Pynchon and global capital/corporations

[Doug Millison]

"jbor"
Personally speaking, if setting up a Nike factory and putting in McDonalds
franchises in Burkina Faso or Shaanxi province is going to help feed and
house the starving populations there then I'm all for it, no matter how many
placard-wavers or armchair "experts" it might offend.


I wouldn't mind it if they could do this without the sexual abuse, physical
and verbal harassment, and other forms of well-documented exploitation,
oppression, abuse, and violence that too often are part of this sort of
thing. Having lived in Shaanxi province for the better part of a year, and
having lived in China for nearly 2 years during one stay and having made
repeated visits and keeping up with quite a bit of the relevant literature
(plus I speak fluent Chinese), I can say that the workers are more likely to
be in prisons than anywhere else, since a huge part of China's manufacturing
for export uses prisoner labor.  Given China's practice of imprisoning
political opponents, practitioners of non-government-sponsored religions,
democracy activists, labor union activists, and other "undesireables",
accomodating transnational corporations in this way would seem well within
the grand but gory tradition of capitalism treating people as production
factors (dead Dora slaves, for example) that we find depicted so clearly in
Pynchon's work.

Somehow I don't think, given Pynchon's treatment of U.S. labor history in
Vineland, the picture he paints of laborers in Lord Lepton's metal works in
M&D, the slave labor that made the V-2 rocket possible in WWII (and GR), &
etc., that he favors the kinds of abusive and oppressive practices that in
fact are an integral part of globalization (a term that is of course
perfectly well-understood outside the domain of this forum -- it refers to
the growth and spread of transnational corporations across international
boundaries and into every geographic region, beyond the control of any
single national government or even, it turns out, any grouping of national
governments; just because certain people on Pynchon-L profess to find the
term difficult to define doesn't make it so). But of course I don't know
Pynchon's personal preferences, but can only read what he writes and draw
conclusions.

I also support the debt jubilee that calls for developed countries to
forgive developing world debt.  Fact is, most of those lenders will make out
like bandits even if they never get paid back -- they'll write their losses
off and receive tax breaks, and most of the loans were subsidized by
governments in the first place.  Not to mention the way that most of the
loans flowed back into the originating lender countries, too, in the form of
purchases of goods and services from the same multinational corporations
that run the banks and loaned the money in the first place. And if soemhow
they wind up having to take a loss for making bad loans to uncreditworthy
subjects in the first place, so be it, isn't that one of the hard lessons of
capitalism?