The liberation of South Africa is instructive. The present isolation of Burma must continue until the military tyrants there crack. The list could continue but the point is already made. It is not the role of the North to raise real wages directly in the South. But it can be our role, as Northern progressives, to support those struggling for better conditions and to weaken those who stand in the way.
Revolutionary struggle is the exception.
This also happened in Japan years before. Something similar may begin to happen in China, which has the potential for either the best or the worst of outcomes. These countries are post-revolutionary in important respects. In most of new industrial world, equalizing revolutions never happened and are not in prospect. And so the advance of evolutionary democracy and with it unionization and the modernization of both the state and the market must accompany industrial growth.