They gambled all our pride
They want money instead
They gone and speared my side
I think they want me dead
IDLES, Mercedes Marxist
While the devastation of the natural world is the most serious consequence of our current economic system, it is far from unique in its destructive capacity. The economic dynamics that resulted in the massive outsourcing of the manufacturing sector and its relocation to developing countries not only determined the labor conditions of the third world, they changed the labor landscape of the first world forever (8.6, 8.16, 8.18). In fact, the so-called gig economy that consolidated itself after 2008 crisis with the emergence of data-driven capitalism, is characterized by “extending earlier trends into new areas. Whereas outsourcing once primarily took place in in manufacturing, administration, and hospitality, today it is extending to to a range of new jobs: cabs, haircuts, stylists, cleaning, plumbing, painting, moving, content moderation, and so on. It is even pushing into white-collar jobs —copy-editing, programming, and management, for instance.”
The wounds that the 2008 crisis inflicted on the global economy, such as low interest rates and increased labor instability, continued as a trend in the following decade, as a new data-driven economic model—deemed surveillance capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff—began replicating the lean production and outsourcing strategies implemented by manufacture giants such as GM (8.6) in the seventies which were generalized by corporations like Nike in the nineties. The result has been the spread of a profoundly unequal and unstable labor market which has pauperized the middle class on a global scale and given new tech corporations like Uber, Deliveroo and Rappi, access to a workforce desperate to find any sort of employment. The continuity between the maquilas and the EPZs and the new labor market is evident, both are the result of economic processes that emerged during the postwar years and intensified with the appearance of new data technologies. This trend caught up with me right in the middle of the 2020 pandemic when the company I had worked for for sixteen years decided to further cut its payroll expenses and hire me as an “independent consultant” on an hourly basis, thereby reducing my income to less than half and forcing me to look for alternative means of revenue.
If the model of economic exception that we have examined in this chapter is a direct heir to colonialism, understood as a formula that leverages mercantile power with military power and vice versa (8.4), its consequence is that as natural resources are depleted or become irretrievably polluted (8.19) colonialism will have no choice but to start to eat itself. Proof of this is that its tactics of economic domination are now being applied to the descendants of those First World populations that brought colonialism to life centuries ago. Those of us fortunate enough not to work in an EPZ have nonetheless become prisoners of the paradeisos without walls that underlies the global economy (0.28). This enormous planetary maquila, which has begun to cover large portions of the world’s population, has developed in recent decades hidden behind the economic processes of profitability, austerity and competitiveness (8.6, 8.9, 8.10, 8.11, 8.12) that have defined the economy since the mid-twentieth century.
Our situation is vividly expressed by Hedges and Sacco in a fragment that is worth quoting in full:
The old conflict between Indians and Euro-Americans, between colonizers and colonized, between masters and serfs, is the templete for the last act of the corporate state. The tyranny we imposed on others is now being imposed upon us. We too are wage slaves. We, too, no longer know how to sustain ourselves. We, too, do not grown our own food or make our own clothes. We are as dependent on the state as the indians who were herded into the agencies and stripped off their self-sufficiency. Once trapped on reservations, once the buffalo herd no longer existed, once the indians could no longer move in bands… they became what most of us have become—prisoners.2
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