Europe can hardly outsource anything anymore

Forced by yield-seeking activist shareholders, Europe has sold out its industry. Now we are reaping the bitter fruit.

Technology essential to our survival

Our ancestors really weren’t dumber than us. They just didn’t have the technical capabilities that we do have. Take, for example, a medieval peasant. It had no fertilizer, no tractors, no plant protection products. As a result, this farmer was able to harvest about 3-5 times as much as he put in sowing seed in the soil. In modern agriculture this is dozens of times more. The result: there was so little food left over in the Middle Ages that almost the entire population was forced to farm.

Thanks to our modern technology, we can feed the entire population with a handful of farmers. The reason we are rich now, and poverty-stricken in the Middle Ages, is due to one thing only. We now have technology that we didn’t have back then. We now have a grip on nature, where then we could do little more than pray and beg the deities for a good harvest.

Neoliberalism exploited industry

Our industry has been financialized for the past half century. This means that there are no longer family businesses, but large, legally complex groups that are owned by anonymous funds and hedge funds.

Companies are no longer in the hands of industrialists, such as Anton Philips and Henry Ford, whose primary goal was to keep a company afloat and take care of its employees. Today, the workforce is controlled by managers and company executives whose main task is; to squeeze out as much money as possible for the shareholders. In fact, if they make a decision that doesn’t maximize shareholder value, they could be fired and sued.

As a result, production was massively outsourced. Preferably to low-wage countries, because they are of course the cheapest. Countries where wages were low and the quality of work acceptable. Chief among these countries was China.

China gratefully filled the gap

The Chinese gladly jumped at the opportunity. In China, capitalism is not an ideology, as it is here, but a means. The then Chinese party leader Deng Xiaoping wanted to match and then surpass Western technological success. He also wanted to end what the Chinese see as the Age of Humiliation, in which Western colonial powers such as the United Kingdom and France, and “barbaric” outlying regions such as Japan, could dictate the law to the Chinese.

It was never China’s intention to become a capitalist country. In the Marxist theory guiding the Chinese Communist Party, the stage of industrialization and the formation of the proletariat is only an intermediate stage in the realization of the communist state.

Delivered to China

The strategy of Deng and his successors turned out to be a smashing success. As Karl Marx said in Das Kapital, the capitalists sell the noose with which they are hanged. The Chinese demanded that Western factories in China transfer their technology to the Chinese. By outsourcing essential industries to China, Europeans inadvertently put their heads in China’s noose.

Because the Chinese kept their currency artificially low, production in China remained profitable and listed European factories outsourced their production – and with it a large part of their technical knowledge – to China en masse. As a result, Europe deindustrialized. Where 50 years ago almost half of all people worked in industry, with between 800,000 and 900,000, that is now perhaps 10%.

The Westerners praised themselves to heaven, because the profits remained in the West and the stock prices inflated considerably. These were spent on mergers, enrichment of a small group, financial tricks and armies of lawyers in the US and a welfare state in Europe. While this money was celebrated at a shareholder party, the Chinese laid the foundations for an industrial and economic superpower. The China of today.

How can we get out of this noose?

The situation is not completely hopeless yet. Although he can certainly be called serious. It is now five to twelve, if not five past twelve. We will have to say goodbye to short-sighted shareholder capitalism and financialisation.

Instead of fashionable talk about corporate image, CO2 footprint, inclusiveness and diversity, it will have to be about production, becoming a leader in the technical field and smart innovation. And things like: becoming self-sufficient. China has already taken over the oil states in the Middle East and is working closely with Russia. Russia – and China – are also enjoying unprecedented popularity in Africa. We can therefore better ensure that we become more self-sufficient. In terms of energy, but also in terms of important raw materials.

Not a VOC mentality, but a Musk mentality

Elon Musk managed to make Twitter work better by firing 80 percent of its staff, especially those in “soft” positions. He kept the best technicians. We too must let the air out of the economic system and focus on real added value, ie: top products that are sought after all over the world for their unsurpassed quality, and reliable services with an immediate benefit.

It is time for reparation for the professional, the nerd and the technician, who also pay decently, and the abolition of house style management. Time to roll up your sleeves.