I’ve just been thinking about this recently. Remote work is getting quite common, if a job can be done remotely there is no reason it can’t be sent overseas. If you’ve read Marx you know that commercial capital does not add value, all it does is bring things from areas of low demand to those of higher demand to bring in profit.
What jobs would be left in the first world in this case? Service jobs. I’m skeptical on service jobs alone being enough to hold an economy together. They are low paying and largely serve those who make more than them. A major if not main portion of which are office workers. It seems like this will at least cause the unemployment rate to skyrocket if not collapse the economy entirely.
Been thinking about this recently.
A lot of them are already outsourced (e.g. call centers, remote tech support). There are also factory jobs and other manual labour that necessarily have to remain domestic (even if immigrants and refugees are often exploited for this as well). Amerikan decline will mean that the imperial core will have access to less and less cheap foreign labour, so outsourcing may slow down
Luckily the West, Europe in particular, has an unending supply of refugees that could, will and are used to undercut the domestic labour market to offset losses from insourcing.
Isn’t that sort of “labour arbitrage” also a huge part of what the EU common market is based off of?
I suppose manufacturer of paper products and the like will stay, but that is the only thing I can think of that necessarily needs to stay here.
So what, toilet paper (sold domestically) and service? Can you build an economy off that?
It’s not just tree-based products; there’ll still be domestic food production, for example. Either way, if the Global South continues to drift toward China (etc.), yes, capitalism will become worse and worse for the people in the imperialist countries as they run out of foreign workers to exploit
I mean, I thought most food production (except for that which spoils to quickly) was foreign due to it being cheaper too produce.
AFAIK most countries still grow/produce a lot of staple foods domestically, for domestic consumption by households and industry, because the cost of transportation would be too high to justify outsourcing it (e.g. corn in Amerika)
I see. I’m surprised. I thought most developed countries largely imported foods.
they certainly do import a huge amount; many countries in the imperial core only produce a few types of food, and it’s often mostly high-carbohydrate (grain, potatoes, etc. rather than legumes), so people wouldn’t necessarily have access to sufficiently nutritious food
Do carbohydrates generally not hold well or are they too bulky to be worth transporting?
What do you think those IT companies that hurriedly left Russia were doing? That’s basically it.
No Usa office jobs= No jim and Pam /s
Is that supposed to be a bad thing?
