If you want to map the trajectory of my medical career, you will need a large piece of paper, a pen, and a high tolerance for Brownian motion. It has been tortuous, albeit not quite to the point of varicosity.
Why, for instance, did I spend several months in 2023 working as a GP at a Qatari visa center in India? Mostly because my girlfriend at the time found a job listing that seemed to pay above market rate, and because I needed money for takeout. I am a simple creature, with even simpler needs: I require shelter, internet access, and enough disposable income to ensure a steady influx of complex carbohydrates and the various types of Vitamin B. For all practical purposes, this means biryani.
Why did a foreign branch of the Qatari immigration department require several doctors? Primarily, to process the enormous number of would-be Indian laborers who wished to take up jobs there. I would say they were 99% of the case load - low-skilled laborers working in construction, as domestic servants, as chauffeurs or truck drivers. There were the odd handful of students, or higher-skilled workers, but so few of them that I could still count them on my fingers even after several hundreds of hours of work.
Our job was to perform a quick medical examination and assess fitness for work. Odd chest sounds or a weird cough? Exclude tuberculosis. Weird rashes or bumps? The absolute last thing Qatari urban planners wanted was an outbreak of chickenpox or fungal infections tearing through a high-density labor dormitory. Could the applicant see and hear well enough to avoid being crushed by heavy machinery, or to avoid crushing others when operating heavy machinery? Were they carrying HIV? It was our job to exclude these possibilities before they got there in the first place. Otherwise, the government wasn't particularly picky - a warm body with mostly functional muscles and ligaments would suffice.
This required less cognitive effort than standard GP or Family Medicine. The causal arrow of the doctor-patient interaction was reversed. These people weren’t coming to us because they were sick and seeking healing; they were coming to us because they needed to prove they weren't sick enough to pose a public health hazard or suffer a catastrophic workplace failure.
We were able to provide some actual medical care. It's been several years, so I don't recall with confidence if the applicants were expected to pay for things, or if some or all of the expense was subsidized. But anti-tubercular meds, antifungal ointments and the like weren't that expensive. Worst case, if we identified something like a hernia, the poorest patients could still report to a government hospital for free treatment.
A rejection on medical grounds wasn't necessarily final. Plenty of applicants returned, after having sought treatment for whatever disqualified them the first time. It wasn't held against them.
While the workload was immense (there were a lot of patients to see, and not much time to see them given our quotas), I did regularly have the opportunity to chat with my patients when work was slow or while I was working on simple documentation. Some of that documentation included the kind of work they intended to do (we'd care more about poor vision for a person who had sought a job as a driver than we would for a sanitation worker), and I was initially quite curious about why they felt the need to become a migrant worker in the first place.
Then there was the fact that public perception in the West had soured on Qatari labor practices in the wake of the 2022 FIFA World Cup. Enormous numbers of migrant workers had been brought in to help build stadiums and infrastructure, and many had died.
Exact and reliable numbers are hard to find. The true number of deaths remains deeply contested. The Guardian reported that at least 6,500 South Asian migrant workers died in Qatar since the country was awarded the World Cup in 2010 - many were low-wage migrant workers, and a substantial share worked in construction and other physically demanding sectors exposed to extreme heat. However, this figure is disputed. Critics noted that the 6,500 figure refers to all deaths of migrant workers from Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, India, and Bangladesh regardless of cause, and that not all of those deaths were work-related or tied to World Cup projects.
Qatar's official position was far lower. Qatari authorities maintained there were three work-related deaths and 37 non-work-related deaths on World Cup-related projects within the Supreme Committee's scope. But in a striking on-camera admission, Hassan al-Thawadi, secretary general of Qatar's Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy, told a TV interviewer that there had been "between 400 and 500" migrant worker deaths connected to World Cup preparations over the preceding 12 years. His committee later walked the comment back, claiming it referred to nationwide work-related fatalities across all sectors. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International both called even the 400-500 figure a vast undercount.
It is worth pausing here, because the statistics are genuinely confusing in ways that I think matter. The 6,500 figure, as several researchers have noted, covers all-cause mortality for a very large working-age male population over twelve years - a group that would have a non-trivial background death rate even if they stayed home and did nothing dangerous. Some analyses, including ILO-linked work on Nepali migrants, have argued that overall mortality was not obviously higher than among comparable same-age Nepali men, though other research found marked heat-linked cardiovascular mortality among Nepali workers in Qatar. The Nepal report also (correctly) notes that the migrants go through medical screening, and are mostly young men in better health on average. They try to adjust for this, at least for age.
I raise this not to minimize the deaths - dying of heat exhaustion in a foreign country, far from your family, in service of a football tournament, is a genuine tragedy regardless of the comparison group - but because I think precision matters. "Qatar killed 6,500 workers" and "Qatar had elevated occupational mortality in difficult-to-quantify ways" are meaningfully different claims, and conflating them makes it harder to know what we should actually want to change.
I am unsure if there was increased scrutiny on the health of incoming workers to avoid future deaths, or if the work I was doing was already standard. I do not recall any formal or informal pressure from my employers to turn a blind eye to disqualifying conditions - that came from the workers themselves. I will get to that.
I already felt some degree of innate sympathy for the applicants. Were we really that different, them and I?
At that exact moment in my life, I was furiously studying for the exams that would allow me to move to the UK and work in the NHS. We were both engaged in geographic arbitrage. We were both looking at the map of the global economy, identifying zones of massive capital accumulation, and jumping through burning bureaucratic hoops to transport our human capital there to capture the wage premium. Nobody really calls an Indian doctor moving to the UK a "migrant worker," but that is exactly what I am right now. The difference between me and the guy applying to drive forklifts in Doha is quantitative, not qualitative.
I could well understand the reasons why someone might leave their friends and family behind, go to a distant land across an ocean and then work long hours in suboptimal conditions, but I wanted to hear that for myself.
As I expected, the main reason was the incredibly attractive pay. If I'm being honest, the main reason I moved to the UK was the money too. "Incredibly attractive?" I imagine you thinking, perhaps recalling that by First World standards their salary was grossly lacking. To the point of regular accusation that the Qataris and other Middle Eastern petrostates are exploitative, preying on their workers.
First World standards are not Third World standards.
This is where Western intuition about labor often misfires, stumbling into a sort of well-intentioned but suffocating paternalism. The argument generally goes: This job involves intense heat, long hours, and low pay relative to Western minimum wages. Therefore, it is inherently exploitative, and anyone taking it must be a victim of coercion or deception.
This completely ignores the economic principle of revealed preferences: the idea that you can tell what a person actually values by observing what they choose to do under constraint. Western pundits sit in climate-controlled pods and declare that nobody should ever have to work in forty-degree heat for $300 a month. But for someone whose alternative is working in forty-degree heat in Bihar for $30 a month with no social safety net, banning Qatari labor practices doesn't save them. It just destroys their highest expected-value option.
You cannot legislate away grinding poverty and resource constraints.
The economic case for Gulf migration from South Asia is almost embarrassingly strong when you actually look at it. India received roughly $120 billion in remittances in 2023, making it the world's largest recipient, with Gulf states still accounting for a very large share, though the RBI's own survey data show that advanced economies now contribute more than half of India's remittances. For certain origin states - Kerala being the clearest case, alongside Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu - remittance income is not a rounding error in household economics; it is the household economy. The man sending money home from Doha is participating in a system that has done more for South Asian poverty alleviation than most bilateral aid programs combined. This is not a defense of every condition under which that labor is extracted. It is simply a fact that seems consistently underweighted in Western discourse.
Consider the following gentleman: he had shown up seeking to clear the medical examination so that he could carry sacks of concrete under the sweltering heat of a desert sun. Out of curiosity, I asked him why he hadn't looked for work around his place of birth.
He looked at me, quite forlorn, and explained that there was no work to be had there. He hailed from a small village, had no particular educational qualifications, and the kinds of odd jobs and day labor he had once done had dried up long ago. I noted that he had already traveled a distance equivalent to half the breadth of Europe to even show up here on the other end of India in the first place, and can only trust his judgment that he would not have done this without good reason.
Another man comes to mind (it is not a coincidence that the majority of applicants were men). He was a would-be returnee - he had completed a several year tour of duty in Qatar itself, for as long as his visa allowed, and then returned because he was forced to, immediately seeking reassessment so he could head right back. He had worked as a truck driver, and now wanted to become a personal chauffeur instead.
He had been away for several years and had not returned a moment before he was compelled to. He had family: a wife and a young son, as well as elderly parents. All of them relied on him as their primary breadwinner. I asked him if he missed them. Of course he did. But love would not put food on the table. Love would not put his son into a decent school and ensure that he picked up the educational qualifications that would break the cycle. Love would not ensure his elderly and increasingly frail parents would get beyond-basic medical care and not have to till marginal soil at the tiny plot of land they farmed.
But the labor he did out of love and duty would. He told me that he videocalled them every night, and showed me that he kept a picture of his family on his phone. He had a physical copy close at hand, tucked behind the transparent case. It was bleached by the sun to the point of illegibility and half-covered by what I think was a small-denomination Riyal note.
He said this all in an incredibly matter-of-fact way. I felt my eyes tear up, and I looked away so he wouldn't notice. My eyes are already tearing up as I write this passage, the memories no less vivid for the passage of many years. Now, you are at the point where my screen is blurry because of the moisture. Fortunately, I am a digital native, and I can touch-type on a touchscreen reasonably well with my eyes closed nonetheless. Autocorrect and a future editing pass will fix any errors.
(Yes, I do almost all my writing on a phone. I prefer it that way.)
There. Now they're drying up, and I'm slightly embarrassed for being maudlin. I am rarely given to sentiment, and I hope you will forgive me for this momentary lapse.
I asked him how well the job paid. Well enough to be worth it, he told me. He quoted a figure that was not very far from my then monthly salary of INR 76,000 (about $820 today). Whatever he made there, I noted that I had made about the same while working as an actual doctor in India in earlier jobs (as I've said, this gig paid well, better than previous jobs I'd had and many I had later).
He expected a decent bump - personal drivers seemed to be paid slightly better than commercial operators. I do not know if he was being hired by a well-off individual directly or through an agency. Probably the latter, if I had to guess, less hassle that way.
I asked him if he had ever worked similar roles in India. He said he had. He had made a tenth the money, in conditions far worse than what he would face in Qatar. He, like many other people I interviewed, viewed the life you have the luxury of considering inhumane and unpalatable, and deemed it a strict improvement to the status quo. He was eager to be back. He was saddened that his son would continue growing up in his absence, but he was optimistic that the boy would understand why his father did what he had to do.
One of the reasons this struck me so hard then, as it continues to do now, is that my own father had done much the same. I will beat myself with a rusty stick before I claim he was an absentee dad, but he was busy, only able to give his kids less time than he would have liked because he was busy working himself ragged to ensure our material prosperity. I love him, and hope this man's son - now probably in middle school - will also understand. I do not have to go back more than a single generation before hitting ancestors who were also rural peasants, albeit with more and better land than could be found in an impoverished corner of Bihar.
By moving to the Middle East, he was engaged in arbitrage that allowed him to make a salary comparable to the doctor seeing him in India. I look at how much more I make after working in the NHS and see a similar bump.
I just have the luxury of capturing my wage premium inside a climate-controlled hospital, sleeping in a comfortable bed, and making enough money to fly home on holidays. I try to be grateful for the privilege. I try to give the hedonic treadmill a good kick when it has the temerity to make me feel too bad for myself.
There are many other reasons that people decry the Kafala system other than the perceived poor pay and working conditions. The illegal seizure of passports, employer permission required to switch jobs, accusations of physical abuse and violence are all well-documented, though the link to the 2020 Reuters article claims the system was overhauled and “effectively dismantled”.
I make no firm claims on actual frequency; I have seen nothing with my own two eyes. Nor do I want to exonerate the Qatari government from all accusation. What I will say is that "exploitation" is a word with a definition, and that definition requires something more than "a transaction that takes place under conditions of inequality." If we define exploitation as taking unfair advantage of vulnerability, we need a story about how the worker is made worse off relative to the alternative - and the workers I spoke with, consistently and across months, told me the opposite story. They are not passive victims of false consciousness. They are adults making difficult tradeoffs under difficult constraints, the same tradeoffs that educated Westerners make constantly but with much less margin for error and no safety net.
The people who know best still queued up for hours in the hopes of returning, and I am willing to respect them as rational actors following their incentives. I will not dictate to them what labor conditions they are allowed to consider acceptable while sitting on a comfy armchair.
I do not recall ever outright rejecting an applicant for a cause that couldn't be fixed, but even the occasional instances where I had to turn them away and ask them to come back after treatment hurt. Both of us - there was often bargaining and disappointment that cut me to the bone. I do not enjoy making people sad, even if my job occasionally demands that of me. I regret making them spend even more of their very limited money and time on followups and significant travel expenses, even if I was duty-bound to do so on occasion. We quit that job soon; you might find it ironic that we did so because of poor working conditions and not moral indignation or bad pay. I do, though said irony only strikes me now, in retrospect.
Returning to the man I spoke about, I found nothing of concern, and I would have been willing to look the other way for anything that did not threaten to end his life or immediately terminate his employment. I stamped the necessary seals on his digital application form, accepted his profuse thanks, and wished him well. I meant it. I continue meaning it.
(If you so please, please consider liking the article and subscribing to my Substack. I get no financial gain out of it at present, but it looks good and gives me bragging rights. Thank you.)
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
There's a saying that goes 'there, but for the grace of God I go'. It's that feeling that fills you of a blend of sympathy and empathy, that being slightly above the level of exploitation of others. In the end, you made the faceless, pitiless economic machine of a bizarre and Kafkaesque country a little less inhuman. You saw those faceless workers you'd never see again and made their lives a little better. A Western attitude would be to perform conscientious objection, but that would not be to the benefit of those people.
So if there is a God, I would that that your deeds in their favor are worth more than all the faith of liberal human rights put together. You did some good, with the means at your disposal. That's good enough. God doesn't demand more.
I am not known to be exceedingly humble, but even the atrophied organ responsible for those feelings is a tad bit overwhelmed by the high praise. Thank you. I do what I can, I'm a doctor for many reasons (including money, that's a big one) but I also genuinely do try to help.
It's rare that I have the opportunity to be more than a snarker at the latest liberal rattling our cages, so reading something heartfelt is a good change. Keep on doing what you're doing, man. Live in the best of all possible worlds.
Thank you. I genuinely did not lie about tearing up, I would be ashamed of a cheap rhetorical trick to gain sympathy. I am often caught in the position of seeing the worst misery the world can offer, and doing much less than I wish I could to alleviate it. I try my best.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There was a recent article in the CBC (I believe), talking about "modern slavery" in Canada's temporary foreign worker program. They interviewed a worker who talked about the poor conditions he was facing in the job, and how it had stayed that way for over a dozen separate trips. The author didn't seem to realize that something was pulling him back to those jobs after he left at the end of each previous term. Or rather, they had the term "slavery" floating around the article, and left the readers to reach their own conclusions.
Yet the persistence of this misuse indicates (at least to me) that there's something underlaying it other than just an inability to comprehend the scope of third world squalor.
If I had to guess, I would say it's not so much with the actual harm done the worker, but instead a discomfort with the idea of a westerner exercising power and control over a racially or ethnically-othered workforce. The journalist isn't looking at the worker and seeing Kunta Kinte from Roots; he's looking at the worker's boss and seeing Simon Legree, and backfilling everything else from there in horror.
More options
Context Copy link
I see that kind of attitude a lot and my personal impression is that it's one of the ways for the people on the left who are unable to ignore the negative externalities of uncontrolled immigration to express opposition to it in a way that preserves their "compassionate" self-image. See, the problem is not the heckin' enriching immigration we've been supporting, it's that evil capitalists perverted it into modern slavery.
I still find it strange that "immigrants are depressing wages for you, the [Insert Country Here] people" never caught on. Maybe it's too anti-capitalist for the Right, and too nationalist for the Left. "Taking Jobs" is close, but that's a more individualized look at it than I'm thinking.
From HWFO:
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is where Marx gets to stick is big hairy face in the door and yell "See! SEE! I fucking told you!", he would probably use those words exactly I think.
I remember my time breaking rocks in the hot sun, or in my case doing some fun child labor picking coffee cherries in 100% humidity/91 d*F for what worked out to be a dollar per 40 kilos, and I gotta say: the exploitation was there. Do not recommend.
Eventually, I got to crawl around in attics dragging wires around and what have you, making 20 dollars an hour (until i learned what the boss charged for my labor, after which I realized if I got 5 hours of work a week on my own, I would come out ahead over 40 hours with the boss. How's that for bullshit?), and the exploitation remained.
Now, I get to do the exploiting, get to crush humans in a big wine press until the juice runs clear, but even worse: I give my money to a guy, who gives it to a guy, who gives it to a firm, who runs the press by proxy by proxy by proxy, and there is the exploitation. I choose not to feel bad about it, because what am I supposed to do? Cry into my big pile of money? Would that help anyone, particularly?
Exploitation is inherent in the system we occupy. Pretending otherwise is the domain of weak hearted libs who want to believe it can be made kind, or cowardly cons who pretend that there is some sort of virtue in breaking your back but ooh ahhh ouch I have bone spurs it can't be me, or some third group that intersects both political tendencies that get off on the third hand sadism of it all and never imagine it might happen to them or their kids, closing their eyes to the facts that inevitably, the wheel will come back around.
Marx would let them starve on their tiny plot of land and declare victory, because nobody had gotten rich from their labor. Having no food is inherent in the system of reality, it's only by creating things that people can eat and have stuff and not be poor. Everyone is born as a poor, defenseless, property-less infant. Every moment you live is a battle against your body trying to eat things that don't want to be eaten, or eating itself if you can't put things in your stomach. It's only via economics that we advance beyond that, and it's only via the massive massive massive godlike success of capitalism that we've build so many privileges we've forgotten not only what poverty is like, but that it's the default state of humanity.
Who cares if someone else gets rich in the process of enriching you? Is jealousy and spite worth more than not being poor?
Read the post you're responding to before writing a response. /u/self_made_human debunked your point before you even made it, arguing that this is a good thing compared to the alternative, and all you did was make the original Marxist point and say "but it's a bad thing". We already know you think that. We also think you're wrong.
I don't think you properly comprehended my post, /u/self_made_human humans post, or Marx's posts (He definitely had the cursed and fiery soul of a post-er).
I did the thing the migrant laborers he is describing did! I made the choice to work for 'slave wages' etc etc etc so forth! I rationally decided it was better for me to be exploited in the first world than the third, given my value was gonna be extracted anyway I might as well be in the place it gets extracted to!
And also, Marx was super pro-industrialization! You are imagining some 11 trillion people murdered by communism chicago school Trotskyist propaganda bullshit, the dude himself thought that capitalism was up to that point the most important and powerful social technology humans had ever invented, he just thought "Hey, this system is going to produce alienation and exploitation as an externality of unleashing the productive forces of each individual guided by the market, which will inevitably destabilize the relationships of production much like the feudalistic system from which it sprung" and what do you fucking know, the thing that was obvious in retrospect but prophetic at the time keeps trying to happen when the technocrats get their hands slapped off the wheel by some populist mouthbreather.
Consider the way shit works without first imagining a just world or a historical narrative or the axiom derived idea that anyone deserves anything at all: It is inarguably the case that exploitation is built in to the system bones out, it just so happens to be that it is better than what came before.
Some day capitalism will get out competed and crushed by some other system of arranging who gets what for what, and the people of that better world will look at us like we look at the illiterate dirt grubbing serfs of past centuries, wondering how we could ever live like that, is the point.
It turns out that shit continued after the 90's after all. Fukuyama BTFO historically.
As a note for @MathWizard and yourself, you need to use @RandomUsername, not u/.
That links to a Reddit profile. One of the minor differences on this site.
I'll be honest, I just copy pasted and didn't want to summon you if you weren't already looking.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'll steelman this. If you prohibit slave-like conditions, the employer could just not hire anyone, but the incentives are against that. If the price curve is relatively flat, prohibiting this means that most of the workers will be hired in better conditions. It is of course possible to overdo this and demand so much that the employer really can't afford to keep most of his workers. But it's not inherently ludicrous to assume otherwise. It also isn't inherently ludicrous to think that employers will tell you they can't afford to treat the workers better when they actually can.
I agree, but the way we value things currently comes from the liberal idea of property rights, including property rights over yourself and your capacities. To make that prohibition, you would need to violate the concept that the owner owns his business free and clear and may choose as he likes, and that the worker owns their labor free and clear and may choose as he likes.
If you were to make that general prohibition, you would defacto live under a different system of relationships than we do now.
We already have laws against sweatshops, so this would not be a different system of relationships than we have now. It may be different than a hypoithetical libertarian system that is not being practiced, however.
We have a mixed system it's true, but over the bast 40 years it has become less and less mixed, and more and more market based. At will employment mass adoption/the elimination of the pension was the point at which we ticked over into a libertarian system IMO.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Maybe this is just a quibble about language then, but language carries with it smuggled implications and connotations that can be quite important. So quibble I will.
It's not exploitation if both people are profiting and fully informed and mutually consenting and no shenanigans are going on. Exploitation is when the Company Town charges 10x market value for food and services because it's a monopoly and there's literally nowhere else to buy your stuff and then takes it out of your wages until you have negative money and wish you'd never started the job. Exploitation is when an employer threatens (implicitly or explicitly) to turn their illegal immigrant workers over to the authorities if they complain, or when a Pimp threatens to beat the crap out of his prostitutes if they don't earn enough, or when children are forced to work in Diamond mines at literal gunpoint.
Exploitation is when someone wants to leave but can't, and the inability to leave allows their employer/captor to pay them less than market wage. Exploitation is things like indentured servitude and slavery. This is bad. People don't like this, people don't want this, and it makes the world a worse place.
Exploitation is not "the market has lots of labor but not a lot of capital, so people with capital can capture most of the profits from their joint ventures". If both parties are profiting and are glad for the presence of the other party, then neither is being exploited. If you call this exploitation then you in turn have to come to counterintuitive conclusions like "exploitation is sometimes good for the exploited people and we should encourage more of it". Instead, you should use a different word for it, that doesn't carry all the negative connotations and connections to actual bad exploitation.
Of course it's not as good as some hypothetical utopian ideal that we haven't yet discovered which distributes resources equitably while simultaneously being at least as productive as capitalism. But it's better than anything we've found so far, and it's better than literal exploitation. It deserves a better name.
If capital accumulates and accumulates and accumulates in your area and you stay just as immiserated does it not eventually become rational just to size it or at least not unreasonable ?
This just reeks of envy. Other person has a thing, I don't have the thing. I want the thing. I feel entitled to it. I am going to steal it, because I want it.
If someone is not harming you, is not unfairly manipulating the market to spite you, is not oppressing you, is not even interacting with you except voluntarily in positive sum ways then what do their possessions have to do with you at all? If your next door neighbor suddenly had 1000x as much wealth as they do now and then didn't tell you about it or share it, your life would not meaningfully change. It's not your business. It is unreasonable to throw away freedom and property rights to feed your envy and desire for things that other people have, simply because they have more than you.
This is not an absolute rule. I am willing, and in fact enthusiastic to accept exceptions to this in cases where they are manipulating the market via monopolies, especially in cases where they are snatching up non-renewable things like land, and their wealth actually does affect you. But the default state of mankind is that people are born without anything and have to struggle and labor and in some cases literally battle against nature in order to survive. It is only by the accumulation of capital and knowledge gathered generation after generation that society has enabled us to crawl out of the dirt and be slightly less immiserated.
If capital accumulates and accumulates in your area then a competitive market should cause wages to rise as demand for labor does. Which creates opportunities for you to gather more for yourself than you did before, even if it's not as much as the capitalists get. This is what we see: across the globe absolute poverty has plummeted regardless of what "inequality" is doing. Don't worry about how rich your neighbor is, just be the best you that you can be instead of trying to kill the golden goose.
What is there to do? It’s looking like people will not suffer inequality like will not despite its economic benefit to them it’s almost as if they would rather be worse off
Some people. But some people are happy with it and content with their lives. And some people are actively trying to migrate into areas with higher pay even if that surrounds them with ultra wealthy people. Different people are different and have different preferences.
It's one thing to say "I refuse to work for the ultra rich megacorp because it will enrich them more than it enriches me." It's another to say "No one is allowed to work for the ultra rich megacorp. Ultra rich megacorps are not allowed to exist and I will do everything in my power to destroy them and prevent people from working for them even if they want to." I'm not quite sure how much is due to a perceived prisoner's dilemma where the employees cause the rich to become richer which makes the leftist envious by their mere existence, and how much is a patronizing attempt to control the poor people "for their own good". It's probably a mix of both. But as usual the problem is the broad and sweeping attempts to micromanage all of society and force it into one legible idealized cookie cutter mold.
Let people make up their own minds. If you want to be poor (or are able to finagle yourself into a scenario where you are self employed or working for a small private business that doesn't enrich capitalists and make decent money at it), you do you. But don't try to impoverish billions of other people by forcing that decision on them. Let them decide for themselves.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think you gloss over quite a lot of nuance with this. Is it explotation to give my mentally deficient neighbor a piece of candy to mow my lawn and clean my pool? Is it exploitation to give a homeless alcoholic a bottle of vodka in exchange for him pulling out his tooth on camera? Is it made worse if I sell copies of the recording for a pretty penny? The consent aspect, to me, is muddied by the fact that there is a strong imbalance in power and leverage. There is a threat inherent in the subtext to the impovrished. Work yourself to the bone, or starve. Both people profit, one enough to fill his coffers, the other enough to keep them going through the next day of labor. A market wage does not make the claim that it is fair or humane.
I think the nuances you claim I'm glossing over are embedded into the term "market wage". I agree that consent alone is not sufficient, but would argue that. Rational and collective consent That is, if everyone consistently trades X for Y, and agrees that X is worth Y, and X is causally necessary for Y or at least strongly related to it, and there's no realistic way for someone who wants Y to get Y without X, then it's not exploitation for one more person to come along and also offer Y for X.
The problems with the examples you are offering below market rate for those exchanges. A rational actor can buy a piece of candy for a couple of cents, and can mow a lawn for quite a few dollars. The exploitation is that the mentally deficient neighbor could mow a lawn and clean a pool and earn much more money and buy much more candy if they knew better. The exploitation is the difference between what they could get if you didn't deceive them, and what they do get. Similar-ish with the homeless alcoholic. A bottle of vodka is like $10, a tooth is worth way more than $10, and the alcoholic is in an irrational position where they're not really considering the long term impact of their choices. The term "market wage" bakes into it the assumption that there are no better alternatives available (or they would determine the market wage). If you can get a job paying 100 pieces of candy (or the equivalent in cash) and don't know about it so choose a job paying 1 piece of candy, you are not getting paid the market rate. If you pull out a tooth for $10, you are not getting market rate (There isn't a well established market for teeth, but order of magnitude given how much it would cost to add a fake tooth via a dentist plus a bunch for pain and suffering, it'd probably be fair and non-exploitative at a few thousand dollars)
The rationality here isn't quite the issue though, so much as the reason why the people in your examples would accept an obviously bad offer. The offer is bad because better alternatives exist. In a world where candy did not exist but you invented candy for the first time and offered it exclusively to people who mow your lawn I would argue that this is NOT exploitative. Because people who want to try out candy and can't get it any other way could benefit from your invention. Similarly, in the case of migrant workers traveling to get a 10x pay raise, that 10x pay raise is not exploitative even if small in absolute terms because it's improving their lives and it's the best offer they have available. Rational people want 10x pay raises, even if it's not 100x. I think this might be the crux of the issue here.
-I believe that a trade offered by party A is exploitative if it offers/forces/coerces/deceives people into accepting a worse exchange rate compared to other offers available to them from parties other than A. Someone is worse off than if party A had never existed.
-You appear to be arguing that a trade offered by party A is exploitative if it is a worse exchange rate compared to other offers party A could make and still profit from.
That is, the question appears to be whether someone is obligated to be generous in their trades. Actually, even then there seems to be an asymmetry where you expect people in power to be generous in their trades but not the common people (otherwise you would have to argue that someone who buys a cheap lawnmower and uses it to earn 100x as much as the lawnmower costs is exploiting the store they bought it from unless they donate half of their pay). Similarly, hopefully you'd agree that in our world, someone getting paid $200/hr to mow a lawn is not being exploited. However in a world where lawnmowing talent was extremely rare and most lawnmowers got paid $1000/hr, then someone who didn't know this getting paid $200/hr would be exploited, despite it being the same absolute amount of money. The existence of alternatives modulates what is "fair" or "exploitative" because the opportunity cost of someone's labor and talents is whatever else they could be doing with them.
I would argue that it is greedy and not very nice to offer someone the bare minimum you can get away with. I do not think it is "exploitation", or should be illegal or ostracized or criticizes especially harshly. Again, I think the key distinction is "if you did not exist, would they be better or worse off?" We want people to make other people's lives better, even if only a little. it's better than none. And it's especially better than people who make other people's lives worse, which is evil and is what we should use the word "exploitation" for. Tarring people who make other people's lives only a little bit better but less than they could with the same brush as people who ruin lives just dilutes outrage and discourages progress. The more these fake exploiters there are, the more they have to compete with each other and the higher the market wage grows. We should encourage more of them, not discourage them.
By that reasoning I could argue that the sweatshop is in fact exploitation. If all the workers would decide at once that they refuse to work until they get better conditions, they would get it, so by your reasoning the sweatshop conditions are not market rate. It's just a collective action problem where nobody told the employees that they could get better wages if they did this. Making it illegal to run a sweatshop solves the collective action problem by forcing the employer to pay market rate.
Maybe I didn't word the part you quoted especially carefully, but I'm pretty sure I made it clear with the rest of my post. In general (not just in this case, not just in economics) the net value that party A provides to party B is
U_B(X_A) - U_B(X_!A)
Where U_B is the utility of party B, X_A is the world where A exists, and X_!A is the world where party A does not exist. Note that I'm not 100% confident on this being the end all be all of moral value (someone can be net negative through no fault of their own just by taking up space, or buying things someone else wanted to buy), but I think it's a good rule of thumb.
If the sweatshop did not exist, the employees would not get paid your collective action rate rate, they would get paid whatever they could get at the next best sweatshop.
I am tentatively in favor of voluntary collective bargaining, which is NOT the same as making it illegal to pay below a certain rate, and not the same thing as mandatory collective bargaining. But in order to maintain economic equilibrium it needs to be legal for the employers to exist and to reject offers made by this collective action. If a bunch of people come in and agree to work for $5 then change their minds and suddenly demand $10, and there are thousands of unemployed people willing to work for $5, it should be legal for the employer to fire the demanding employees and hire more $5 people. Making this illegal distorts the market and prevents people who want to work from being allowed to work.
But that ignores the explanation that someone who doesn't know that they can do better is being exploited. "Not knowing they could collectively bargain" is still not knowing better.
(And if the sweatshop did not exist and the employees knew better, they could collectively bargain at the next best sweatshop too.)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The exact point of the examples was that the people in these bad situations would accept the trade. The thing with the homeless guy was real. It happened on bumfights. And if that man had complained and insisted on a "fair market wage", they could have walked down a block and found someone else. If some above the board company bought teeth it would probably pay a lot. This isn't that, though. The market rate for homeless people pulling teeth isn't very high. On paper, the homeless guy could kick his addiction, get it together, and find a job. However, humans are not rational actors, and the common ailments that ail the permanently homeless are exceptionally difficult to solve. For many people the best option is a shitty one.
Yes, everyone wants a 10x pay raise. Yes, that pay raise comes with quality of life increases. You're speaking of a relative comparison though. In terms of absolutes, if you're still living a hard, shitty life while your employer profits off of your time, your health, your very ability enjoyment of life, to me it is unjust and exploitation.
It is my view that the common people are far more than generous in their trades while the largest players are the most stingy.
I believe that people would be a lot better off, and that your view would be a lot closer to accurate, if we lived in a world where most of the power was in the hands of many small and medium sized players. Because we really would be better off in everything but the short term if private equity and the like didn't exist. Sure, they provide a lot of jobs. They've also had a large hand in creating the current wreck that is the US economy and the cratered buying power of the us citizenry.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is one of many cases where Marxist Language and ordinary language hit friction. "Exploitation", in Marx, is a very precise concept that is supposed to be a technical term, different from ordinary use (iirc, the employer's capture of surplus-value, as in asdasd's examples). Of course, in practice, it becomes a case of using the scope of the technical term with the moral connotations of its ordinary use. I sympathize with the ornery back-to-the-text Marxists who also find this frustrating, but it's an inherently frustrating thing about arguing Marxist theory and the majority of "Marxists" seem to enjoy the motte-and-bailey games it enables. Honestly, I think Marx did, too, there's always a tension in his work between the serious economist and the firebrand pamphleteer.
This is a feature, not a bug, and one of my main gripes with leftist ideologies. I have no sympathy, because the entire point is the deceive people but get away with it under the guise of "not technically lying". It's a step beyond the media version where you use words which are literally true but heavily imply something false. Here they use words which are literally false but with made-up definitions that would be technically true if that's what those words actually meant. And they spend however many years or decades publishing articles that nobody reads establishing those definitions so they have something to point to when called out on their deception. But the deception is the point.
Fundamentally it's the same as calling your political opponents "child molesters" and then when called out you say that you've redefined the term "child molester" to mean whatever political point they hold. It's a difference in magnitude, being less egregious and much more carefully laundered in order to get away with it, but it's the same kind of rhetorical trickery, and deserves the same level of respect.
In your post, you just define "exploitation" to be what the standard capitalist thinks exploitation should mean. The fact that you have a different intuition than Marx does not mean deception is the point. The Marxists could (and did/do!) accuse capitalists of all the same critiques you are leveling at Marxists and their critiques are equally valid.
For example:
The obvious counterexample to this claim would be the Roman practice of molesting young boys. Both parties here profited from the exchange (the elder statesman receiving sexual gratification and the young boy receiving political tutelage), both entered into the practice willingly, but up-to-lizardman's-constant, every modern American considers this to be exploitation.
So it seems to me you are redefining the term exploitation away from its common-sense meaning into a technical one to perform the exact same motte-and-bailey you accuse the Marxists of.
This is a bad counterexample, because the problem in the Roman case is not the quantity of the exchange but in the kind. That is, the exchange of political tutelege for sexual gratification is fundamentally illegitimate. It should be possible to gain political tutelage without resorting to sexual favors, and anyone who refused to give sexual favors would be blocked out of the system. This is exploitative because it forces people to perform actions they shouldn't be forced to perform. If the ratio were 10x more favorable to the boys (they get 10x as much tutelege per sexual act) it would still be fundamentally exploitative. Sex work is demeaning and degrading and nobody should be forced to do it. Good faith political tutors should offer their services for non-sexual compensation.
Meanwhile, the exchange of labor for money is inherent to... reality. You can't create things without labor. Someone somewhere is going to have to labor. The labor in combination with the capital creates the wealth. Capitalists cannot offer money for not doing labor, they would immediately go bankrupt. You can make a quantitative argument (working for $5/hr is exploitative but working for $500/hr is not) but this is fundamentally different from saying exchanging labor for money is inherently exploitative. Unless the argument is that labor itself is inherently demeaning and degrading, in which case Marx just has an irreconcilable problem with reality itself, because if nobody labors then everyone just starves to death.
Exploitation comes from the monopolistic seizing of something that by all rights ought to be a public good and holding it hostage at distorted prices that wouldn't persist if it weren't being monopolized. Some Marxists would argue this is true of capitalists monopolizing capital, but this is a really stupid take and doesn't hold up to any scrutiny. Capital didn't spawn on the Earth, it was made by people. A good rule of thumb is "if this person had never been born, would everyone be better off, or worse off." In this case of political people forming networks and functionally ostracizing people who didn't go through their tutelege, the world where they didn't exist is one where young boys could grow up and not get molested and control politics themselves. They are better being exploited compared to being ostracized in a complicated system designed to force people to need tutors, but they're worse off than if this system didn't exist.
In the case of capital, if the capitalists didn't exist then neither would their capital. It's not like the world had this factory sitting there and the capitalist came along and snatched it up and prevented the workers from owning it themselves*. It wasn't there before the capitalist paid to have it built! If you want a world where the capitalists don't exist, literally pretend that they don't and go physically build your own factory, and then you'll own it. The fact that most people don't do this (or can't afford to do this) suggests that the capitalists are providing real value.
*In cases where this is untrue, like natural resources that people did snatch up and exclude others from, I agree this is exploitative and bad, which is why I am tentatively in favor of Georgism and think they should have to pay Land Value Taxes. Marxism is just an inferior proto-version of Georgism that fails to comprehend the distinction between land and capital.
This sounds entirely post-hoc justified to me. Every primeape understood the exchange of sex for favors long before homo sapiens invented money.
More options
Context Copy link
I_consent_I_consent_I_dont.jpg
Sex is labor, usually performed in exchange for vital resources (modern welfare states excepted). Even the feminists acknowledge this, though considering feminism is in a very literal sense a union of the dedicated sex-laborer gender, and a cartel interested in driving the price of that sex as high as possible (and your "shouldn't" happens to be one of their slogans), I'm not sure how much credit they deserve for pointing that out.
No it isn't, per the above.
No further comment.
Who "ought" decide that? You can say "the community", but there's nothing that backs that up outside of its members' capacity for violence in the service of reaching a consensus. Which is kind of just how socialism works.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
My sympathy is strictly with the textualist Marxists who also find this annoying when the kids around them are doing it. They do exist and I appreciate their grumpiness.
But it's inherent to the redefinition in the first place. Marx could have picked a different word to begin with. If Marx did not want to smuggle in all of the connotations of the word "exploitation" he would have used a different word for his technical definition. You can't just appropriate words that everyone already uses and means for something and then redefine them and then get annoyed when people keep using them for their original meaning.
This is some basic rationalist A Humans Guide to Words stuff. Socrates fell afoul of this thousands of years ago and get roasted by Diogenes for it. They should know better by now. They do know better. I don't for an instant believe that Marx did this by mistake. He wanted to expand the definition of exploitation in order to include people who normally wouldn't be included and thus smear them with the same brush. Any textual Marxist who is autistic enough to genuinely think that the new definition is what this word is supposed to mean is a victim of Marx himself, not the kids using it the way he intended.
I do think the word had a different valence in the 19th Century, more neutral - in part because of its entirely negative use by socialists. Think of the the way the word is used for the exploitation of mineral deposits, for instance (that is to say, "exploitation" had the connotation of treating people as resources, still mildly negative but not as inflammatory as today). For what it's worth, the robot agrees - but I may be wrong, this is just the vibe I get from old books. At the same time, Marx was very much a pamphleteer as well as economist, so I think it's partly both.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Thank you. You've made any argument I could have made, and with more detail and rigor than I could bring myself to muster right now. I've very appreciative.
More options
Context Copy link
I'm pretty sure I have at at least one point exploited my employers by collecting full wages in spite of decidedly poor performance.
Checkmate socialists.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This makes perfect sense. There are lots of reasons to not like the rich gulf states, taste (or lack thereof) is one of the big ones. Actual systematic real bad bait and switch exploitation of unwitting migrant workers from south asia (which while I am sure does happen more than zero times) is not one of them. Neither is the whole "their legal system is terrible, you can't do XYZ" where XYZ is something westerners think they have a god given right to, argument a good one.
I am always slightly alarmed when you're in agreement with me, but thank you nonetheless.
Goodness, am I that reliable a contrarian? I shall have to agree with you more often, if only to keep you on edge.
I appreciate the advance warning. I will reward you, not with a metaphorical cookie, but a real beer if I'm down at the Wharf: if you are not particularly Muslim, if I am there again, and if you care to. The main thing that struck me about CW, other than the cleanliness and wealth, was how cheap the booze was in London terms. I'm glad Finance people are stingy and very eager to engage in arbitrage, at least when it benefits me.
Ah, I am particularly Muslim when it comes to intoxicating liquors. Canary Wharf is a nice place overall, I wouldn't mind meeting up for some 0.0% when the time is right if you are around, but in the short term my attention is mostly focused on making as much money as possible from Trump's antics (they tend to generally be very profitable for us).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
AAQC’d
I have had conversations with illegals which certainly rhymed- their salaries are quite low by Texas standards, but they still make in a day what a good job paid them in a week in Oaxaca. Even when their employers treated them badly they considered it worth it; they regularly worked six twelves and asked for more hours, and few of their jobs were pleasant and fun. But Mexico- or for that matter honduras- are simply not as bad as India. I don’t say that as a value judgement, $1/day labor isn’t really a thing there. And as northern Mexico has industrialized there have been far fewer migrants from there; being a factory worker in Monterrey isn’t as good as being a factory worker in Dallas, but it beats being a ditch digger or roofer in Dallas.
Overall there’s a neglect of the ‘what’s the alternative’ problem. Like yes working in a sweatshop sucks, but subsistence farmers try it and then beg the places to expand so they can get their friends and family on. The world is not naturally ‘nice’ and plenty of people can improve their lot by quite a lot with it still sucking.
I’m not trying to make some grand point. Yes there are grand points to be made, but for most people migrating or working in sweatshops or whatever, it’s not a grand point, it’s an individual one.
The alternative to the sweatshop is that the sweatshop owner, who still wants employees, will hire people at higher wages and better conditions. If your demands are too unprofitable, the sweatshop owner will go out of business instead, but it's not automatically true that every demand for better conditions and pay is too unprofitable. And the history of sweatshops in the US shows that the claim that businesses will go out of business if they don't run sweatshops is often just not true.
(This does not apply to illegal aliens since the alternative is hiring natives at higher wages.)
More options
Context Copy link
This is essentially the issue with so much Western discourse where people assume that 'middle class person in a Western Democracy' is the natural water level for human existence since they don't have any real understanding of how shit the world is/was a country over or a century back.
More options
Context Copy link
Thank you. I'm glad we're in agreement.
People love to imagine Fabricated Options.
Agreed. In a society where sweatshops are the only way they can financially stay afloat, shutting down the sweatshops means a return to the fields for subsistence agriculture. Don't let the bad become the enemy of the even worse. If the people you are trying to save are telling you they're not in need of saving...
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link