I Tried to See Where My T-Shirt Was Made
motherjones.com
motherjones.com
Trade is the foundation of capitalism, not exploitation. (The references for this, of course, are the writings of Adam Smith and David Ricardo.) India (and also much of South America) specifically rejected this wisdom during much of my lifetime, and now those countries have to play catch-up. They still have time. They won't have stark poverty forever if they learn from the examples of other countries, just as Taiwan did.
EDIT: Taking a class in economics and thinking everything has a monetary value attached to it, or that homo economicus actually exists would obviously be just as bad.
edit - Folk keep framing stuff in the economic dogma-battles of the superpowers in the 19th and 20th century, but to me the problem is 14th century economics combined with 21st century logistics. Retaining a caste system in a world of global networks can give you a fucking big pyramid and systemise abuse on an unprecedented scale with the money that flows in from those outside the structure.
[0] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naxalite
[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naxalite%E2%80%93Maoist_insur...
[2] http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-09-27/news...
Edited to include a reference to "backward" - a term used in official language.
Seems to me too few people take classes in anything these days, let alone Marxist sociology.
Popper compared Marx to Freud, in that both people spawned a theory of knowledge that is very good at explaining what has already happened but horrifyingly bad at telling you how things will be tomorrow, and how to change those things. Almost sixty years after this observation nothing has changed. We now recognize Freud as pseudoscience, but Marxism remains unfortunately persistent. Marxists like to talk about how well Marx predicted the nature of the class struggle and stuff like that, but in a theory which sees everything in terms of class struggle, this is not a scientific prediction at all.
And they typically do him a dis-service. I find when "Marxists" speak of such things, "bad" is synonymous with capitalism just as "capitalism" is synonymous with bad.
When Marxists talk about it being 'scientific socialism,' they are contrasting with 'utopian socialism.' Scientific socialism takes the approach of examining the world, making changes, seeing how those work out, and then re-examining the theory. You can see how that relates to the scientific method.
Marxism is not scientific, as it does not attempt to falsify one of its core axioms—that the class struggle is over a local optimization game. A central committee can actually do a pretty good job of adjusting the ratio of copper tubing to copper wiring, but the actual challenge turns out to be making people want to invent things like graphene.
Regardless, you're not engaging with my core point, which is that 'scientific' in this context means something specific, not whatever you happen to think scientific means. Nobody is claiming Marxism is falsifiable, that's a red herring.
And that's exactly why you should learn about it, Marx analysis of economic conditions is pretty much spot on. What conclusions you draw from that analysis is a different topic. And of course all the work is interesting for historic purposes, it's pretty much impossible to understand the history of the 20th century without (at least some of) it.
I also haven't met (or read) anybody for a long time who actually believed Marx' idea of class struggle by force of nature leading to a communist society, where do you still find those people?
This is why my stomach turns when Popper is mentioned. The idea of falsifiability and testable statements being the essence of science is the best known guiding principle in scientific methodology. Having articulated this wonderful idea, he just couldn't help but muddy the water and misuse it to peddle his political and social views.
EDIT: I forgot to give an example of a falsifiable prediction in Marxism: the outcome of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and the transitional socialist state leading to communism. It was actually falsified successfully by Soviet Union et al.
That's debatable, given the modifications to Marxism made in Leninism -- the actual "Communist" states all were based on Leninism, rather than Marxism. The advanced democratic capitalist states that had the foundations which Marx saw as essential for the transition to socialism on the way to communism have generally transitioned in the direction of socialism since Marx's time, though in a rather gradual way. At least in the direction of the natural progression beyond the model of political-economic system that Marx and other 19th century socialists critiqued under the name "capitalism", Marx seems to have been very broadly correct -- as to whether that eventually leads to communism is, well, something that we're probably several generations away from seeing.
I think that its a lot more likely that something like the modern mixed economy -- evolving with productivity in a way that increasing has a greater domain of social support and responsiveness -- will be dominant for a very long term. OTOH, I can envision that happening in a way where the social support is delivered in a way based on private property (e.g., through a mechanism like basic income) with social goods delivered more through the market than directly by the state. With sufficient productivity (and hence, goods being less scarce) this would in many ways resemble communism (while still having features of socialism and capitalism.)
Whether it is "honest" or not is largely beside the point, which is that it is a deliberate attempt to short-circuit what in Marx's theory was an essential step on the road from feudalism through developed capitalism and then socialism and finally to communism, and that a such a short-circuiting effort cannot be an empirical test -- whether it succeeds or fails -- of Marx's theory (well, except insofar as its success would refute at least one element of Marx's theory.)
Perhaps Marxism could be studied as a specimen of a certain mindset, like intellectual design: "learn about it", not "learn it". One problem is so many people (millions!) have had Marxism shoved in the throats. No wonder it tends to go out the other way. (Sorry for the graphic image.)
That must be why it has such strong labour laws and enormous social safety net supported by a tax and spend government then. Or possibly the economy ditched socialism in 1991 when it carried out a series of free market reforms at the behest of global trade organisations. Who can possibly say.
We can't have good labor conditions without the capital and productive capacity in place to offer good labor conditions.
But you have to realize that most people on hacker news who want socialism never had first-hand experience with it. People have to learn their lessons the hard way. :(
http://www.npr.org/templates/archives/archive.php?thingId=19...
The NPR staff wound up working with Jockey to have the shirt made and that obviously opened up a lot of doors to the production facilities and interviews with factory workers, etc.
The Mother Jones article reminded me, I guess, that Jockey's hand in the NPR access had a non-trvial amount of P/R influence in the project.
We clearly need to apply science and technology directly to human needs rather than relying entirely on outdated systems like money that primarily enforce hierarchies. In previous eras where the only means to an end was raw human labor, perhaps this type of system made sense. In our contemporary society with our technological capability it is absurd. Too bad that people can only see that when it involves the most extreme cases.
We have had experiments with other systems than Capitalsm, and some of them are still running. Korea is split in North and South, the southern part is capitalist, was in garment manufacturing and now has an exceptional level of wealth, while the northern part is communist and has become one big concentration camp.
I hope you won't bother pulling a No True Scotsman here, because the list goes on.
Citation please.
It's become apparent to me that it does that until the workforce hits equilibrium at which point it divides people slowly into two classes, the lower of which is purely exploited by the upper.
NK just skipped the first bit.
Unrestrained capitalism may of course creates huge levels of inequality. Luckily, unrestrained capitalism was largely put to rest (in the western world) after the 1900s, via unions and other similar movements.
Capitalism floats all boats, but not all equally. To ignore the fact that it floats all boats and point only add to the inequalities it creates is to miss the point.
Capitalism got "restrained" in the West because people fought for basic rights, and many died during the process.
To back up my original point.
Then use another example from your list. North Korea is a totalitarian dictatorship. It's not exactly clear whether its woes are the result of its economic system or its form of governance.
The dictatorship of the proletariat is not communism. Not even for Marx. It is the state before communism, in which the proletariat makes changes in society so that communism may take place.
Most ideologies and political or economic ideas have had their names subverted to mean something different by opponents (democracy, republicanism, communism, anarchism, capitalism...). That doesn't mean that if you speak in the "formal sense" you can decide to use whatever meaning you prefer.
edit - adding 'in the formal sense' to your post doesn't really change things. Formally, communism is supposed to be a developing theory, which is part of the reason for Marx famously saying that he wasn't a Marxist. Formally, communist theory, as envisioned by Marx, was never meant to be frozen as dogma, but rather relentlessly self-critical. Whether he was right or not is a seperate issue, but you are seriously misrepresenting his ideas.
Specifically, capitalism is the 'dictatorship of the bourguise,' so it needs to be counteracted by a dictatorship of the proletariat. Within the governing body, democratic councils run things. To draw a parallel to today's concept of 'dictatorship,' think of it this way: one class has absolute, total rule of things. But a class is made up of many people...
At one time you could say that about agrarian feudalism.
So, what other systems? State socialism? It can only be viewed as an alternative system to liberal capitalism, not to capitalism in general sense because it still leaves the same economic relations basically intact. It's an incompetent, extremely monopolistic form of capitalism, which is why it failed so miserably.
Apologies, Go!
What about Cuba?
This always occurs because in order to transfer to communism, an intermediate government is necessary to take power from the evil capitalists, consolidate it, and distribute it throughout the people before volunteering to dissolve. In practice, this never occurs. Where power is centralized, sociopaths will congregate, and the first stage of the transition to communism is nothing if not the centralization of power. Thus, communism has always failed under the weight of despots, and will always do so as long as that is the case. There are no benevolent governments, period.
Meanwhile, though capitalism is surely far from perfect in its implementation, every nation which has embraced it has done remarkably well relative to those which embraced its ideological opposite. No, it's not perfect, but it's obviously preferable to communism. I give those who sided with communism or socialism before 1980 or so the benefit of the doubt, as they were not privy to the vast evidence that we are today of communism's many failures. On the other hand, I immediately write anyone off who still believes communism > capitalism to be a delusional idiot who is almost certainly not worth arguing with.
I have the People's Republic of China, Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Socialist Republic of Vietnam and Republic of Cuba on the line, all of which would like to have a word with you.
Edit: allow me to clarify what I mean by the DPRK being communist. It is not communism as in the endgame of communism on paper; it is the intermediate stage of communism when it is allowed to exist for far too long by a world that is not interested in intervening. The central authority has seized power for itself, but it will never return that power to the people and transition to communism's final stage for obvious reasons. The DPRK is the final stage of communism as it exists in reality.
If you take an equally narrow view of "capitalism" as you necessarily must of "communism" to make this even arguably true (well, and still it wouldn't be true to say China is "capitalist", but at least "not communist"), there aren't any "successful" capitalist nations today either, they all became "socialist" sometime between the late 19th and mid-20th century.
Realistically, most of the worlds major economies are mixed economies, and certainly one can make that case with regard to China -- though its a lot closer to communism than it is to capitalism.
> Finally, Cuba is socialist, not communist, and even they are trending towards capitalism, not communism, as all nations inevitably do.
The Communist Party of Cuba would be as surprised to learn that they aren't Communist (they'd agree that they are socialist, but they'd be baffled at the idea that the two were incompatible.)
At any rate, the idea that all nations eventually trend towards capitalism is ludicrous, especially given that the advanced nations whose systems in the 19th century were the defining exemplars of the term "capitalism" have since all trended toward socialism.
By the actual definition of "communism" there are no communist nations today, nor were there ever any for the reasons I gave in my initial argument. The definition of communism I've used for this discussion was actually more lenient than how it is defined.
>The Communist Party of Cuba would be as surprised to learn that they aren't Communist
The Communist Party of Cuba would not be surprised at all. They're just playing the game they've been given, and to think that they don't know the score is to assume they are all idiots right off the bat.
>At any rate, the idea that all nations eventually trend towards capitalism is ludicrous
Every formerly communist/socialist nation on the planet save one has moved to liberalize their economy in the last few decades, because communism/socialism is inherently flawed. All nations do, indeed, inevitably trend towards capitalism. If they choose not to, they inevitably fail, and once they pick up the pieces, they inevitably choose the alternative, which has been proven to succeed time and time again.
It seems that so very few of you can argue in favor of your favorite alternative to capitalism well enough to refrain from nitpicking. It becomes tiresome after a while.
And, while there's probably some definitions of "socialism" and "capitalism" for which my preferred tuning of a modern mixed economy is more "socialism" than "capitalism", all I've been arguing in this thread is that your Marx-in-reverse arguments about the inevitability of capitalism are as ludicrous as Marxist fanatics arguments about the inevitability of Communism -- and that's not even related to advocacy about the desirability of any system.
By cherry-picking North Korea as your only example as a non-capitalist experiment, and pre-disqualifying anyone who says that it isn't a representative example for all possible non-capitalist systems as someone employing a logical fallacy, you haven't really left any room for discussion.
Why not pick China, or the USSR?
Or the entire modern West, which pretty much exists as explicitly mixed socialist/capitalist economies - filled with welfare, national health services, unemployment benefits, industrial subsidies, public education, and progressive taxation?
I hope you won't bother pulling a No True Scotsman here, because the list goes on.
From the relevant wikipedia page: " In the wake of the spread of fascism through Europe, Stalin repressed both Communist Party members and elements of the population by creating an atmosphere of political paranoia and establishing a system of correctional labour camps."
Or perhaps actual sacrifices and secret rites were performed in the dark corners of Bretton Woods in order to counteract socialism? ;-)
> By cherry-picking North Korea as your only example as a non-capitalist experiment, and pre-disqualifying anyone who says that it isn't a representative example for all possible non-capitalist systems as someone employing a logical fallacy, you haven't really left any room for discussion.
> Why not pick China, or the USSR?
I cannot fathom what's going on in your comment. But there are two obvious responses:
1. North Korea was called out, as mentioned in the comment you respond to, because, unlike Maoist China and the USSR, it's still going.
2. Maoist China and the USSR also fit the bill of "one big concentration camp", so if he had picked one of them instead, nothing about his comment would have changed. Both were total, unimaginable disasters for the entire population of each country. It's like you said "sure, 2 is an even number, but what about 8?"
Not sure about that. Stalin may have achieved economic growth of 500% over 13 years - more than China.
The problem with socialism/communism is that you don't have a market. Besides lacking of incentives, feedback loops etc., you basically don't have a way to price goods. Not market, no prices. All these systems will fail in the long run.
This being said, a capitalistic system relies on expansion of credit (actually one point, in which good old Mises was wrong). Credit is always a ponzi scheme. If credit expansion stops, the whole system will collapse. What we currently see is the prevention of system collapse by the western government. People are maxed out and the gov, as a lender of last resort, goes into debt. This will not end good. I doubt that significant growth can be achieved anymore in western countries. So communism has failed but capitalism does not look very good either, at least in the west.
How did you get to this generalization? Just because the most prevalent current brand of capitalism works this way, it doesn't mean it's the only way it can work, or that when "expansion of credit" will stop capitalism will collapse.
Then you should start an investment portfolio that broadly shorts Western bellwether stocks. You'll make a killing if you're right. Make sure you diversify your profit into non-Western countries so that you can keep those gains.
Congratulations.
In other words, shorting requires a buyer. If a company goes tits up, you still lose.
No it isn't. Trade is. That's like saying rape is the foundational structure of sex.
We clearly need to apply science and technology directly to human needs
Who are we? Why? Do you mean something like communism, "for the benefit of the people"? This is a classical is-ought fallacy.
relying entirely on outdated systems like money
Outdated system? How so? What is a better system in your opinion?
that primarily enforce hierarchies.
How exactly does money enforce hierarchies? What is one system that doesn't "enforce hierarchies"?
Too bad that people can only see that when it involves the most extreme cases.
Well, I am glad that you are one of the Enlightened People.
Apologizes if this post came across as hostile, but there are just too many things that irks me with this post.
Trade? No, trade is the foundation of any kind of economy, of any kind of organized social life. Exploitation is one of the foundational concepts of capitalism, but the same is true for all past dominant economic systems, so it's true that it's not terribly useful to define capitalism as something that is just about exploitation. The way exploitation is structured, whom and how is exploited, in capitalism is the key point.
I think it's more accurate to say "trade is the foundation of a market". According to Smith, river-valley civilizations arose because of markets. Markets arose because of specialization. Specialization arose because the rivers allowed more efficient transportation of goods than land (by a factor of 50?).
But for the paleolithic era, most tribes shared goods communally. No trade needed.
-- Joan Violet Robinson
More substantially, I disagree that our technological capability is currently sufficient. Maybe once we have universal molecular assemblers. Of course on the grand scale there will be competition over black hole orbiting real estate, because the energy for work has to come from somewhere.
The problem here is more a lack of strong mechanisms to set and enforce standards along with a host of deeply rooted cultural norms (especially the dowry system) that are easily exploited.
Churchill was distinctly batshit as well so you can't really actually cite him as a single reliable source.
That's simply balderdash. Churchill was not only a brilliant politician, but an extremely witty and accomplished writer, thinker, and artist. He even received the Nobel prize ... for literature[1].
If you'd like to explain why you think he is "batshit" I'd love to hear it.
A better argument is that free trade based on voluntary transactions is the only just and moral system of allocating resources, in theory and in practice.
Yes, it is true that India has a culture of corruption and bribery. I wonder if part of these girls' wages are taken for the housing or "company store" type things. There were some stories recently about workers in Dubai who are just lied to about the level of pay and then held hostage with visa or passport paperwork. If it is that type of case here, then it is fraud and the exploitation is due to the faulty legal system, lack of enforcement, culture of misogyny, etc.
I don't agree at all with the idea that wage labor by itself is exploitative. Basically the error with Marxist exploitation theory is that it ignores the concept of time preference. Wage laborers with a higher time preference prefer present goods in the form of wages to the process of saving and deferring some of the present enjoyment and then taking up their own entrepreneurial venture. Of course, the state by erecting barriers to entry and other distortions exacerbate the problem.
Churchill and the likes are not exactly neutral observers with no interest in preserving the status quo by any means possible, starting with intellectual dishonesty.
About your second line, I think that the biggest problem about capitalism and developing/underdeveloped countries is that capitalism doesn't break the existing power structures, and, worse, it may reinforce them. There, capitalism is (even) less of a sea of oportunities and more of a new source of oppression mechanisms. The vicious circle associated with poverty isn't any good for people from the lower strata.
It seems to me that what is required here is a deep change of Indian society. Women seem to compete for men with money, which is absurd. Moreover, there is this "caste" thing which, frankly, sounds like feudalism from 1000 years ago.
In most of the western world, adolescent males compete for women with their charm, looks, etc... and also the other way around. Flirting is cool. No caste system.
How do you change an ancient country's attitude towards women? I don't think you can.
Traditions can be much more powerful than laws.
Capitalism, in India, is simply one more tool used by the higher castes in order to give strength to some deeply rooted traditions which are totally disconnected from the 21st century Planet Earth.
I'm not advocating cultural relativism; the reality described in this article sounds really shitty, but it is usually instructive to go deeper and ask why things are this way among poor people in India. With sexual attraction being one of the most powerful drives and varying socioeconomic conditions in the world, it stands to reason that different places will have wildly differing customs. These change over generations, as the conditions that formed them change. For instance, an undersupply of men in the wake of a deadly war could be one force which vastly increases the sexual market value of men, and causes customs like the ones described in this article.
Look at China if you want to see a third way this can play out, where the roles are reversed.
Say what?
Multinational garment companies like Adidas, Nike, Puma etc. should have stricter vigilance towards exploitation of employees. Young girls are prone towards exploitation and they are willing to undergo this as they are desperate for money.
And, blame parents too!
It really bugs me when reporters use inconsistent units to exaggerate a point. Yes, the pay difference is horrible, but it sounds almost as bad when you say $25.20 per month, and that is a less misleading way to describe it.
They cut those costs somewhere.
I think companies like Abercrombie & Fitch are feeling the hurt as a result of this.
I'm sure there are ways of making a point to companies on both the long and short tail of fashion/clothing, though.
Update: I tried to search for a couple of minutes for more responsible brands, apparently New Balance makes some of their shoes in the US: http://www.zappos.com/search/made+in+usa/filter/productTypeF...
If a no name brand starts to make quality t-shirts, no one will know about it, and no shops will stock it, because the margins will be too low and the marketing will have too little budget.
If it takes $1 to make a shitty $15 shirt, and $15 to make a proper shirt, what will you charge for the proper quality shirt? How will you market it?
The end result is that they're marketed as super high quality only available for the sort of person that can afford to spend $100 on a basic shirt, just to compensate for the decreased margin and decreased demand.
The solution would have to be that these kinds of brands need to be ran by charities, with such low margins that no one gets rich of it. You need someone to splurge a couple million to buy a factory in India, and then increase wages and conditions until you make 0 profit.
Is it true that the only way to run capitalism humanely, is to have capitalists surrender their money?
If we would force India to also enforce those conditions, all we would do is make their factories unattractive, and business would move to another country.
Solving that, would perhaps require legislation to ban clothing (et al.) companies from using offshore factories that are not under close scrutiny of our own government. But perhaps that will just make our brands like H&M unattractive to more liberal countries like the U.S.
> But I also imagine that refusing to buy such goods would do no good to said children. You are assuming children are getting paid. they are not most of the time.
The fault lies not in reducing costs per se. Rather, it lies in reducing costs in an inhuman, inhumane, stupid and mean fashion: by abusing weaker people rather than by creating smarter solutions. In the long term, the latter will win. However, that does not help those poor souls caught in the former trap.
Lower costs are a noble objective. Lower costs through any means, however, are an abomination.
Agreed.
People have the causation backwards. Lower prices stem from lower costs which come from use of less resources (natural or productive) which means that there is more produced stuff out there. Increasing costs is the best way to increase prices and induce smaller supplies of produced goods.
She started it because she realised that in the UK marketplace it was very hard to buy underwear that didn't come from sweat-shops, even if you were prepared to spend a bit (or a lot) more. So these are made here in the UK, by disadvantaged women who get to learn a skill and take home some pay.
It's more along the lines of living your entire life without locking your doors, and then, one day getting burgled, and thereafter making a point to lock your doors when you leave.
Or getting mugged at night, and not walking down that dark street anymore.
Perhaps it's a good thing that I don't just automatically take things at face value; I'll admit to having listened with rapt attention to Mike Daisey's performance on NPR - he's really quite talented - maybe there was a positive takeway, Mike Daisey was like a vaccine, I'm now more resistant to false reporting.
Why is this tripe being upvoted here on HN? You might as well have posted something directly from Rush Limbaugh's blog (or website, or whatever he has). It's crap.