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Pulling the lens back... supply chains and the competitive struggle for imperialist profitability

A supply chain is an integrated network of production units, transport, and distribution forming the process of producing a final commodity for sale: from clothing, to automobiles, to pharmaceuticals, to electronics,  and jet engines. Imperialist capital contracts out to different suppliers that are links in interrelated segments of production. Supply chains encompass mining of materials, manufacture of parts and components, assembly of products, and transportation.

Supply chains (sometimes called “value” or “commodity” chains) constitute what some scholars call the “new central nervous system” of the world (imperialist) economy. By the 2010s, 80 percent of global trade was flowing through supply chains dominated and controlled by Western transnational corporations. One in five jobs worldwide is linked to production in these chains.

Low-cost production in the oppressed countries is pivotal to the profitability of these supply chains.

Now the same factory in China might be producing goods for different Western corporations. But supply chains are not some single monolith serving a single “super-imperialist” capital. They are privately controlled by competing corporations, banking, and investor groups. They are weapons in the competitive battle of imperialist capital for winning market share. The imperialist corporations that command these supply chains, that purchase the output from low-cost suppliers, put continual pressure on suppliers to further cheapen costs, and move operations from, let’s say, Indonesia to Vietnam. And as imperialist rivalry intensifies, supply chains are geographically reconfigured to lower costs, to minimize disruptions, and build up new or strengthen existing bases of competitive strength. This has been a phenomenon of the 2020-21 pandemic, as trade tensions between the U.S. and China grew.

Imperialist supply chains combine 21st century high-tech global coordination of production and transport with 19th century sweatshop conditions in the oppressed countries, as in the garment factories of Bangladesh that employ 3.6 million workers, many of whom live in mud-drenched slums. Low-cost suppliers in Honduras, in China, in Vietnam, and elsewhere are competing with other suppliers to meet production targets and standards set by a company like Target. If that means factories with no grounded wire or fire exits... if it means makeshift buildings that collapse, only to be replaced quickly by others—so be it. That is the cost-cutting logic of capital and profit maximization.

Announcing New work by BA, SOMETHING TERRIBLE, OR SOMETHING TRULY EMANCIPATING:

 

We are at a turning point in history. The capitalist-imperialist system is a horror for billions of people here and around the world and threatening the very fabric of life on earth. Now the election of fascist Trump poses even more extreme dangers for humanity—and underscores the total illegitimacy of this system, and the urgent need for a radically different system.

The website Revcom.us follows the revolutionary leadership of Bob Avakian (BA), the author of the new communism. Bob Avakian has scientifically analyzed that we are in a rare time when an actual revolution has become more possible in the U.S. He’s charted a strategy for making that revolution, and laid out a sweeping vision and concrete blueprint for “what comes next” in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America.

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Our website applies the scientific approach BA has developed to analyze major events in society and the world—why they are happening, how they relate to each other, how all this relates to the system we live under, where people's interests lie, how revolution is in fact the solution to all this, and what the goals of that revolution are.

Revcom.us acts as a guiding and connecting hub for the revcom movement nationwide: showing what’s being done, digging into what’s right and what’s wrong, and rapidly learning—and recruiting new people into what has to be a rapidly growing force. As part of this, revcom.us feature and promotes the weekly The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show on YouTube.com. 

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