>>2763180It persists because it's not a myth. It's kind of amazing to link something like this as if it should be a surprise to me. Your view of industry is conflating different steps and forms of manufacturing, and it's telling that you ignored the parenthetical right before the sentence you quoted:
>everything but final assemblyThe manufacturing that remains in the US, including the south, is principally the least productive part of the process: final assembly. What little real productive manufacturing that remains (which is absolutely also in the South) makes
heavy use of enslaved prisoners and migrant workers, which are the only groups that can be paid third world rates (or close to them). Now, it's not a bad thing to emphasize that what production is left in the US is also concentrated in the Black Belt and the industrial farms of the Chican@ homeland (a sign of where the lowest and most exploited workers actually exist), but it is undeniable that the global direction of modern decaying imperialism (principally expressed as neocolonialism today) is toward higher and deeper forms of exploitation in the third world in a desperate bid to stave off increasing crises and declining rates of real profit.
As part of "development" the foundries and mines which already existed in third world countries are being augmented with manufacturing plants and other facilities where parts can be constructed for final assembly in the first world, an expansion of the pre-existing condition where raw materials were exported for refinement and manufacturing in the first world. As Marxists we understand that labor is what produces value in a given commodity, and in general the most laborious work is what puts the most value in a given product. Thus the crisis in industrial labor in the US: where the less-productive stages of the manufacturing process cannot profitably hire the whole population of people who expect to work in it at the wages they expect. In such a crisis, Black labor is the first thrown out in order to sustain the wages of everyone else, but this isn't enough. US capital is in a position where it must either A: magically reverse what the big bourgeoisie needs to survive — which the fascists and imperialists claim to be doing by supposedly moving "jobs" back to the States — or B: intensify attacks on
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