Deindustrialized regions supply surplus labor at lower wages to late capitalism

Evidence

But additionally, these warehouses demonstrate an essential feature of what Mandel identified—drawing on the arguments of Latin American and African Marxists—as the cultivation of imperialist “dependencies.” Through varied extractive logics of exploitation, capital can impoverish particular geographical areas and then pretend to “save” these very same areas with the promise of “development.” While Mandel mostly examined how this power relation exemplified imperialist economies of domination between Global North and Global South, he also made it explicit that, through automation, deindustrialization, and the flight of capital, “underdeveloped regions within capitalist countries, just like the ‘external colonies,’ thus function as sources of surplus-profits.” In other words, late capitalism relies on the promise of reintegrating geographic regions either decimated or left “undeveloped” by previous waves of capitalist production and extraction. The building of warehouses in Lehigh Valley is not only a result of the centrality of logistics and shipping to contemporary capitalism; it is also because deindustrialization left a surplus population willing to work for lower wages, without meaningful guarantees of rights for workers. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 286

Categorization

• XREF: Mandel’s underdeveloped regions within capitalist countries as sources of surplus-profit — a mechanism directly feeding the reader’s causal account of how warehouse labor generates the influencer class. — connects to: Wage labour has grown more pervasive even as manufacturing employment declined — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 480; Postwar boom industries concentrated in a few grand production regions — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 790; German reunification delivered a vast low-cost labor pool to employers — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 125 (+1 more)