July
21, 2023
Early
U.S. capitalism was centered in New England. After some time, the pursuit of
profit led many capitalists to leave that area and move production to New York
and the mid-Atlantic states. Much of New England was left with abandoned
factory buildings and depressed towns evident to this day. Eventually employers
moved again, abandoning New York and the mid-Atlantic for the Midwest. The same
story kept repeating as capitalism’s center relocated to the Far West, the
South, and the Southwest. Descriptive terms like “Rust Belt,”
“deindustrialization,” and “manufacturing desert” increasingly applied to ever
more portions of U.S. capitalism.
