Planned Statehood

I just finished reading Building a More Resilient Haitian State, a Rand Corporation report that was published in the wake of the 2010 earthquake that devastated Haiti. It is somewhat better than I expected it to be, since it acknowledges the destructive roles that both France and the US have played in Haitian history -- up until the election of Jean-Bertrand Aristide to the Presidency in 1990, where it pretty much follows the US government line. But its analysis and recommendations seem fairly reasonable for the most part -- which doesn't mean I'd follow them if I were granted the power to decide what to do in Haiti, only that they're reasonable given US power and the constraints of politics.

Here's one thing that caught my attention, though. On page 73 the team writes:

Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and the only country in the hemisphere formally designated a least-developed country by the World Bank. Alone among the states of the Western Hemisphere, per capita GDP in Haiti has fallen over the past 40 years to roughly one-half to two-thirds the level that it was in 1965. Not surprisingly, Haiti suffers from high rates of absolute poverty: Fifty-four percent of the population is estimated to live on less than $1 per day, and 72 percent on less than $2. Income is the most unequal in the hemisphere.

Then, on page 84, we get this:

The Haitian economy needs to enjoy a period of sustained, steady growth. With such a period, Haitians will remain mired in poverty, with all of its attendant ills. To generate growth, Haiti will have to sustain macroeconomic stability, improve the environment for business, and capitalize on favorable treatment it has been granted by the international community. With the adoption of the HOPE II Act by the U.S. government, Haiti enjoys highly favorable access to the U.S. market for clothing. Some of Haiti’s best prospects for growth are to attract foreign and domestic investment to the garment industry. Haiti has too many people engaged in agriculture. The country is heavily populated, and more land is cultivated than is ecologically sustainable. In contrast, labor-intensive industries, such as garment manufacture, provide an attractive source of jobs and income, especially given Haiti’s competitive, low-cost labor force. However, to take advantage of the opportunities in labor-intensive exports, the Haitian government in conjunction with the international community, should implement the recommendations set forth in this section.

Notice the words I put into boldface. The reason why Haiti's labor force is competitive and low-cost is Haiti's terrible poverty, the worst in the Western hemisphere. As I've pointed out before, Haitian garment workers will only be "competitive" as long as they are poor. Once their wages go up -- as they must, because as apologists for global capitalism love to say, working in terrible conditions for a pittance is the best hope of the world's poor to escape poverty -- they will become much less attractive to foreign businesses, and even to domestic ones. What Haiti (or any other country in the same position) will do then is anyone's guess. But at the moment, Haitians still have a long way to go before they have to worry about being paid too much, even by the miserly standards of global capital.

Planned Statehood

I just finished reading Building a More Resilient Haitian State, a Rand Corporation report that was published in the wake of the 2010 earthquake that devastated Haiti. It is somewhat better than I expected it to be, since it acknowledges the destructive roles that both France and the US have played in Haitian history -- up until the election of Jean-Bertrand Aristide to the Presidency in 1990, where it pretty much follows the US government line. But its analysis and recommendations seem fairly reasonable for the most part -- which doesn't mean I'd follow them if I were granted the power to decide what to do in Haiti, only that they're reasonable given US power and the constraints of politics.

Here's one thing that caught my attention, though. On page 73 the team writes:

Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and the only country in the hemisphere formally designated a least-developed country by the World Bank. Alone among the states of the Western Hemisphere, per capita GDP in Haiti has fallen over the past 40 years to roughly one-half to two-thirds the level that it was in 1965. Not surprisingly, Haiti suffers from high rates of absolute poverty: Fifty-four percent of the population is estimated to live on less than $1 per day, and 72 percent on less than $2. Income is the most unequal in the hemisphere.

Then, on page 84, we get this:

The Haitian economy needs to enjoy a period of sustained, steady growth. With such a period, Haitians will remain mired in poverty, with all of its attendant ills. To generate growth, Haiti will have to sustain macroeconomic stability, improve the environment for business, and capitalize on favorable treatment it has been granted by the international community. With the adoption of the HOPE II Act by the U.S. government, Haiti enjoys highly favorable access to the U.S. market for clothing. Some of Haiti’s best prospects for growth are to attract foreign and domestic investment to the garment industry. Haiti has too many people engaged in agriculture. The country is heavily populated, and more land is cultivated than is ecologically sustainable. In contrast, labor-intensive industries, such as garment manufacture, provide an attractive source of jobs and income, especially given Haiti’s competitive, low-cost labor force. However, to take advantage of the opportunities in labor-intensive exports, the Haitian government in conjunction with the international community, should implement the recommendations set forth in this section.

Notice the words I put into boldface. The reason why Haiti's labor force is competitive and low-cost is Haiti's terrible poverty, the worst in the Western hemisphere. As I've pointed out before, Haitian garment workers will only be "competitive" as long as they are poor. Once their wages go up -- as they must, because as apologists for global capitalism love to say, working in terrible conditions for a pittance is the best hope of the world's poor to escape poverty -- they will become much less attractive to foreign businesses, and even to domestic ones. What Haiti (or any other country in the same position) will do then is anyone's guess. But at the moment, Haitians still have a long way to go before they have to worry about being paid too much, even by the miserly standards of global capital.

Every Knee Shall Bow and Every Tongue Confess the Name of Nike

Today I'm reading China in Ten Words (Pantheon, 2011) by Yu Hua. Born in 1960, Yu grew up during the Cultural Revolution in conditions of moderate poverty (which means he was hungry most of the time, but not hungry enough to die of it), though both his parents were medical doctors. In these essays, he contrasts his memories of China's recent past with its drastically changed present, but he's not interested in oversimplifying the present either. After I'd started reading the book, I looked again at the blurbs on the back cover, especially this one from Orville Schell, a longtime writer on East Asia.

In this era of the China Boom, when Communist Party officials are so inclined to erase the travails of their country's past from public consciousness, Yu Hua's insistence on remembering comes as an almost shocking intrusion into a willful state of amnesia. His earthy, even ribald, meditations on growing up in small-town China during Mao's Cultural Revolution remind us of just how twisted China's progress into the present has been and how precariously balanced its success story actually still is.

Ah, the State of Amnesia! It ought to be admitted to the Union officially, it's so essential to our nationhood. For any American to dwell on another nation's will to amnesia is disingenuous. Schell has his own history as a critic of US policy in East Asia, especially Vietnam, but from this paragraph it sounds like he's been reabsorbed into the American elite that spawned him. There's nothing exactly false in what he wrote, though; it's just a wee bit one-sided. Advocates of capitalist "reforms" in the US don't want to think about the human cost of China's "progress into the present" either -- well, the Right is concerned about the plight of Christians there, it's true, and the Liberal-Left is very concerned about dangerous child toys we import from China. But the human cost to Chinese? Not so much.

For example, in "Disparity" Yu recounts this story, which he heard from his "friend Cui Yongyuan, an anchorman on China Central Television," who,

In May 2006, ... began to retrace the route of the Red Army’s Long March, along with his film crew and twenty-six other people from different walks of life. It took them 250 days to travel the 3,800 miles …

By the summer of that year, just when the soccer World Cup finals were taking place in Germany, Cui’s miniature Long March expedition arrived at an impoverished area in China’s southwest, and there he had a sudden inspiration to organize a soccer match for the local primary school children. Even if it was a far cry from the passions of Berlin, he thought, at least it would create a little ripple of World Cup excitement in this backward hinterland county.

He immediately encountered two problems. The first was that no soccer ball could be found in the stores of the county town, so he had to send two fellow Long Marchers off in a car to a bigger city to buy one. The second was that the local primary school children not only had never seen a soccer match; they had never even heard that such a game existed [155-6].

From the context that Yu provides, it's clear that never having heard of soccer is the least of these children's disadvantages. Cui's cluelessness would, I feel sure, be echoed by most Americans on learning that these children had never heard of the Superbowl. Someone would probably start a charity to bring that and other similar blessings of civilization to these poor unfortunates.

Yu knows better, though. A bit later in the same essay he talks about poverty in China. He says that around a hundred million Chinese earn no more than 800 yuan (US $125.99) per year, and tells this story:

When I pointed this out at a talk in Vancouver in 2009, a Chinese student rose to his feet. “Money is not the sole criterion for judging happiness,” he objected. This remark made me shudder, for it is not just a single student’s view; a substantial number of people in China today would take a similar line. Surrounded by images of China’s growing prosperity, they have not the slightest inclination to concern themselves with the hundred million who still struggle in unimaginable poverty. That is the real tragedy: poverty and hunger are not as shocking as willful indifference to them. As I told the Chinese student, the issue is not how we judge happiness but how we address a widespread social problem. “If you are someone with an annual income of only 800 yuan, you will earn a lot of respect for saying what you did,” I replied. “But you’re not.”

China isn't a Christian country, but it has traditions of concern for the poor, however inadequately they were carried out in practice. Communism took them further, however badly Mao's regime carried them out in practice. Capitalism has no such tradition, and Yu's story reminded me that when I see right-wing Christians on Facebook call for putting Christ back into Christmas and God back into America, they never talk about poverty, in the US or elsewhere. (The closest I've seen anyone come to it was in the immediate aftermath of last year's earthquake in Haiti, when one Christian Facebook friend complained that though people go to bed hungry in the US, "we have a benefit for the people of Haiti on 12 stations." But she didn't want universal healthcare, because it would help "illegal immigrants.") All that matters to them is that there be a Christmas tree in the White House, that no one says "Happy Holidays", that everyone says "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, and that we support our troops -- until they come home, at which point who cares? None of these concerns can be found anywhere in the New Testament, but one theme that runs through both testaments is care of the poor. "Sell all you have and give to the poor" is one of those teachings of Jesus like "There are those who make themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven" -- all very well in his day, no doubt, but no longer relevant in ours.

At another points of the political spectrum, blame is laid at the feet of the poor for having too many children, a familiar theme from a century ago. China was the culprit then, and there was more fuss in the US about the prospect of a billion Chinese than there ever was about a billion Hindus, though I think India got there first. And probably there are more human beings than we can support; the trouble is that there's very little serious attempt to support them. Instead we get distractions, like China's capitalist "reforms." As Raymond Williams wrote in "Socialism and Ecology," twenty or thirty years ago, it's an error that even the great socialist theorists couldn't seem to avoid:

Because of course these attitudes of mastering and conquering had from beginning been associated not just with mastering the earth, or natural substances, or making water do what you wanted, but with pushing other people around, with going wherever there were things which you wanted, and subjugating and conquering. That’s where the metaphors of conquest and mastery came from. They were a classic rationale of imperialism in just that expanding phase. They were from the whole internal ethic of an expanding capitalism: to master nature, to conquer it, to shift it around to do what you want with it. Engels went along with that and then suddenly remembered where the metaphor came from and said, quite correctly: we shall never understand this if we fail to remember that we are ourselves part of nature, and that what is involved in this mastery and conquest is going to going to have its effects on us; we can’t just arrive and depart as a foreign conqueror. But then he shifted back, under the influence of this very strong nineteenth-century triumphalism about nature, and took up the metaphors again. And still today we tread these triumphalist arguments about production. They are a bit less confident now, but if you read the typical case for socialism, as it became standard between the wars in the dominant tendency, it is all in terms of mastering nature, setting new human horizons, creating plenty as the answer to poverty...

It has always been a running argument within the Labour Party, especially since 1945, whether we’re going to get equality, and what are usually referred to as ‘the things we all want’ – schools and hospitals are usually the first to be named – when we’ve got the economy right, when we’ve produced enough, enlarged the national cake and so on; or whether equality and the priority of human needs require, as their first and necessary condition, fundamental changes in our social and economic institutions and relationships. I think we now have to see that argument as settled. The usual ‘national cake’ position, the soft political option, can be seen to rest on a basic fallacy, which the United States has demonstrated to the world – and no society is every going to be relatively richer in gross indiscriminate production than that one – that by getting to a certain level of production you solve the problems of poverty and inequality. Tell them that in the slums, the inner cities, of rich America! All socialists are then forced to recognize that we have to intervene on quite a different basis. We have to say, as Tawney said sixty years ago, that no society is too poor to afford a right order of life. And no society is so rich that it can afford to dispense with a right order, or hope to get it merely by becoming rich. This is in my view the central socialist position. We can never accept so-called solutions to our social and economic problems which are based on the usual crash programmes of indiscriminate production, after which we shall get ‘the things we all want’. By the ways in which we produce, and the ways in which we organize production and its priorities – including, most notably, the inherent capitalist priority of profit – we create social relations which then determine how we distribute the production and how people actually live [reprinted in Resources of Hope (Verso, 1989), 214, 222].

Reading Hua's account, I remembered something the American historian Stephen F. Cohen wrote about Russia in the 1990s, in his Failed Crusade (Norton, 2000):

Many American correspondents clearly did not like "doom and gloom" stories about unpaid wages and pensions, malnutrition, and decaying provinces, where, a Russian journalist tells us, "desperation touches everyone." (Newsweek's correspondent advised the poor to continue living on bread: "They could do worse.") ... American journalists found instead preferable "metaphors for Russia's metamorphosis" -- usually in the tiny segment of Moscow society that had prospered, from financial oligarchs to yuppies spawned by the temporary proliferation of Western enterprises.

Thus, for a Washington Post columnist who had recently been a correspondent, an especially successful insider beneficiary of state assets was a progressive "baby billionaire" and, for the Wall Street Journal, a "Russian Bill Gates." For many others, like a New York Times editorial writer and also former Moscow correspondent, "One of the best seats for observing the new Russia is on the terrace outside the cavernous McDonald's [that] serves as a mecca for affluent young Muscovites. They arrive in Jeep Cherokees and Toyota Land Cruisers, cell phones in hand." In the New Russia at that time, the average monthly wage, when actually paid, was about sixty dollars, and falling [16-17].

It's more or less the same for American media covering American people: the rich and fabulous are the real America, the other ninety-nine percent or so don't count and barely exist. So why not take the same approach when covering China or the former Soviet Union?

Yu Hua doesn't care to forget the rest of the population, so he won't let you, or his Chinese readers, forget them either. But then he's not one of China's New Class of rich people, though the New York Times claims that, because his novels have sold well, he "has gone on to receive an ample share of the fruits of capitalism" (Yu alludes to this interview in China in Ten Words). He benefited from the cultural openings of the 1980s to become a writer, but he also benefited from Chinese political and economic egalitarianism:

In China during the 1980s, a doctor wasn’t any richer than a worker. The doctors then were all poor bastards. They were given fixed wages by the government. So I gave up being a dentist to work at a cultural center without suffering any stress either emotionally or economically. On the contrary, I felt so happy I nearly woke up smiling. I turned from being a poor bastard who worked his ass off every day into a poor bastard who had a jolly good time every day. I was still a poor bastard, but a poor bastard in the cultural center who had every minute to himself.

And Yu has no illusions about capitalism any more than he did about communism. He told the Times interviewer, "These young nationalists have no sense of ambivalence, no idea of life’s ambiguities. But when times are hard, their attitude will change, become more mature, and because capitalism in this form cannot go on in China, it has to end, those hard times will come soon." For most Chinese, they never went away.

Every Knee Shall Bow and Every Tongue Confess the Name of Nike

Today I'm reading China in Ten Words (Pantheon, 2011) by Yu Hua. Born in 1960, Yu grew up during the Cultural Revolution in conditions of moderate poverty (which means he was hungry most of the time, but not hungry enough to die of it), though both his parents were medical doctors. In these essays, he contrasts his memories of China's recent past with its drastically changed present, but he's not interested in oversimplifying the present either. After I'd started reading the book, I looked again at the blurbs on the back cover, especially this one from Orville Schell, a longtime writer on East Asia.

In this era of the China Boom, when Communist Party officials are so inclined to erase the travails of their country's past from public consciousness, Yu Hua's insistence on remembering comes as an almost shocking intrusion into a willful state of amnesia. His earthy, even ribald, meditations on growing up in small-town China during Mao's Cultural Revolution remind us of just how twisted China's progress into the present has been and how precariously balanced its success story actually still is.

Ah, the State of Amnesia! It ought to be admitted to the Union officially, it's so essential to our nationhood. For any American to dwell on another nation's will to amnesia is disingenuous. Schell has his own history as a critic of US policy in East Asia, especially Vietnam, but from this paragraph it sounds like he's been reabsorbed into the American elite that spawned him. There's nothing exactly false in what he wrote, though; it's just a wee bit one-sided. Advocates of capitalist "reforms" in the US don't want to think about the human cost of China's "progress into the present" either -- well, the Right is concerned about the plight of Christians there, it's true, and the Liberal-Left is very concerned about dangerous child toys we import from China. But the human cost to Chinese? Not so much.

For example, in "Disparity" Yu recounts this story, which he heard from his "friend Cui Yongyuan, an anchorman on China Central Television," who,

In May 2006, ... began to retrace the route of the Red Army’s Long March, along with his film crew and twenty-six other people from different walks of life. It took them 250 days to travel the 3,800 miles …

By the summer of that year, just when the soccer World Cup finals were taking place in Germany, Cui’s miniature Long March expedition arrived at an impoverished area in China’s southwest, and there he had a sudden inspiration to organize a soccer match for the local primary school children. Even if it was a far cry from the passions of Berlin, he thought, at least it would create a little ripple of World Cup excitement in this backward hinterland county.

He immediately encountered two problems. The first was that no soccer ball could be found in the stores of the county town, so he had to send two fellow Long Marchers off in a car to a bigger city to buy one. The second was that the local primary school children not only had never seen a soccer match; they had never even heard that such a game existed [155-6].

From the context that Yu provides, it's clear that never having heard of soccer is the least of these children's disadvantages. Cui's cluelessness would, I feel sure, be echoed by most Americans on learning that these children had never heard of the Superbowl. Someone would probably start a charity to bring that and other similar blessings of civilization to these poor unfortunates.

Yu knows better, though. A bit later in the same essay he talks about poverty in China. He says that around a hundred million Chinese earn no more than 800 yuan (US $125.99) per year, and tells this story:

When I pointed this out at a talk in Vancouver in 2009, a Chinese student rose to his feet. “Money is not the sole criterion for judging happiness,” he objected. This remark made me shudder, for it is not just a single student’s view; a substantial number of people in China today would take a similar line. Surrounded by images of China’s growing prosperity, they have not the slightest inclination to concern themselves with the hundred million who still struggle in unimaginable poverty. That is the real tragedy: poverty and hunger are not as shocking as willful indifference to them. As I told the Chinese student, the issue is not how we judge happiness but how we address a widespread social problem. “If you are someone with an annual income of only 800 yuan, you will earn a lot of respect for saying what you did,” I replied. “But you’re not.”

China isn't a Christian country, but it has traditions of concern for the poor, however inadequately they were carried out in practice. Communism took them further, however badly Mao's regime carried them out in practice. Capitalism has no such tradition, and Yu's story reminded me that when I see right-wing Christians on Facebook call for putting Christ back into Christmas and God back into America, they never talk about poverty, in the US or elsewhere. (The closest I've seen anyone come to it was in the immediate aftermath of last year's earthquake in Haiti, when one Christian Facebook friend complained that though people go to bed hungry in the US, "we have a benefit for the people of Haiti on 12 stations." But she didn't want universal healthcare, because it would help "illegal immigrants.") All that matters to them is that there be a Christmas tree in the White House, that no one says "Happy Holidays", that everyone says "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, and that we support our troops -- until they come home, at which point who cares? None of these concerns can be found anywhere in the New Testament, but one theme that runs through both testaments is care of the poor. "Sell all you have and give to the poor" is one of those teachings of Jesus like "There are those who make themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven" -- all very well in his day, no doubt, but no longer relevant in ours.

At another points of the political spectrum, blame is laid at the feet of the poor for having too many children, a familiar theme from a century ago. China was the culprit then, and there was more fuss in the US about the prospect of a billion Chinese than there ever was about a billion Hindus, though I think India got there first. And probably there are more human beings than we can support; the trouble is that there's very little serious attempt to support them. Instead we get distractions, like China's capitalist "reforms." As Raymond Williams wrote in "Socialism and Ecology," twenty or thirty years ago, it's an error that even the great socialist theorists couldn't seem to avoid:

Because of course these attitudes of mastering and conquering had from beginning been associated not just with mastering the earth, or natural substances, or making water do what you wanted, but with pushing other people around, with going wherever there were things which you wanted, and subjugating and conquering. That’s where the metaphors of conquest and mastery came from. They were a classic rationale of imperialism in just that expanding phase. They were from the whole internal ethic of an expanding capitalism: to master nature, to conquer it, to shift it around to do what you want with it. Engels went along with that and then suddenly remembered where the metaphor came from and said, quite correctly: we shall never understand this if we fail to remember that we are ourselves part of nature, and that what is involved in this mastery and conquest is going to going to have its effects on us; we can’t just arrive and depart as a foreign conqueror. But then he shifted back, under the influence of this very strong nineteenth-century triumphalism about nature, and took up the metaphors again. And still today we tread these triumphalist arguments about production. They are a bit less confident now, but if you read the typical case for socialism, as it became standard between the wars in the dominant tendency, it is all in terms of mastering nature, setting new human horizons, creating plenty as the answer to poverty...

It has always been a running argument within the Labour Party, especially since 1945, whether we’re going to get equality, and what are usually referred to as ‘the things we all want’ – schools and hospitals are usually the first to be named – when we’ve got the economy right, when we’ve produced enough, enlarged the national cake and so on; or whether equality and the priority of human needs require, as their first and necessary condition, fundamental changes in our social and economic institutions and relationships. I think we now have to see that argument as settled. The usual ‘national cake’ position, the soft political option, can be seen to rest on a basic fallacy, which the United States has demonstrated to the world – and no society is every going to be relatively richer in gross indiscriminate production than that one – that by getting to a certain level of production you solve the problems of poverty and inequality. Tell them that in the slums, the inner cities, of rich America! All socialists are then forced to recognize that we have to intervene on quite a different basis. We have to say, as Tawney said sixty years ago, that no society is too poor to afford a right order of life. And no society is so rich that it can afford to dispense with a right order, or hope to get it merely by becoming rich. This is in my view the central socialist position. We can never accept so-called solutions to our social and economic problems which are based on the usual crash programmes of indiscriminate production, after which we shall get ‘the things we all want’. By the ways in which we produce, and the ways in which we organize production and its priorities – including, most notably, the inherent capitalist priority of profit – we create social relations which then determine how we distribute the production and how people actually live [reprinted in Resources of Hope (Verso, 1989), 214, 222].

Reading Hua's account, I remembered something the American historian Stephen F. Cohen wrote about Russia in the 1990s, in his Failed Crusade (Norton, 2000):

Many American correspondents clearly did not like "doom and gloom" stories about unpaid wages and pensions, malnutrition, and decaying provinces, where, a Russian journalist tells us, "desperation touches everyone." (Newsweek's correspondent advised the poor to continue living on bread: "They could do worse.") ... American journalists found instead preferable "metaphors for Russia's metamorphosis" -- usually in the tiny segment of Moscow society that had prospered, from financial oligarchs to yuppies spawned by the temporary proliferation of Western enterprises.

Thus, for a Washington Post columnist who had recently been a correspondent, an especially successful insider beneficiary of state assets was a progressive "baby billionaire" and, for the Wall Street Journal, a "Russian Bill Gates." For many others, like a New York Times editorial writer and also former Moscow correspondent, "One of the best seats for observing the new Russia is on the terrace outside the cavernous McDonald's [that] serves as a mecca for affluent young Muscovites. They arrive in Jeep Cherokees and Toyota Land Cruisers, cell phones in hand." In the New Russia at that time, the average monthly wage, when actually paid, was about sixty dollars, and falling [16-17].

It's more or less the same for American media covering American people: the rich and fabulous are the real America, the other ninety-nine percent or so don't count and barely exist. So why not take the same approach when covering China or the former Soviet Union?

Yu Hua doesn't care to forget the rest of the population, so he won't let you, or his Chinese readers, forget them either. But then he's not one of China's New Class of rich people, though the New York Times claims that, because his novels have sold well, he "has gone on to receive an ample share of the fruits of capitalism" (Yu alludes to this interview in China in Ten Words). He benefited from the cultural openings of the 1980s to become a writer, but he also benefited from Chinese political and economic egalitarianism:

In China during the 1980s, a doctor wasn’t any richer than a worker. The doctors then were all poor bastards. They were given fixed wages by the government. So I gave up being a dentist to work at a cultural center without suffering any stress either emotionally or economically. On the contrary, I felt so happy I nearly woke up smiling. I turned from being a poor bastard who worked his ass off every day into a poor bastard who had a jolly good time every day. I was still a poor bastard, but a poor bastard in the cultural center who had every minute to himself.

And Yu has no illusions about capitalism any more than he did about communism. He told the Times interviewer, "These young nationalists have no sense of ambivalence, no idea of life’s ambiguities. But when times are hard, their attitude will change, become more mature, and because capitalism in this form cannot go on in China, it has to end, those hard times will come soon." For most Chinese, they never went away.

"Oh, Didn't You Know I'd Been Ruined?" Said He

Right after Steve Jobs died, I did a long post which touched on the human cost of economic development in other countries, though it also applies to the US. Much like Lucy yanking the football away from Charlie Brown before he can kick it, there's a recurring pattern of excusing the inhumane treatment of workers (long hours, dangerous working conditions, low pay) by promising that things will get better. As soon as they begin to do so, however, the people in charge of big business get restive: workers are getting too much money, you want things too easy, you're lazy and want to spend time with your families or just relaxing instead of putting in another thirty-four hour shift at the dear old factory. What's the matter with you? Don't you realize that we're all in this together, and that Exploitation, Inc. is just one big happy family? If you keep demanding higher wages, then poor old Exploitation, Inc. will go broke -- its profits have already dwindled to almost nothing because of you lazy, insatiable ingrates. When we go out of business, you'll be sorry, but it'll be too late then!

We hear this spiel even when profits are at record highs, as they are now in the US. It's nothing new, of course. In 1854, Charles Dickens wrote in his novel Hard Times about industrial Manchester, which he called Coketown:

Surely there never was such fragile china-ware as that of which the millers of Coketown were made. Handle them never so lightly, and they fell to pieces with such ease that you might suspect them of having been flawed before. They were ruined, when they were required to send labouring children to school; they were ruined, when inspectors were appointed to look into their works; they were ruined, when such inspectors considered it doubtful whether they were quite justified in chopping people up with their machinery; they were utterly undone, when it was hinted that perhaps they need not always make quite so much smoke ...

Whenever a Coketowner felt he was ill-used — that is to say, whenever he was not left entirely alone, and it was proposed to hold him accountable for the consequences of any of his acts — he was sure to come out with the awful menace, that he would ‘sooner pitch his property into the Atlantic.’ This had terrified the Home Secretary within an inch of his life, on several occasions. However, the Coketowners were so patriotic after all, that they never had pitched their property into the Atlantic yet, but, on the contrary, had been kind enough to take mighty good care of it. So there it was, in the haze yonder; and it increased and multiplied.

(I first read this passage in Allen Chase's The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism [Knopf, 1977], page 61. A very useful book.)

We've made progress since then, though I think even Dickens slightly exaggerated the desire of factory owners to be "left entirely alone." Even in those days, they wanted State protection from unruly workers and foreign competitors. Nowadays they expect more direct government subsidies, because "economic freedom" is so endangered here that a billionaire can't make even another billion unless the tyrannical, vampirical government helps him out.

These noises are meant to distract attention from the companies packing up and preparing to move to greener pastures: states with more "business-friendly" climates, countries where wages are even lower, and workers more vulnerable, than they were in the last free-enterprise haven.

Factories in China’s manufacturing heartland are feeling the squeeze again, with minimum wages in Guangdong province set to rise by as much as 20 percent on Jan. 1 for the second time in less than a year.

Oh noes!

In other words, the days of endless, cheap Chinese labor are limited. What that means for consumers in the United States and elsewhere is simple: Things are going to cost more, soon.

“I think there’s quite a good argument now that the global race to the bottom has been concluded,” said Geoffrey Crothall of the China Labour Bulletin, a Hong Kong-based labor-rights group. “There’s nowhere else to go.”

The Pearl River Delta is no longer a cheap place to produce, but it does have established supply chains, factories and infrastructure. Companies that want to produce ultra-low-cost products are moving inland in China, or to poorer countries like Bangladesh and Cambodia. Yet there’s nothing on the horizon to replace the cheap China model of the 1990s and 2000s.

Oh noes! Wherever shall Wal-Mart go? Whatever shall Wal-Mart do? Read the whole article; if you thought the Coketowners' plight was sad, the suffering of business in the Pearl River Delta will wring your heart.

So it appears we have a dilemma here. One of the defenses of capitalism is that it improves the lives of workers and consumers, but as this story shows, improving the lives of workers and consumers is a threat to capitalism, and therefore to the lives of workers and consumers. If wages go up, prices will go up and profits will go down, and then, more in sorrow than in anger, our beneficent Captains of Industry and Finance will just have to pull up stakes and move on. This appears to be a problem with capitalism itself, whether under socialism, monarchism, or the plutocratic oligarchy that we enjoy here in the Land of the Free: socialist states have run into the same roadblock on the highway to a higher standard of living. Nor has anyone come up with a way of avoiding it, partly because admitting that it's a problem would undermine the case for industry and economic growth.

Since my earlier post on Jobs, a lot more information has surfaced about his unsavory political views: for example, his demand that Obama make the US more like China, because of "the ease with which companies can build factories in China compared to the United States, where 'regulations and unnecessary costs' make it difficult for them." (I suppose it's a mercy that Jobs died before he could see his dream frustrated again. And besides, those lazy, pampered workers in the Chinese computer factories should feel honored to be participating in the creation of new "races," enabling the emergence of posthuman life with the iPhones they make.) And today, very much to my surprise, Eric Alterman has a good piece at The Nation on the human cost of Apple products, part of Steve Jobs's legacy.

Apple is a wonderful company for its customers and investors. So, too, Pixar. (NeXT, not so much…) But Apple is also an engine of misery for its subcontracted Chinese workers. That this story went largely unreported during Jobs’s life is a testament to how enthralled our media are by the myth of the man’s talismanic qualities, and how easily manipulated most reporters are by wealthy, successful entrepreneurs. But it is also a testament to how little the lives of laborers appear to count anymore.

"Anymore"? When did they ever? (Alterman also has to put in a concession that Jobs was a "genius"; so much the worse for geniuses then.) But on the whole this column is one you should read. The slobbering adulation lavished on Jobs even by political liberals and progressives is similar to Barack Obama's now somewhat tarnished luster: both men are marketers, not innovators, and their appeal is based on image rather than substance. You don't even want to look behind the curtain ... do you?

"Oh, Didn't You Know I'd Been Ruined?" Said He

Right after Steve Jobs died, I did a long post which touched on the human cost of economic development in other countries, though it also applies to the US. Much like Lucy yanking the football away from Charlie Brown before he can kick it, there's a recurring pattern of excusing the inhumane treatment of workers (long hours, dangerous working conditions, low pay) by promising that things will get better. As soon as they begin to do so, however, the people in charge of big business get restive: workers are getting too much money, you want things too easy, you're lazy and want to spend time with your families or just relaxing instead of putting in another thirty-four hour shift at the dear old factory. What's the matter with you? Don't you realize that we're all in this together, and that Exploitation, Inc. is just one big happy family? If you keep demanding higher wages, then poor old Exploitation, Inc. will go broke -- its profits have already dwindled to almost nothing because of you lazy, insatiable ingrates. When we go out of business, you'll be sorry, but it'll be too late then!

We hear this spiel even when profits are at record highs, as they are now in the US. It's nothing new, of course. In 1854, Charles Dickens wrote in his novel Hard Times about industrial Manchester, which he called Coketown:

Surely there never was such fragile china-ware as that of which the millers of Coketown were made. Handle them never so lightly, and they fell to pieces with such ease that you might suspect them of having been flawed before. They were ruined, when they were required to send labouring children to school; they were ruined, when inspectors were appointed to look into their works; they were ruined, when such inspectors considered it doubtful whether they were quite justified in chopping people up with their machinery; they were utterly undone, when it was hinted that perhaps they need not always make quite so much smoke ...

Whenever a Coketowner felt he was ill-used — that is to say, whenever he was not left entirely alone, and it was proposed to hold him accountable for the consequences of any of his acts — he was sure to come out with the awful menace, that he would ‘sooner pitch his property into the Atlantic.’ This had terrified the Home Secretary within an inch of his life, on several occasions. However, the Coketowners were so patriotic after all, that they never had pitched their property into the Atlantic yet, but, on the contrary, had been kind enough to take mighty good care of it. So there it was, in the haze yonder; and it increased and multiplied.

(I first read this passage in Allen Chase's The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism [Knopf, 1977], page 61. A very useful book.)

We've made progress since then, though I think even Dickens slightly exaggerated the desire of factory owners to be "left entirely alone." Even in those days, they wanted State protection from unruly workers and foreign competitors. Nowadays they expect more direct government subsidies, because "economic freedom" is so endangered here that a billionaire can't make even another billion unless the tyrannical, vampirical government helps him out.

These noises are meant to distract attention from the companies packing up and preparing to move to greener pastures: states with more "business-friendly" climates, countries where wages are even lower, and workers more vulnerable, than they were in the last free-enterprise haven.

Factories in China’s manufacturing heartland are feeling the squeeze again, with minimum wages in Guangdong province set to rise by as much as 20 percent on Jan. 1 for the second time in less than a year.

Oh noes!

In other words, the days of endless, cheap Chinese labor are limited. What that means for consumers in the United States and elsewhere is simple: Things are going to cost more, soon.

“I think there’s quite a good argument now that the global race to the bottom has been concluded,” said Geoffrey Crothall of the China Labour Bulletin, a Hong Kong-based labor-rights group. “There’s nowhere else to go.”

The Pearl River Delta is no longer a cheap place to produce, but it does have established supply chains, factories and infrastructure. Companies that want to produce ultra-low-cost products are moving inland in China, or to poorer countries like Bangladesh and Cambodia. Yet there’s nothing on the horizon to replace the cheap China model of the 1990s and 2000s.

Oh noes! Wherever shall Wal-Mart go? Whatever shall Wal-Mart do? Read the whole article; if you thought the Coketowners' plight was sad, the suffering of business in the Pearl River Delta will wring your heart.

So it appears we have a dilemma here. One of the defenses of capitalism is that it improves the lives of workers and consumers, but as this story shows, improving the lives of workers and consumers is a threat to capitalism, and therefore to the lives of workers and consumers. If wages go up, prices will go up and profits will go down, and then, more in sorrow than in anger, our beneficent Captains of Industry and Finance will just have to pull up stakes and move on. This appears to be a problem with capitalism itself, whether under socialism, monarchism, or the plutocratic oligarchy that we enjoy here in the Land of the Free: socialist states have run into the same roadblock on the highway to a higher standard of living. Nor has anyone come up with a way of avoiding it, partly because admitting that it's a problem would undermine the case for industry and economic growth.

Since my earlier post on Jobs, a lot more information has surfaced about his unsavory political views: for example, his demand that Obama make the US more like China, because of "the ease with which companies can build factories in China compared to the United States, where 'regulations and unnecessary costs' make it difficult for them." (I suppose it's a mercy that Jobs died before he could see his dream frustrated again. And besides, those lazy, pampered workers in the Chinese computer factories should feel honored to be participating in the creation of new "races," enabling the emergence of posthuman life with the iPhones they make.) And today, very much to my surprise, Eric Alterman has a good piece at The Nation on the human cost of Apple products, part of Steve Jobs's legacy.

Apple is a wonderful company for its customers and investors. So, too, Pixar. (NeXT, not so much…) But Apple is also an engine of misery for its subcontracted Chinese workers. That this story went largely unreported during Jobs’s life is a testament to how enthralled our media are by the myth of the man’s talismanic qualities, and how easily manipulated most reporters are by wealthy, successful entrepreneurs. But it is also a testament to how little the lives of laborers appear to count anymore.

"Anymore"? When did they ever? (Alterman also has to put in a concession that Jobs was a "genius"; so much the worse for geniuses then.) But on the whole this column is one you should read. The slobbering adulation lavished on Jobs even by political liberals and progressives is similar to Barack Obama's now somewhat tarnished luster: both men are marketers, not innovators, and their appeal is based on image rather than substance. You don't even want to look behind the curtain ... do you?

Occupy New Delhi

I just finished reading Arundhati Roy's Broken Republic: Three Essays (Hamish Hamilton / Penguin, 2011), about the uprisings in India's forests against government-corporate depredations. The highest-profile rebels are led by the Communist Party of India (Maoist), and though Roy discusses other groups, the Maoists are her focus in this new book. In the second essay she recounts a time she spent "Walking with the Comrades" in the forests, and it's a moving piece of work.

Of course Roy has come under attack for her sympathetic account of the Maoists and the poor farmers they are trying to organize. I trust her more than her critics, though, because she is critical of the Maoists, though not as critical as she is of state terror against the poor. Her sarcasm against respectable Indians can be withering (page 69):

Baba Amte, the well-known Gandhian, had opened his ashram and leprosy hospital in Warora in 1975. The Ramakrishna Mission and the Gayatri Samaj had been opening village schools in the remote forests of Abujhmad. In north Bastar, Baba Bihari Das had started an aggressive drive to 'bring tribals back into the Hindu folk', which involved a campaign to denigrate tribal culture, induce self-hatred, and introduce Hinduism's great gift -- caste.

(This reminds me of a friend many years ago who'd just watched Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth on PBS and told me how wonderful it was. Among the things she'd learned was that Judeo-Christianity was the only religion that was used as a means of social control. What about Hinduism? I asked her -- you know, the caste system? She hadn't thought of that. But it's easy to romanticize oppressive systems if you don't have to live under them.)

The important thing is that Roy asks the right questions, which must be answered by not only the Maoists but by other Indian Communist Parties, and by anyone else who says they want to help all Indians, not just the 100 Indian billionaires (210-211). (Compare the quotations from Raymond Williams in these posts.)

But let's take a brief look at the star attraction in the mining belt -- the several trillion dollars' worth of bauxite. There is no environmentally sustainable way of mining bauxite and processing it into aluminium. It's a highly toxic process that most Western countries have exported out of their own environments. To produce one tonne of aluminium, you need about six tonnes of bauxite, more than a thousand tonnes of water and a massive amount of electricity. For that amount of captive water and electricity, you need big dams, which, as we know, come with their own cycle of cataclysmic destruction. Last of all -- the big question -- what is the aluminium for? Where is it going? Aluminium is a principal ingredient in the weapons industry -- for other countries' weapons industries. Given this, what would a sane, 'sustainable' mining policy be? Suppose for the sake of argument, the CPI (Maoist) were given control of the so-called Red Corridor, the tribal homeland -- with its riches of uranium, bauxite, limestone, dolomite, coal, tin, granite, marble -- how would it go about the business of policy making and governance? Would it mine minerals to put on the market in order to create revenue, build infrastructure and expand its operations? Or would it mine only enough to meet people's basic needs? How would it define 'basic needs'? For instance, would nuclear weapons be a 'basic need' in a Maoist nation state?

Over the years I've asked questions like these to various politicos, all of whom brushed them aside impatiently, which probably means they don't want to think about them, or to admit that they've already thought about them, and see no problem with running the poor off their land to permit industrial development. This is a mindset shared by private-sector capitalists and public-sector capitalists alike, though "private-sector" is a misnomer since Western anti-communist capitalism still leans heavily on the state for support, defense, and subsidy. Roy is aware of this, for she immediately points to the record of industrialized societies on both sides of the ideological divide. For the nominally socialist countries no less than the 'capitalist' ones,

the ability to consume has become the yardstick by which progress is measured. For this kind of 'progress', you need industry. To feed the industry, you need a steady supply of raw material. For that you need mines, dams, domination, colonies, war. Old powers are waning, new ones rising ... [212].

Except that there's nothing new about this process. For Marx (as Roy acknowledges earlier in the book), revolution would come out of the smokestacks of factories; the reason why the Soviet Union rejected Maoism as an "infantile leftist disorder" was that Mao thought revolution could arise in a country of peasants, with no industrial base to speak of. Once that revolution succeeded, however, the industrial base followed in the Great Leap Forward, with great human cost. But industrial capitalism always exacts a great human cost, in the West, in the East, and what's now called the Global South.

That's important to remember, because apologists for the West have pointed to the human costs of Stalin's and Mao's "modernization" of their respective countries; the resultant debate rather resembles the Creationist / Evolutionist debates, in which sides assume that between them they cover all possible positions. Creationists assume that if they can find crucial flaws in Darwinism, Creationism will be the only option remaining. It isn't; but it also doesn't follow that if Creationism is false, Darwinism as it's now construed must be true. There are always other alternatives. Likewise, Capitalists assume that if Socialism fails, Capitalism is vindicated. Looking at the world today, it's hard to take that claim seriously.

Occupy New Delhi

I just finished reading Arundhati Roy's Broken Republic: Three Essays (Hamish Hamilton / Penguin, 2011), about the uprisings in India's forests against government-corporate depredations. The highest-profile rebels are led by the Communist Party of India (Maoist), and though Roy discusses other groups, the Maoists are her focus in this new book. In the second essay she recounts a time she spent "Walking with the Comrades" in the forests, and it's a moving piece of work.

Of course Roy has come under attack for her sympathetic account of the Maoists and the poor farmers they are trying to organize. I trust her more than her critics, though, because she is critical of the Maoists, though not as critical as she is of state terror against the poor. Her sarcasm against respectable Indians can be withering (page 69):

Baba Amte, the well-known Gandhian, had opened his ashram and leprosy hospital in Warora in 1975. The Ramakrishna Mission and the Gayatri Samaj had been opening village schools in the remote forests of Abujhmad. In north Bastar, Baba Bihari Das had started an aggressive drive to 'bring tribals back into the Hindu folk', which involved a campaign to denigrate tribal culture, induce self-hatred, and introduce Hinduism's great gift -- caste.

(This reminds me of a friend many years ago who'd just watched Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth on PBS and told me how wonderful it was. Among the things she'd learned was that Judeo-Christianity was the only religion that was used as a means of social control. What about Hinduism? I asked her -- you know, the caste system? She hadn't thought of that. But it's easy to romanticize oppressive systems if you don't have to live under them.)

The important thing is that Roy asks the right questions, which must be answered by not only the Maoists but by other Indian Communist Parties, and by anyone else who says they want to help all Indians, not just the 100 Indian billionaires (210-211). (Compare the quotations from Raymond Williams in these posts.)

But let's take a brief look at the star attraction in the mining belt -- the several trillion dollars' worth of bauxite. There is no environmentally sustainable way of mining bauxite and processing it into aluminium. It's a highly toxic process that most Western countries have exported out of their own environments. To produce one tonne of aluminium, you need about six tonnes of bauxite, more than a thousand tonnes of water and a massive amount of electricity. For that amount of captive water and electricity, you need big dams, which, as we know, come with their own cycle of cataclysmic destruction. Last of all -- the big question -- what is the aluminium for? Where is it going? Aluminium is a principal ingredient in the weapons industry -- for other countries' weapons industries. Given this, what would a sane, 'sustainable' mining policy be? Suppose for the sake of argument, the CPI (Maoist) were given control of the so-called Red Corridor, the tribal homeland -- with its riches of uranium, bauxite, limestone, dolomite, coal, tin, granite, marble -- how would it go about the business of policy making and governance? Would it mine minerals to put on the market in order to create revenue, build infrastructure and expand its operations? Or would it mine only enough to meet people's basic needs? How would it define 'basic needs'? For instance, would nuclear weapons be a 'basic need' in a Maoist nation state?

Over the years I've asked questions like these to various politicos, all of whom brushed them aside impatiently, which probably means they don't want to think about them, or to admit that they've already thought about them, and see no problem with running the poor off their land to permit industrial development. This is a mindset shared by private-sector capitalists and public-sector capitalists alike, though "private-sector" is a misnomer since Western anti-communist capitalism still leans heavily on the state for support, defense, and subsidy. Roy is aware of this, for she immediately points to the record of industrialized societies on both sides of the ideological divide. For the nominally socialist countries no less than the 'capitalist' ones,

the ability to consume has become the yardstick by which progress is measured. For this kind of 'progress', you need industry. To feed the industry, you need a steady supply of raw material. For that you need mines, dams, domination, colonies, war. Old powers are waning, new ones rising ... [212].

Except that there's nothing new about this process. For Marx (as Roy acknowledges earlier in the book), revolution would come out of the smokestacks of factories; the reason why the Soviet Union rejected Maoism as an "infantile leftist disorder" was that Mao thought revolution could arise in a country of peasants, with no industrial base to speak of. Once that revolution succeeded, however, the industrial base followed in the Great Leap Forward, with great human cost. But industrial capitalism always exacts a great human cost, in the West, in the East, and what's now called the Global South.

That's important to remember, because apologists for the West have pointed to the human costs of Stalin's and Mao's "modernization" of their respective countries; the resultant debate rather resembles the Creationist / Evolutionist debates, in which sides assume that between them they cover all possible positions. Creationists assume that if they can find crucial flaws in Darwinism, Creationism will be the only option remaining. It isn't; but it also doesn't follow that if Creationism is false, Darwinism as it's now construed must be true. There are always other alternatives. Likewise, Capitalists assume that if Socialism fails, Capitalism is vindicated. Looking at the world today, it's hard to take that claim seriously.

In My Back Yard

The above image makes a good point, but there are some problems with it. For one thing, while there is too much hunger in the world, 99% of the population don't look like the children in the lower half. The worldwide maldistribution of wealth has as much to do with relative standards of living as with catastrophic famine, but it is really not a good idea for everyone to use as much electricity and own as many cars and generate as much garbage as Americans do. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak said in a recent interview that a lot of talk about "sustainability" is misconceived, because the lifestyles people want to sustain simply aren't sustainable.

And some well-meaning people just don't get it: one person commented on Facebook, "When I have enough to feed myself for the month and not Overdraft ... Overdraft ... I will undoubtedly suffer help I those less fortunate." It's a nice sentiment, but it misses the point. Personal, private charity can't fix the systemic structural problems the world faces.

For example: as everyone knows by now, Steve Jobs died yesterday. I'm sure I don't need to tell the readers of this blog who he was, any more than I'd need to tell you who Michael Jackson was. There has been an enormous outpouring of commentary about him, some of which annoys me. I do perhaps need to tell you who Fred Shuttlesworth and Derrick Bell were, both of whom died yesterday as well, and both of whom matter more to me than Jobs. That's not because I don't own a Mac, because I expect to shudder just as much at the tidal wave of goo that will be generated when Bill Gates cashes in his chips. I'm not a brand loyalist.

But I've been amazed at what otherwise sensible people have written about Jobs. Part of it is normal de mortuis nil nisi bonum, of course, but "transformative genius"? IOZ beat me to the punch on that sort of thing. I love computers and the Internet, but there are problems: the toxic byproducts of microchip production, for example, the harm done to the workers' health in computer factories, the economic exploitation of the workers, and so on. And on and on. The first reaction to Jobs' death by one friend of mine, with whom I'm in accord on politics, was: "Wouldn't it be nice if Jobs's iconic 'American' products had been made in the U.S.A.? Jobs, indeed." Well, no, it wouldn't be nice, not without very extensive regulation in working conditions -- which isn't going to happen without some intense struggle.

You see how difficult it is to disentangle these matters, though? I don't mean to imply that it's okay for Chinese workers to be underpaid, overworked, and slowly killed by poison; no one should work in those conditions. We need to improve conditions for workers around the world. But such efforts will be opposed by countries like China, which will claim that Chinese don't expect the silly "rights" that soft Westerners expect. Western corporations, with their multicultural sensitivity, will second that claim enthusiastically. Chinese and other Asian workers won't, but who cares about them? As Amartya Sen wrote in Development as Freedom (Oxford, 1999),

Are the citizens of third world countries indifferent to political and democratic rights? This claim, which is often made, is again based on too little empirical evidence .... The only way of verifying this would be to put the matter to democratic testing in free elections with freedom of opposition and expression -- precisely the things that the supporters of authoritarianism do not allow to happen. It is not clear at all how this proposition can be checked when the ordinary citizens are given little political opportunity to express their views on this and even less to dispute the claims made by the authorities in office. The downgrading of these rights and freedoms is certainly part of the value system of the government leaders in many third world countries, but to take that to be the view of the people is to beg a very big question.

It is thus of some interest to note that when the Indian government, under Indira Gandhi's leadership, tried out a similar argument in India, to justify the "emergency" she had misguidedly declared in the mid-1970s, an election was called that divided the voters precisely on this issue. In that fateful election, fought largely on the acceptability of the "emergency," the suppression of basic political and civil rights was firmly rejected, and the Indian electorate -- one of the poorest in the world -- showed itself to be no less keen on protesting against the denial of basic liberties and rights than it was in complaining about economic poverty. To the extent that there has been any testing of the proposition that poor people in general do not care about civil and political rights, the evidence is entirely against that claim. Similar points can be made by observing the struggle for democratic freedoms in South Korea, Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Burma (or Myanmar) and elsewhere in Asia [151].

The appeal of cheap labor isn't limited to the US. That's one of the revealing things about the development of capitalism in Asia. South Korea began developing its industrial plant in the 1960s under the dictator Park Chung-hee, in an intimate partnership between the government and business. This was capitalism, and Park's Korea was included in the propaganda category "the Free World," but it was far from free, and far from free markets. Working conditions were terrible, and we'll probably never know how many human beings South Korea's industrial revolution used up. In theory, workers weren't supposed to be worked to death; the Republic had an extensive labor law code that in theory protected workers' rights, but it wasn't enforced. (Park Gwang-su's 1995 film A Single Spark, based on the 1970 martyrdom of textile worker Jeon Tae-il, has never been released in the US, but it is currently available with English subtitles on Youtube, starting here. It made a powerful impression on me when I first saw it years ago. Jeon set himself afire, along with a copy of the Korean labor code, in protest against the conditions in the sweatshops of the Peace Market, the Seoul garment district. The biography on which the film was based was translated into English by Jeon's sister, who's now a professor of labor studies, and is worth reading if you can find it. Se-hui's Cho's novel in stories The Dwarf [Hawaii, 2006] gives a vivid picture of the impact of factory work and forced modernization on ordinary Koreans; for a sociological study of young factory women, see Seung-kyung Kim's Class Struggle or Family Struggle? [Cambridge, 2009]; Janice C. H. Kim's To Live To Work [Stanford, 2009] shows the roots of the system during the Japanese colonial period.)

The government promised its people that conditions and pay would eventually improve, and that everyone had to work together to make this happen. Just as this promise began to be fulfilled in the 1980s, Korean corporations found that they couldn't afford to pay higher wages, so they began moving production overseas to other Asian countries, especially Southeast Asia. At around the same time, South Korean citizens began demanding more of a political voice, climaxing with the overturning of the military dictatorship in 1987 and the first real elections in 1993. I think there's a two-way relationship here: that the corporations began moving overseas to escape the growth of Korean democracy and an independent and militant labor movement, while the democracy and labor movements became more militant as Korean business began to welsh on the long promise of better pay, better working conditions, and more leisure. (I believe I figured this out after reading John Kie-chang Oh's Korean Politics [Cornell, 1999], though he probably wouldn't agree with my interpretation. See also South Korea's Minjung Movement [Hawaii, 1995], edited by Kenneth M. Wells, and Echoes of the Past, Epics of Dissent [California, 1996] by Nancy Abelmann, for accounts of the grassroots movement against the dictatorship.)

Almost as soon as the military dictatorship caved in, international capital and its government partners increased pressure on the South Korean government for more access to the Korean economy. It should be no surprise that these agents were not happy about growing democracy and civil freedom in the countries they sought to buy; the US Chamber of Commerce, for example, has often called for a crackdown on what it calls "anti-American" sentiment in Korea. The International Monetary Fund sought to destroy the social services Koreans enjoyed through privatization, and in the economic crisis of the late 90s many government-owned businesses and services were sold off at fire-sale prices to foreign corporations; for a good account of the neoliberal assault on Asian economies, see Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine (Metropolitan Books, 2007). Koreans have continued to resist these trends, and the struggle continues.

There was a similar pattern in the United States after World War II: American business fed at the public trough, to its great benefit, both at home and abroad. The prosperity of the 1950s was the fulfillment of the American dream, we were told, and there was speculation about shorter work weeks, more leisure, and the benefits of technology (television, household appliances, etc.) that would give all Americans a better life. The prospect of more leisure made corporate elites uneasy, however, and they began trying to tighten their control on their workers. Higher wages were seen as wasteful, except for CEOs. When Ronald Reagan became President in 1981 and unemployment rose to near-Depression levels, new jobs were mostly part-time, low-wage, and devoid of benefits, a pattern that continues to this day. During the Reagan and Clinton regimes, this meant that many people were working two or sometimes more jobs at once to try to support their families, and the breadwinner/housewife model faded not because of feminism but because wives also had to work outside the home. Corporations had already begun moving production overseas to more hospitable business climates, which in practice meant not only lower wages but freedom from environmental and worker-safety regulations, and especially friendly governments that would crush any labor agitation by force. (A "docile" labor force is their Impossible Dream; workers in other countries tend to be more militant than Americans, but a regime dedicated to what the Koch Brothers call "economic freedom" will torture, abduct, and kill any workers who get too uppity, let alone try to organize.) Then the official line changed: the prosperity of the Fifties was not the inevitable flowering of Free Enterprise, but a historical blip. Americans had gotten spoiled, and now we were going to have stop coasting along and work.

This isn't a "conspiracy theory." It doesn't really matter how conscious business and governments elites are of what they're doing, though they are more aware than they pretend in public. (See David Gordon's Fat and Mean: The Corporate Squeeze of Working Americans and the Myth of Managerial "Downsizing" [Free Press, 1996] for a good account.) What matters is that the pattern I've described keeps turning up in different countries, even "socialist" ones. Capitalism is capitalism, whether it's overtly or covertly intertwined with a nation-state, as I'd long suspected and as the late Chris Harman showed in Zombie Capitalism [Haymarket Books, 2010] and Raymond Williams explained in his ecological essays in Resources of Hope (Verso, 1989).

Of course we need good jobs here in America, as people do everywhere, but the trouble is not so much that jobs are being shipped to other countries, but that no good new jobs are being created here to take their place. As those jobs make their exodus to Latin America, Southeast Asia, and other such countries, they're stripped of most of the economic benefits that made them worthwhile at home. The myth of America's conversion to a service-based (as opposed to a production-based) economy also overlooks this problem: the new service jobs are mostly low-wage, no-benefit work tied to "flexible labor markets," or the elimination of job security. And as we've seen very forcefully in the past few years, the outcome is increased economic inequality, a wildly oscillating business cycle, and a new Depression as economic elites try to ride the economic tiger and turn to the government to bail them out when they fall off.

In My Back Yard

The above image makes a good point, but there are some problems with it. For one thing, while there is too much hunger in the world, 99% of the population don't look like the children in the lower half. The worldwide maldistribution of wealth has as much to do with relative standards of living as with catastrophic famine, but it is really not a good idea for everyone to use as much electricity and own as many cars and generate as much garbage as Americans do. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak said in a recent interview that a lot of talk about "sustainability" is misconceived, because the lifestyles people want to sustain simply aren't sustainable.

And some well-meaning people just don't get it: one person commented on Facebook, "When I have enough to feed myself for the month and not Overdraft ... Overdraft ... I will undoubtedly suffer help I those less fortunate." It's a nice sentiment, but it misses the point. Personal, private charity can't fix the systemic structural problems the world faces.

For example: as everyone knows by now, Steve Jobs died yesterday. I'm sure I don't need to tell the readers of this blog who he was, any more than I'd need to tell you who Michael Jackson was. There has been an enormous outpouring of commentary about him, some of which annoys me. I do perhaps need to tell you who Fred Shuttlesworth and Derrick Bell were, both of whom died yesterday as well, and both of whom matter more to me than Jobs. That's not because I don't own a Mac, because I expect to shudder just as much at the tidal wave of goo that will be generated when Bill Gates cashes in his chips. I'm not a brand loyalist.

But I've been amazed at what otherwise sensible people have written about Jobs. Part of it is normal de mortuis nil nisi bonum, of course, but "transformative genius"? IOZ beat me to the punch on that sort of thing. I love computers and the Internet, but there are problems: the toxic byproducts of microchip production, for example, the harm done to the workers' health in computer factories, the economic exploitation of the workers, and so on. And on and on. The first reaction to Jobs' death by one friend of mine, with whom I'm in accord on politics, was: "Wouldn't it be nice if Jobs's iconic 'American' products had been made in the U.S.A.? Jobs, indeed." Well, no, it wouldn't be nice, not without very extensive regulation in working conditions -- which isn't going to happen without some intense struggle.

You see how difficult it is to disentangle these matters, though? I don't mean to imply that it's okay for Chinese workers to be underpaid, overworked, and slowly killed by poison; no one should work in those conditions. We need to improve conditions for workers around the world. But such efforts will be opposed by countries like China, which will claim that Chinese don't expect the silly "rights" that soft Westerners expect. Western corporations, with their multicultural sensitivity, will second that claim enthusiastically. Chinese and other Asian workers won't, but who cares about them? As Amartya Sen wrote in Development as Freedom (Oxford, 1999),

Are the citizens of third world countries indifferent to political and democratic rights? This claim, which is often made, is again based on too little empirical evidence .... The only way of verifying this would be to put the matter to democratic testing in free elections with freedom of opposition and expression -- precisely the things that the supporters of authoritarianism do not allow to happen. It is not clear at all how this proposition can be checked when the ordinary citizens are given little political opportunity to express their views on this and even less to dispute the claims made by the authorities in office. The downgrading of these rights and freedoms is certainly part of the value system of the government leaders in many third world countries, but to take that to be the view of the people is to beg a very big question.

It is thus of some interest to note that when the Indian government, under Indira Gandhi's leadership, tried out a similar argument in India, to justify the "emergency" she had misguidedly declared in the mid-1970s, an election was called that divided the voters precisely on this issue. In that fateful election, fought largely on the acceptability of the "emergency," the suppression of basic political and civil rights was firmly rejected, and the Indian electorate -- one of the poorest in the world -- showed itself to be no less keen on protesting against the denial of basic liberties and rights than it was in complaining about economic poverty. To the extent that there has been any testing of the proposition that poor people in general do not care about civil and political rights, the evidence is entirely against that claim. Similar points can be made by observing the struggle for democratic freedoms in South Korea, Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Burma (or Myanmar) and elsewhere in Asia [151].

The appeal of cheap labor isn't limited to the US. That's one of the revealing things about the development of capitalism in Asia. South Korea began developing its industrial plant in the 1960s under the dictator Park Chung-hee, in an intimate partnership between the government and business. This was capitalism, and Park's Korea was included in the propaganda category "the Free World," but it was far from free, and far from free markets. Working conditions were terrible, and we'll probably never know how many human beings South Korea's industrial revolution used up. In theory, workers weren't supposed to be worked to death; the Republic had an extensive labor law code that in theory protected workers' rights, but it wasn't enforced. (Park Gwang-su's 1995 film A Single Spark, based on the 1970 martyrdom of textile worker Jeon Tae-il, has never been released in the US, but it is currently available with English subtitles on Youtube, starting here. It made a powerful impression on me when I first saw it years ago. Jeon set himself afire, along with a copy of the Korean labor code, in protest against the conditions in the sweatshops of the Peace Market, the Seoul garment district. The biography on which the film was based was translated into English by Jeon's sister, who's now a professor of labor studies, and is worth reading if you can find it. Se-hui's Cho's novel in stories The Dwarf [Hawaii, 2006] gives a vivid picture of the impact of factory work and forced modernization on ordinary Koreans; for a sociological study of young factory women, see Seung-kyung Kim's Class Struggle or Family Struggle? [Cambridge, 2009]; Janice C. H. Kim's To Live To Work [Stanford, 2009] shows the roots of the system during the Japanese colonial period.)

The government promised its people that conditions and pay would eventually improve, and that everyone had to work together to make this happen. Just as this promise began to be fulfilled in the 1980s, Korean corporations found that they couldn't afford to pay higher wages, so they began moving production overseas to other Asian countries, especially Southeast Asia. At around the same time, South Korean citizens began demanding more of a political voice, climaxing with the overturning of the military dictatorship in 1987 and the first real elections in 1993. I think there's a two-way relationship here: that the corporations began moving overseas to escape the growth of Korean democracy and an independent and militant labor movement, while the democracy and labor movements became more militant as Korean business began to welsh on the long promise of better pay, better working conditions, and more leisure. (I believe I figured this out after reading John Kie-chang Oh's Korean Politics [Cornell, 1999], though he probably wouldn't agree with my interpretation. See also South Korea's Minjung Movement [Hawaii, 1995], edited by Kenneth M. Wells, and Echoes of the Past, Epics of Dissent [California, 1996] by Nancy Abelmann, for accounts of the grassroots movement against the dictatorship.)

Almost as soon as the military dictatorship caved in, international capital and its government partners increased pressure on the South Korean government for more access to the Korean economy. It should be no surprise that these agents were not happy about growing democracy and civil freedom in the countries they sought to buy; the US Chamber of Commerce, for example, has often called for a crackdown on what it calls "anti-American" sentiment in Korea. The International Monetary Fund sought to destroy the social services Koreans enjoyed through privatization, and in the economic crisis of the late 90s many government-owned businesses and services were sold off at fire-sale prices to foreign corporations; for a good account of the neoliberal assault on Asian economies, see Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine (Metropolitan Books, 2007). Koreans have continued to resist these trends, and the struggle continues.

There was a similar pattern in the United States after World War II: American business fed at the public trough, to its great benefit, both at home and abroad. The prosperity of the 1950s was the fulfillment of the American dream, we were told, and there was speculation about shorter work weeks, more leisure, and the benefits of technology (television, household appliances, etc.) that would give all Americans a better life. The prospect of more leisure made corporate elites uneasy, however, and they began trying to tighten their control on their workers. Higher wages were seen as wasteful, except for CEOs. When Ronald Reagan became President in 1981 and unemployment rose to near-Depression levels, new jobs were mostly part-time, low-wage, and devoid of benefits, a pattern that continues to this day. During the Reagan and Clinton regimes, this meant that many people were working two or sometimes more jobs at once to try to support their families, and the breadwinner/housewife model faded not because of feminism but because wives also had to work outside the home. Corporations had already begun moving production overseas to more hospitable business climates, which in practice meant not only lower wages but freedom from environmental and worker-safety regulations, and especially friendly governments that would crush any labor agitation by force. (A "docile" labor force is their Impossible Dream; workers in other countries tend to be more militant than Americans, but a regime dedicated to what the Koch Brothers call "economic freedom" will torture, abduct, and kill any workers who get too uppity, let alone try to organize.) Then the official line changed: the prosperity of the Fifties was not the inevitable flowering of Free Enterprise, but a historical blip. Americans had gotten spoiled, and now we were going to have stop coasting along and work.

This isn't a "conspiracy theory." It doesn't really matter how conscious business and governments elites are of what they're doing, though they are more aware than they pretend in public. (See David Gordon's Fat and Mean: The Corporate Squeeze of Working Americans and the Myth of Managerial "Downsizing" [Free Press, 1996] for a good account.) What matters is that the pattern I've described keeps turning up in different countries, even "socialist" ones. Capitalism is capitalism, whether it's overtly or covertly intertwined with a nation-state, as I'd long suspected and as the late Chris Harman showed in Zombie Capitalism [Haymarket Books, 2010] and Raymond Williams explained in his ecological essays in Resources of Hope (Verso, 1989).

Of course we need good jobs here in America, as people do everywhere, but the trouble is not so much that jobs are being shipped to other countries, but that no good new jobs are being created here to take their place. As those jobs make their exodus to Latin America, Southeast Asia, and other such countries, they're stripped of most of the economic benefits that made them worthwhile at home. The myth of America's conversion to a service-based (as opposed to a production-based) economy also overlooks this problem: the new service jobs are mostly low-wage, no-benefit work tied to "flexible labor markets," or the elimination of job security. And as we've seen very forcefully in the past few years, the outcome is increased economic inequality, a wildly oscillating business cycle, and a new Depression as economic elites try to ride the economic tiger and turn to the government to bail them out when they fall off.