“We don’t make anything anymore,” is a common lament by the right-wing base. Trump played into it with his campaign rhetoric of bringing back jobs, factories, and production to the US. What’s insidious about these nostalgic exclamations is what they signal: 1) White settlers feel cheated out of their slice of the Empire, and 2) the mythology of US production is used to hide past and current exploitation of Black/Hispanic/Asian workers.
This all plays into what I’ve said before about reactionarism and the Trump movement. Reactionaries creep out when the white middle class/petty-bourgeoisie’s economic benefits start to slide downward. Historically, the US’s white settler base has progressively gained more and more benefits as the Empire has extended its tentacles. White settler gains come at the expense of Black, brown, asian, and indigenous exploitation and suffering, as J Sakai outlines in Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern”:
“In the 1945-1965 period the loyal Euro-Amerikan workers received a mass promotion away from the proletariat, raising the majority of them out of the factories and fields and into the white-collar professional, office, and sales world. Even in its origins this was only possible by replacing them with colonial labor, Afrikan, Puerto Rican, and Chicano-Mexicano.”
All nostalgic references to this period, when “our parents could stay at the same company for 20+ years and retire comfortably,” are subtle-reactionary laments of a time when the bourgeoisie heaped massive benefits on their loyal white settlers. It shouldn’t be hard (yet, it is) to acknowledge that this period of comfort was reserved chiefly for white Amerikans. The reactionaries of today were born out of yesterday’s settler riches.
No white Amerikan wants to work in a factory, operate the production line, or assemble various products of mass consumption. Even that period of industrial white work was built on the backs of Black, Hispanic, and Asian labor. The narrative of US industrial power is but another notch in the mythology of US self-success.
White Amerikans don’t even do most of their labor today. Everything from child care, to grocery shopping, to transportation is forced on the backs of BIPOC labor. All in the name of increasing their gains from the White Supremacist Empire. “Saving time,” etc. No one wonders why they have to continually save more and more time.
Some white reactionaries do believe that all the US needs to do is bring back production to its continent and everything will be groovy again. The intricacies of neocolonialist capitalism don’t do much for them (they’d probably accuse you of being a commie anyway, which faaaiiiirrr), because if they wanted to understand even a surface level concept of how they can live the lifestyles they do, they’d implode in a conniption of cognitive dissonance.
Which brings us to my second point. This narrative of “bringing home the factories'' not only hides Amerika’s past labor atrocities, but its current ones. J. Sakai points out again:
“The observation was made by the Black Liberation Movement during the 1960's that modern Amerika was just "slavery days" on a higher level - in which U.S. imperialism as slavemaster made the entire Third World its plantation and Amerika itself its ‘Big House.’”
The entire history of White Settler Amerika has been built on the backs of slavery, genocide, subjugation, and exploitation of its Black, Hispanic, Indigenous, and Asian subalteran populations. It’s not hard to find this history, either. And this foundation of blood is ever present, altering its strategy according to economic (read, what’s necessary to fully exploit them) need.
I’m sure the white reactionary Trump-fucks wouldn’t appreciate knowing that the US does in fact have factories. Yeah! They’re called sweatshops! And they predominantly employ undocumented workers who earn below the minimum wage and work long hours. Mostly in cities like New York and LA, these sweatshops service the clothing industry. (here’s one article about it, focusing on Forever21’s sweatshops in LA. Doing your own research on this is easy, btw.)
Pretty sure those white petty-bourgeoisie fuckers don’t mean undocumented-worker filled factories when they pine on about their silly economic fantasies.
By the way, I’d like to make a quick note that reactionaries are not a right-wing exclusive phenomenon. Plenty of liberals and democrats are reactionary in their own ways. Or, at many moments promote petty-bourgeois propaganda, like “shopping local” and the idolization of small businesses, which are reactionary not revolutionary - much less reformist - approaches to our current economic issues. If anything, liberal reactionarism is more reformist (and subtle) in nature, than its militant right-wing variant. The rich white liberal who “employs'' a hispanic woman to take care of their children and complains about the “rioting” Black kids downtown while they rack in the dough in a comfy corporate job at some blood soaked financial institution is just as complicit as the rich white republican who funds voter restriction laws.
What I’m saying is the difference between liberals and conservatives is one of degrees of intensity. As we can see by the Biden administration continuing the caging of children that Trump intensified, and that was prevalent in less extreme degrees under Obama and Bush. Sure, one is technically worse than the other. But the less worse option won’t save us. Making something less worse isn’t making it better. But I digress.
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