On 3/30/07, raghu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 3/30/07, Martin Hart-Landsberg <[EMAIL PROTECTED] > wrote:
> remain poor for the great majority. But isnt the question what
> relationship we want to have with these exploited workers. Should we
> encourage their growing resistance or should we tell them that we, on
> the left, celebrate the growth models supported by their national elites
> and advise them to cool it
It depends. The answer is obvious if it involves for instance the attempted
land-grab in West Bengal to create "Special Economic Zones" for capital:
encourage resistance!
But what about other forms of more benign capital exploitation? For instance
if Intel opens a fab, or if Dell outsources its call-centers to India,
should the local workers really resist this type of capital exploitation? In
the short run, this form of exploitation actually brings benefits ( i.e. new
jobs) at the expense of workers in the developed world. Why should Indians
not take such opportunities and try to build on them?
Capitalist globalization, more often than not, comes as a package
deal, not as an a la carte menu (unless your country has already made
it capitalistically, in which case you have more power to set your own
terms than those who have weaker hands). To create the kind of
business environment that leads multinationals to outsource a lot of
jobs (some of which, like R&D jobs, may increase the level of training
of workers but others, like call-center jobs, are dead-end) to your
country, your country's government will have to accept the legal
architecture that such multinationals favor. The hungrier the
country's power elite are for foreign capital, the worse bargains
(i.e., worse for workers, petty producers, etc.) they make with it (as
in the case of India's SEZs).
The difficulty is that probably a number of people in India still feel
that the neoliberal combo of the Congress, parliamentary Marxists, et
al. is the lesser evil compared to the BJP-led right-wing coalition
and that a lot of people in China, while wishing to defend positive
legacies of Chinese socialism, probably don't really want to go back
to the Maoist days nor have they come up with a powerful left
alternative to the Communist Party. It's basically the same
predicament as that of US leftists, most of whom are unable and
unwilling to give up on the Democratic Party. What is to be done?
--
Yoshie
