Offshoring Our Way to Utopia?

The topic of offshoring has become quite hot lately. Offshoring means to shift the labor process related to either manufacturing or service provision from a domestic site to a site in a foreign country. I first encountered offshoring in my twenties when I was in the import-export and clothing manufacturing (a small scale sweatshop, but a sweatshop nevertheless) business in Portland, Oregon. My partner and I contracted with businesses in West Africa to produce some items and I personally had two agents working for me in Abidjan, Ivory Coast buying items for resale in the U.S.A., Canada, and Britain. These are both examples of offshoring, although the former example is the type most often focused upon -- manufacturing goods in a foreign locale for a domestically based firm. However, from my standpoint no distinction between these different types of offshoring was necessary -- these were simply means for using people to make money and sometimes the people who could make me the most money were in places far from my home base. After all, when you're trying to make money (especially if you take profit maximization seriously, either because you studied economics or just because of your own internal wiring), then it doesn't matter what country you do things in, only the results are important.

Indeed, offshoring has been an important process for businesses for centuries. It was important in slavery long before capitalism became the dominant way of economic life in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe. U.S., U.K., and Euroland slavers subcontracted with "firms" on the West Coast of Africa, as well as other foreign entities, to acquire slaves and sometimes to directly produce or acquire commodities on the African continent or associated islands. Offshoring is a way of creating potable wealth, so to speak. Wealth generated by the labor of people in foreign lands is embodied in forms that can ultimately be captured by domestic based firms and individuals. This is the case today, as well. So why has it become a big deal in the media and around the watercooler?

Offshoring is hitting home to many "white collar" workers who now face the possibility of their jobs being offshored (often through a process that may be more clumsily described as offshore outsourcing). These are better educated and higher income individuals than the manufacturing workers who were the disposable parts being discarded in most previous iterations of the process. The media folk who think about what stories are worth writing about or disseminating feel a good deal closer to the former than the latter. After all, they, too, tend to wear white collars to work. So that's probably part of the reason it's talked about so much more these days.

I encountered this offshoring in another intimate way recently when my publisher offshore outsourced the printing of my book, Chinese Capitalism and the Modernist Vision to a printer in India. In the last stage of publication most of my contact was with this printer, not my editor (or anyone else at the publisher) in London. Increasingly, we live in a world where our relationship to firms based in one country are mediated through other firms (or individuals in subsidiaries) in another country altogether. When it works smoothly, one doesn't even notice.

Part of the reason it works smoothly a lot of the time is the availability of technological means for rapid communication across vast geographic space. We can even move huge amounts of data almost instantaneously (the human perception of the instant being what it is). This makes it possible to do all sorts of things at a geographic distance. Eventually we could be looking at technology that is close to the Star Trek's holographic reproductions, allowing humans in one location to interact in a virtual reality space with humans far distant in real spatial terms. What will all of this mean for economic and, more generally, social life? How will it change capitalism? Will these technological changes trigger (or contribute to the triggering of) changes in class processes, such that capitalism is displaced by some new (or old) class process?

Of course, these restructurings in the site of economic activity are not the only changes occurring in society. It is the gestalt of changes that will drive the way society "evolves" in future. Based on current trajectories, we may be on the road to some sort of cyborg future where communication is not even mediated by external devices but incorporated into our new and improved brains. The cell phone, pager, wirelessly enabled PDA may be unnecessary when these capabilities can be surgically implanted within the corpus of the homo sapien sapiens (or whatever we will be called once that is the case, perhaps homo technus). In that brave new world, perhaps the Marxian notion of a teleological advance to communism would have been achieved but on the basis of something like the Borg, rather than Marx's more ideal visions (mostly unwritten about) that might have more in common with the Paris Commune and more contemporary kibbutz structures than where we're actually headed. (Shrug)

I guess the point (if there is one in this particular blog entry) is that the direction things are going isn't necessarily planned, nor is it governed by humanist notions, by any concern for the freeing of human creativity and the cultivation of compassion, empathy, and other "higher" forms of human being, but are more likely linked to notions of efficiency, getting more output from a given level of inputs, where humans have become nothing more or less than inputs, either on the production/service side of the equation or the revenue side of the equation (nodes of sales -- the customer is not only not always right, but who the Hades cares about any individual customer in a mass market world).

As humans we have this capacity to think in fantastically creative ways, to plan things, to implement our plans, to connect each others abilities, even across time and space, but capitalism is pushing us to give up our individuality, our individual creativity and rebelliousness in favor of highly specialized machine-like cooperation and conformity controlled by centralized nodes, like the world of ants or bees. Is this de-evolution (from what makes us unique as humans) to something more like the ants and bees? Utopia as an ant farm where the ants have physically embedded iPods and cell phones?