[lbo-talk] cruise "blog"

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Fri Aug 3 07:11:55 PDT 2007


Doug:

Reports from Alaska:

<http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070813/henwood>

[WS:] Hey, Doug, I like your line about God and dollar being intimate friends since the Puritans set their foot on this side of the pond, but then you strike a decidedly puritanical tone yourself when you talk about "exploited" Indonesian workers on the ship. Emigrant laborers are the lucky ones, not the exploited ones - they leave voluntarily and quite eagerly to earn better wages than they would have at home.

What is wrong with that? Nobody would be bitching if these were, say, IT workers coming to Silicon Valley or Boston, but suddenly it becomes a problem when these are service workers on a cruise ship. It smells like the puritanical hatred of pleasure and luxury masked as a critique of global capitalism.

Wojtek



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