On 3/30/07, Yoshie Furuhashi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
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).
It is not that simple. The Chinese/Indian governments are hardly as powerless as you seem to think. The global capital needs China/India just as much as they need global capital. Theoretically there is no reason why a sufficiently enlightened government can't pick and choose partnerships with global capital. Of course in the long run there is no common interests there. There is also the ethical issue of hurting the working class in the developed world.. But in the short run why not? The call centers is a great example. They may be dead end jobs in the long-run, but in the short run they absorb some surplus labor that would otherwise just end up unemployed. So why are they a bad thing? All I am saying is, capital exploitation may very well provide substantial *short-term* benefits to poor countries. Why should we pass on such opportunities in the name of ideological purity? 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
I can't speak for the Chinese left, but without any question the Indian parliamentary Marxists are the lesser evil. There is absolutely nothing progressive about the Indian right wing; they are, basically, the Indian Taliban. -raghu.
