capitalism to destruction for all the heinous acts it has committed against humanity.
