JazzG this sounds right and has an internal logic to it. However, I don't think its based in any kind of achievable or historical reality. The myths of industrialization continue to be propagated throughout political discourse, on the right, on the left, and everywhere else, but they were never an actual state of affairs. Industrialization was always reliant on the rest of the world - completely and utterly - through the framework of the modern/colonial apparatus. It always relied on the exploitation of labor and raw materials in a globalized market. It was never artisanal as is widely romanticized, it was never isolationist, and it was never self-sufficient. It was always predicated on the porosity of borders to capital and resources, and their solidity to labor and bodies. The eventual increase in quality of life for those in the colonial homeland (which was built on the bones of dead workers who never saw the fruits of their labor) necessarily results in a fundamental lack: nobody in the colonial homelands are willing to work under these conditions anymore, and any notion that increasing the number of such "jobs" in a post-industrial society would amount to anything is delusional. We can have workers in sanitation, janitorial, construction, food service, retail, education, healthcare, and tech, but all of these are subject to either direct assault (e.g., education) or the insidiousness of automation. I think people fail to understand the brutality of the modern/colonial apparatus in its own homeland - we romanticize manufacturing to the extreme, but there was resource exploitation as well, and both were brutal. The working class only worked out of a combination of desperation and aspiration to that life to which we (as residents of the colonial homelands or their extensions) now expect, and indeed, demand. The only result of isolationism or attempts at self-reliance will be to reproduce the periphery within the bounds of the core - an internal periphery that has always existed, but can be expanded for the sake of corporate gains. When there are no more lands to conquer, seek rent.
