Roemer vs. Marx in Vietnam?

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

[was: RE: [PEN-L:23532] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Wade vs Wolf]

Doug Henwood wrote:>>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).<<

Ian writes:
> This of course raises, again, the issue of Marx' vs. Roemer's
> views on exploitation.....

Is there a reserve army of labor (or something similar) in Vietnam? If there
isn't, then Roemer's case of people voluntarily choosing to be exploited may
apply. (Similar institutions might involve taxes imposed on peasants that
must be paid in cash, landholdings that are too small to allow the
production of a subsistence level of production, etc.)

But if there is, the structural coercion implicit in that reserve army would
imply that the choices aren't so voluntary, so that Marx's story applies.

Though I could be wrong, my understanding is that Roemer would have accepted
Marx's story (of capitalist exploitation as based on structural coercion)
when he developed his own story, but saw the structural coercion as
unnecessary to the existence of exploitation.

Jim Devine