the U.S. industrial base being in China does seem like an obstacle yeah
During the first COVID supply crisis after China shut down, I remember:
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A door factory shutting down because they couldn’t domestically source the parts for doors
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Freight truck factories shutting down production because they couldn’t domestically source some small metal part
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Every utilities company facing critical shortages for repairs and maintenance, warning they were one natural disaster away from the electrical grid collapsing
Every utilities company facing critical shortages for repairs and maintenance
Still an issue, I work for a utility and lead times for things like high voltage transformers are still ~18 months or so from what I’ve been told
Coincidentally, I also processed a shipment of smaller transformers that came thru from South Korea (which for us was unheard of)
It’s not ideal
so what youre telling me is that if a group of organized people wanted, they could take out the entire us electrical grid by blowing up a bunch of transformers?
HUH
Attack on Nine Substations Could Take Down U.S. Grid (2014)
https://spectrum.ieee.org/attack-on-nine-substations-could-take-down-us-grid
I have said it before and I will say it again: people still pretend like American imperialism is still rooted in industrial prowess. That era is long gone.
No, America is a landlord/rentier capitalist and as such will always behave like a landlord.
A landlord does not have to work. I repeat, a landlord does not work. A landlord extracts what other people have worked hard on.
American tech giants like Microsoft and Google aren’t dominating the market because they are the most competent at making the best products out there. No, they dominate because they were able to leverage on various legal and financial means to bully their competitors out of the business, and they are able to do so precisely because the sector works just like a rentier economy. Every time you use their product, you (or your employer) pays a rent to those companies.
America is never going to re-industrialize because industrialization raises the price of labor, and thus confers labor with leverages against capital. America didn’t de-industrialize itself in the first place for nothing. It de-industrializes itself precisely to defeat the trade unions and working class movements that had been gaining momentum by the 1970s.
This is how US imperialism functions. Nobody is ever going to invade America so long as it has nukes at its disposal. And as long as the dollar reigns supreme, it will continue to behave like a landlord that extracts concessions from all over the world.
Incidentally, this is a fantastic read on the subject https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2021/08/the-value-of-nothing-capital-versus-growth/
That was a great read. I’m working my way through vol 2 of Capital. In it, Marx talks about how it’s in the sphere of production only where value is created. Distribution, beyond what is technically necessary, does not add value. I think this is particularly relevant for the non-financial sector of the US economy - Apple, Nike, Gap, even Amazon and Walmart to an extent. For the most part, these firms are not creating surplus value, they are extracting surplus value from, for example, contracting factories in the global south. That strikes me as inherently unstable: all it takes for much of the surplus value in the non-financial sector to just evaporate is for imperialism to be severed.
American tech giants like Microsoft and Google aren’t dominating the market because they are the most competent at making the best products out there. No, they dominate because they were able to leverage on various legal and financial means to bully their competitors out of the business, and they are able to do so precisely because the sector works just like a rentier economy. Every time you use their product, you (or your employer) pays a rent to those companies.
This is why they’re so fucking scared of Huawei and Bytedance
It’s even more involved than just the renting. US imperialism demands large consolidation in order to exert control over the markets. Tech giants are supremely important to consolidate because they offer all of the intelligence any empire could want, thus it is in the interest of the empire to ensure that a handful of giants rise, and those giants run uncontested.
Capitalism builds industry for war.
Socialism builds industry for human needs.
Simple as.
Except not even - if that was the case then ukraine would be winning instead of getting rinsed.
The idea that the US could even hope to “resolve key challenges” here is laughable. China is too far ahead in manufacturing and companies aren’t willing to spend the massive amounts of money required to expand manufacturing in the US.
Yeah, this is delusional beyond belief. Most people don’t realize just how dependent on China US is today. For example:
https://edconway.substack.com/p/globalisation-is-a-far-far-bigger
Posting numbers from 2018 is an insufficient insight into the situation though as there has been reported increased decoupling following covid.
US industrial output is currently shrinking, the decoupling is just talk with no substance to it
You’d need to build new facilities and train people up to run lathes and whatnot. On top of that weapons aren’t made with steel and wood anymore so you’ll need to teach them some light programming too in order to mill your M4 receivers. In short America is fucked because free training in a high skill job is sacrilege here.
