So all these big developed countries, they have their own protection measures to face globalization. But a country like us, we are so naive, so innocent, so young. We are a developing country. We don’t have expertise in making this kind of regulation. Indonesia in the end becomes the target market. We have to open [our market], people come in. Some investments come in because our labor is very cheap. But in the end of the day, what happens? They’re selling their products here, mostly, and we don’t have any protections.
The quotation above is taken from one of the interviews I conducted with top managers at two companies in Indonesia. Interestingly, the opinion expressed by this interviewee, a representative of capital from the global South, is predicated on the persistence of the hierarchical world economy, a phenomenon that is recognized by all classes in the South, but which has recently been the subject of a renewed debate among Western scholars, including those on the left.
