Page 26 - Culture Society and Economy

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BRINGING THE ECONOMY BACK IN

A new cultivation of the self – cognitive or aesthetic – now becomes
possible on an unprecedented scale. At heart, this is a frivolous or, if you
will, a ‘ludic’ response to social process of historic proportions. The intel-
lectual, like the consumer, even though he or she may notice, draws no
conclusions from the fact that the goods consumed originate in a variety
of countries and places. In fact, today this variety is so great and the chain
of subcontracting so complex, that some furniture sold by the Swedish
company IKEA, for example, carry a label explaining that their products
are made from such a variety of sources that it becomes difficult to label
them as made in anywhere in particular! It is only when there is a sig-
nificant economic event in some other part of the world (recession in the
United States, for example), which impacts on others in hitherto far-away
places that this interdependence seeps into popular consciousness, usually
tendentiously and demagogically. Or, when jobs, as mentioned above,
and suppliers are outsourced abroad at the demand of national firms, on
the perfectly sound ground that failure to do so will mean a fatal loss of
global competitiveness. This process has gone so far that even military
supplies of the most sophisticated kind are sourced abroad by the Pentagon.
Militarists who, in a political and military context, gain renown as rabid
unilateralists then turn out to be equally vigorous multilateralists in the
economic sphere, when it comes to sourcing the highest quality military
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supplies most efficiently. The firm rebuffing of ‘Buy America’ campaigns
for military supplies has become standard policy in the Pentagon and
its private sector partners among the large defense contracting firms. 14
The market, it turns out, is as much a mechanism of compulsion as it
is of choice.
Global interdependence is therefore as much a reality in the military
production and consumption field as it is in economic life as a whole.
Global interdependence is not simply to be identified with free trade
although this is a clearly a vital aspect of it. This is not simply a matter
of large transnationals involved in inter-firm transactions. In practice, a
substantial number of small and medium-sized firms are subcontractors
to the transnationals and through this means are themselves deeply
enmeshed in this new sociality, where they are not direct exporters them-
selves. This is particularly true of high-skills firms in the producer ser-
vice sector as well as personal services firms. If their clients are not large
firms directly, they are employees of such firms or of others which sub-
contract to them. This is why, as shall be discussed more fully in a later
chapter, any program of economic ‘localization’ is doomed to fail. It is in
fact impossible today to draw a meaningful line between small and large
firms connected largely to a local or national economy in the old manner.

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