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this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2023
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...Do you guys think this sudden Chinese ability to manufacture technology might have something to do with the entire Western World spending three or four decades outsourcing the manufacturing of every single kind of technology to China specifically because it was cheap? No, no, I realize that I sound crazy when I say that.
The countries being outsourced to aren't supposed to actually learn how to make the thing Brandon please you gotta stop this
The funniest part is that this is a trick that Lenin openly discussed in public speeches in the early years of the Soviet Union.
Can you point me towards some of them?
Probably the "the capitalists will sell us the rope we hang them with"
Lenin never said that it was said by some chud american politician
Apparently he actually said this:
The rope thing was probably a rough paraphrase
Interesting. Thanks for the correction
This probably
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/oct/17.htm
It sounds a lot like "uneven and combined development". Trotsky and Lenin were trying to figure out why if a technologically advanced nation moved all their high tech shit to an underdeveloped backwards country, why did the underdeveloped country remain backward? They realized that technology takes a long time to develop and where it develops and alienates the workers and causes all these social changes that workers organize against and the bourg has to make cultural adjustments...but once its finished you can just take it to a new country where it can be sold to the ruling class along with all the methods of suppression that were learned along the way, and the new tech just strengthens the ruling class in that underdeveloped country.
But it works the other way too. For example, after the failed 1905 Russian revolution, the burgeoning proletariat of Russia looked to workers organizations in more advanced countries and adapted the union form to suit their own purposes. But the Russian bourgeoisie was a joke and wasn't able to organize against the worker orgs, which became the soviets that grew into a dual power rival until they seized power in Feb 1917.
Uneven and combined development is definitely a crucial theory in order to understand historical development.
And the manufacturing can’t be brought back home, because the domestic costs of production have skyrocketed thanks to the financialization of everything in the interim period.
Also because manufacturing takes a lot of skill, and so much of it has been outsourced for so long that the Western world simply lacks the infrastructure to be able to do it. And infrastructure in this case doesn't just mean equipment. Equipment could be procured quickly. It a also means a population with the relevant education for and, above all, experience with working in large scale manufacturing of complicated products.
Once upon a time "Made in China" really did mean that something was of dubious quality. Back when they started putting all the manufacturing in China simply because it was cheap and China was still getting to grips with how to do this large scale manufacturing with no experience and a severe lack of people educated in how it worked. Two or three generations later and that is no longer the case. Unsurprisingly, people raised and educated from birth in the world's largest manufacturer of goods are kind of good at making stuff. But moving production back would mean more than just building factories and machines. It would mean accepting that two or so decades long period where you are just learning how to make stuff in the 21st century.
Exactly. Not only the infrastructure, but also the expertise for it. You can't build on the knowledge of hundreds of engineers with decades of expertise in a subject without having the facilities. Especially with the new crop of engineers, 70% of whom are coming out of school basically running everything through Chat GPT and not actually understanding how anything works, setting them years behind their international competition. It's not even their fault though, only the top 5% of engineering schools get any kind of real funding, everything else is expected to get additional funding through endowments, which means even STEM curriculum gets massively underfunded to what it would take to actually industrialize the nation intellectually, which is what we would need since we do not have the labor based to support that. There is literally only one school in the U.S. that does a masters or doctorate program in manufacturing engineering for welding. One. For the whole country. There are only a few schools in the U.S. that offer plastics engineering, or even generalized manufacturing engineering.
What's the one school?
University of Ohio, pretty sure it is in Boise, but most of those professional graduates degrees are mostly online these days.