Wade vs Wolf

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Wade vs Wolf
by Doug Henwood
05 March 2002 13:53 UTC

Sabri Oncu wrote:

>Let me ask you a direct question: Is it your point that
>capitalism is not as bad a system as some of us here think it is?

It's awful, but I guess it beats slavery or feudalism. But it's also
a deeply contradictory system, producing wealth and possibility
alongside poverty and oppression. A friend of mine who spent a few
years as a reporter in Vietnam interviewed Nike workers who told her
that they prefer their sweatshop jobs to what they would have been
doing otherwise - things like chasing rats in rice paddies (not much
fun to be a woman on the farm). Anticapitalists - and I'm one - often
overlook that sort of thing. And capitalism often produces great
booms, though PEN-Lers seem to prefer talking about busts. Which kind
of begs the question of just how capitalist China is, and what
lessons it might hold for other poor countries.

Doug

^^^^^^^^

CB: One big problem is that capitalism, since the beginning and continually ever since, doesn't seem to be able to produce great booms, without producing great "booms" , as in kapploooweee !! Viet Nam is an extraordinarily tragic example of the destructive scale of a capitalist "boom" as in Kaaaappppllooowweeee !!!

One obvious lesson that U.S. leftists don't seem to like to talk about with respect to China and that might hold for other poor countries might be have a Communist Party and Marxist economists as the political economic leadership of your country.