And that isn't going to last, take advantage of it while you can, America.
You can build domestic industry and jobs without this dumb shit. It's just going to reduce the purchasing power.
this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
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It would be very funny to see Americans mald over rising treat prices, except...
This shit never seems to catch the biggest fish. They just send everything to a big warehouse in some exempted country (Indonesia, Korea, Canada, wherever) and have people put stickers on the widgets as part of the "final assembly process", then insist that's the country of origin.
People will pay $1500 for a "next gen" iPhone that has a slightly nicer camera and a chromium finish. The tariffs don't seem to meaningfully impact our import rate.
Insourcing production to the US (assuming this is ever actually going to happen) is technically good for the American economy. Trump's methods are ham-fisted and ill-conceived, but re-capitalization of the American economy would be an unmitigated good and would strengthen this cursed white supremacist state.
The whipped dog of the American proletariat only ever knows how to lash out at weaker and more vulnerable people around them. They continue to lack any revolutionary character that might actually harm the foundation of the bourgeois dictatorship.
re-capitalization may seem alluring to American nationalists but its actually dumb as hell. Capitalism is a world system lubricated by USD, which americans send abroad to pay for imports. Its not a competition of discrete national economies, capitalism is global and totalizing. Everyone else in the world does the actual work, Americans just need to do their part: consume to provide high-end demand. Trying to go to protectionism now is like trying to make the oil pump in the opposite direction, your gonna break the motor and probably set something on fire.
China and India are recapitalizing to good effect. Russia is recapitalizing, and that's why the country hasn't collapsed under the weight of their stupid war. Germany is capitalized, and that's why it can bully everyone else in the EU except France.
Meanwhile, the UK is just six banks in a trench coat and their economy is disintegrating underneath them. Saudi Arabia is trying to build out capital in excess of its oil drilling and desalination systems, but all MBS knows how to do is build Monaco over and over again in a big line. Hong Kong has fucked itself, because all the business assets are in Shenzhen and western nations no longer need a UK-backed financial bridge into China. Japan is increasingly just Tokyo plus Alabama, as all the capital wealth concentrates in a handful of metropoles.
So much of what gets "consumed" from abroad is waste. Wasted textiles. Wasted foodstuffs. Disposable packaging and one-use commodities. Wasted energy from A/C cooling empty buildings and cars lined up in five mile long traffic queues. Technology that's run at high capacity solely to put up fake shit on the internet. Technology that's designed not to last longer than the next marketing cycle. It isn't even stuff Americans get to enjoy. It's Instant Trash that just molds in a factory somewhere. Grain during the potato famine. The Grapes of Wrath.
Americans have a bunch of jobs that desperately need doing - education, health care, infrastructure maintenance, logistics, waste management - that they don't want to pay anyone to do. Consequently, everyone runs off and gets jobs in finance and advertising, because that's the only shit that pays. So we have more and more of Graeber's Bullshit Jobs putting up numbers on the domestic economy while fewer and fewer people know how anything in the country actually works.
But to say Americans aren't "doing work" is absurd. Americans are chronically overworked. They're perpetually exhausted. They're a miserable, wrung out, and depressed. They're not idle. They're wasted. Americans are working overtime to produce excess waste.
You don’t have to be Viktor Frankl to know that life becomes unbearable when a person can’t derive some kind of meaning from it. I thought things were getting bad in the ‘90s, but America keeps telling me to hold its beer.
You're mixing up "capitalism" and "production/industrialization." The two are not one and the same.
China and Russia are if anything, doing the exact opposite of what you claim; while Russia may be structurally and politically capitalist (and while China retains its market socialism, which is another spiel in and of itself) the developments ongoing in both are not the capitalization (privatization, financialization) of their economies, but rather the submission of capital to the interests of the state and the public good (in Russia's case, its national security) and towards actual production.
What part of China's cracking down on corruption and speculation (engaging in the controlled demolition of its real estate markets for instance) and engaging in even further state-led development sounds like "capitalization" to you? What part of Russia's own return to 5-year plans, of its reindustrialization (of which a large part is the MIC- which by and large is state enterprise, not private), of the cracking down on the corruption and influence of the oligarchs (now that the west has so helpfully neutered them), and the return to domestic production and development rather than financial instruments and other grifts geared towards the transfer of wealth to the west sounds like "re-capitalization," or rather, "further capitalization?" (Considering that Russia still is decidedly capitalist).
Because the real "economy," or rather everything people associate with and can tangibly interact with, was never truly capital (though capital certainly has considerable correlation, as a system built over it). The British economy is disintegrating because the "capital" you seem to assume Britain is lacking in, is actually present in overabundance (and was developed relative to the size and influence of the former empire and what plunder it could obtain). Britain is literally choking on, and drowning in its capital (inflation), while it's bourgeoisie, to preserve the value of their capital (which has no inherent value in its own right), bleed the British society and true economy further and further dry, through their endless pursuits of their bottom lines, through their rentier behavior (landlordism, monopolistic behaviors/oligopolies, and through extracting what could be described as "rent" from the state in the forms of corporate welfare- particularly the MIC- regulatory capture and the maintaining of captive markets, and copious tax breaks). And of course, they also preserve their value of their capital, by taking it out of the sinking ship- by moving it into actual tangible assets, exchanging it for the currencies/capital of nations whose economies are not going into freefall, and which are not ridiculously overpriced (capitalized) bubbles ripe to burst.
Saudi Arabia is another nation absolutely swimming in capital accumulated from its oil revenues; they have no need of ""building"" capital, they have no lack of it. What the Saudis are trying to do, is convert said capital into tangible assets and production- ie. actual value (of which capital is just an approximation and floating measurement of). They built what capital they have, off of such (natural) assets (obviously, oil), and are trying to prepare themselves for the transition past it, as well as develop actual productive forces outside of oil extraction (as that is the actual wealth of the nation- not capital, which is a fickle, unstable, and abstract measure of value).
I could go on further, but basically- capital =/= production. And Americans work, sure (a immense amount of it "bullshit jobs," as from the sounds of it you're aware). But the expansion of US capital and imperialism across the globe, the network of American "capitalization," if you will- has literally priced the American working class out of existence (they still exist obviously- but it's a miserable and withering thing).
The USD is kept artificially overvalued, allowing the US (particularly it's corporations, but also the citizenry that have increasingly moved to "bullshit" largely unproductive jobs) inordinate purchasing power, something the US state and corporations abuse the utter hell out of
.
US labor, being paid in the USD, is artificially overvalued- which is to say, it is prohibitively expensive and uncompetitive, and what manufacturing, agriculture, etc. exists is generally heavily subsidized so as to keep the gears of empire turning. Goods and services within the US are artificially overvalued (overpriced) due to the "capitalization" of the economy as well- everything in the US is "capitalized" to hell and back (and it is no more productive for it, oftentimes less). Tuition, healthcare, housing, food, consumer goods, etc... there are layers upon layers of "capitalization" in the US, of course not least of all through the "capitalization" of immense consumer and state debt (line goes up). None of this is "competitive" or "appropriately valued-" rather the opposite- and thus even marshalling the productive forces of the nation and moving past all the "capitalization" is a cartoonishly expensive and arduous hurdle.
I could go on further, but I'd simply recommend looking up the talks on economics on YT (or their writings, etc) by professors Michael Hudson and Richard Wolff, as well as the Geopolitical Economy Report among others for more information to set you on the right path.
It sounds like rather, you’re confusing capitalization for capitalism. You don’t need to be capitalist to have capital, you do need capital to have industry/production.
I don't have the energy for this atm so will try to reply later (if anyone else wants to help me out go for it). But just... No, IMO (as said a bit out of it atm) this sounds incorrect.
Limited capitalization =/= capitalism, I agree (Dengism, or the NEP, etc. are examples of that). But I think we'd need to define what we mean by "capitalization" (the term which I was using since @BashfulBob@hexbear.net used it).
The definition from a quick google alone as an easy (+lazy, as said not quite up for it entirely- someone save me pls
) answer would be essentially... Accounting.
Thats understandably, not the context we were using (maybe innacurately, idk) the term "capitalization" for, given how it was first introduced into discussion (by @BashfulBob@hexbear.net ).
I was using it (and put it alongside the term in parentheses many times) as essentially- "financialization."
I guess where I'm getting at is "financialization" is not a requirement for industrialization or production.
Also, of course, production (and thus actual value) and trade and/or the division of labor ("the actual economy") and all can exist without capital, and predate capital. And I'd go so far as to say that capital (not just capitalism- but capital) is not a prerequisite for industrialization, though it is certainly the most efficient and viable mechanism to promote it thus far.
And even if we were to say that "all industry/production requires capital" - that does not mean that industry/production = capital. The two things are different, with the latter meant as something akin to a unit of measurement (and exchange) or the former.
As Marx said:
While I wouldn't claim that labor = production/industry (though it certainly has far more correlation than capital and production), I think it demonstrates my point...
I think you’re confused about what capital is to begin with (in BashfulBob’s comment at least). Capital is the means of production. It’s the machinery, the tools, etc. Capitalists are called that because they own those things. Under socialism, the workers will own it (directly or via the state), but the capital still exists. You definitely cannot have industry without it.
Financial capital is a thing but this is not what the person you replied to was talking about and it doesn’t make any sense to think the U.S. would need to “recapitalize” if it meant financialization. The U.S. is already a fully financialized economy. Recapitalization here refers to bringing industrial capital back.
You mention Saudi Arabia “swimming in capital” in response to Bob saying that they are trying to build it beyond their oil industry. That’s not accurate. They’re swimming in money, money isn’t the same thing as capital.
Still low energy and woke up (dysfunction) but this cinched it, admittedly- I'm certain now that the confusion is on your end.
Capital =/= the means of production (though under capitalism as a system has control of said means of production).
Hell, the theoretical end goal of communism is to abolish capital- not just "capitalism," but capital. And certainly it is undeniable if you think of it- the means of production existed long before "capital" ever did.
And yes, money is capital. Whether that "capital/money" be in imaginary fiat currency, imaginary stonks, imaginary ugly digital apes, or gold and silver (which while having true value, all the same are used as a measure and form of speculation).
Think about it. Do you really think communists seek to "abolish" the means of production? Do you think that capitalists simply arbitrarily own the means of production through some magic mumbo jumbo rather than through the mechanism of capital? I don't know where you got the idea that capital = the means of production from, but I'm sure that it is doing far more harm than good in preventing actual understanding of the subject.
You should probably take your own advice. I'm not humoring this anymore, hopefully someone else will knock you out of it. Imagine thinking capital = the means of production. You may be communist or think you are (probably are just deeply ill informed) but this is ridiculous, you've internalized the neoliberal brainrot concepts over what is actually and tangibly presented within Marxist or even classical liberal analysis.
You are correct, sorry! I was at work when I replied earlier and didn’t read you properly or didn’t comprehend properly what you were saying, so yes, the confusion was on my end. I’ll delete my previous comment.
The use of the word “capital” to mean machinery etc is colloquial and non-Marxist. Marx uses the more specific term “constant capital” to refer to capitalist investment in these things, while “capital” itself is a broader term referring to the social relation of self expanding value of which these things are simply a part. Thank you for setting me straight, usually I’m pretty good at understanding when the word is being used in the colloquial sense vs the Marxist sense but again I was sloppy because I was replying while at work and not paying enough attention.
Now that I think we are on the same page let me try again with the point of my original comment, I was just trying to clear up where I think you were talking past the other user because they were using the word one way and you were using it in the more correct Marxist way. I think when the others were speaking of countries “recapitalizing”, they meant onshoring, or bringing the constant capital back into their own borders.
I- huh. Thanks for clearing it up, sounds like we were both reading each other wrong (speaking the wrong language effectively) then.
NGL thanks for responding on that actually, I actually was disappointed at what seemed like the end result of the conversation (seemed so close and yet so very far). FWIW I also was being sloppy and not paying the most attention (as said in various other comments- tired, no energy for it).
And yeah, their take on it was what I was trying to respond to initially.
Yeah exactly this. I basically have a habit of code switching and using more colloquial terms and definitions when I talk about capitalism and these things with people in the workplace or normie online spaces like Reddit, but I should have remembered where I was and that people on this forum tend to discuss things with more precise Marxist understanding. Thanks again for your efforts to explain it and helping me get those wires un-crossed in my head.
As I was driving home from work I listened to this video which helped me realize where I was going wrong. If you ever find yourself getting frustrated having to explain this to somebody in the future maybe you can link them to this, it is professor Wolff explaining essentially what you said in a succinct way.
https://youtu.be/6fOtDtAjtdY
No worries, I get where you're coming from. Thanks for the link though (actually caught me while watching another more recent talk by professors Wolff and Hudson).
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I'm feeling called out
Replying rather than editing on extra to my comment but- very simplified (and with the disclaimer that I'm no scholar and I'm literally typing on my phone):
Capital =/= production or the real economy.
Capital =/= value (though it is a unit meant to approximate value and transfer it)
Imagine if the US creates a missile. Let's say the production cost and valuation is... Uh, 100$usd. Let's say that Russia produces the exact same missile, functionally and materially identical (though in reality Russian missiles are better than western crap because of capitalization, lol). It's valuation and production cost is.. 25$usd.
What is the difference, exactly? What is the 75$ difference? As a really shitty and lazy and probably somewhat flawed simplification- this is the "capital," the "capitalization" you're talking about.
This is how you get wonderful capitalistic... Capitalizations, like say, the US army spending over 36$k per garbage bin (look it up... Lmao). This is how you get the world's most expensive and certainly the least cost-efficient healthcare system on the planet (and probably in all of history). This is how regurgitated capital ("capitalizations" or "financialization," if you will) in the form of money lending, then interest paid to service the loan, and so on and so forth- metaphorical circlejerks of debt and transactions ("services")
get measured as """productive economic activity.""" 
Anyways yeah, that's about it (heavily and shittily simplified). Once again I heavily recommend looking up prof. Michael Hudson, prof. Richard Wolff, and the Geopolitical Economy Report.
I think someone else referred to this definition before. But
"Capital (goods)" = "those durable produced goods that are in turn used as productive inputs for further production"
No, that's the marginal cost.
What's more, a Marxist "all else equal" analysis would say the $75 difference in cost is ultimately a labor cost + profit. One big reason why Russia can build artillery cheaper than the US is simply due to its limited number of middle men between raw materials and deployed weapon.
That inflates the raw labor cost (the US MIC procurement system is a jobs program that rewards inefficiency) and extracts an admin fee at every step.
But that price differential isn't capital. It's cost.
Am example of capital would be the mineral gathering operation used to create explosives. Another would be the machinery to create the bomb housing. Another would be the training school for the engineers who assemble the bombs.
IMO points #1 and #2 are key reasons why #3, as you describe it (with appropriate skepticism) isn't going to happen. The parasitism of deeply established rentiers (of industry) and the hyper-financialization is not going to come to a halt, not without what can only be described as a death to the system (it could be resuscitated after- but all these contradictions would frankly need to be purged, a politically painful and systematically tumultuous process, to allow for such developments).
The world reserve currency status and the consequences of its decades-long abuse/"cheap money" (or rather, toilet paper money, the ubiquitousness and cartoonish levels of debt and speculation, etc) is also a noose around AmeriKKKa's neck in this regard. There is no soft landing, and there will be no reining in the system, not without the destruction of the wealth of the capitalist classes and of the global economic system the US has made itself the center of (though it is unsustainable in its own right).
As for #4... sure, I agree entirely. And thus personally I hope to get the hell out of the imperial cores before the death camps and/or pogroms begin, if they do. But thankfully however, the rest of the world- the overwhelming majority of the world- is moving past the west's hateful, racist, genocidal, and deranged system, and will leave them in the dust if they cannot progress forward (IMO the west will not- not for a long time, anyways, the social, ideological, institutional, etc. contradictions of 500 years, and the contradiction of settlerism in particular, shall be a hurdle that will take a very long time to be overcome, if ever- though I do expect it will happen eventually in the long run).
The west will embrace fascism, and likely will try to take all the rest of humanity down with it if they can't keep them as their slaves. It sounds dismal, but that's my expectations for the western regimes, anyways- whether the masses, or even those within the system with the decency or self-preservation to resist and break free from this course, will be able to recognize in full just what path they are headed down and prevent it is another matter.
But- in response to #4- my answer is- "yeah, so what?" Not to be callous, but this is the path these societies were almost certainly going to go down from the beginning; this is the great hurdle they must overcome (that they created for themselves). I am not disregarding the suffering that it will cause (which I will likely also face, and so will many of my loved ones). But this is still progress of an overwhelmingly positive nature for the rest of the world- just because the slave masters (the "international community") might tear themselves apart and get homicidal, does not mean that the slaves (the overwhelming global majority) should wait on their liberation and the improvement of their lives till it is convenient; it does not mean that the global south should continue bending over to western parasitism (which is in fact becoming more and more deranged and intolerable, as shown with their attempts at "Ukrainizing" countries like the Philippines and Armenia and their march to WW3, with their blatant genocide in Gaza and their constant provocations and meddling reaching a fever pitch across the globe, their attempts to destroy the peace, prosperity, and development of ASEAN, of Africa through its trade and cooperation with BRICS, etc...).
If the west wishes to go fascist (which I don't doubt they most likely will), if they want to destroy all of humanity if they cannot re-establish global slavery, unquestioned imperialism, and omnipresent hegemony as they desire- that's a hurdle that humanity will have to face. And humanity, the collective humanity, will either win (whether those in the west wish to consider themselves a part of it, or bring destruction upon their heads to the bitter end is another matter) or go extinct, but either way the ordeal will have been- if not necessary, absolutely inevitable (because the west and even the western masses, if they play along with their regimes, will have done everything to ensure it was so).
The world will free themselves from AmeriKKKa and the league of western imperialists- they will free themselves from the petrodollar's parasitism, from western enforced monopolies, from theft and coercion, from the US' salami-slicing tactics of moving ever-closer to a "winnable nuclear war" and the effective genocide or enslavement of the entire planet. Whether the western populations are ready for such a change is irrelevant, and they can either get with the program (and they will have every chance of doing so- right up until the call comes to launch the nukes) or die rejecting the most basic decency and humanity.
That's my take on it, anyways. All the west, the "garden peoples," have left (as a simplification- they have much, but their system has reached the end of the road and they can only try to threaten the world to prevent it from moving further) is terrorism. And all the west, the "garden," can accept, is the complete subservience and enslavement of the world, to return to the unipolar moment and not only that, but worse- to gradually balkanize and de-industrialize all the nations of the global south, so as to never allow such a challenge to their "garden" to arise again.
All they offer is terrorism, and their reward, to those who submit- as Russia's experience post-dissolution, Ukraine's current experience, etc. and that of countless others have shown- the reward for submission is slavery and death, the loss of everything of value and of all hope. The global south (and the masses of the west, if they can get their heads out of their asses to realize it) truly has nothing to lose but their chains.
To your point 3, I don't think the US in its current form will ever actually onshore meaningful industry. Industry is a riskier and lower impact investment. It takes a ton of money to buy land, build a huge building on it, fill it with machines, fill it with people, train those people, fill it with inputs, and coordinate the shipping and distribution of the outputs. This is a huge huge huge cost for not a lot of payoff in the short term, at least to someone trying to fund it privately.
What private investors want to do that when they can just buy real estate or insurance bonds or whatever, rent it or turn around and sell it all in a few years for a huge profit to some other investors trying to do the same?
Trying to onshore industry to the US via protectionism won't accomplish anything meaningful beyond "Americans can afford less shit." An economy built on financialization and that doesn't care about anything except short term profit has no incentive to build industry. At the kind of scale that would make a meaningful impact on the average American, only a government could accomplish it, and that definitely won't happen.
We're doing it with battery manufacturing as we speak. A big reason the Atlantic Coast is trending blue stems from re-shoring of automotive manufacturing, particularly with regard to EVs. In theory, we'd be doing it with semiconductor manufacturing, too, if we weren't so far behind the curve.
Some private investors see value in real assets, even if they aren't producing the immediate sky-high returns available in the IP markets. Yes, GE's sort of blazed a trail of "don't own anything except the debt of other industries" as a corporate model. But you've also got big energy producers like Exxon and construction companies like Bechtel that have huge investments in income generating capital projects. Even companies like Amazon and Microsoft are invested in data centers - which require material infrastructure, maintenance, energy, etc. For all the shit AI gets, its been an excuse to build out these enormous facilities for data processing that have value beyond whatever lies Sam Alton is telling people.
I disagree, but I guess we'll see. I think onshoring means rebuilding the collapsed base of engineering, technical management, and logistics that we've let sag over the last 40 years. And I think it's going to boost the quality of work for a vital sector of the national economy.
There's no reason the US can't onshore its industry again... But the process (and the products) will be prohibitively expensive, such that without astronomical subsidies (which the US certainly is pumping out, money printed go brrr) the only viable markets for such goods will be captive markets.
Rebuilding the industrial infrastructure, etc. will be hilariously overpriced. Rebuilding the ecosystem (base of engineering, R&D, etc) will be hilariously overpriced. The labor costs will be hilarious overpriced (because the workers' living expenses will be depressingly overpriced- Yankkkeestan and the collective west is expensive as all hell). The valuations, final cost of production, etc etc... will all be hilariously overpriced. And each and every capitalist will... "capitalize" appropriately on the situation to whittle out their cut.
What I'm saying is- China will be building a bridge in a few months to a year, and often doing it under budget and generally with great quality. Africa, Asia, Latin America will build their bridges, and it will take (varying amounts of time), and it will cost considerably less than it would in the US or anywhere in the west for comparable quality. Same with Russia, etc.
The US will use its money printer to magic up the funds to build a bridge (or even just repair it lol) and will wind up going massively over budget, will probably not have completed it within a decades time, will cut corners here and there (and won't even maintain it properly... Because everything in their system is so overpriced), and will have what may as well be infinite grift and corruption (probably legalized in one form or another). All the "capitalization" adds up lol...
I thought the Atlantic coast automotive manufacturing was mostly a way to union bust the last dregs of Detroit manufacturing
That was more Right to Work legislation. The insourcing of Asian auto assembly was about Japan giving a bunch of Mid-Atlantic senators/congressmen a jobs program so they'd step off picking a trade war with the Pacific Rim nations.