After the sale, various cohorts of VIP's (middle and upper mgmt) came to visit at little old us. What was striking about the visitors was the U.N. look: all flavors of asian, indian, north african faces peered back at us, and this got me to meditating ..... I know that this is not new new; it has been developing in this direction for about a generation. But this is the first time I've personally run straight into this....and number of things are circling in my mind.
1. The working conditions of software professionals (and other workers) is getting worse. This includes salary, amount of work expected, benefits, expectations for retirement (none), destruction of craftsmanship, and the unraveling of the social net that might protect one against all this.
2. Even the smallest startup software development company is now expected to have a branch abroad, usually in India. I'm not exactly sure why, but supposedly this looks good to the VCs (venture capitalists).
3. We are literally trained to accept a multi-national world. In our mandatory HR training, every single slide talks about Amit, Singha, Curtis, Jamilla, etc. This is not PCness; this is the new reality.
3. Colonial masters once ruled by creating fake nations that amalgamated diverse tribes and by empowering the minority, who, in order to keep power, had to serve the interests of their colonial masters. In a similar way global capital creates a patchwork of nomadic rulers whose continuing power is no longer based on national identity, local networks, or social relations; but devolves from the global corporation alone. To keep this power, managers must remain completely indifferent to strictly "local" concerns, environmental, social, political etc.
5. Any Tea Party, racist, anti-immigrant movement, far from changing this situation, will basically contribute to the further dependence of the new nomadic managerial class upon the continued existence of global capital and thus further erode the possibility of cross-border solidarity or the relevance of local solutions. For this reason, it is in the interest of global capital to give them lots of air time. The violence effected by these groups will always be vented on immigrant grunts and be completely ineffectual so far as the larger set up is concerned.
6. Any strictly locally-based protest will not affect the larger setup: hence the simultaneous rage/helplessness that characterizes the TPers and hence also the weird "resonance" of their complaints.
7. Obama is the perfect poster boy for this global corporate capital epoch.
8. The grayer the borders, the more "natural" tactics like targeted assassinations will seem to be.
I haven't put it together quite. Just drawing on the treads. If anybody can say it more clearly, I"m all ears.
joanna