Nothing to lose but your chains
Jun. 3rd, 2005 12:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rezendiDisposable People, by Kevin Bales, is a brilliant and horrifying study of modern slavery. I read it as research for Book 3. (One might reasonably ask if it's really research when I'm already two drafts in; the answer is "sorta" - but DP is so good and thought-provoking that the pretext is irrelevant.) Bales travelled around the world investigating slavery, asking hard questions, and thoughtfully analyzes the economics and sociology of exploitation. I recommend the book to everyone: he's a terrific researcher and good writer. (And all proceeds go to free the estimated 27 million slaves in the world today: see www.freetheslaves.net).
So why are some of his conclusions so infuriatingly wrongheaded?
To back up: Bales defines slavery as a person held by violence or the threat of violence for economic exploitation. He reports that many people are shocked to learn that there are still millions of slaves in the world; I'm a little surprised that anybody is shocked.
He draws a distinction between "old slavery" and "new slavery". "Old slavery", as practiced in the American South, featured legal ownership, high purchase cost (one of the things I was surprised to learn was that in 1850 an average field labourer sold for the equivalent of $60,000 today - buying a slave was like buying a car or house), a long-term relationship, in fact often lifelong and generation-spanning, a shortage of potential slaves, and an ethnic distinction between slave and slaveowner. This kind of slavery, Bales agrees, is dead everywhere in the world but Mauritania. Of which more later.
The "new slavery" is completely opposite: there is often a pretext of a contract, but in fact ownership is enforced through illegal violence, there are a glut of potential slaves and the purchase cost is low, the relationship generally lasts no more than a few months years (generally until all the work has been wrung from a slave), and the slave and slaveholder - note the distinction between the old-slavery owner and the new-slavery holder - are usually of the same ethnicity. It's control without ownership, slavery as contract work.
(He also argues that the new slavery is much more profitable than the old slavery, but this is directly contradicted by some of his own data later on.)
Bales journeys through Thailand, Mauritania, Brazil, Pakistan, and India, visiting slaves and interviewing slaveholders, and concludes that slavery thrives due to corruption that loosens the state's monopoly on legal violence; population explosions that flooded the world with a glut of potential slaves; and the globalization of the world economy. To which I respond: duh; hmm I guess; and are you on crack?
Biases on the table. I am strongly in favour of more, not less, globalization; more, not less, free trade; more, not fewer, economic connections between the rich and poor world. I think that globalization has its flaws, and can and does lead to excesses and exploitation, but despite that, on balance it's the only hope of the poor world. Other people look at the canonical Nike factory worker in the Indonesian sweatshop on $5/day and think "oh God, that's awful"; I look at them, and think of the shantytowns I saw when I was there, and think, "yep, but there's a reason they show up at work every day."
Thailand. Bales interviews "Siri". Her story is horrifying. At fifteen years old, she was sold by her parents into sex slavery, and viciously beaten and raped to break her will. She has sex in her glorified closet/cell with up to three hundred clients a month - Thai laborers, plus, perhaps, police officers and government officials to whom she is given by her pimp. By Bales' estimate, there are some 35,000 enslaved prostitutes in Thailand.
The sex industry is technically illegal in Thailand, but the government turns a blind eye when not actively cosseting it. It's certainly not undercover; I have literally had to peel prostitutes off me when walking certain streets in Thailand. Siri knows that if she were to somehow escape, the police would capture her and bring her back to her pimp.
Note that Bales' estimate of Thai sex slaves, 35,000, means maybe 5% of all Thai prostitutes. Everyone knows that Thailand's sex industry is enormous; I don't think many realize that most of it is domestic. More than 80% of Thai men have had sex with a prostitute. It's a social event: 95% of men who go to a brothel do so with their friends, as part of a night of drinking. "Most Thais, men and women, feel that commercial sex is an acceptable part of an outing for single men, and about two-thirds of men and one-third of women feel the same for married men ... businessmen will provide or expect sex as part of the negotiating process ... for most Thais this is a perfectly unremarkable part of business practice." Bales goes on to conclude that "women in Thailand are things, markers in a male game of status and prestige." That's a cultural judgment more than a logical one, but never mind.
Bales' bizarre conclusion? Globalization - ie the West - is to blame. He admits that "the direct link between sex tourism and slavery is small. With the exception of children sold to pedophiles, most commercial sex workers serving the tourist boom are not slaves." Yet he somehow, with pretzel logic, finds that globalization is at fault because it has helped Thailand's economy and thereby increased the demand for slaves by allowing more labourers to afford prostitutes.
"The same economic boom that has increased the demand for prostitutes may in time bring about an end to Thai sex slavery. Industrial growth has also meant an increase in jobs for women. Education i training are expanding rapidly across Thailand, and women and girls are very much taking part. The ignorance and deprivation on which the enslavement of girls depends are on the wane," he writes. And I think, right on, brother! That's what I'm talking about! Globalization will end this, not cause it!.
...and yet, blinkers unremoved, he goes on to pretend he'd never written that and concludes, at the end of the Thai chapter, that somehow "sex tourism has created a new business climate conducive to sexual slavery ... As the country takes on a new Western-style materialist morality, the ubiquitous sale of sex sends a clear message - women can be enslaved and exploited for profit. Sex tourism helped set the stage for the expansion of sexual slavery." While in the same paragraph he admits "Thai culture, as we have seen, has always treated women and sex as commodities to be bought, sold, traded, and used." And, yet somehow, it's all the fault of the West, dat old debbil globalization.
Bales, otherwise incredibly perceptive, has fallen prey to what I call the Noble Savage fallacy; that before white people came, bearing the viruses of exploitation and capitalism and Original Sin and whatnot, people lived in just and peaceful harmony with one another. This is, of course, completely insane. (It's worth nothing that Thailand was never colonized.) And yet it's such a powerful myth that it blinds even someone as sharp as Bales.
Mauritania is one of the most remote countries on the planet. It's certainly the most remote one that I've ever visited. And I have to say, my experience did not jibe with Bales', even though we visited almost contemporaneously (he in '97, me in '98). He writes "it is illegal to take pictures on the street - carrying a video camera means instant detention, and the police are everywhere. A policeman stands on practically every corner in the capital, and to drive anywhere means constant stops at police roadblocks where your papers and passport are checked again and again. The plainclothes police also feel free to stop you regularly ... Mauritania is a police state."
All I can say is that I remember nothing like this. We had a video camera with us; I don't recall any injunctions to keep it hidden. I think I have pictures from Nouakchott, I certainly don't recall being told not to take any. Policemen at every corner of the capital? No memory of that at all. There may have been the odd roadblock, but that's standard in Africa, it was nothing like what you get in Nigeria and Cameroon. We did have a bad experience with the police there, but, um, that's what you get when you try to buy drugs from a guy you just met. (A large bribe got the individuals in question out of trouble. I was not one of them.)
That said, Mauritania is a desolate, squalid wasteland, Nouakchott is the most isolated capital city I have ever seen or even imagined, and it's very easy to believe that this is the last place on earth where the old-style slavery, the owning of families by families from one generation onto the next, continues. (Unless you count Indian debt bondage, of which more later, but those labourers can at least theoretically buy their way free.) The country officially abolished slavery in 1980, but, well, if you've ever been to a poor African state, you know what official pronouncements are worth.
Brazil I have never visited, and in some ways it's the most terrifying of all the examples in the book. Brazilian slavery starts with procurers - gatos - who visit the country's vast shantytowns, recruiting desperate men to come work for them, with promises of good pay and conditions. There's never any shortage of those willing to take the chance. Their identity cards are taken and they are driven thousands of kilometres into the Amazon, with the gato telling them, at every roadside where they stop, "Eat what you like, I'll pay for it." Then, a hundred kilometres down a dirt road through raw jungle, impossibly far from anything like civilization, they finally arrive at their work camp - in the cases Bales studied, charcoal camps called batterias, where the work is incredibly, infernally, hot and brutal - to be told "You owe me a lot of money for all that food you ate, and the gas we used driving you here, now get to work." Of course, no matter how hard the men work, their debts mount up - they have to buy food from the gato, after all - until they are discarded years later, broken shells of human beings.
The incredible thing is how much the workers want to repay the money their exploiters claim they owe. "These workers were too honest to perceive how they were being entrapped ... all had a very strong sense that debts must be repaid, that a person who did not clear his debts was the lowest of the low," writes Bales. When that sense of fair play fails, the gatos resort to violence; and even if a worker escapes, even if they somehow make it to a nearby jungle town, they are penniless, without ID, and a thousand miles from home.
Women and children don't work in the batterias. Not any more. Bales puts this down to a BBC program and a New York Times article that ran in 1995 while the governer of a Brazilian Amazon state was in NYC to recruit investors. And "All the gatos in the state suddenly came out against child labour ..." Aha! Globalization strikes a blow for freedom once again, no? (A partial blow, sporadic rather than part of a dedicated campaign, granted - but were it not for foreign economic influence, foreign opinion would have no effect at all.) Bales is not impressed: the chapter concludes "putting an end to real slavery is a job that only Brazilians can do." Which I'm inclined to agree with, but once again, he's diminishing - I think unconsciously - the positive effects of globalization.
Pakistan is a tale of brickmakers: whole families, parents and children, making thousands of handmade bricks per day, and firing them in vast kilns the size of football fields - and living in debt bondage to the kiln-owners, being paid per brick, and often cheated out of any hope of buying their way out. Bales admits and explores a whole sea of complexities here. In many ways, this kind of debt bondage is the only kind of credit for the poor that exists in Pakistan. Some kiln owners are practising effective slavery, but he estimates their number at about 30%. This is in some ways the most fascinating of the chapters, but Pakistan is sufficiently secluded that globalization isn't really an issue. It only raises its ugly head at the end, where Bales points out that modern brickmaking machines work ten times faster than the fastest family, and automated kilns are twice as fast as the handmade ones. This brings up what he calls "one of the fundamental moral dilemmas of slavery: which is better, freedom with starvation, or slavery with food?" I have no answer; I would, however, argue that free trade is the best road to "freedom with food".
India is, he reports, home to most of the world's slaves: labourers who, while in debt bondage, are paid no money, just a kilogram of wheat a day, in return for working all day, every day, for their landlord; if they have any spare effort they can try to cultivate the one acre of bad land they are allowed to use for themselves. Debt bondage is inheritable from parent to child. Bales speculates that their might be bonded laborers in India whose ancestors have been working for their landlord's ancestores for thousands of years. India is also home to devadasis, young women "married to gods" who in practice are turned into enslaved prostitutes by religious leaders; tens of thousands of child labourers who make fireworks, in the city of Sivakasi; and countless other forms of slavery.
This may surprise those who haven't been there, who know India as the modern, vibrant, newly wealthy country of Bollywood and Cyberabad and Infosys. It's a huge place with enormous extremes. You won't find slaves in Bangalore. You'll certainly find them in the enormous red-light district in Bombay. What Bales is talking about it mostly labour slavery in the countryside, which is still, for most intents and purposes, a medieval fiefdom, thanks to India's still-endemic corruption.
That said, things are changing. "Leela's story", that of a woman who started a "Ladies' Self-Help organization", learned how to read or write, got a goat from the government, trained to become a midwife, and managed to get two oxen so she and her husband could till her own field, and now she is able to send all her five children to school and buy their books, made me want to stand up and cheer - until I realized they are still sharecropping for her old master, and just getting by. The government is providing generous loans to free labourers from debt bondage - but massive corruption means these loans are misused, and in many cases they go straight to the masters rather than the labourers.
Meanwhile, and perhaps more decisively, India's nouveau riche, middle-caste people made prosperous by business, are buying farmland, breaking the united front of the upper-caste bonded-labour landlords. These new landlords are more likely to use modern farming methods. (Side note: early on in the book, Bales claims "No paid workers, no matter how efficient, can compete economically with unpaid workers - slaves." I can't stress enough just how wrong and untrue this is. Well, maybe I can, since its truth or falsehood is actually irrelevant to my point.)
How did these people become prosperous? Where is the government money for "rehabilitation" of labourers coming from? In both cases, the answer is, at least in large part, "globalization and free trade." (I urge anyone to read VS Naipaul's 1964 book An Area Of Darkness, then his 1980 book A Million Mutinies Now, and then visit India today. Just try to come away from that with a negative opinion of globalization.) And yet Bales' castigation continues. "The tea you drink may have been picked by bonded workers in Assam," he writes, implying slavery is your fault for providing a market.
In his What Can Be Done conclusions, Bales writes "Sometimes economic growth is presented as a tide that raises all boats, the idea being that industrializing the economy of Thailand or Brazil will improve the lives of everyone, rich and poor. This is certainly not true in the short term." It's certainly not true of everyone. Nothing raises all boats - even vaccinations kill some people. People suffer because of free trade, suffer greatly, yes; but even in the short term, it seems to me good for the overwhelming majority.
"In the nineteenth century the booming British cloth industry was forced to acknowledge that slave labor supplied most of its raw material - cotton ... There was no moral leadership from the owners; they said they had to buy the cheapest cotton to compete ... The government of the time ... followed a strict hands-off policty, arguing that 'the market' made the best decisions." I admit that this is a compelling and powerful anti-free-trade analogy - or would be if it was anything like the cases Bales studied in his book. But he admits Westerners are not the customers of Thai sex slaves. Nor do Western companies import charcoal from Brazil, or bricks from Pakistan, or food from India, or anything but iron and fish, neither slave-produced, from Mauritania. (And they wouldn't want to, because slavery is not economically viable; free workers are more productive.) On the contrary, it's free trade that creates both the conditions that allows the civilized world leverage over the slavers, and the conditions - better education, more economic alternatives - in which slaves can escape from their bondage.
Disposable People is a brilliant book, and I urge everyone to read it despite my disagreement with its conclusions. But it's sad to see a man so passionately opposed to slavery urging people to fight the very movement most likely to free the world's slaves.
So why are some of his conclusions so infuriatingly wrongheaded?
To back up: Bales defines slavery as a person held by violence or the threat of violence for economic exploitation. He reports that many people are shocked to learn that there are still millions of slaves in the world; I'm a little surprised that anybody is shocked.
He draws a distinction between "old slavery" and "new slavery". "Old slavery", as practiced in the American South, featured legal ownership, high purchase cost (one of the things I was surprised to learn was that in 1850 an average field labourer sold for the equivalent of $60,000 today - buying a slave was like buying a car or house), a long-term relationship, in fact often lifelong and generation-spanning, a shortage of potential slaves, and an ethnic distinction between slave and slaveowner. This kind of slavery, Bales agrees, is dead everywhere in the world but Mauritania. Of which more later.
The "new slavery" is completely opposite: there is often a pretext of a contract, but in fact ownership is enforced through illegal violence, there are a glut of potential slaves and the purchase cost is low, the relationship generally lasts no more than a few months years (generally until all the work has been wrung from a slave), and the slave and slaveholder - note the distinction between the old-slavery owner and the new-slavery holder - are usually of the same ethnicity. It's control without ownership, slavery as contract work.
(He also argues that the new slavery is much more profitable than the old slavery, but this is directly contradicted by some of his own data later on.)
Bales journeys through Thailand, Mauritania, Brazil, Pakistan, and India, visiting slaves and interviewing slaveholders, and concludes that slavery thrives due to corruption that loosens the state's monopoly on legal violence; population explosions that flooded the world with a glut of potential slaves; and the globalization of the world economy. To which I respond: duh; hmm I guess; and are you on crack?
Biases on the table. I am strongly in favour of more, not less, globalization; more, not less, free trade; more, not fewer, economic connections between the rich and poor world. I think that globalization has its flaws, and can and does lead to excesses and exploitation, but despite that, on balance it's the only hope of the poor world. Other people look at the canonical Nike factory worker in the Indonesian sweatshop on $5/day and think "oh God, that's awful"; I look at them, and think of the shantytowns I saw when I was there, and think, "yep, but there's a reason they show up at work every day."
Thailand. Bales interviews "Siri". Her story is horrifying. At fifteen years old, she was sold by her parents into sex slavery, and viciously beaten and raped to break her will. She has sex in her glorified closet/cell with up to three hundred clients a month - Thai laborers, plus, perhaps, police officers and government officials to whom she is given by her pimp. By Bales' estimate, there are some 35,000 enslaved prostitutes in Thailand.
The sex industry is technically illegal in Thailand, but the government turns a blind eye when not actively cosseting it. It's certainly not undercover; I have literally had to peel prostitutes off me when walking certain streets in Thailand. Siri knows that if she were to somehow escape, the police would capture her and bring her back to her pimp.
Note that Bales' estimate of Thai sex slaves, 35,000, means maybe 5% of all Thai prostitutes. Everyone knows that Thailand's sex industry is enormous; I don't think many realize that most of it is domestic. More than 80% of Thai men have had sex with a prostitute. It's a social event: 95% of men who go to a brothel do so with their friends, as part of a night of drinking. "Most Thais, men and women, feel that commercial sex is an acceptable part of an outing for single men, and about two-thirds of men and one-third of women feel the same for married men ... businessmen will provide or expect sex as part of the negotiating process ... for most Thais this is a perfectly unremarkable part of business practice." Bales goes on to conclude that "women in Thailand are things, markers in a male game of status and prestige." That's a cultural judgment more than a logical one, but never mind.
Bales' bizarre conclusion? Globalization - ie the West - is to blame. He admits that "the direct link between sex tourism and slavery is small. With the exception of children sold to pedophiles, most commercial sex workers serving the tourist boom are not slaves." Yet he somehow, with pretzel logic, finds that globalization is at fault because it has helped Thailand's economy and thereby increased the demand for slaves by allowing more labourers to afford prostitutes.
"The same economic boom that has increased the demand for prostitutes may in time bring about an end to Thai sex slavery. Industrial growth has also meant an increase in jobs for women. Education i training are expanding rapidly across Thailand, and women and girls are very much taking part. The ignorance and deprivation on which the enslavement of girls depends are on the wane," he writes. And I think, right on, brother! That's what I'm talking about! Globalization will end this, not cause it!.
...and yet, blinkers unremoved, he goes on to pretend he'd never written that and concludes, at the end of the Thai chapter, that somehow "sex tourism has created a new business climate conducive to sexual slavery ... As the country takes on a new Western-style materialist morality, the ubiquitous sale of sex sends a clear message - women can be enslaved and exploited for profit. Sex tourism helped set the stage for the expansion of sexual slavery." While in the same paragraph he admits "Thai culture, as we have seen, has always treated women and sex as commodities to be bought, sold, traded, and used." And, yet somehow, it's all the fault of the West, dat old debbil globalization.
Bales, otherwise incredibly perceptive, has fallen prey to what I call the Noble Savage fallacy; that before white people came, bearing the viruses of exploitation and capitalism and Original Sin and whatnot, people lived in just and peaceful harmony with one another. This is, of course, completely insane. (It's worth nothing that Thailand was never colonized.) And yet it's such a powerful myth that it blinds even someone as sharp as Bales.
Mauritania is one of the most remote countries on the planet. It's certainly the most remote one that I've ever visited. And I have to say, my experience did not jibe with Bales', even though we visited almost contemporaneously (he in '97, me in '98). He writes "it is illegal to take pictures on the street - carrying a video camera means instant detention, and the police are everywhere. A policeman stands on practically every corner in the capital, and to drive anywhere means constant stops at police roadblocks where your papers and passport are checked again and again. The plainclothes police also feel free to stop you regularly ... Mauritania is a police state."
All I can say is that I remember nothing like this. We had a video camera with us; I don't recall any injunctions to keep it hidden. I think I have pictures from Nouakchott, I certainly don't recall being told not to take any. Policemen at every corner of the capital? No memory of that at all. There may have been the odd roadblock, but that's standard in Africa, it was nothing like what you get in Nigeria and Cameroon. We did have a bad experience with the police there, but, um, that's what you get when you try to buy drugs from a guy you just met. (A large bribe got the individuals in question out of trouble. I was not one of them.)
That said, Mauritania is a desolate, squalid wasteland, Nouakchott is the most isolated capital city I have ever seen or even imagined, and it's very easy to believe that this is the last place on earth where the old-style slavery, the owning of families by families from one generation onto the next, continues. (Unless you count Indian debt bondage, of which more later, but those labourers can at least theoretically buy their way free.) The country officially abolished slavery in 1980, but, well, if you've ever been to a poor African state, you know what official pronouncements are worth.
Brazil I have never visited, and in some ways it's the most terrifying of all the examples in the book. Brazilian slavery starts with procurers - gatos - who visit the country's vast shantytowns, recruiting desperate men to come work for them, with promises of good pay and conditions. There's never any shortage of those willing to take the chance. Their identity cards are taken and they are driven thousands of kilometres into the Amazon, with the gato telling them, at every roadside where they stop, "Eat what you like, I'll pay for it." Then, a hundred kilometres down a dirt road through raw jungle, impossibly far from anything like civilization, they finally arrive at their work camp - in the cases Bales studied, charcoal camps called batterias, where the work is incredibly, infernally, hot and brutal - to be told "You owe me a lot of money for all that food you ate, and the gas we used driving you here, now get to work." Of course, no matter how hard the men work, their debts mount up - they have to buy food from the gato, after all - until they are discarded years later, broken shells of human beings.
The incredible thing is how much the workers want to repay the money their exploiters claim they owe. "These workers were too honest to perceive how they were being entrapped ... all had a very strong sense that debts must be repaid, that a person who did not clear his debts was the lowest of the low," writes Bales. When that sense of fair play fails, the gatos resort to violence; and even if a worker escapes, even if they somehow make it to a nearby jungle town, they are penniless, without ID, and a thousand miles from home.
Women and children don't work in the batterias. Not any more. Bales puts this down to a BBC program and a New York Times article that ran in 1995 while the governer of a Brazilian Amazon state was in NYC to recruit investors. And "All the gatos in the state suddenly came out against child labour ..." Aha! Globalization strikes a blow for freedom once again, no? (A partial blow, sporadic rather than part of a dedicated campaign, granted - but were it not for foreign economic influence, foreign opinion would have no effect at all.) Bales is not impressed: the chapter concludes "putting an end to real slavery is a job that only Brazilians can do." Which I'm inclined to agree with, but once again, he's diminishing - I think unconsciously - the positive effects of globalization.
Pakistan is a tale of brickmakers: whole families, parents and children, making thousands of handmade bricks per day, and firing them in vast kilns the size of football fields - and living in debt bondage to the kiln-owners, being paid per brick, and often cheated out of any hope of buying their way out. Bales admits and explores a whole sea of complexities here. In many ways, this kind of debt bondage is the only kind of credit for the poor that exists in Pakistan. Some kiln owners are practising effective slavery, but he estimates their number at about 30%. This is in some ways the most fascinating of the chapters, but Pakistan is sufficiently secluded that globalization isn't really an issue. It only raises its ugly head at the end, where Bales points out that modern brickmaking machines work ten times faster than the fastest family, and automated kilns are twice as fast as the handmade ones. This brings up what he calls "one of the fundamental moral dilemmas of slavery: which is better, freedom with starvation, or slavery with food?" I have no answer; I would, however, argue that free trade is the best road to "freedom with food".
India is, he reports, home to most of the world's slaves: labourers who, while in debt bondage, are paid no money, just a kilogram of wheat a day, in return for working all day, every day, for their landlord; if they have any spare effort they can try to cultivate the one acre of bad land they are allowed to use for themselves. Debt bondage is inheritable from parent to child. Bales speculates that their might be bonded laborers in India whose ancestors have been working for their landlord's ancestores for thousands of years. India is also home to devadasis, young women "married to gods" who in practice are turned into enslaved prostitutes by religious leaders; tens of thousands of child labourers who make fireworks, in the city of Sivakasi; and countless other forms of slavery.
This may surprise those who haven't been there, who know India as the modern, vibrant, newly wealthy country of Bollywood and Cyberabad and Infosys. It's a huge place with enormous extremes. You won't find slaves in Bangalore. You'll certainly find them in the enormous red-light district in Bombay. What Bales is talking about it mostly labour slavery in the countryside, which is still, for most intents and purposes, a medieval fiefdom, thanks to India's still-endemic corruption.
That said, things are changing. "Leela's story", that of a woman who started a "Ladies' Self-Help organization", learned how to read or write, got a goat from the government, trained to become a midwife, and managed to get two oxen so she and her husband could till her own field, and now she is able to send all her five children to school and buy their books, made me want to stand up and cheer - until I realized they are still sharecropping for her old master, and just getting by. The government is providing generous loans to free labourers from debt bondage - but massive corruption means these loans are misused, and in many cases they go straight to the masters rather than the labourers.
Meanwhile, and perhaps more decisively, India's nouveau riche, middle-caste people made prosperous by business, are buying farmland, breaking the united front of the upper-caste bonded-labour landlords. These new landlords are more likely to use modern farming methods. (Side note: early on in the book, Bales claims "No paid workers, no matter how efficient, can compete economically with unpaid workers - slaves." I can't stress enough just how wrong and untrue this is. Well, maybe I can, since its truth or falsehood is actually irrelevant to my point.)
How did these people become prosperous? Where is the government money for "rehabilitation" of labourers coming from? In both cases, the answer is, at least in large part, "globalization and free trade." (I urge anyone to read VS Naipaul's 1964 book An Area Of Darkness, then his 1980 book A Million Mutinies Now, and then visit India today. Just try to come away from that with a negative opinion of globalization.) And yet Bales' castigation continues. "The tea you drink may have been picked by bonded workers in Assam," he writes, implying slavery is your fault for providing a market.
In his What Can Be Done conclusions, Bales writes "Sometimes economic growth is presented as a tide that raises all boats, the idea being that industrializing the economy of Thailand or Brazil will improve the lives of everyone, rich and poor. This is certainly not true in the short term." It's certainly not true of everyone. Nothing raises all boats - even vaccinations kill some people. People suffer because of free trade, suffer greatly, yes; but even in the short term, it seems to me good for the overwhelming majority.
"In the nineteenth century the booming British cloth industry was forced to acknowledge that slave labor supplied most of its raw material - cotton ... There was no moral leadership from the owners; they said they had to buy the cheapest cotton to compete ... The government of the time ... followed a strict hands-off policty, arguing that 'the market' made the best decisions." I admit that this is a compelling and powerful anti-free-trade analogy - or would be if it was anything like the cases Bales studied in his book. But he admits Westerners are not the customers of Thai sex slaves. Nor do Western companies import charcoal from Brazil, or bricks from Pakistan, or food from India, or anything but iron and fish, neither slave-produced, from Mauritania. (And they wouldn't want to, because slavery is not economically viable; free workers are more productive.) On the contrary, it's free trade that creates both the conditions that allows the civilized world leverage over the slavers, and the conditions - better education, more economic alternatives - in which slaves can escape from their bondage.
Disposable People is a brilliant book, and I urge everyone to read it despite my disagreement with its conclusions. But it's sad to see a man so passionately opposed to slavery urging people to fight the very movement most likely to free the world's slaves.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-06-03 10:15 am (UTC)"Hey, ma, we're off down the road with dad, he's going to sell us as slaves to the Christians."
"Oh, good, boys, just make sure you're back in time for dinner."
no subject
Date: 2005-06-03 12:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-03 11:53 am (UTC)Things like this are so flamingly obvious that I can easily understand how Bales gets them completely wrong. The more you look for complexity the more you find it. Sometimes you have to stop looking so hard in order for the answer to spring out at you.
Regarding Assam teas and Western responsibility for a 'market', I genuinely think Western forces which naievely try to remake the world are doing far more to keep slavery alive than are the forces of free trade. The best example I can think of this comes from Fair Trade Coffee, which is all the rage nowadays among the Starbucks cognoscenti of America--you know the type, the people who learn everything they know about social topics by reading the back of Starbucks cups and cartons of Ben & Jerry's.
The anti-globalization crowd points to the collapse of the coffee market as an example of how globalization wrecks the poor. It's true; prior to globalization South American peasant coffee growers could eke out a living on coffee. But then came Vietnamese coffee, which is better-tasting and made by peasants who live in even worse poverty. They realized "hey, there's a market for our coffee, let's sell it to the Americans and Europeans and make a better life for ourselves!".
And in return, what have we done? As a society we've enacted price supports for South American peasants. Starbucks and other major coffee chains hawk their Fair Trade coffee constantly as a 'socially responsible' choice. Sale of Fair Trade coffee is ever-rising as a result of the advertising and marketing. Which means that the peasant Vietnamese farmers are being told, "it doesn't matter that you're making better coffee at a lower price; we're still not going to let you profit from it."
We've spent 30 years since the Vietnam War telling the Vietnamese they could have better lives by embracing the free market. And now that some of their peasants are giving it a shot and producing excellent coffee at a low price, we're telling them "well, really, we didn't mean what we said... we're Socialists now, and we must support the South American peasant even at your expense."
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Date: 2005-06-06 10:46 am (UTC)The road to hell ... etc. If only those who distort markets really understood capitalism and economics.
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Date: 2005-06-03 02:09 pm (UTC)My father used to travel to Asia a lot when he worked for $ComputerCorp as a manufacturing manager. One of the stories he told me has stuck with me-- he was looking at an assembly plant in Malaysia (IIRC) and saw a large number of people lined up outside the plant. "Is that the second shift arriving for work?", he asked. "No," replied the plant manager, "those are all people coming to /look/ for work." Clearly these assembly jobs, likely not at all appealing by first-world standards, looked like a decent opportunity to that line of people. I notice that a lot of reflexive anti-globalization and free market reactions can take on a disturbingly patronizing tone-- as if people in poor countries are too naive or stupid to make their own economic decisions.
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Date: 2005-06-03 02:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-30 09:38 am (UTC)