This isn't comparable, because when you're gathering berries there isn't some huge corporation taking 99% of the shit you gathered and leaving you with just barely enough to survive.
yes but when you work for the corporation ur generating 20000% as much value as when u were berry picking. then u go to the supermarket and buy 2 boxes of berries. thats the idea.
This is because they have no time to actually dismantle the sweatshop when they're working 16 hour days. And when they do try to dismantle the oppressive system, the multinational corporation funds people to kill them. There are plenty of examples of this: the Ludlow Massacre, the Banana Massacre, etc
What? You realize that anthropologists have shown that in hunter-gatherer civilizations, they'd only spend around 2 hours a day working, right? And how are they generating more value? How is them working in a sweatshop to produce something that takes x hours to produce more valuable than them producing or collecting anything else that takes x hours?
Fundamentally, you just don't understand how this works. It is only under capitalism that the value of the product is determined by how much it can be sold for. There is no concept of how much labor must be put into it: only how much you have to pay for that labor. The sweatshop only produces more value because the labor is so cheap and the corporation can sell it for so much more. In reality, the product of a sweatshop has the same value as the product of a factory that produces the same thing and pays the workers what they deserve.
with the berry analogy i was talking about you, the american. i was trying to express that to convince a general american that dismantling the system or reclaiming the product of their labor is legit, they just have to end up with more berries.
with regard to sweatshop workers if they would literally be more productive hunter-gathering they would be hunter-gathering. if they cannot do hunter-gathering because the government or the megacorp controls the berry fields, and you encourage them to do violent revolution to seize the berry fields as an alternative to sweatshop labor, then thats a viable alternative as long as they believe they will have more berries at the end of the day. whether or not the berry fields should be considered given originally to the people or to the government or to the megacorp can be a point of contention, but it does belong to someone, right now, with the guns to control it. so the benefit of the sweatshop coming to town is measured with the current available alternatives in mind.
See: the Banana Massacre. Hint: the megacorporation backed by the country with the largest military in the world will slaughter you if you try this. They have in the past. If your government tries to back you in taking back the farms and fields, then they'll orchestrate a coup with the CIA. There's a reason they're called "banana republics."
This isn't a defense of capitalism: it's a critique. The conditions that make the sweatshop preferable to any other options are created by capitalism and the use of force, so capitalism is to blame for making people's best option toiling away in sweatshops 16 hours a day for nearly nothing.
but again, the main point is simply that if the question is "does globalization in the form of sweatshops benefit the developing country" the answer is probably yes. if it is no, you have to show how the sweatshop existing is worse than letting them handle it by themselves. especially in the case of factory work where its just dealing with labor. if ur exploiting their resources by manipulating their government its a different story.
Jesus fucking Christ this is completely absurd.
I've already done so: sweatshops are able to exist because they can make the products at almost no cost to be sold elsewhere where people have the money to buy them for a large profit. If the business was local, then it would have to pay decent wages because the products being sold would be sold to those workers.
You can't extract that as something different. It's part of the same exact system and is what allows this kind of exploitation of those in developing nations to function.
bad arrangements are bad. (ideal) capitalism is about parties interacting and both coming away better off. if the megacorp controls your non-labor resources and you wish they had never shown up at all but they can because they have deals with your government, thats isnt considered well-functioning capitalism. and i think its not good to generalize this to all sweatshops, or to capitalism in general.
modern capitalism is not perfect and doesnt work equally well for everyone. but at least in theory you can sort behaviors into "healthy capitalism" and "abusive capitalism". youre saying that capitalism is inherently abusive, which i disagree with. a lot of the time (as in developing countries) its the weakness of the institution that lends them to exploitation by foreign capitalists.
and again: the alternative! the megacorp and the americans never cared about the welfare of the developing country in the first place. they could have showed up and slaughtered everyone, but they set up the banana sweatshop system instead because its more profitable for them. the way i see it the primary problem is that the developing country isnt strong enough to protect its banana farms, since i dont trust americans not to be greedy.
this is strange. suppose that there is a factory and the borders suddenly close and the locals seize the factory. you can now produce consumer goods, like say, iphones, at a cheap price. but you cant sell the iphones to anyone because people need food, not iphones. you wish you could sell your iphones overseas and import food, instead.
why does the sweatshop preclude applicable local business from operating? besides directly controlling the banana farms. note that in the case of the banana farms, if you closed the border suddenly they would just have way too many bananas and wish they could sell them overseas instead.
bro what is this even
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well they did do this back in the old days. im asking what is the alternative system where they dont get exploited. the point is that the world is rather brutal to start with, so when u propose tearing down the existing system u have to explain how the new structure makes things less brutal. in this case, for developing countries.
This isn't true. The foundational idea of capitalism is extracting as much surplus value as possible. That's all capitalism is as an ideal. Nothing about multiple parties being better off.
Yes it is. Fundamentally, this is what capitalism is designed to do: facilitate the accumulation of wealth. You don't get to make these claims without citing anything. And, even if that isn't ideal capitalism, it doesn't matter. It's the end result of capitalism and it always will be.
No, it is the institutions in those countries that are also pursuing the accumulation of wealth and working with the multinational corporations. Capitalism is working exactly as intended.
If there was no capitalism, there would be no reason for a country to take over the banana farms in a way that completely exploits the local populace. That happens due to capitalism.
Because they control all of the resources in the region as well?
No one said anything about closing the borders. It's about maintaining the value within the country, rather than having it be extracted away from that country.
They still do.
Getting rid of the accumulation of surplus value, i.e. getting rid of capitalism and exchange for profit, pretty clearly makes things less brutal because your labor time is then as valuable as anyone else's and you don't lose that value to some rich asshole who takes 99% off the top.
@hbotz, how about you respond to this? If capitalism is a good system, then why is over-abundance a bad thing in capitalism?
it isnt. its bad for the people who are producing the thing, and good for everybody else. the people producing the thing may have some interest in burning it. i prefer you sell it to a foreign country, though.
if steel factories getting hurt hurts the overall economy and not just the steel industry, then maybe your country depends too much on steel production? its good to have lots of industries.
or~ alternatively, the steel factory produced too much steel, as in, so much that it cannot be used and therefore the steel factory wasted a lot of inputs and labor has to go idle. this is bad for capitalism, yes. capitalism wants to produce the optimal amount of the thing. it has some fallout like there is less labor and resources for the rest of us because you effectively bought and burned it all. but hey now there is a lot of steel.
like, suppose you and your friends get together and fold paper cranes until you starve to death. you produced an abundance of paper cranes, but the economy is bad since you have starved to death. you should be producing the optimal amount of paper cranes, and if you cant sell them for food, do something else.
This is only true within capitalism: it's only bad for the producers because they can't sell it all at a high enough profit to maintain growth (they could sell it lower and break even). You are admitting capitalism is the problem and what makes it so backwards when you frame it this way.
False analogy. Steel has material used, not just aesthetic. It doesn't go bad, so an abundance of steel should just allow for producing an abundance of things using steel, but it doesn't in capitalism. It hurts the economy
its because youve used this word "over-abundance" which has two meanings.
when you are in the steel industry and there is an overabundance of steel cuz u and ur fellow manufacturers are getting really good at producing it and the barrier to entry is low and the price has dropped and ur struggling to make money, thats super normal and ideal (though not for you, youd prefer a monopoly).
on a societal level if the steel companies all went crazy and a steel bubble just popped and you have a ton of useless steel lying around then yes you have an inefficiently high amount of steel. youd prefer the resources to have been allocated elsewhere. this is anticapitalistic because everyone loses.