Hooray for sweatshops

THE PRIMARK group has come under attack from fair trade campaigners complaining about the fact that it sources its products from factories engaged in exploitative sweatshop labour.

Primark, whose Irish outlet is Penneys, stands accused of exploiting workers in the third world – as if all capitalist enterprise did not rely on such exploitation. Indeed, all wages are minimum wage: the fact that our lives are more comfortable in the west reflects a number of factors including two centuries of industrial struggles, economic growth and the movement away from primitive accumulation to more sophisticated forms of capitalism.

This apogee of middle class pseudo-politics is the nadir of public debate for two reasons:

First of all: shopping is not political. Political struggles exist at the point of production, not consumption. As westerners have no engagement with production in this case, their complaints are all focussed on the realm of consumption and amount to nothing more that a simplistic misunderstanding of political economy rooted in solipsism: “It’s all about meeeeeeeeeeee!” It is the politics of identity all over again. Boycotting a shop is not an act, it is a non-act.

Secondly, and much more importantly, to argue as they do is to demand a brake on economic development.

The fact is, even sweatshop labour represents some limited liberation. Take the following hypothetical example:

Is a young woman better off working in a garment factory with all of its attendant dangers or in a field for her father or husband? The answer is startlingly clear. In the field she is effectively the property of another person. In the factory she is an exploited labourer and, like all exploited labourers, in a position to change things. It is no coincidence that the rise of the labour movement in the west coincided precisely with the industrial revolution: the factory replaced the workshop and in doing so created the social conditions for popular revolt.

Even without any industrial struggle she is earning her own income and not dependent on the goodwill of her father or husband.

Development raises incomes. Raised incomes mean greater freedom. Political struggles are economic struggles and require socialisation. A peasant woman working in a field has no economic life and no social solidarities. The factory transforms this.

If westerners want to help people in the third world they can either go and help them in their political struggles – and not through NGOs – or at least have the decency to stop trying to halt the kind of industrial development that their own comfortable lifestyles depend on.

China’s rise to become the world’s most important exporter has been difficult and uneven but it is impossible to argue that it has not lifted literally millions of people out of grinding poverty.

In addition, with industrial and economic development so comes the development of working class political agency. Almost entirely unreported in the western press, China’s new capitalist class is being faced-down by an increasingly militant and unionised working class demanding greater access to the fruit of their labour. Just because we have become unproductive rentiers living off decadent non-investment doesn’t mean everyone else has. China’s capitalists will soon feel the full force of organised labour and, when they do, conditions will improve.

Gliberal demands to boycott this or that shop do nothing to improve working conditions. In fact, they have the opposite effect, forcing people not only out of work but also out of the social environment where production takes place and labour struggles begin. Their insistance on calling impoverished countries ‘the developing world’ is in striking contrast to the fact that what they are doing is stopping development.

The growth of manufacturing industry in the third world is a direct result of capitalism’s abandonment of productive investment at home, instead preferring the easy option of making ‘profit’ from non-productive activity such as the sale of legal titles and complex financial instruments. It is very much the case that our loss has been their gain and while it is inevitable that the spoils are shared unevenly this should not blind us to the fact that complex social and economic forces are at work. The people of the third world are strong individuals, often stronger than us, and capable of acts of solidarity and self-organisation.

Put simply: the feminist and Marxist argument is for more development, not less. As James Connolly wrote: “Our demands most moderate are, we only want the Earth.”