Kevin Carson, Another By-the-Numbers Defense of Sweatshops

Mutualist Blog

By definition, anything anyone does in a situation where there is a choice between more than one alternative is the "best available alternative." The question you should be asking is: why is the range of available alternatives so crappy in the first place? And a big part of the answer is the role of Third World states in carrying out land expropriations on the model of the English Enclosures, to drive peasants off their land and coerce them into the wage labor market. Third World states also play a major role in enforcing draconian restrictions on labor organization, tax their own people to provide subsidized road and utility infrastructure to offshored foreign industry, turn the peasants' confiscated common lands into industrial parks, and enforce the anti-market "intellectual property" [sic] laws without which the Nike model of outsourcing everything but marketing and finance would be impossible.

And Western capital is engaged in no small collusion with Third World states in guaranteeing a set of conditions under which workers accept employment on whatever terms are offered as the "best available alternative."

Western employers are engaged in parasitic activity, profitably selling crutches to people whose legs were broken by their partners in crime -- Third World states. (Never mind the role of the American state in backing death squads and military dictators to stop land reforms and make the world safe for corporate power, to subsidize the export of capital with World Bank loans for infrastructure, and to impose stuff like the Uruguay Round TRIPS Accords on the rest of the world).

You should be asking yourself how labor and capital would be directed in Third World countries if it weren't for all those broken windows.