I hear this said a lot even among people who describe themselves as liberal and progressive. Even among people who identify as feminists. That capitalism as an economic system may be flawed, but it’s certainly the best system that we have.
The best for whom?
It’s certainly not the best system for the workers at the Phils Jeon Garment factory at the Cavite Export Processing Zone in the Philippines. For demanding living wages,
the women strikers were hog-tied, blindfolded, and loaded into a waiting truck. The men dismantled their makeshift tents and loaded them into the truck along with the strikers’ other belongings. The workers were dropped outside the gate of the Cavite EPZ.
They were arrested because the strike was holding up production, and subcontractors needed to meet pricepoints and delivery deadlines.
The workers arrested because in a globalized capitalist economic system, making pesky demands for safe working conditions and a living wage raised the threat that subcontractors could move on to Vietnam, China, or a host of other countries with export processing zones.
And these workers were actually lucky that the armed strikebreakers stopped at intimidation. Many others were simply disappeared.
The beneficiaries of capitalism certainly do not include millions of indigenous peoples around the world, as collated visually in this map (pdf). Their rights are routinely violated by both large- and small-scale capitalist projects that encroach into their ancestral zones. Some highlights of the report include:
- the Ata-Manobos of the Philippines, who opposed tree plantation projects, have become targets of military attacks.
- the Maisai Mara in Kenya. Most Masai land has been appropriated for national parks (for tourists), ranches, and private farms.
- the Cofan of Ecuador. The Cofan population numbered 15,000 in the 1970s, when oil development was started. The development included the construction of a 315-mile pipeline and introduced settlers. Today, Cofan population is 650
How dare these indigenous populations get in the way of corporations trying to extract minerals or cultivate environmentally destructive tourism in in their ancestral lands?
And are Filipina peasant women (a) benefiting from the conversion of their rural communities to capitalist projects like tourist resorts and the Calabarzon industrial enclave or (b) being displaced from their farms and forced to work irregular jobs with low pay and potentially exploitative conditions? (Hint: it’s b)
If you champion capitalism, then you find the examples given above as acceptable. But you’d do well to look into how peasant women, unionists, indigenous activists are resisting the onslaught. At the very least, try to remember their stories the next time you extol capitalism’s supposed benefits.
Thanks for this post, especially for the last paragraph — critically important for Filipinos in the diaspora “trying to make it.”
Thanks for reading, kiita. Yeah, I do agree with you about the Pinoy diaspora, especially in north American and western Europe. Just curious, do you have a blog?
I do! It’s 112yearsold.wordpress.com. Thanks for asking!
Yay, salamat, kiita! I couldn’t click on your name and wasn’t sure where to find you. (And am mad at myself for not finding you sooner)
Something about your post on Pinoys in the diaspora struck me, and I wanted to read you more.
Omg, all the clicks that you’ll find on your stats page will be me going through your archives. Salamat!
In the west the bourgeoisie try and sell the lie that so-called third world workers are better off with globalization. They see subsistence living as a backward step and not one that affirms the earth and the bodies that must labor. I have been reading a lot of Vandanna Shiva recently to get a better understanding of subsistence labor and from the way that I see it, whether or not the western world likes it or not this is the way of the future. We cannot continue to exploit the earth the way that we have and we cannot afford for other countries “to develop” the way the west has. It seems to me we need to change our idea of what constitutes development. Once again another enlightening post from you. Thank you so much for blogging. I may not comment as much as I should but I lurk and read.
Aww, Renee, thanks so much for your kind words. And I definitely agree with you that we need to change our idea of what constitutes development. It seems like a simple idea, but why do people seem invested in the opposite idea, that we all need to arrange our lives around an idea of development that is so harmful and unsustainable?
Salamat for reading and for the conversations, I learn so much from you.
[…] 18, 2008 by tanglad One more thing in this series of posts that irritate me about pro-capitalist arguments. It’s the claim that capitalism is […]
This post is a sound destruction of straw-capitalism, but then, it’s not as though that is particularly difficult. In everything criticized here, I see a flagrant violation of rights, property and otherwise, by the politically privileged, making this an attack more on pre-capitalist feudal and caste economies than on the free market.
The armed strikebreaking is an attempt by the factory to get by force what it isn’t willing to pay for. Clearly anti-market. There are also more subtle anti-market factors at work here, as it is said in the site you linked, “…despite the fact that the union received permission to strike under Department of Labor and Employment regulations.” In a free market, no worker, union or otherwise, should require “permission” from the government to stop working.
The displacement of natives also could not happen under an actually capitalist system, as that is, after all, their land. Only by mutually agreeable terms of payment could private enterprises acquire the use of their land through the market mechanism, if they could even acquire it at all. Instead, they used the political mechanism. Again, a clear denouncement of the use of force, but hardly of capitalism.
Hi AR, thanks for commenting.
The strikebreaking actually occurs in a late-stage transnational setting, wherein a significant part of the “market” is in the one-third world, far away from where these goods are produced. Products made in the EPZs are for export, and it’s illegal to buy and sell the stuff in the Phils. It’s problematic then when the consumers here demand cheaper goods, regardless of the conditions that made them “affordable.” Subcontractors decide what to pay workers, and their (subcontractors’) decisions are legitimated by the market. A market which will refuse to do so and move on to other countries if its demands for cheap labor are not met.
When governments act as agents of the free market, whose interests are privileged?
As to the displacements of indigenous populations, I’m drawn to your phrases such as “it’s their land” and “mutually agreeable terms of payment could private enterprises acquire the use of their land through the market mechanism.” The thing is, you are working within a discourse that recognizes only Western capitalist definitions of value and ownership.
In Feminism Without Borders, for example, Chandra Mohanty discusses how groups like the WTO and other similar entities privilege western definitions of property and ownership based on possession and privatization. But for many indigenous groups, innovation and knowledge was collective, something that evolved in fields and forests over time and was to collectively gathered and passed on to all. This is the complete opposite of the Western paradigm of ownership.
The capitalist solution cannot be to work out some “mutually agreed upon” system that incorporates the best of both systems. Rather, it has always been to annihilate the other, to completely destroy the systems of knowledge and social organization that are incompatible with capitalism.
Hi Tanglad. Thanks for
When governments act as agents of the free market, whose interests are privileged?
That is an interesting question, but one which I only wish were relevant here. The government here is acting as an agent of a few particular interests at the expense of everyone else. To act as an “agent of the free market” would require impartiality. Some argue that such impartiality is itself undesirable, but if you’re interested in the welfare of Philippine workers, it would clearly be an improvement over the present anti-worker socialism.
Subcontractors decide what to pay workers, and their (subcontractors’) decisions are legitimated by the market.
If by “legitimated by the market” you mean that the wages paid “clear the market,” then I again fail to see the relevancy as that is clearly not what’s happening. The fact that workers are refusing to work, via strike, for the wages and conditions offered shows that they are being paid non-clearing wages, and whenever non-market prices persist, you can be sure there’s an element of coercion at work, and that’s exactly what we find.
Products made in the EPZs are for export, and it’s illegal to buy and sell the stuff in the Phils.
I know how EPZs work. As if trade restrictions at national borders to favor local special interests wasn’t enough, some governments see fit to create borders-within-borders to further refine their ability to engineer the transfer of wealth to favored groups. I haven’t read anything by you about EPZs in particular, but I suspect you oppose them. If so, I agree.
A market which will refuse to do so and move on to other countries if its demands for cheap labor are not met.
The workers are not harmed by a company coming and offering them any kind of wages, since if the workers think the wages are too low, they’ll decline and keep doing whatever they were doing before, and be no worse for having heard the offer, while if they think they’d be better off with the job than without, they’ll take it and be better off. Only forceful intervention can make workers worse off for receiving an offer, by acting to make wages artificially low.
The thing is, you are working within a discourse that recognizes only Western capitalist definitions of value and ownership.
What is ownership? The legitimate authority to decide how a scarce resources will be used. The fact that land has not been scare in the past for some groups does not make it less scarce now, and so obviously somebody must own it, because not everyone can do everything they want with it. That is the essence of property: control of things which are scarce.
How shall it be decided whether a gold-mining company or a native village has more right to a tract of land? If the land actually is unowned, merely because the villagers are not capitalist, then it might as well be one as the other. But that is obviously absurd. Clearly then, the villagers in some sense “own” their land.*
The capitalist solution cannot be to work out some “mutually agreed upon” system that incorporates the best of both systems. Rather, it has always been to annihilate the other, to completely destroy the systems of knowledge and social organization that are incompatible with capitalism.
To the contrary, a capitalist society built on personal liberty and property rights is compatible with a great deal. In modern, (mostly) capitalist America, for instance, it is entirely possible for a group of citizens to become completely socialist. They need only agree to pool their resources and make decisions collectively, and there you go. The opposite situation is too absurd to contemplate.
Whenever there is a case of capitalism being forced on people, it is a case of complete disregard to the target’s autonomy, as well as complete violation of the principles of voluntary exchange. This is not a result of capitalism, nor is it exclusive to capitalism. Any economic system whatsoever can as easily, often more easily, support the violent subjugation of another group. Otherwise, most of history would be without wars, when in fact warfare and subjugation predates most property.
*For an elaboration on my conception of ownership, this article, I think, explains it better than I could. It is about ownership of the electromagnetic spectrum, so if you’d just like to know my position ownership, skip to “Economics Redux: Rothbardian Property Theory” thru “Trespass: Rothbard versus Coase.” I think it’s an interesting read in any case.
Opening line should read, “Thanks for blogging about this.
Hey AR, it was an interesting read indeed on Rothbardian property theory (that’s why it took me a while to respond). It looks like we’re coming down to fundamental differences in the concepts of ownership and property.
I’m still bothered by how transnational capitalism as it exists today is predicated on the acceptance of hegemonic values (for ex., Rothbard’s property as praxeological, based on “technological units”).
The 1994 Neem Tree Campaign in India is a good example of the shortcomings of this formulation. Foreign corporations were able to patent the neem tree based on the claim that they developed new extraction methods (their technology unit, I guess). The WTO did not have the framework to recognize hundreds of years of indigenous knowledge behind the medicinal aspects of neem, as well as technology behind the tree’s cultivation and the extraction of the relevant chemical (this was the claim of Indian activists). So today, foreign corporations are reaping the benefits of centuries of knowledge, and neem seeds (which used to be shared freely) are expensive.
Anyhow, in my more optimistic moods, I hope for a synthesis where capitalism could co-exist without decimating other ways of social organization that are not based on individual, private property. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened yet.
So obviously, I don’t agree with the Rothbard [because I’m right 🙂 ] but yes, I do think it’s important to understand opposing views. Thanks for making me think abt this more.
To clarify, Austrian economics is a praxeological science while the idea of Rothbardian property is an ethical position. While people who believe one disproportionately tend to believe the other, the two are not in and of themselves related, as one seeks to explain how things are, and the other asserts how things should be.
As for the neem tree, I don’t like the anti-market WTO and similar organizations either, and the patenting of unpatentable technologies is obviously an abuse. But, the outright isolationist bias of the author of the article you linked becomes obvious when she denies that stabilization is a legitimate innovation, as it is only needed for long-distance shipping, the implication being that nobody who doesn’t have a neem tree growing right outside their home should never want to benefit from it’s products.