>>I agree with Micheal. Workers earning their livings in sweatshops do not >>even get a living wage. Let's not make the situation look better. >>Particulary, women workers are more vulnerable to exploitation in this >>process.It is true that most of the women in this part of the world come >>to cities to find jobs in order to escape themselves from old fashioned >>rural patriarchy. Yes, they prefer to work in Nike rather than in rice >>fields. What happens is that they are now exploited by capitalist bosses >>who use them as slave labor. Brad writes: >But they're better off than they would be if they weren't exploited by >capitalist bosses, right? Didn't Joan Robinson understand this? Though her book with that epigram in it is in a box somewhere and I can't verify this, Robinson was referring to the case of being employed (and exploited) by capitalists vs. being unemployed. The fact that being exploited is more pleasant than being unemployed is one of the bases for capitalist exploitation of workers. People wouldn't put up with exploitation if not threatened by competition from the reserve army of labor (and the fear of being drafted into that army). If being unemployed became more pleasant (or equally pleasant), exploitation of labor by capital would likely stop. Capitalists and their ideologists -- e.g., economist Martin Feldstein -- are quite aware of this and want to make sure that unemployment insurance and the like don't undermine workers' proletarian status (though they don't think of these matters in these terms). (Feldstein lobbied for, and won, the taxing of unemployment insurance benefits in the U.S.) In the longer run, of course, if the degree of exploitation is reduced, that dampens the rate of accumulation, restoring the reserve army of labor and exploitation (as Marx points out in volume I, chapter 25, of CAPITAL). (In the medium run, in an economy with fiat money, inflation is encouraged by this situation.) There's another interpretation which might be true to Robinson, since she's referring to poorer, dependent and agricultural, countries in East Asia a couple of decades ago. She may be comparing the situation of being exploited by capitalists vs. being in the "traditional" rural sector. But that interpretation has some problems. If I remember correctly, she was imbued by the then-fashionable urban bias of development economists (one that Brad typically rejects), though she thought that the problems of the countryside could be solved not by urbanization but by a Maoist strategy. This urban bias included Nobel Prize-winning economist W. Arthur Lewis' fallacious notion that traditional peasants had a zero marginal product of labor in agriculture, so that they could be shifted to the "modern" sector with little or no cost and lots of benefits. In addition, it ignores the non-market benefits of living in the countryside, such things as lack of congestion, clean air, and the social connectedness of "traditional" families and clans (which provided a pre-capitalist version of unemployment insurance). (NB: I'm not idealizing "traditional" society as much as noting that it had benefits which were lost with marketization. As others have noted, patriarchy rules the countryside.) What existence of these benefits of living in the countryside indicate is that it's not just a matter of the "pull" factors of the city encouraging people to voluntarily move to the fetid shanty-towns that ring third-world metropoli. There are also "push" factors, such as the rapid commercialization (marketization) of agriculture, the grabbing of the best land by the new commercialized land-lords, etc. (These factors make the countryside even less crowded, as less labor-intensive techniques are applied by commercial farmers, but dirty the air with pesticides, herbicides, and the like, while destroying the security arising from family and clan connectedness.) Push factors may include such matters as "la violencia" in Colombia (the Liberal/Conservative civil war), which with US guidance has morphed into the equally repellent "war on drugs." Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://liberalarts.lmu.edu/~JDevine
