Friday, October 13, 2006
(11:52 AM) | Brad:
Market-Driven Benevolence
Are you sitting down? Are you ready for something that will completely jar you from your present evaluation of how the world works. Ready?China is planning to adopt a new law that seeks to crack down on sweatshops and protect workers’ rights by giving labor unions real power for the first time since it introduced market forces in the 1980’s.
The move, which underscores the government’s growing concern about the widening income gap and threats of social unrest, is setting off a battle with American and other foreign corporations that have lobbied against it by hinting that they may build fewer factories here.The proposed rules are being considered after the Chinese Communist Party endorsed a new doctrine that will put greater emphasis on tackling the severe side effects of the country’s remarkable growth.
[. . .]
Hoping to head off some of the rules, representatives of some American companies are waging an intense lobbying campaign to persuade the Chinese government to revise or abandon the proposed law.
Who could have anticipated that capitalist industry cares nothing about its workers -- that, in fact, the more voice its workers have, the more threatened capitalist industry becomes?
An hypothesis not shared by all: effecting changing things from the inside of any structure, when it is not built around changing the structure itself, i.e. by changing the terms by which we understand the function and status of said structure & our place/role in it, is no change at all. This is exactly what is being proposed by American & European industry here -- we'll insure Chinese workers are protected through the market-driven benevolence of our productivity and profitability. Or, in other words, allow us to continue what we do best, produce more objects, and all will be fine. Of course, the objects in this case are "workers." However, insofar as they/we (the workers) remain objects, they/we are not sensible agents of change: they/we can neither see any other possible way of attending to the system in which they/we exist, nor of providing a voice (from the wilderness, as it were) to reimagine a place in this system & thus the status of the system itself. Insofar as they/we are objects, we remain anonymous nodes whose interests are only attended to in the redemptive promise of profitability.
Now, of course, this "works," often quite well, precisely because the terms and evaluation of this system's (in this case, the market) function and productivity are defined retroactively, and thus within the situational parameters it sets for itself. It's not that such a system creates its own rules & thus cannot lose, à la Calvinball, but that the rules themselves are constructed in such a way that losing is (potentially, at least) another form of winning. In the eyes of the market, though, these Chinese workers are neither losers nor potential winners, because they in fact are not in fact playing at all. They are, rather, the (preferably) anonymous/voiceless means by which others play.
The question then becomes: do such workers who somehow invest in the market finally begin playing by the rules, and thus change his or her status as worker (because s/he can now win and/or lose)? Is this the horizon of our expectation and hope, that the market change from within so that the reach of its status-defining rules & evaluations expand? Such is, I suppose, the perspective of the proponents of globalism. Or, rather, is this status only truly changed by the reevaluation -- be it by politics, aesthetics, religion -- of the rules by which these evaluations of status are made in the first place?
