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By Root 1372 0

earnings beyond America; American Home Products, which earns 24 percent of sales far away from home; the American International Insurance group, which gets 46 percent of its revenue from its international rather than its American side; American Standard (plumbing), which earns 49 percent of revenue on someone else’s currency standard; American Cynamid, which like most American chemical companies earns more than half its revenue (51 percent) abroad; and finally American President (shipping), which derives two thirds of its income from foreign port sailings.14

Twenty or more years ago, many of the American companies now deriving majority revenue abroad were almost exclusively focused on the domestic market. A “French” company like Michelin (tires), with 20 percent of world tire sales, earns only 19 percent of its revenues in France, while Sony earns less than a quarter of its nearly $30 billion in annual income from Japan, deriving over half from the United States and Europe (28 percent of its total sales in each). Smaller countries have also lost even nominal sovereignty over their businesses. Sweden’s cheap furniture retail giant IKEA sells better than four-fifths of its products ($3.2 billion in sales in 1992) beyond Swedish frontiers and founder Anders Moberg (like Wal-Mart’s Sam Walton, a billionaire) recently transferred total ownership of IKEA to a foundation he established in Amsterdam, while company head quarters went to Denmark (Moberg himself moved to Switzerland).15 With a style called “Danish modern,” how Swedish can IKEA really be?

As manufacturing is internationalized, and traditional industrial powers cede dominion to new markets with cheaper labor, the industrial sector is itself being transformed. The internationalization of companies is only one part of this change; for the goods companies make—the very idea of what a consumer good is—are evolving. From hard to soft goods, from soft goods to services, which are themselves becoming goods. We turn now to that part of the story.

4

From Hard Goods to Soft Goods

WHILE MAKING AND selling goods is still the dominant form of economic activity in the international markets of McWorld, the goods are increasingly associated with or defined by symbolic interactions that belong to the service sector in its postmodern, virtual economy manifestations. The move from heavy defense-related industrial production to consumer goods that has been a continuing feature of economic development has in the last decade moved into another phase in which hard consumer goods are increasingly becoming associated with soft technologies rooted in information, entertainment, and lifestyle, and in which products are emerging that blur the line between goods and services. The ancient capitalist economy in which products are manufactured and sold for profit to meet the demand of consumers who make their unmediated needs known through the market is gradually yielding to a postmodern capitalist economy in which needs are manufactured to meet the supply of producers who make their unmediated products marketable through promotion, spin, packaging, and advertising. Whereas the old economy, mirroring hard power, dealt in hard goods aimed at the body, the new economy, mirroring soft power, depends on soft services aimed at the mind and spirit (or aimed at undoing the mind and spirit). This wedding of telecommunications technologies with information and entertainment software can be called for short the infotainment telesector. The goods sector is captured by the infotainment telesector, whose object is nothing less than the human soul.

Hyperbole? The long dormant language of the soul, until just recently quite unfashionable, at least in corporate capitalism’s domain, is making a secular comeback. As it assimilates and transforms so many other ideologies, postmodernist capitalism has not shied away from assimilating and transforming religion. If Madonna can play erotic games with a crucifix, why shouldn’t Mazda and American Express work to acquire some commercial purchase on the Holy Spirit?