> Only in the BRIC countries, where a near-total lack of copyright
> enforcement, informal copying, developmental states, and feisty social
> movements have been beating back neoliberalism for decades.
Franco Barchiesi (pdf) <http://www.global-labour-university.org/fileadmin/GLU_conference_2011/papers/Franco_Barchiesi.pdf>
'[E]xperiments - followed with interest by a left eager to break free from the limitations of the "Washington consensus" - in the emerging economies of the southern hemisphere have hardly departed from a script that prioritizes economic activity and labor market participation. India"s "employment guarantees" projects and Brazil"s Bolsa Familia are the two most celebrated examples of this kind, consisting of conditional and limited public provisions such as periods of casual, underpaid work in the former case, cash payments for poor families sending children to school in the latter. Their rationale is to provide recipients with tools to replenish their human capital needed for labor market competition, but in practice they operate as active inducements towards precarious work. The compulsion to work for low-wages becomes then part of the solution to poverty, rather than part of the problem. The global economic elites and the international financial institutions have enthusiastically endorsed such projects as they combine political stability with limited budgetary and fiscal burdens for the upper classes.28 The left"s support, on the other hand, praises these interventions for improving uncritically accepted indicators defined by development technocrats on often quite conservative bases, like the two US dollars per day that for the World Bank are the threshold of poverty.29 Thus, in two of the most unequal societies in the world, progressive discourse ends up abetting interventions educating the poor to accept as the only viable, realistic choice the one between utter destitution and a level of pure biological reproduction adequate for labor market participation.'