Some years ago Paul Krugman wrote a pithy little piece singing the praises of international capitalism.
The lofty moral tone of the opponents of globalization is possible only because they have chosen not to think their position through. While fat-cat capitalists might benefit from globalization, the biggest beneficiaries are, yes, Third World workers.
Compare to the wicked Bill Warren (New Left Review 1973):
empirical observations suggest that the prospects for successful capitalist economic development (implying industrialization) of a significant number of major underdeveloped countries are quite good…substantial progress in capitalist industrialization has already been achieved…the period since the Second World War has been marked by a major upsurge in capitalist social relations and productive forces (especially industrialization) in the Third World…in so far as there are obstacles to this development, they originate not in current imperialist-Third World relationships, but almost entirely from the internal contradictions of the Third World itself
These glosses might be qualified, re-worked, railed against. But here is an anecdote.
Yesterday I corresponded with a co-author on the East coast regarding a project on the economic geography of Palestine. I sent him an image file showing a finely-grained census of Jewish settlement in the 1920s taken, not by the British authorities, but by the Palestine Zionist Executive.
Today, in a remarkable transubstantiation, I find in my email a tidy spreadsheet containing all the data. The congealed, data-entry labor of someone in Ahmedabad.
