For all the misery they can engender, sweatshops at least offer a precarious escape from the poverty that is the developing world's greatest problem. The left must refute this idea, conceive a better economic policy that incorporates it, or risk devolving into a kind of ugly nativism. Until the left devises a better plan for lifting people in the Third World out of poverty, it won't be able to mount much of an ideological challenge to unfettered capitalism. A widespread loss of faith in socialism and other grandiose plans for economic reordering has robbed most left thinkers of any enthusiasm for that task. The question, routinely addressed to all critics, insists on a practicality inimical to utopianism.
Nothing is to be done.
Yet that does not mean nothing is to be thought or imagined or dreamed. If nothing can be done but dream, that brings us right back to the meaningless symbolic politics that he assails. The few sentences Frank devotes to solutions are less resigned, but equally amorphous. Frank's critics have called him on his refusal to offer answers to the problems he so deftly elucidates. In a Baffler debate between Frank and Jay Rosen over public journalism, Rosen asked what good comes of Frank's talent for satire and corruption-spotting in the absence of a positive objective.