Capitalism Helps Those Who Help Themselves

I've been reading David C. Berliner and Bruce J. Biddle's The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America's Public Schools (Perseus Books, 1995), which is good but slow going since it contains so much useful information.  The part I was reading today addressed the American myth of individualism and self-reliance and its role in hostility to public schools.  But that myth has influence in other important areas of public concern as well, and I think I noticed something about it that the authors didn't.

They write:

Americans tend to assume that most social outcomes are generated by the characteristics of individuals -- rather than, say, by unfair laws, structural forces in the society, industrial greed, accidents, or divine intervention.  And we also believe that schools are given broad responsibility for molding individuals so they are more likely to experience positive outcomes.  This is all very well, but what happens when social outcomes are negative?  And what happens when, as in the past twenty years, social problems escalate in America?  What happens when American industries lose out to foreign competitors, when more and more people lose their jobs, when crime rates soar, when the country must deal with high rates of violence and drug addiction, when the divorce rate shoots up, or when Americans suffer in increasing numbers from sexually transmitted diseases?  By extension of the above logic, the individuals experiencing those social problems are (obviously) responsible for their fates, the schools those individuals attended have (obviously) failed in their missions, and those schools should be brought to account [152].

Not very surprisingly, research finds that

beliefs about individual efficacy were weaker among people who were most likely to have experienced economic failure or discrimination -- namely, those who were young, black, female, impoverished, or from poorer sections of the country.  The researchers commented. "The picture of the prototypical believer in the [myth of individualism that] emerges quite clearly and, perhaps not coincidentally resembles Ronald Reagan: an older, white, male, Westerner with a relatively high income" [153-5].

Believers in individual efficacy can rebut this easily enough, by saying that of course losers will try to blame someone else -- the system, society -- for keeping them down, while winners will modestly and correctly credit themselves or their innate genetic superiority for their success.  And (though I don't agree as a general principle) it's quite plausible that people prefer to blame the System, or other people's malevolence, instead of their own shortcomings for their failures; who hasn't known people who do just that?  I'll return to this in a moment.

Berliner and Biddle distinguish between this myth of individual efficacy and the myth of unbounded instructional responsibility, the belief that "schools can and should assist students in intellectual tasks AND political tasks AND economic tasks AND social tasks" (156).  I'd like to rename the second myth the myth of unbounded institutional responsibility, since it prescribes not only for schools but for our society as a whole.

What they (like those they are criticizing) seem not to notice is that these myths contradict each other.  This turns up in the second sentence of my first quotation from The Manufactured Crisis: blame for failure isn't laid solely on the individuals who failed, but on the institution that should have molded them into winners, but for some reason didn't.  This is important because so much of the debate over white and male privilege has focused on individuals: Nobody gave me anything, I worked hard for everything I have, and look at Oprah or other rich minorities -- if the system is rigged against them, how did they succeed if not by pure grit and determination and hard work?  The losers are just making excuses for not trying hard enough.  But if the fault lies with the schools, who failed to inculcate the traits and habits of Success, why blame the individuals?  The fault can also lie with the Dang Government, which has fostered habits of dependency with its welfare programs.  And so on.

The answer, I think, lies in what happens to privileged people when things don't work out as they wish.  "When American industries lose out to foreign competitors," do the corporations and their CEOs admit they didn't work hard enough?  Do they tighten their belts, hitch up their britches, spit in their hands and put their noses to the grindstone?  They do not.  First they vote themselves higher salaries and stock dividends; then they demand that the Dang Government help them, with trade barriers against the foreign competitors, with tax cuts, with subsidies to facilitate the offshoring of production, and if things get bad enough, with bailouts.

Here's a famous example (via), by no means unusual:

In the 1981–86 period, Prestowitz says, [Steve] Jobs and his executives “had the funny notion that the US government had an obligation to help them…. We did all we could, and in doing so came to learn that virtually everything Apple had for sale, from the memory chips to the cute pointer mouse, had had its origins in some program wholly or partially supported by US government money…. The heart of the computer is the microprocessor, and Apple’s derived from Motorola’s 680X0, which was developed with much assistance, direct and indirect, from the Defense Department, as were the DRAM memory chips. The pointer mouse came from Xerox’s PARC center near Stanford (which also enjoyed government funding). In addition, most computer software at that time derived from work with government backing.”

Prestowitz points out that Apple also assumes the US government is obligated to stop foreign pirating of Apple’s intellectual property and, should supply chains in the Far East be disrupted, to offer the comforting support of the Seventh Fleet. “And those supply chains. Are they the natural product of good old free market capitalism, or does that scalability and flexibility and capacity to mobilize large numbers of workers on a moment’s notice have something to do with government subsidies and the interventionist industrial policies of most Asian economies?”

 A few years later (boldface added),

When an Apple team visited, the Chinese plant’s owners were already constructing a new wing. “This is in case you give us the contract,” the manager said, according to a former Apple executive. The Chinese government had agreed to underwrite costs for numerous industries, and those subsidies had trickled down to the glass-cutting factory. It had a warehouse filled with glass samples available to Apple, free of charge. The owners made engineers available at almost no cost. They had built on-site dormitories so employees would be available 24 hours a day.

This didn't keep Jobs from snarling at President Obama that he was on his way to being a one-term president (this man must be a prophet!) because he wasn't "business-friendly" enough, because "regulations and unnecessary costs" made it "difficult" for corporate welfare moochers to squeeze out a few measly billions of dollars of profit.  To repeat: did Jobs blame his own parasitical tendencies and laziness for those difficulties?  He did not; he blamed the system.  Ditto for the Koch Brothers, who admit they are leeches on the American taxpayer, but it's not their fault!  They couldn't "remain competitive" without the government handouts, because everybody does it!  Nothing is their fault!   If they could just get The Man off their back, not only they but everybody would be better off!  American society, especially the investor class and the media that report the news from their perspective, scorns the excuses made by the poor, but is intensely sympathetic to the same excuses made by the rich.

So it seems that the myth of individual efficacy, like many if not most basic cultural principles, is invoked only selectively, when it can be used to justify one's privileges.  That's not surprising.  But how interesting that even such astute critics of the myth as Berliner and Biddle fail to notice the contradiction in its application to American education.

Dragons' Teeth and Crocodile Tears

Okay, Duncan, get to work!

I've been meaning to write about this for weeks, but you know how I am; it took me until yesterday to change my holiday-themed profile picture on Facebook, and then only because several people nagged me. I mean, c'mon, if I delay just a few months more it'll be War on Christmas Season again and the picture will be timely. But anyway.

I think I detect a slight waning of Apple adoration, and even of Jobs worship, since the media began covering the horrific work conditions in the Chinese factories where Apple products are made. I could be wrong, though. Some writers have argued that it's not fair to pick on Apple, because conditions are no better in the factories that manufacture electronics for other companies. True, Apple is not the only offender, but it's appropriate to single them out simply because Apple devotees were so damned smug about their electronic pets, and so cultish about Jobs. And to be fair, it seems that some of them have admitted that using people up might be too high a price to pay for having the coolest toys. That's progress.

I was writing about this before Jobs became late, and in my first post about his legacy I used Apple as only one example of the human costs of capitalism. Judging by some of the articles I read which focused mainly on Apple, they may just have felt betrayed: But, but, Steve -- I thought you were cool! I mean, you're a genius and a visionary! Say it ain't so!

We learned from the new biography that Jobs had criticized Obama for not being "business-friendly" enough.

"You're headed for a one-term presidency," he told Obama at the start of their meeting, insisting that the administration needed to be more business-friendly. As an example, Jobs described the ease with which companies can build factories in China compared to the United States, where "regulations and unnecessary costs" make it difficult for them.

If this sounds like a typical "economic freedom" whine, a la the Koch Brothers, it is. For all that such people complain about government interference in the economy, they couldn't succeed without it, and indeed they expect and demand it. Tabloid Friend on Facebook linked to this New York Times article which contains a now-famous anecdote about the development of the iPhone. Jobs demanded scratch-proof glass, and he got it from China.

When an Apple team visited, the Chinese plant’s owners were already constructing a new wing. “This is in case you give us the contract,” the manager said, according to a former Apple executive. The Chinese government had agreed to underwrite costs for numerous industries, and those subsidies had trickled down to the glass-cutting factory. It had a warehouse filled with glass samples available to Apple, free of charge. The owners made engineers available at almost no cost. They had built on-site dormitories so employees would be available 24 hours a day.

Notice the sentence I put in boldface there; most people apparently didn't. Mostly the lesson we were supposed to learn from this story was "supply chains." China has the newest and best and the US doesn't. But supply chains aren't a natural product of "economic freedom," they're complex infrastructure that capitalists aren't interested in building themselves.

Some might argue that this isn't really capitalism, it's residual Communism that the Chinese haven't fully weaned themselves from. But this sort of government subsidy is exactly how capitalism works in the real world, as opposed to the propaganda of "economic freedom."

In particular, companies say they need engineers with more than high school, but not necessarily a bachelor’s degree. Americans at that skill level are hard to find, executives contend. “They’re good jobs, but the country doesn’t have enough to feed the demand,” Mr. Schmidt said. ... Apple executives believe there simply aren’t enough American workers with the skills the company needs or factories with sufficient speed and flexibility.

I'm not sure that the executives' contention should be believed, partly because an engineer with a bachelor's could probably do the job just as well, but would probably cost too much. And notice that they clearly want those "factories with sufficient speed and flexibility" to just grow out of the ground. Building such factories themselves would be expensive, and cut into profits. That's why Apple and other companies go overseas, where the factories have already been built with government subsidies. The same goes for the engineers "China provided"; they didn't emerge from their mothers' wombs with the skill set they needed. But who's going to pay for training those engineers? Not I, said the Jobs.

Alexander Cockburn wrote a good column on this for The Nation, quoting a Reagan-era trade negotiator who had been angered when an Apple executive told the Times, “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.”

In the 1981–86 period, Prestowitz says, Jobs and his executives “had the funny notion that the US government had an obligation to help them…. We did all we could, and in doing so came to learn that virtually everything Apple had for sale, from the memory chips to the cute pointer mouse, had had its origins in some program wholly or partially supported by US government money…. The heart of the computer is the microprocessor, and Apple’s derived from Motorola’s 680X0, which was developed with much assistance, direct and indirect, from the Defense Department, as were the DRAM memory chips. The pointer mouse came from Xerox’s PARC center near Stanford (which also enjoyed government funding). In addition, most computer software at that time derived from work with government backing.”

Prestowitz points out that Apple also assumes the US government is obligated to stop foreign pirating of Apple’s intellectual property and, should supply chains in the Far East be disrupted, to offer the comforting support of the Seventh Fleet. “And those supply chains. Are they the natural product of good old free market capitalism, or does that scalability and flexibility and capacity to mobilize large numbers of workers on a moment’s notice have something to do with government subsidies and the interventionist industrial policies of most Asian economies?”

What Prestowitz says is what the arch-heretic Noam Chomsky (among others) has been saying all along: the wonders of American free enterprise were in reality products of government intervention and subsidy. And remember that bit in Jobs' complaint to Obama, about the ease with which companies can build factories in China? It's a lot easier when the Chinese government and American taxpayers are footing the bill. Why do American companies get tax breaks for operating overseas? That is what the Right calls "social engineering" and "redistribution of wealth" if it goes in the other direction. But it should: tax breaks, perhaps, for returning production to the US; maybe even subsidies for building up our supply chains; but it would also be legitimate to raise taxes on companies which operate overseas.

Last Friday Democracy Now! did a segment on the human cost of cheap, cool high technology. One guest was Charles Duhigg, a New York Times reporter who'd done a series on conditions in the factories. Mostly he gushed about the "amazing products" Apple produces, and the infrastructure that makes that cornucopia possible:

Well, one of the things that President Obama asked was, is it ever possible to bring back those jobs to the United States, to make iPhones in the U.S.? And what Steve Jobs said was—I think accurately—those jobs are never coming back. And the reason why isn’t just because workers are cheaper in China, although that—they are cheaper in China; it’s because China has established a huge competitive advantage over the U.S. There are supply chains that exist in China and Asia now which the U.S. simply can’t replicate. And there’s a system of labor there that allows factories to hire 3,000 people overnight or, as Mike can speak to, create facilities that house 250,000 workers and change them in a couple of hours or a couple of days from one product to another. It’s an amazing, amazing manufacturing capacity that’s grown up overseas—with harsh costs associated with it, but that makes it possible for us to get a brand new iPhone every single year.

"There's a system of labor there" that "by American standards, would be almost unconscionable." But Apple is "enormously well-meaning," and "you have to take Apple at their word, because this is a major corporation, they usually don’t lie about stuff like this." (I sat there astounded as this nonsense poured giddily out of the man's mouth.) But the important thing is that it makes it possible for us to get a brand new iPhone every single year; one shudders to think about the consequences if we couldn't.

The other guest, Mike Daisey, was more critical. He's doing a one-man show called The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, based on interviews he did with Chinese factory workers.

MIKE DAISEY: Well, Foxconn chose to deal with the suicides, in the period when I was visiting—what they had done, after month after month of suicides, was put up nets.

AMY GOODMAN: Nets.

MIKE DAISEY: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: To catch the bodies.

Duhigg's response?

Without Foxconn—and there’s only really one or two other companies that can do what Foxconn does—you can’t produce 300 million iPhones. You need a partner like this that you can give designs to, and they can start it rolling out a week later. And Foxconn does it amazingly. Now, conditions inside the plants are fairly harsh, as Mike so eloquently describes. But it is—it’s a new type of company that really we haven’t seen in history.

Well, that's all right then. Mr. Duhigg will no doubt flourish at the Times. But it does appear that Apple's lustre has begun to tarnish. Not only The Daily Show but This American Life -- both epitomes of US media cool -- have done segments critical of Apple, and that's got to hurt. Apple is fighting back, though.

In the last month, Apple has released a damning audit which found that almost 100 of Apple’s supplier factories force more than half their workers to exceed a 60-hour week. The company announced responsibility for aluminum dust explosions in Chinese supplier factories that killed four workers and injured 77. Hundreds more in China have been injured cleaning iPad screens with a chemical that causes nerve damage.

This is a familiar tactic, though, as Jeff Ballinger, the author of the article I just quoted, points out. It's what Nike did when conditions in its factories were revealed. By ostentatiously taking responsibility while limiting transparency and insisting on voluntary monitoring, companies can maintain a good PR front without changing conditions very much, except for the people who really matter.

This is not to say that these high-profile monitoring operations are worthless. Just ask the shareholders who saw Nike bounce back from being equated with slavery to join the top rankings of “responsible” companies. “Corporate social responsibility” has proved invaluable at repairing brand images and wrong-footing the anti-sweatshop movement – maybe what Bill Clinton had in mind when launching the Apparel Industry Partnership, precursor to the FLA.

Yesterday FAIR had a blog post on the other leg of Apple's defense: that, as New York Times tech writer David Pogue, put it, "Bringing workplace standards and pay in Chinese factories up to American levels would, of course, raise the price of our electronics. How much is hard to say, but a financial analyst for an outsourcing company figures a $200 iPhone might cost $350 if it were built here." And while "we" feel deeply for the Chinese workforce, "we" don't want to pay more for our iPhones! FAIR then linked to a Columbia Journalism Review piece by David Chittum which demolished Pogue's arithmetic.

Even if Pogue were right, and as much as I love my cheap laptop and other electronics, nobody has a right to lower-priced toys at the expense of other human beings' lives or health. We've been spoiled, and we will have to grow up. But it looks like our artificial people, the corporations, will have to grow up first. Apple takes a huge profit margin on the goodies it sells to those of us who want to be cool, Chittum says 71%, and by his calculations Chinese workers could have decent pay and tolerable working conditions without the margin dropping below 50 percent, without having to raise the price of an iPhone at all. Apple would make huge profits instead of obscene ones. Since their profits depend not only on degrading and shortening the lives of their factory workers but on government subsidies in both China and the US, I don't think they'd have grounds for complaint. The world doesn't owe Apple Computers, or any other company, a living. Nor does it owe me, or you, inexpensive computers and cell phones.

Remember: "business-friendly" means "corporate welfare."

Hey Pontiff -- Leave Those Kids Alone!

(For years now, I've wanted to write a new set of lyrics for Pink Floyd's The Wall. Mine would be called The Mall. "Can I take the station wagon / Mom, let me use your MasterCard ... All in all, it's just another day at the mall.")

I wasn't going to write today, but then I found this picture and some other things, so here goes. The picture comes by way of Whatever It Is I'm Against It, who notes that the Holy Father doesn't settle for superficial glitter, he wants and gets gold. The Guardian says that he urged his audience "to look beyond the holiday's 'superficial glitter' to discover its true meaning", which reminds me of the old joke about looking below the fake tinsel of Hollywood to find the real tinsel underneath.

I guess I really am a Scrooge, in a narrow sense of the word: I am not a Christian at all, and the story of the birth of a child in a manger doesn't do anything for me. Too many people can coo over that legend while real children go hungry or are burned in drone attacks and scarred for life (look for the story and photo of Shakira) for me to think it has much positive effect on the world. Christians of progressive politics often try to find a left-ish significance in Jesus' supposedly humble beginnings, but the point of that story was that this kid was really King of Kings. In order to make all this turn out right, Jesus' heavenly Father arranged the Slaughter of the Innocents at the hands of King Herod, who was merely an instrument in the divine plan. (The deaths of "all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under" were sad, but fulfilled what Yahweh had said through the prophets, so we think the price is worth it.) Remember that Father Zeus spent his childhood in a cave hiding from his murderous father Cronus, eventually emerging to seize his birthright and his glory. Likewise, the relatively insignificant (his birth signaled by a supernatural star and recognized by Magi and heavenly choirs) Jesus suffered (Son of David), but was exalted to Heaven to bide his time until the day he will judge the nations and take his vengeance.

But back to Pope Rat for a moment. A lot of people like the gold and jewels and rich robes and spectacle, it's part of what they want from religion and from life; if they can't have it themselves, they can at least get it vicariously through others. The Church's ostentation is a symbol and a promise of the glory of God and his heavenly kingdom, and so on; but I'm not interested in kings, earthly or heavenly. (And this kind of thing isn't limited to Catholicism; Buddhist temples, for example, are often decorated lavishly with gold leaf. One of my neo-pagan friends sighed recently and covetously over a photo of a "laurel" crown made of gold.) With the best will in the world, a Pope who tried to live simply would probably be denounced and reviled not only by the hierarchy but by the laity. Some lay Catholics, when I've suggested that Popes ought to tone it down a bit, indignantly accuse me of wanting the Holy Father to live in the gutter and starve to death! The typical reduction of alternatives to extremes, you'll notice, but I'm suggesting a middle path for once. Still, once there are no hungry people in the world anymore, the Pope can have his fancy robes back.

Several online writers have been discussing our other big Christmas myth, Dickens's A Christmas Carol, in connection with JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon's whining about how rich people are being hated for no reason at all. This, as the writers explain, isn't true at all. Fred Clark at Slactivist (via) reports this year's bandwagon of anonymous donors who've been paying off layaway accounts at various stores around the country, and says,

We like good-hearted rich people. We like them very much. ...

It’s certainly true that we don’t like Ebenezer Scrooge at the beginning of A Christmas Carol, but that dislike has nothing to do with the fact that he’s rich or that he’s “been successful.” We hate the Scrooge we meet at the beginning of the story not because he’s rich, but because he’s a cruel, selfish, greedy miser enriching himself from the toil of the employees he mistreats.

And you know who else really hates Ebenezer Scrooge at the beginning of the story? Ebenezer Scrooge. He’s one of the most miserable, joyless, wretchedly unhappy figures in all of literature.

Scrooge tries to comfort himself by telling himself that he’s just a cool-headed rationalist who sees the logic of greed. He tries to make himself feel better about his abuse of poor Cratchit by thinking of himself as a “job creator.” It doesn’t work. It can’t work. He’s miserly and, therefore, miserable.

This is good, but if I recall correctly Scrooge is a miser because he's miserable; unable to control his life, he can at least hang on to his money. And as several of Clark's commenters pointed out, Scrooge wasn't as bad as he could have been: his harried employee Bob Cratchit gets Christmas off, which wasn't the Victorian norm. Eric Oppen wrote (no permalink that I can find; sorry):

My own take on Scrooge was that he'd been badly traumatized early on. It's often not remembered, but the late 1700s/early-1800s (roughly 1790-1840), when he'd been young, were not good times in Britain, Regency Romances notwithstanding. The economy had been bled nearly white by the Napoleonic Wars, and then you had the disruptions of the Industrial Revolution. Scrooge always reminded me of old people I've known who'd been through the Depression and still were haunted by it.

And he'd earned a reputation for honesty such that his signature was worth any amount he cared to raise, which is not the sign of a crooked man. He's grumpy and cranky...but not everybody likes Christmas, and he has some particular reasons not to. A real hard-heart wouldn't be thinking of his dead-five-years best pal to the point where his door-knocker suddenly looked like Marley's face. It also wasn't his fault that Bob Cratchit had a sick son, or more children than he could comfortably support. And le[a]ve us not forget...he did give Cratchit Christmas off, with pay, which was not the norm in early-Victorian Britain...the holiday had been badly damaged under Cromwell, and many Dissenters and Scots still scorned it.

(Before you sneer at Oppen for dragging politics into the discussion, remember that what he's talking about would have been well-known to his original readers, just as the Great Depression should be well-known to us now.) Backed up by commenter fraser:

Which probably explains why he denounces his nephew as poor when the guy appears to have a very nice middle-class life: In Scrooge's eyes, the very fact he's spending his money on frivolous things like a pleasant home and Christmas dinner presumably means he's heading for poverty.

Still (like some other commenters) I'm wary of the "Satisfied Mind" meme which holds that despite all their wealth, the rich aren't really happy. It's to Dickens's credit that he didn't think Scrooge was unhappy because he was rich; after all, though he grew up poor, Dickens himself become a best-selling author and lived comfortably.

But back to Jamie Dimon. Clark linked to this open letter to Dimon by Joshua Brown, who laid out some obvious home truths:

America is different than almost every other place on earth in that its citizenry reveres the wealthy and we are raised to believe that we can all one day join the ranks of the rich. The lack of a caste system or visible rungs of society's ladder is what separates our empire from so many fallen empires throughout history. In a nation bereft of royalty by virtue of its republican birth, the American people have done what any other resourceful people would do - we've created our own royalty and our royalty is the 1%. Not only do we not "hate the rich" as you and other em-bubbled plutocrats have postulated, in point of fact, we love them. We worship our rich to the point of obsession. The highest-rated television shows uniformly feature the unimaginably fabulous families of celebrities not to mention the housewives (real or otherwise) of the rich. We don't care what color they are or what religion they practice or where in the country they live or what channel their show is on - if they're rich, we are watching.

So true, and it helps to explain why so many Americans (though by no means a majority) worry that tax rates for the ultra-rich might go up a few percentage points, even though they themselves are in no danger of such a fate; they'll never see $100,000 a year, let alone Dimon's $23 million in 2010. These people feel more sympathy for the rich than they do for themselves.

Brown goes on:

Likewise, when Steve Jobs died, he did so with more money than you or any of your "job alliance" buddies - ten times more than most of you, in fact. And upon his death the entire nation went into mourning. We set up makeshift shrines to his brilliance in front of Apple stores from coast to coast. His biography flew off the shelves and people bought Apple products and stock shares in his honor and in his memory. Does that strike you as the action of a populace that hates success?

No, Jamie, it is not that Americans hate successful people or the wealthy. In fact, it is just the opposite. We love the success stories in our midst and it is a distinctly American trait to believe that we can all follow in the footsteps of the elite, even though so few of us ever actually do.

So, no, we don't hate the rich. What we hate are the predators.

I have quibbles about the sanctification of Steve Jobs, who was a contemporary Scrooge (and a predator) if anybody was. But that just confirms Brown's account of Americans' attitude to the rich, doesn't it?

I've been happy to read about the Layaway Secret Santas. (I must say I'm weirded out by terminology like "layaway angels" or "holy mischief" applied to them; "Secret Santa" is bad enough. They aren't demigods or mythical elves from the North Pole, they're people with humane instincts. Why does human goodness always have to be displaced onto supernatural sources? That's the real misanthropy, I believe, the real cynicism and the real Scrooginess.) One of the saddest things I've heard has been the accounts by people who work in the big-box stores of people who've had to return things they bought on Black Friday because they needed the money to buy food or pay the utility bills; but often the returned items had been gifts for their children (which, despite the parents' good intentions, is a reminder of the harmfulness of the commercialization of Christmas, and of childhood. Still, private charity has its limits; Secret Santas are only a stopgap in a bad time. Government-run programs are better, since they are (at least in theory) less vulnerable to the vagaries of donors' generosity or even ability to give: many charities are finding that as need increases, the less wealthy can't afford to donate. What the world needs is an economy that works well enough that people can pay off their own layaway accounts without having to work eighty hours a week.

"Oh, Didn't You Know I'd Been Ruined?" Said He

Right after Steve Jobs died, I did a long post which touched on the human cost of economic development in other countries, though it also applies to the US. Much like Lucy yanking the football away from Charlie Brown before he can kick it, there's a recurring pattern of excusing the inhumane treatment of workers (long hours, dangerous working conditions, low pay) by promising that things will get better. As soon as they begin to do so, however, the people in charge of big business get restive: workers are getting too much money, you want things too easy, you're lazy and want to spend time with your families or just relaxing instead of putting in another thirty-four hour shift at the dear old factory. What's the matter with you? Don't you realize that we're all in this together, and that Exploitation, Inc. is just one big happy family? If you keep demanding higher wages, then poor old Exploitation, Inc. will go broke -- its profits have already dwindled to almost nothing because of you lazy, insatiable ingrates. When we go out of business, you'll be sorry, but it'll be too late then!

We hear this spiel even when profits are at record highs, as they are now in the US. It's nothing new, of course. In 1854, Charles Dickens wrote in his novel Hard Times about industrial Manchester, which he called Coketown:

Surely there never was such fragile china-ware as that of which the millers of Coketown were made. Handle them never so lightly, and they fell to pieces with such ease that you might suspect them of having been flawed before. They were ruined, when they were required to send labouring children to school; they were ruined, when inspectors were appointed to look into their works; they were ruined, when such inspectors considered it doubtful whether they were quite justified in chopping people up with their machinery; they were utterly undone, when it was hinted that perhaps they need not always make quite so much smoke ...

Whenever a Coketowner felt he was ill-used — that is to say, whenever he was not left entirely alone, and it was proposed to hold him accountable for the consequences of any of his acts — he was sure to come out with the awful menace, that he would ‘sooner pitch his property into the Atlantic.’ This had terrified the Home Secretary within an inch of his life, on several occasions. However, the Coketowners were so patriotic after all, that they never had pitched their property into the Atlantic yet, but, on the contrary, had been kind enough to take mighty good care of it. So there it was, in the haze yonder; and it increased and multiplied.

(I first read this passage in Allen Chase's The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism [Knopf, 1977], page 61. A very useful book.)

We've made progress since then, though I think even Dickens slightly exaggerated the desire of factory owners to be "left entirely alone." Even in those days, they wanted State protection from unruly workers and foreign competitors. Nowadays they expect more direct government subsidies, because "economic freedom" is so endangered here that a billionaire can't make even another billion unless the tyrannical, vampirical government helps him out.

These noises are meant to distract attention from the companies packing up and preparing to move to greener pastures: states with more "business-friendly" climates, countries where wages are even lower, and workers more vulnerable, than they were in the last free-enterprise haven.

Factories in China’s manufacturing heartland are feeling the squeeze again, with minimum wages in Guangdong province set to rise by as much as 20 percent on Jan. 1 for the second time in less than a year.

Oh noes!

In other words, the days of endless, cheap Chinese labor are limited. What that means for consumers in the United States and elsewhere is simple: Things are going to cost more, soon.

“I think there’s quite a good argument now that the global race to the bottom has been concluded,” said Geoffrey Crothall of the China Labour Bulletin, a Hong Kong-based labor-rights group. “There’s nowhere else to go.”

The Pearl River Delta is no longer a cheap place to produce, but it does have established supply chains, factories and infrastructure. Companies that want to produce ultra-low-cost products are moving inland in China, or to poorer countries like Bangladesh and Cambodia. Yet there’s nothing on the horizon to replace the cheap China model of the 1990s and 2000s.

Oh noes! Wherever shall Wal-Mart go? Whatever shall Wal-Mart do? Read the whole article; if you thought the Coketowners' plight was sad, the suffering of business in the Pearl River Delta will wring your heart.

So it appears we have a dilemma here. One of the defenses of capitalism is that it improves the lives of workers and consumers, but as this story shows, improving the lives of workers and consumers is a threat to capitalism, and therefore to the lives of workers and consumers. If wages go up, prices will go up and profits will go down, and then, more in sorrow than in anger, our beneficent Captains of Industry and Finance will just have to pull up stakes and move on. This appears to be a problem with capitalism itself, whether under socialism, monarchism, or the plutocratic oligarchy that we enjoy here in the Land of the Free: socialist states have run into the same roadblock on the highway to a higher standard of living. Nor has anyone come up with a way of avoiding it, partly because admitting that it's a problem would undermine the case for industry and economic growth.

Since my earlier post on Jobs, a lot more information has surfaced about his unsavory political views: for example, his demand that Obama make the US more like China, because of "the ease with which companies can build factories in China compared to the United States, where 'regulations and unnecessary costs' make it difficult for them." (I suppose it's a mercy that Jobs died before he could see his dream frustrated again. And besides, those lazy, pampered workers in the Chinese computer factories should feel honored to be participating in the creation of new "races," enabling the emergence of posthuman life with the iPhones they make.) And today, very much to my surprise, Eric Alterman has a good piece at The Nation on the human cost of Apple products, part of Steve Jobs's legacy.

Apple is a wonderful company for its customers and investors. So, too, Pixar. (NeXT, not so much…) But Apple is also an engine of misery for its subcontracted Chinese workers. That this story went largely unreported during Jobs’s life is a testament to how enthralled our media are by the myth of the man’s talismanic qualities, and how easily manipulated most reporters are by wealthy, successful entrepreneurs. But it is also a testament to how little the lives of laborers appear to count anymore.

"Anymore"? When did they ever? (Alterman also has to put in a concession that Jobs was a "genius"; so much the worse for geniuses then.) But on the whole this column is one you should read. The slobbering adulation lavished on Jobs even by political liberals and progressives is similar to Barack Obama's now somewhat tarnished luster: both men are marketers, not innovators, and their appeal is based on image rather than substance. You don't even want to look behind the curtain ... do you?

In My Back Yard

The above image makes a good point, but there are some problems with it. For one thing, while there is too much hunger in the world, 99% of the population don't look like the children in the lower half. The worldwide maldistribution of wealth has as much to do with relative standards of living as with catastrophic famine, but it is really not a good idea for everyone to use as much electricity and own as many cars and generate as much garbage as Americans do. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak said in a recent interview that a lot of talk about "sustainability" is misconceived, because the lifestyles people want to sustain simply aren't sustainable.

And some well-meaning people just don't get it: one person commented on Facebook, "When I have enough to feed myself for the month and not Overdraft ... Overdraft ... I will undoubtedly suffer help I those less fortunate." It's a nice sentiment, but it misses the point. Personal, private charity can't fix the systemic structural problems the world faces.

For example: as everyone knows by now, Steve Jobs died yesterday. I'm sure I don't need to tell the readers of this blog who he was, any more than I'd need to tell you who Michael Jackson was. There has been an enormous outpouring of commentary about him, some of which annoys me. I do perhaps need to tell you who Fred Shuttlesworth and Derrick Bell were, both of whom died yesterday as well, and both of whom matter more to me than Jobs. That's not because I don't own a Mac, because I expect to shudder just as much at the tidal wave of goo that will be generated when Bill Gates cashes in his chips. I'm not a brand loyalist.

But I've been amazed at what otherwise sensible people have written about Jobs. Part of it is normal de mortuis nil nisi bonum, of course, but "transformative genius"? IOZ beat me to the punch on that sort of thing. I love computers and the Internet, but there are problems: the toxic byproducts of microchip production, for example, the harm done to the workers' health in computer factories, the economic exploitation of the workers, and so on. And on and on. The first reaction to Jobs' death by one friend of mine, with whom I'm in accord on politics, was: "Wouldn't it be nice if Jobs's iconic 'American' products had been made in the U.S.A.? Jobs, indeed." Well, no, it wouldn't be nice, not without very extensive regulation in working conditions -- which isn't going to happen without some intense struggle.

You see how difficult it is to disentangle these matters, though? I don't mean to imply that it's okay for Chinese workers to be underpaid, overworked, and slowly killed by poison; no one should work in those conditions. We need to improve conditions for workers around the world. But such efforts will be opposed by countries like China, which will claim that Chinese don't expect the silly "rights" that soft Westerners expect. Western corporations, with their multicultural sensitivity, will second that claim enthusiastically. Chinese and other Asian workers won't, but who cares about them? As Amartya Sen wrote in Development as Freedom (Oxford, 1999),

Are the citizens of third world countries indifferent to political and democratic rights? This claim, which is often made, is again based on too little empirical evidence .... The only way of verifying this would be to put the matter to democratic testing in free elections with freedom of opposition and expression -- precisely the things that the supporters of authoritarianism do not allow to happen. It is not clear at all how this proposition can be checked when the ordinary citizens are given little political opportunity to express their views on this and even less to dispute the claims made by the authorities in office. The downgrading of these rights and freedoms is certainly part of the value system of the government leaders in many third world countries, but to take that to be the view of the people is to beg a very big question.

It is thus of some interest to note that when the Indian government, under Indira Gandhi's leadership, tried out a similar argument in India, to justify the "emergency" she had misguidedly declared in the mid-1970s, an election was called that divided the voters precisely on this issue. In that fateful election, fought largely on the acceptability of the "emergency," the suppression of basic political and civil rights was firmly rejected, and the Indian electorate -- one of the poorest in the world -- showed itself to be no less keen on protesting against the denial of basic liberties and rights than it was in complaining about economic poverty. To the extent that there has been any testing of the proposition that poor people in general do not care about civil and political rights, the evidence is entirely against that claim. Similar points can be made by observing the struggle for democratic freedoms in South Korea, Thailand, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Burma (or Myanmar) and elsewhere in Asia [151].

The appeal of cheap labor isn't limited to the US. That's one of the revealing things about the development of capitalism in Asia. South Korea began developing its industrial plant in the 1960s under the dictator Park Chung-hee, in an intimate partnership between the government and business. This was capitalism, and Park's Korea was included in the propaganda category "the Free World," but it was far from free, and far from free markets. Working conditions were terrible, and we'll probably never know how many human beings South Korea's industrial revolution used up. In theory, workers weren't supposed to be worked to death; the Republic had an extensive labor law code that in theory protected workers' rights, but it wasn't enforced. (Park Gwang-su's 1995 film A Single Spark, based on the 1970 martyrdom of textile worker Jeon Tae-il, has never been released in the US, but it is currently available with English subtitles on Youtube, starting here. It made a powerful impression on me when I first saw it years ago. Jeon set himself afire, along with a copy of the Korean labor code, in protest against the conditions in the sweatshops of the Peace Market, the Seoul garment district. The biography on which the film was based was translated into English by Jeon's sister, who's now a professor of labor studies, and is worth reading if you can find it. Se-hui's Cho's novel in stories The Dwarf [Hawaii, 2006] gives a vivid picture of the impact of factory work and forced modernization on ordinary Koreans; for a sociological study of young factory women, see Seung-kyung Kim's Class Struggle or Family Struggle? [Cambridge, 2009]; Janice C. H. Kim's To Live To Work [Stanford, 2009] shows the roots of the system during the Japanese colonial period.)

The government promised its people that conditions and pay would eventually improve, and that everyone had to work together to make this happen. Just as this promise began to be fulfilled in the 1980s, Korean corporations found that they couldn't afford to pay higher wages, so they began moving production overseas to other Asian countries, especially Southeast Asia. At around the same time, South Korean citizens began demanding more of a political voice, climaxing with the overturning of the military dictatorship in 1987 and the first real elections in 1993. I think there's a two-way relationship here: that the corporations began moving overseas to escape the growth of Korean democracy and an independent and militant labor movement, while the democracy and labor movements became more militant as Korean business began to welsh on the long promise of better pay, better working conditions, and more leisure. (I believe I figured this out after reading John Kie-chang Oh's Korean Politics [Cornell, 1999], though he probably wouldn't agree with my interpretation. See also South Korea's Minjung Movement [Hawaii, 1995], edited by Kenneth M. Wells, and Echoes of the Past, Epics of Dissent [California, 1996] by Nancy Abelmann, for accounts of the grassroots movement against the dictatorship.)

Almost as soon as the military dictatorship caved in, international capital and its government partners increased pressure on the South Korean government for more access to the Korean economy. It should be no surprise that these agents were not happy about growing democracy and civil freedom in the countries they sought to buy; the US Chamber of Commerce, for example, has often called for a crackdown on what it calls "anti-American" sentiment in Korea. The International Monetary Fund sought to destroy the social services Koreans enjoyed through privatization, and in the economic crisis of the late 90s many government-owned businesses and services were sold off at fire-sale prices to foreign corporations; for a good account of the neoliberal assault on Asian economies, see Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine (Metropolitan Books, 2007). Koreans have continued to resist these trends, and the struggle continues.

There was a similar pattern in the United States after World War II: American business fed at the public trough, to its great benefit, both at home and abroad. The prosperity of the 1950s was the fulfillment of the American dream, we were told, and there was speculation about shorter work weeks, more leisure, and the benefits of technology (television, household appliances, etc.) that would give all Americans a better life. The prospect of more leisure made corporate elites uneasy, however, and they began trying to tighten their control on their workers. Higher wages were seen as wasteful, except for CEOs. When Ronald Reagan became President in 1981 and unemployment rose to near-Depression levels, new jobs were mostly part-time, low-wage, and devoid of benefits, a pattern that continues to this day. During the Reagan and Clinton regimes, this meant that many people were working two or sometimes more jobs at once to try to support their families, and the breadwinner/housewife model faded not because of feminism but because wives also had to work outside the home. Corporations had already begun moving production overseas to more hospitable business climates, which in practice meant not only lower wages but freedom from environmental and worker-safety regulations, and especially friendly governments that would crush any labor agitation by force. (A "docile" labor force is their Impossible Dream; workers in other countries tend to be more militant than Americans, but a regime dedicated to what the Koch Brothers call "economic freedom" will torture, abduct, and kill any workers who get too uppity, let alone try to organize.) Then the official line changed: the prosperity of the Fifties was not the inevitable flowering of Free Enterprise, but a historical blip. Americans had gotten spoiled, and now we were going to have stop coasting along and work.

This isn't a "conspiracy theory." It doesn't really matter how conscious business and governments elites are of what they're doing, though they are more aware than they pretend in public. (See David Gordon's Fat and Mean: The Corporate Squeeze of Working Americans and the Myth of Managerial "Downsizing" [Free Press, 1996] for a good account.) What matters is that the pattern I've described keeps turning up in different countries, even "socialist" ones. Capitalism is capitalism, whether it's overtly or covertly intertwined with a nation-state, as I'd long suspected and as the late Chris Harman showed in Zombie Capitalism [Haymarket Books, 2010] and Raymond Williams explained in his ecological essays in Resources of Hope (Verso, 1989).

Of course we need good jobs here in America, as people do everywhere, but the trouble is not so much that jobs are being shipped to other countries, but that no good new jobs are being created here to take their place. As those jobs make their exodus to Latin America, Southeast Asia, and other such countries, they're stripped of most of the economic benefits that made them worthwhile at home. The myth of America's conversion to a service-based (as opposed to a production-based) economy also overlooks this problem: the new service jobs are mostly low-wage, no-benefit work tied to "flexible labor markets," or the elimination of job security. And as we've seen very forcefully in the past few years, the outcome is increased economic inequality, a wildly oscillating business cycle, and a new Depression as economic elites try to ride the economic tiger and turn to the government to bail them out when they fall off.