I have a copy of Robinson's "aspects of development and underdevelopment"
(1979, Cambridge UP). my hunch is that this particular phrase will be in
it. It's very possible I had found it decades ago.
But Robinson's notion of exploitation is very similar to Marx, i.e. how is
economic surplus generated? Labor exploitation is one (thus being
unemployed generates little surplus). And yes, it was in the context of
India and rural development etc.
cheers,
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Anthony P. D'Costa, Professor
Comparative International Development
University of Washington
1900 Commerce Street
Tacoma, WA 98402, USA
Phone: (253) 692-4462
Fax : (253) 692-5718
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Tue, 6 Jun 2006, Louis Proyect wrote:
I imagine that most people who read the NY Times op-ed page--a chore if there
ever was one--might not make the connection between the pull-quote that
appears in Nicholas Kristof's 6/06 defense of sweatshops and the leftwing
economist who first articulated it:
"What's worse than being exploited? Not being exploited."
We are speaking here of course of Joan Robinson, whose general political and
economic views could not be further apart from Kristof's. Indeed, the quote
does not seem to appear in any of her writings but was something that she
stated in her lectures from time to time. Michael Meerpol, the economist son
of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and someone much more in sympathy with Robinson
than Kristof, once wrote the following on PEN-L, a mailing list for
left-of-center economists:
<startquote>
I don't have a cite but it's not apocryphal. Joan Robinson made that comment
orally a number of times --- both in conversation and in lectures. The first
(and only specific) memory I have of that was in the context of discussing
rural poverty in places like India, etc. --- where she said many people on
the scene told her that the only real solution for massive rural poverty in
overpopulated regions was "capitalist agriculture" --- and then she went on
to state, "the only thing worse than being exploited, is not to be
exploited!"
If there are written cites, I don't know about them.
Cheers, Mike -- Mike Meeropol
<endquote>
The opening sentence of Kristof's op-ed piece is meant to startle the reader:
"Africa desperately needs Western help in the form of schools, clinics and
sweatshops."
Touring Namibia in his pith-helmet, Kristof discusses the misfortune of a
group of construction workers who cannot get regular work. According to him,
"they would vastly prefer steady jobs in, yes, sweatshops."
Well, whatever. Mr. Kristof seems to have a real knack for eliciting the
truth out of the natives, namely that they hunger after low-paying jobs for
Western corporations. One can't imagine anybody channeling these construction
workers better--except Thomas Friedman of course who has never seen a
sweatshop he didn't like.
<startquote>
Some things are true even though Phil Knight, the chairman of Nike, believes
them.
Mr. Knight recently made news by suddenly withdrawing a contemplated $30
million gift to the University of Oregon after the university balked at
joining a coalition -- the Fair Labor Association (F.L.A.) -- that was formed
by human rights groups, colleges, the U.S. government and companies such as
Nike to alleviate global sweatshop conditions. Oregon opted to join an
alternative group being pushed on college campuses, the Worker Rights
Consortium (W.R.C.), which also plans to combat sweatshops, but refuses to
cooperate with any companies, such as Nike.
The natural assumption is that Mr. Knight is wrong. The truth is, Nike has a
shameful past when it comes to tolerating sweatshops. But on the question of
how best to remedy those conditions in the future -- which Nike has now
agreed to do -- Mr. Knight is dead right and Oregon wrong.
(NY Times, June 20, 2000)
<endquote>
The infatuation with sweatshops on the NY Times op-ed page even extends to
Paul Krugman, the liberal icon who really differs little from Thomas Friedman
when it comes to a belief in the benefits of low-wage coolie labor.
Basically, Krugman wrote a column identical to Kristof's on April 22, 2001:
There is an old European saying: anyone who is not a socialist before he is
30 has no heart; anyone who is still a socialist after he is 30 has no head.
Suitably updated, this applies perfectly to the movement against
globalization -- the movement that made its big splash in Seattle back in
1999 and is doing its best to disrupt the Summit of the Americas in Quebec
City this weekend.
<startquote>
The facts of globalization are not always pretty. If you buy a product made
in a third-world country, it was produced by workers who are paid incredibly
little by Western standards and probably work under awful conditions. Anyone
who is not bothered by those facts, at least some of the time, has no heart.
But that doesn't mean the demonstrators are right. On the contrary: anyone
who thinks that the answer to world poverty is simple outrage against global
trade has no head -- or chooses not to use it. The anti-globalization
movement already has a remarkable track record of hurting the very people and
causes it claims to champion.
The most spectacular example was last year's election. You might say that
because people with no heads indulged their idealism by voting for Ralph
Nader, people with no hearts are running the world's most powerful nation.
Even when political action doesn't backfire, when the movement gets what it
wants, the effects are often startlingly malign. For example, could anything
be worse than having children work in sweatshops? Alas, yes. In 1993, child
workers in Bangladesh were found to be producing clothing for Wal-Mart, and
Senator Tom Harkin proposed legislation banning imports from countries
employing underage workers. The direct result was that Bangladeshi textile
factories stopped employing children. But did the children go back to school?
Did they return to happy homes? Not according to Oxfam, which found that the
displaced child workers ended up in even worse jobs, or on the streets -- and
that a significant number were forced into prostitution.
<endquote>
So, you get the picture. It is better to get crumbs from the table than
nothing at all. Of course, well-fed bourgeois ideologists like Kristof,
Friedman and Krugman could never imagine that there are alternatives to
super-exploitation and starvation.
To begin with, Namibia has other sources of wealth besides a pool of cheap
labor that a Nike can exploit. It is endowed with many different minerals,
including diamonds. That Kristof can omit any reference to these natural
resources suggests a combination of ignorance and bad faith.
The Southern African Development Community website informs us: "Namibia
produces gem quality diamonds, uranium, copper, lead, zinc, arsenic, cadmium,
antimony, pyrite, silver, gold, semi-precious stones, industrial minerals and
dimension stone." Furthermore, "Namibia is one of the largest producers of
gem quality diamonds with around 98 percent of production being gem quality."
One imagines that diamonds can generate a better standard of living than the
wage you get for making athletic shoes for Wal-Mart on an assembly line.
However, it is foreign companies who own the means of production in Namibia,
like the South African De Beers Corporation. De Beers's Elizabeth Bay Mine in
Namibia produces about 110,000 carats/year. At $300 per carat, that's 33
million dollars a year. Multiply that by all the other mining, copper,
uranium, silver and gold operations in Namibia and you are dealing with
serious money, much more serious than sewing together play clothes for tots.
To my knowledge, this is Kristof's first foray into Thomas Friedman's
territory. He has spent the better part of a year beating the drums for
intervention in Darfur, for which he has earned the Pulitzer Prize. Since my
employer hands out these prizes each year, I tend to be a bit more jaded. The
President of Columbia University is President of the Pulitzer board that also
includes such luminaries as Thomas Friedman, who is infamous for having
stated that:
"The hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden
fistMcDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of
the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's
technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine
Corps."
But one wonders in light of Kristof's hymn to sweatshops whether there might
be a connection to Friedman's more openly mercenary understanding of how the
dollar and the bullet intersect. Could this insufferable moralizing prig be
possibly be more interested in corporate profits than he is in
missionary-style rescues?
For an answer to this, I'd recommend John Bellamy Foster's article in the
current Monthly Review, which does a really good job of describing the
emerging strategic interests of US imperialism in Africa--especially in
regions that are the focus of Cruise Missile liberals like Kristof. In "A
Warning to Africa: The New U.S. Imperial Grand Strategy," Foster writes:
<startquote>
Here the flag is following trade: the major U.S. and Western oil corporations
are all scrambling for West African oil and demanding security. The U.S.
militarys European Command, the Wall Street Journal reported in its April
25th issue, is also working with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to expand the
role of U.S. corporations in Africa as part of an integrated U.S. response.
In this economic scramble for Africas petroleum resources the old colonial
powers, Britain and France, are in competition with the United States.
Militarily, however, they are working closely with the United States to
secure Western imperial control of the region.
The U.S. military buildup in Africa is frequently justified as necessary both
to fight terrorism and to counter growing instability in the oil region of
Sub-Saharan Africa. Since 2003 Sudan has been torn by civil war and ethnic
conflict focused on its southwestern Darfur region (where much of the
countrys oil is located), resulting in innumerable human rights violations
and mass killings by government-linked militia forces against the population
of the region. Attempted coups recently occurred in the new petrostates of
São Tomé and Principe (2003) and Equatorial Guinea (2004). Chad, which is run
by a brutally oppressive regime shielded by a security and intelligence
apparatus backed by the United States, also experienced an attempted coup in
2004. A successful coup took place in Mauritania in 2005 against
U.S.-supported strongman Ely Ould Mohamed Taya. Angolas three-decade-long
civil warinstigated and fueled by the United States, which together with
South Africa organized the terrorist army under Jonas Savimbis UNITAlasted
until the ceasefire following Savimbis death in 2002. Nigeria, the regional
hegemon, is rife with corruption, revolts, and organized oil theft, with
considerable portions of oil production in the Niger Delta region being
siphoned offup to 300,000 barrels a day in early 2004.16 The rise of armed
insurgency in the Niger Delta and the potential of conflict between the
Islamic north and non-Islamic south of the country are major U.S. concerns.
Hence there are incessant calls and no lack of seeming justifications for
U.S. humanitarian interventions in Africa. The Council on Foreign Relations
report More than Humanitarianism insists that the United States and its
allies must be ready to take appropriate action in Darfur in Sudan
including sanctions and, if necessary, military intervention, if the
Security Council is blocked from doing so. Meanwhile the notion that the
U.S. military might before long need to intervene in Nigeria is being widely
floated among pundits and in policy circles. Atlantic Monthly correspondent
Jeffrey Taylor wrote in April 2006 that Nigeria has become the largest
failed state on earth, and that a further destabilization of that state, or
its takeover by radical Islamic forces, would endanger the abundant oil
reserves that America has vowed to protect. Should that day come, it would
herald a military intervention far more massive than the Iraqi campaign.
Full:
<http://www.monthlyreview.org/0606jbf.htm>http://www.monthlyreview.org/0606jbf.htm
<endquote>
Returning to Joan Robinson, whatever she thought about the need to be
exploited, there are still the overarching concerns that she brought to her
economic writings and lectures, which--to repeat myself--are about as far
from the Nicholas Kristof's of the world as can be imagined. Let's turn to
her own words as a reminder of where she stood:
"The United States record in Western Asia and Latin America follows the same
pattern. The good, well-meaning individuals [like Kristof, giving him the
benefit of the doubt] sent out to aid underdeveloped countries are in a false
position (as, by the way, many of them admit) because the object of the
operation is not to aid the people there to develop, but to keep reactionary
governments in power."
(The Chinese Point of View, International Affairs, April 1964)
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