Offshoring and de-industrialization was the only way the US was able to push off the spectre of the declining rate of profit and the corresponding class consciousness that comes with it.
Maybe they don’t care? US proles are really, really, really propagandized against class consciousness and socialism. End of history and all that. I mean inevitably it comes back when conditions get bad enough and /enough/ time passes but maybe they think something else will happen before then to prevent it? Nuclear war where they all hide in their bunkers? Automated police kill-bots to keep the proles in line? Things like AI and robotics alleviating the need for all those workers (here’s where they obviously don’t understand proper Marxist economics of course and it eventually breaks down to them eating each other but by then they might have exterminated a lot of us so it’ll be small comfort). I mean they’re attacking public education and doing all kinds of other things you’d need to do to create a downwardly mobile population suitable for harsh factory work in horrible conditions. Add in some terror of gutting public healthcare, spreading around a few ever-present diseases like covid that slowly cripple those who get repeatedly infected and only those who keep their heads down and work have the healthcare to be able to survive in those conditions while many others are being picked off and you no longer have just food and hunger but living as a weapon.
I am not optimistic about Americans becoming class conscious quickly enough to matter in the next 20-30 years and more specifically class conscious and aware of and versed in Marxist theory as it’s not enough to be class conscious, there are plenty of liberal-ish types who are but think the end all is peaceful protest and organizing and are easily put down. I just see some sort of extreme reaction taking hold as much more likely.
They might feel (and not without some reason) that by the time there’s any real risk of the proles becoming class conscious AFTER reshoring that they’ll have AI plus robotics down and they’ll have automated kill bots, an enforcer class (cops), plus be able to increasingly replace the lost labor, plus just kill off or cripple tons of the unruly proles by poisoning their water and air, letting pandemics ravage the population at large, and of course climate change heat effects and perhaps increasing food costs to just starve a certain amount to death every year (if kept small enough I’m sorry to say most Americans would walk atop all those bodies and skeletons and stay in line as long as their number isn’t up, as long as the mass slotted for starvation is small enough every year to be put down by militarized police and for the rest of the population to keep their heads down and not join them this seems viable).
Again this all eventually falls apart but it’s little comfort as many of us here will be dead as a result long before it reaches that point.
I say, never say never. Really they might only be trying to prod back strategic industries. Trump likes to go on about antibiotics production which is telling because in a prolonged war against the rest of the world or at least against China the US would run out of medical treatments for their soldiers who’d begin dying to preventable things because they’d be cut off. The US wants to be able to self-sufficiently wage protracted global war on the rest of the world, war for conquest, war for dominance, war for plunder. They can afford to lose iPhone production, they can afford to lose all kinds of consumer goods but they must have food (already not a problem, not likely to be given Canada is a major supplier of fertilizers and we have lots of natural gas for that purpose), they must have medicine for their soldiers, and they must have arms building capabilities. Trump talks about ship-building, he wants back massive ship-building capability in the US which is why the tarrifs on non-US made ships because right now in a prolonged war China could just keep churning out new ships and the US would be without a navy very quickly, he wants to decrease global purchases of Chinese ships to shut down Chinese shipyards and move them to places where the US has control to give the US the ability to use them to make war-ships quickly in a prolonged war and to deny China that same ability.
Maybe they don’t care? US proles are really, really, really propagandized against class consciousness and socialism. End of history and all that. I mean inevitably it comes back when conditions get bad enough and /enough/ time passes but maybe they think something else will happen before then to prevent it? Nuclear war where they all hide in their bunkers? Automated police kill-bots to keep the proles in line? Things like AI and robotics alleviating the need for all those workers (here’s where they obviously don’t understand proper Marxist economics of course and it eventually breaks down to them eating each other but by then they might have exterminated a lot of us so it’ll be small comfort). I mean they’re attacking public education and doing all kinds of other things you’d need to do to create a downwardly mobile population suitable for harsh factory work in horrible conditions. Add in some terror of gutting public healthcare, spreading around a few ever-present diseases like covid that slowly cripple those who get repeatedly infected and only those who keep their heads down and work have the healthcare to be able to survive in those conditions while many others are being picked off and you no longer have just food and hunger but living as a weapon.
I am not optimistic about Americans becoming class conscious quickly enough to matter in the next 20-30 years and more specifically class conscious and aware of and versed in Marxist theory as it’s not enough to be class conscious, there are plenty of liberal-ish types who are but think the end all is peaceful protest and organizing and are easily put down. I just see some sort of extreme reaction taking hold as much more likely.
They might feel (and not without some reason) that by the time there’s any real risk of the proles becoming class conscious AFTER reshoring that they’ll have AI plus robotics down and they’ll have automated kill bots, an enforcer class (cops), plus be able to increasingly replace the lost labor, plus just kill off or cripple tons of the unruly proles by poisoning their water and air, letting pandemics ravage the population at large, and of course climate change heat effects and perhaps increasing food costs to just starve a certain amount to death every year (if kept small enough I’m sorry to say most Americans would walk atop all those bodies and skeletons and stay in line as long as their number isn’t up, as long as the mass slotted for starvation is small enough every year to be put down by militarized police and for the rest of the population to keep their heads down and not join them this seems viable).
Again this all eventually falls apart but it’s little comfort as many of us here will be dead as a result long before it reaches that point.
I say, never say never. Really they might only be trying to prod back strategic industries. Trump likes to go on about antibiotics production which is telling because in a prolonged war against the rest of the world or at least against China the US would run out of medical treatments for their soldiers who’d begin dying to preventable things because they’d be cut off. The US wants to be able to self-sufficiently wage protracted global war on the rest of the world, war for conquest, war for dominance, war for plunder. They can afford to lose iPhone production, they can afford to lose all kinds of consumer goods but they must have food (already not a problem, not likely to be given Canada is a major supplier of fertilizers and we have lots of natural gas for that purpose), they must have medicine for their soldiers, and they must have arms building capabilities. Trump talks about ship-building, he wants back massive ship-building capability in the US which is why the tarrifs on non-US made ships because right now in a prolonged war China could just keep churning out new ships and the US would be without a navy very quickly, he wants to decrease global purchases of Chinese ships to shut down Chinese shipyards and move them to places where the US has control to give the US the ability to use them to make war-ships quickly in a prolonged war and to deny China that same ability.