"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?

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.