‘Sell yourself for a slave-wage or starve.’

This is how the sweatshop debate is pitched to you—as an absurd false choice made to seem like common sense.

Econ models, ethics panels, and policy briefs all begin from this binary, as if nothing came before it. Centuries of enclosures, debt peonage, and bans on ‘self-sufficiency’ forcing people into wage hunger—this is all just background noise, never considered.

First come all the stock excuses that try to make the choice seem inevitable:

• ‘Better than begging’ (after we outlawed self-sufficiency/vagrancy).
• ‘Labor laws kill jobs’ (the jobs they threaten are those that survive by keeping you silent and disposable).
• ‘Low skills’ (told to the same people running dense, multi-crop polycultures that outyield most industrial farms).
• ‘Capital scarcity’ (capital isn’t scarce—it’s locked behind tariff/IP walls and export-credit pipelines open only to entrenched cartels).
• ‘Foreign investment is lifting them’ (money that buys legislators and decades-long tax abatements before it funds a single wage. Locals inherit nothing—factories arrive cushioned by subsidies/cash-incentives, drain profits through transfer-pricing/royalty fees, then bolt).

Development economists still bless these excuses. Arthur Lewis’ (Nobel-crowned) ‘dual-sector’ model literally casted rural labor as an ‘endless reserve army,’ good for nothing except sub-subsistence factory pay. Industrial profit, not pay, is meant to fund growth. A black, progressive, anti-colonial(!) economist branded slavery as a developmental virtue.

And then come all the ’empowerment’ and ‘ethical sourcing’ slogans that soothe consumer guilt at zero inconvenience. Corporate PR teams pipe in soft-focus videos of grateful slaves and boardrooms applaud their own pathetic ‘impact reports.’

Economists call this progress, the media calls it hope, and the worker is told to thank the boot pressing on her neck.

The question is never ‘Can Nike or Shein raise wages by just a little?’ This concedes that millions must either rent themselves out on any terms—or starve.

The prior question is—who built this fucking prison to begin with?

Why are wages everywhere driven to the bare subsistence margin? Why the fuck are these families all landless, and forced to keep begging? Because violent evictions for export plantations, crop-levy debts, and policy raids on unions stripped workers of every other way to eat.

This is why children in Dhaka queue for 12-hour shifts—the 1982 Land Acquisition Act expropriated their families’ land via cash-crop foreclosure and ‘river-erosion’ claims. Export-zone statutes then empowered police to jail the parents who organized or threatened an export license.

Vietnam’s IMF-era ‘relief’ demanded cuts to every extension service, seed bank and price-support that anchored rice farming since independence. The price of urea tripled in five years; procurement prices were floated; and rural credit for small farmers was choked off. Families that once comfortably subsisted on one or two bighas of paddy were now priced out of their land, food, and fuel. Climate change also eroded their only fallback—the creeping saltwater intrusion in the Ganges Delta pushed farmers off paddies and further inland, directly into factory queues.

By 1990 roughly two million peasants had been reduced to dire fucking wretchedness as either sharecroppers or migrants, precisely as the first export-processing zones at Savar & Chittagong emerged. Zoning authority then shifted to army officers who locked the zones into union-free enclaves for corporations.

This is the old, timeless colonial model—seize land, outlaw self-provision, and impose cash levies payable only by selling your skin at a slave-wage (the hut tax in Zambia, pass laws in South Africa, head taxes in Kenya). The lash of hunger marched every slave to the factory, mine, and plantation; and the colonizers called this ‘progress’ for the ‘idle peasants’ now ‘blessed’ with wages.

Fence off the commons, tax the little that people earn, and the choice narrows to starvation or servitude. It forces capital and labour to the cheapest surviving edge—and when that edge is exhausted, rent hunts the new extractive frontier in ‘design’ patents, retail trademarks, and import markups. This is the pivot from labor-intensive plantations to fast-fashion logos—it’s a different arena, but the same extractive leash.

We dispossess, displace, deregulate, and then they call the sweatshop a lifeline.

The margin of cultivation—where a family could once live by right of labor—is everywhere fenced, taxed in advance by speculative holding costs, or poisoned by prior extraction.

Reclaim the commons, and their dignity returns.

Give land back to those who till it, repudiate their debt, free unions—and no more slave bargains.

A real, locally managed commons—like the pre-NAFTA Mexican ejido—would ignite real growth as workers reinvest the land’s rent in seed banks, small-tool lending, and community funds.

Neighbors would meet as coequals, standing on ground everyone stewards and no one hoards.