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The U.S. Industrial Base Is Not Prepared for a Possible Conflict with China
(features.csis.org)
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this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2024
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Oh yeah, supply chains are so incredibly complex nowadays. The only way you find out what you're missing is when you can't get it anymore. And given that China now accounts for something like 30% of global manufacturing, it's pretty much guaranteed that a lot of essential stuff will be gone if US ever decides to start a war with China.
I do think the crises of overproduction that Marx predicted have been mitigated in part by Just In Time production and lean inventories. However, that all comes at a cost - it makes the whole system much more fragile and if we ever see something like another world war or pandemic that shuts down global supply chains, the economic magnitude of that will be far beyond any simple crises of overproduction. The capitalists can mitigate it temporarily but it just means they’re kicking the can down the road.
I very much agree, just in time economy maximizes profit efficiency because you don't need to keep stores of commodities, but it creates fragility. As soon as you have some unexpected event like a ship getting stuck in the Suez canal, the whole global economy grinds to a halt. And unexpected stuff happens, that's just a fact of life. Factories have accidents, ships sink, wars start, droughts happen, etc. A fragile economy that spans the whole globe simply can't deal with these kinds of events in a reasonable way. So, I expect well be seeing more and more economic crises happening because the world is becoming more unstable overall and the economic house of cards the west built is starting to fall apart as a result.