Sabri Oncu wrote: >Let me ask you a direct question: Is it your point that >capitalism is not as bad a system as some of us here think it is?
It's awful, but I guess it beats slavery or feudalism. But it's also a deeply contradictory system, producing wealth and possibility alongside poverty and oppression. A friend of mine who spent a few years as a reporter in Vietnam interviewed Nike workers who told her that they prefer their sweatshop jobs to what they would have been doing otherwise - things like chasing rats in rice paddies (not much fun to be a woman on the farm). Anticapitalists - and I'm one - often overlook that sort of thing. And capitalism often produces great booms, though PEN-Lers seem to prefer talking about busts. Which kind of begs the question of just how capitalist China is, and what lessons it might hold for other poor countries. Doug
