Reddit reviews The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia

In most of the world this has been the case in the last few decades yes, real incomes tend to increase over time (not sure if the trend is reversed anywhere) - some publications such as Monthly Review have questioned this idea and argued that much of the world is getting poorer but i won't get into them as i don't know how strong their case is. What i'll focus on pointing out instead is that we have to be very careful not to take GDP-per-capita and median income statistics at face value and lose sight of the concrete relationships the data is abstracting away from and lose sight of the bigger picture.

For example: Many economists correctly point out that, if sweatshops that are prevalent in many regions of Asia and Africa were removed, the median income of the workers living there would fall as they would lose their jobs and the only alternative is even worse activities. However, simply presenting the data like this gives the false impression that the people in Southeastern Asia were already poor and sweatshops came out of nowhere and gave an entirely new option to them (as if they were a boon or something), which is simply not the case: The truth is that previously existing stable economic arrangements were brutally smashed by political forces over time in order to create a mass of dispossessed that can act as cheap labor, then sweatshops entered the field presenting themselves as the only available option in order to exploit that cheap labor. The economic, political and sociological externalities of sweatshop labor prevent any decent non-sweatshop alternative from propping up, maintaining the condition of subjection to horrible exploitation under untenable conditions perpetual. And while their incomes may be rising, their lives become more and more insecure and precarious the more they work for sweatshops.

Another example: In The Moral Economy of The Peasant, Yale profesor of anthropology James C. Scott gives a great analysis of how peasant relationships work in Southeastern Asia and what have been the effects of breaking up those relationships in order to introduce growth-centered practices and market-based economies. Peasant communities are predicated on the fact that the worst case scenario is starvation, so they build complex webs of mutual-aid and reliability that aim to be stable and keep everyone alive. The attempts to introduce competition, profit maximization and "growth for the sake of growth" in these communities has eroded this base of mutual-aid and while it has caused real incomes to rise it also introduce most of the population to huge insecurities and created large poverty and exclusion where it didn't previously exist as well as increase social conflict; generally making people's lives more precarious, dangerous and insecure - starvation has indeed become a real risk now. Would this be considered a rise in living standards? If the only thing we look at is GDP growth then sure we would think so, but in reality it makes the peasants way worse off (and hence why they strongly resist the introduction of market-based insecurities into their communities).

In other words: The existence of sweatshops and of capitalist "growth" has technically increased real incomes over time, yes. Does this mean that the conditions that give birth to sweatshops and the resulting sweatshops themselves have translated into better living standards? Certainly not. Trying to legitimize sweatshop exploitation by appealing to GDP growth or real income growth and arguing that sweatshops are the only alternative with out putting the information in it's proper historical context is a terrible, disingenuous defense of the brutal exploitation of millions of people; and the sycophants who engage in this shitty discourse (and Jesus there are many, every single Neoliberal think-thank has dozens of articles praising sweatshops) should be fucking ashamed of themselves.

And this is not true just of sweatshops. This is true of "growth" and "income" just about anywhere, not just where sweatshops are present.

I apologize for the long-text but here is a tl;dr:

• Rising income and GDP growth is not necessarily the same thing as better living standards.

the best authority on peastant peastant revolt is the ever brillant James C. Scott. His answer would be neither.

There's a book I enjoyed titled "The Moral Economy of the Peasant" by James Scott; it takes a look at subsistence agriculture, and the completely different incentive structure (that of risk minimization) it induces than other varieties of work. This leads to a lot of different interesting things. One of them is a community ethic wherein you share with your neighbors so as to insure yourself against future disaster. In other words, if I help my neighbor today when he needs it then he'll help me tomorrow when I do. A subsistence farmer's biggest concern is the risk of uncontrollable factors leading to his inability to feed himself and his family, so he'll do as much as possible to protect against this contingency.

Scott actually makes the argument that a lot of the social functions (like religiosity) you see in subsistence farming villages can actually be understood as various sorts of insurance against the possibility of disaster. So its pretty easy to see why religion CAN be about loving your neighbors, at least, and help induce good survival characteristics (a strong norm of "helping neighbors" means when you fall on hard times, your neighbors will help you out). Both of our narratives can be true. Religion can be about helping others (to protect against disaster) and social control (to unite around warlords or whatever).

>Property is the coercive exclusion of others from entering certain areas or touching certain objects. That's what it is.

Aside from alll those times when it isn't.

Not enough words to make all the citations: more and more and more and more and more

Again with this stupid meme bullshit. Sorry, but to most people morality isn't an economic utility function, it's about the cultivation of social virtue. If the liberal tradition is so great for the global poor, then maybe their political and intellectual forebears shouldn't have created the global poor by destroying their traditional communities and immiserating them through colonialism and authoritarian brutality so that 21st century liberals could wipe their own memories and then pretend to be saviors selling them the cure.