Outsourcing IT

After selling off its computer manufacturing arm to China, IBM was cash rich, and what does it do with the cash, why invest in India. The number two growth economy behind China. This will set off Lou Dobbs for sure. Yet why he does not get the neo-liberal agenda is beyond me.

IBM plans to invest $6 billion in India
Global companies are competing here to harness talent and to garner market share in the second fastest- growing economy in the world, after China. Other technology multinationals like Microsoft, Intel, Cisco Systems and Advanced Micro Devices have recently announced investments in India that each exceed $1 billion.Among IBM's operations in Bangalore is a command center, the largest of three such IBM centers worldwide, which monitors 16,000 computer servers and 10,000 applications globally, according to Mats Agervi, vice president for global delivery services. The center has some of the most sophisticated high-technology equipment, huge bandwidth connectivity and workers who back up operations of the firm's customers worldwide, Agervi said.

America is dying as a manufacturing society as it embraces the service economy of Multi-level marketing and internet business. Manufacturing and computer servicing are going offshore, as America merely becomes a nation of sellers and buyers. Which is why its economy currently is boyed up by the housing bubble.

However it is the nature of globalization, capital goes where it can make money, and it makes money through cheap labour and technological advancement. Which produces a new proletariat where one did not exist before. IBM and other American IT companies are doing what the British Empire did in India 100 years ago during their period of Free Trade expansion. Something Marx pointed out about India over 150 years ago.

The British Rule in India by Karl Marx

These small stereotype forms of social organism have been to the greater part dissolved, and are disappearing, not so much through the brutal interference of the British tax-gatherer and the British soldier, as to the working of English steam and English free trade. Those family-communities were based on domestic industry, in that peculiar combination of hand-weaving, hands-spinning and hand-tilling agriculture which gave them self-supporting power. English interference having placed the spinner in Lancashire and the weaver in Bengal, or sweeping away both Hindoo spinner and weaver, dissolved these small semi-barbarian, semi-civilized communities, by blowing up their economical basis, and thus produced the greatest, and to speak the truth, the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia.

Now, sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness those myriads of industrious patriarchal and inoffensive social organizations disorganized and dissolved into their units, thrown into a sea of woes, and their individual members losing at the same time their ancient form of civilization, and their hereditary means of subsistence, we must not forget that these idyllic village-communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies. We must not forget the barbarian egotism which, concentrating on some miserable patch of land, had quietly witnessed the ruin of empires, the perpetration of unspeakable cruelties, the massacre of the population of large towns, with no other consideration bestowed upon them than on natural events, itself the helpless prey of any aggressor who deigned to notice it at all. We must not forget that this undignified, stagnatory, and vegetative life, that this passive sort of existence evoked on the other part, in contradistinction, wild, aimless, unbounded forces of destruction and rendered murder itself a religious rite in Hindostan. We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a self-developing social state into never changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalizing worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Kanuman, the monkey, and Sabbala, the cow.

England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.

Then, whatever bitterness the spectacle of the crumbling of an ancient world may have for our personal feelings, we have the right, in point of history, to exclaim with Goethe:

“Sollte these Qual uns quälen
Da sie unsre Lust vermehrt,
Hat nicht myriaden Seelen
Timur’s Herrschaft aufgezehrt?”

[“Should this torture then torment us
Since it brings us greater pleasure?
Were not through the rule of Timur
Souls devoured without measure?”]
[From Goethe’s “An Suleika”, Westöstlicher Diwan]

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