Re: Roemer vs. Marx in Vietnam?

["Justin Schwartz" <jkschw@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> From: "Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>
> Reply-To: pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> To: "'pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'" <pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: [PEN-L:23537] Roemer vs. Marx in Vietnam?
> Date: Tue, 5 Mar 2002 10:05:29 -0800
>
> [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.....

Roemer is on record as saying that many agricultural laborers found factory
labor liberating. I criticized him for being unhistorical; he ignores the
savage breaking of the new working class to time and labor disciplibe by
poor laws and the like. That said, it may be true in some cases today.

> 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.

There's a bitter joke that in a labor market the only thing that is worse
than being exploited is not being exploited . . . .

>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.

Well, coercion is not incompatible with voluntariness. You can be forced to
do what you'd do anyway. Coercion is objective and external. Voluntariness
refers to a state of mind.

> 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.

That is exactly correct.

jks

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