>Awesome article.
>
>And, an excellent example of something I've grown increasingly
>interested in: the way self-styled neo-businesses mask timeworn forms
>of labor exploitation with a veil of pleasant phrases and egalitarian
>imagery.
>
>
>It brings to mind something Leo Panitch said during your 10/4/08
>interview with him and Sam Gindon (paraphrasing): 'one of the
>paradoxes of the mainstream left is its insistence that capitalism can
>be made to work for the poor. '
>
>See -- <http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html#081004>
>
>
>A related paradox might be people's belief that the urge to maximize
>profit via exploitation can be permanently mitigated by a company
>having a 'social conscience'.
yup. yup. it's related to your vent about there being no humans on the covers of books about the environment, ecology, etc. You'll get massive amounts of information, gloriously described in WF's supermarket pastoral, but it's not often you'll get any descriptions about how the workers are treated. And if you do, you'll get information about Costa Rican coffee workers, not people toiling in a chicken factory in S. Carolina or the "contract" workers sporting blue bandaids at an industrial organic factory farm.
because, really, deep down, most people utterly believe that you are toiling in a Tyson chicken factory at minimum wage because you earned your place there QED.
Recently, I read someone from the Philippines spewing about how she was returning home to the US and how she'd taken a class on capitalistic (always a sign that someone is klewless, that word) exploitation. That class enraged her because she realized that, back home, her feminist sisters and she didn't realize how much blood they had on their hands, how their lifestyles were made possible by women dying in 3rd World countries.
The lens is never turned on capitalist exploitation in the u.s. Exploitation is never learned as something that happens to _you_ -- leastwise in these introductory courses taught by women's studies professors anyway. (What I mean is, there are debates within marxism about whether the exploitation of a software developer or even Tyson chicken factory worker is even exploitation. But this is not what usually happens in such courses; they're not typically taught by serious marxists who would be familiar enough with the field to even begin to explore the issues)
It's this the really obnoxious tendency for some people to cling to the notion that their success is completely their own, completely the result of their own hard work and effort. If you need to believe that, you also need to believe the also-rans ultimately get their just desserts as well. So, you safely project exploitation on to distant others, who it happens to, over there, far away -- seen in a misty haze, the deserving victims deemed worthy of pity. And as such, the pity needs action! Deny deny deny and make sure to deny everyone else too! Drop out, stop participating in the exploitation of Peruvian textile workers! Get some sheep and make your own yarn and then your own hairshirt for the perpetual guilt.
/rant