By Weaponized Information | April 12, 2025
Trump 2.0’s calls to “bring back American manufacturing” mask the brutal reality of imperial supply chains. If the iPhone were made in the U.S., it would cost $30,000—not because of lazy workers or overregulation, but because global capitalism is built on superexploitation, not national production.
The Story They’re Telling
According to a recent CNBC report, the cost of a Made-in-the-USA iPhone would exceed $30,000 per unit. This revelation sent shockwaves through the discourse on Trump 2.0’s promise to reshore production and “make America manufacture again.” But the number isn’t shocking to anyone who understands the logic of imperialism: Apple’s profit model depends on disarticulated production, low wages, weak labor laws, and ecological disregard—all conditions that can’t be reproduced on U.S. soil without dismantling the settler welfare state.
How the iPhone Is Really Made
Tricontinental’s Notebook #2 maps out the full Global Commodity Chain of the iPhone. Apple outsources nearly all iPhone assembly to Chinese firms like Foxconn, where workers earn around $2.10/hour and often endure 60+ hour workweeks under military-style discipline.
The cost of labor in the U.S., even at minimum wage, would destroy Apple’s profit margin. But more importantly, so would environmental regulation, unionization rights, and the collapse of tax avoidance opportunities. Apple pays just 2% in global taxes along the Chain; if it produced in the U.S., it would owe 35% corporate tax.
The Rate of Exploitation Isn’t a Flaw—it’s the System
According to Tricontinental’s breakdown, the value Apple extracts from its workers per device far exceeds the wages paid. In Marxist terms, the rate of exploitation is astronomical. An iPhone X sold at $999 includes only about $8 worth of labor costs. The rest is surplus value captured by Apple and distributed among shareholders, financiers, and investors—many of whom are managed by BlackRock and Vanguard.
This isn’t just about phones. It’s about capitalism’s core logic: the greater the exploitation, the higher the profit. Domestic production isn’t “uncompetitive”—it’s incompatible with capitalist profitability without mass repression and intensified domestic immiseration.
Trump’s “Bring Jobs Back” Rhetoric Is Technofascist Theater
Trump 2.0’s calls to “decouple” from China and “restore American industry” serve a dual function:
1) Ideologically, it fuels nationalist fantasies that scapegoat foreign labor rather than critique capital itself.
2) Politically, it justifies increased tariffs, military spending, and AI-enabled industrial surveillance under the banner of “national security.”
But no iPhone factory is coming to Kansas. Instead, what we’re getting is digital Taylorism, AI supply-chain mapping, and biometric factory labor in Vietnam, Mexico, and India. The empire doesn’t reshore—it repartitions.
The Future of Tech Is Colonial
As Tricontinental shows, the iPhone is assembled across dozens of countries, each chosen for its “competitive advantage”—a euphemism for weakened labor protections, abundant low-wage labor, and pliant governments. Lithium from Bolivia, rare earths from Congo, assembly in Shenzhen, and packaging in Malaysia—all coordinated via real-time data systems run out of Silicon Valley.
What’s called “free trade” is nothing but neo-colonial integration: resource plunder at one end, mass consumer manipulation at the other. And in between? A military-industrial-digital infrastructure held together by monopoly finance capital.
There Is No Ethical iPhone Under Capitalism
The point isn’t to make iPhones “in America.” The point is to dismantle the system that requires hyper-exploitation to make them profitable. Tricontinental reminds us that the solution is not a “fairer wage,” but the abolition of the wage system. As Marx put it, that slogan belongs on our banners.
Until then, every iPhone in your hand is a tiny empire in your pocket—assembled by the exploited, priced for the affluent, and marketed by the manipulators.
The revolution will not be wireless. But it will be organized.
Weaponized Information 
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