There has been a lot of talk about the fragility of the global supply chain, and a lot of this talk is making its way into the mainstream and up into the halls of power. Part of this is that the crises have become so big and disruptive that they have begun to eat into power, and so they are getting more difficult to ignore and gaslight everyone else about through targeted propaganda.
Some of the recent flashpoints have had to do with the medical industry and concerns about things like the manufacture of saline bags (re: the hurricane disaster in Puerto Rico) and now most recently the shortage of face masks, with concerns about Chinese monopolization on these and the attendant shortages of them as that society reacts to the coronavirus.
Typical to these concerns is an acknowledgement of the real dangers of a concentrated and foreign-owned supply chain - and the diminishing labor power that problem implies - which simultaneously comes packaged with a systematic concealment of the nature of the world industrial system.
It was the Chinese after all who with their troublesome authoritarianism and centralized communist government pulled the world system out of cardiac arrest after the great 2008 crash, setting into motion its siphoned-off manufacturing and construction base, pulling in unprecedented amounts of concrete, steel, oil, copper, and everything else to engage in an unprecedented industrial buildout, stabbing a metaphorical shot of adrenaline right into the heart of global demand.
Demand, let's remember, that was in freefall after US and European bankers blew up the global financial system, after having contributed to that massive offshoring bleed, and having squeezed societies abroad and their own societies of almost every last drop of exchangeable human labor.
So it took a political system with a very different composition than the American and European banker-led neoliberal system to gather the political and economic will to build a bridge to nowhere so that we can continue this massive and absurd charade for another couple of decades.
We can grumble about shady foreign powers all we want, but we have still all been intimately connected in the global system as global history has shown, and the global system has been headed by rapacious financial oligarchs with a deathwish over the long arc of human history, though their influence has waxed and waned over certain intervals. So this is going to keep happening.
And we've been talking about financial oligarchs for thousands of years. A picture emerges of a historical human organism whose Achilles heel (perhaps one of several) has steadily grown larger, more powerful, and more prominent over the last couple of thousand years. What a hell of a story and myth: a great expanding war god with a raging addiction to its own perpetual growth, which has gaslighted its constituents and its own self about this reality since the beginning of recorded time, and which now teeters on the prospect of total self-annihilation.
