Page 16 - Culture Society and Economy

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BRINGING THE ECONOMY BACK IN

issue. Now, to the surprise of many, the effect is much broader. ‘Distant
sites’ are suddenly alive with productive economic activity, receiving
prodigious amounts of western investment as well as investment from
each other and exporting vast quantities of goods and services to each
other as well as to the West. At first it was thought that this global exten-
sion of the division of labor and corresponding global extension of the
market represented simply the transfer of relatively low-end (low-skill
and low-paying) manufacturing jobs to the developing world – especially
to China, Malaysia and India. The high-end and high-paying service jobs
would remain in the West which would in fact allow as many of the fruits
of this new international division of labor to be imported and consumed
at will by the West. The Western standard of living would be preserved.
The Western cost of living would remain low. This immense productivity
of the East of a mass of cheap but high quality manufactured goods
would make this possible for the West.
Of late, however, this has turned out to be not quite so simple. For
report after report indicates that the very high-level service jobs which
were supposed to remain in the West – the treasured ‘symbolic analysts’
themselves – now are being shifted overseas in significant and growing
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numbers. The layoff of relatively highly-paid service-sector employees
in the United States (computer programmers, financial analysts, engi-
neers) who are then required to train the Asian employees to whom their
jobs have been outsourced, is only the latest manifestation of the new
realities of the international division of labor. If, as reported in the
American press, an American Ph.D earns $80,000 per annum while an
Indian earns $12,000, then the economic consequences of such dispari-
ties speak for themselves. How long this will continue in the United
States without an enormous political and economic backlash remains to
be seen.
This process is impacting on the job security and life chances of broad
strata of middle and upper middle-class professionals in a most profound
manner. These groups are becoming more and more skeptical and alien-
ated from globalization in its current form. The awakening of these hith-
erto complaisant social strata to free trade presents a golden opportunity
to the anti-globalization movement, if they will but grasp it. This is the
opportunity of moving the movement into the mainstream of public life
from its present position of being a large but still marginal activity of the
Left. But this opportunity cannot be grasped from within the dominant
mindset of the existing anti-globalization movement. Software engineers
and financial analysts whose jobs flee to Asia are not going to be mobi-
lized by window smashing. Feasible economic alternatives will be the

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