Bringing the Offshore Ashore: Transnational Production, Industrial Relations and the Reconfiguration of Sovereignty1

This article argues that off-shore is losing its exceptionality by being absorbed into a broader process of variegation and deterritorialization of sovereignty, and that capital's search for a new “fix” is driving this process. Capital goes off-shore by exploiting non-territorial definitions of sovereignty, as a means of shifting the regulatory regime under which social relations take place, without moving in a geographic sense. In this way, capital shields itself from social control by defining certain spaces and contexts as off-shore, creating spaces of production in which the sovereign regulatory capacities of the state and society are systematically constrained. This “unbundling” and deterritorialization of sovereignty is a way for capital to escape from national class compromises and undermine working-class associational power. As tensions and contradictions created by off-shore production unravel, conditions on-shore and offshore converge, and off-shore loses its distinctiveness. Ultimately, this process threatens to undermine the sovereignty norm, state autonomy, and capitalist hegemony.