The dominant capitalist discourses have insisted in the last three decades that the socialist economies have crumbled on their own, due to inefficient industrial production and distribution capacities. The strongest counter-narratives to this view were the workers stories and memories – but they were often disqualified by the dominant actors and information channels/platforms as “myths”. Slowly, since the 1990s, they were silenced, while the economy and the state were restructured according to the new requirements of the global capital flows. On the contrary, our REDURB research project revealed evidence from diverse sources that actually back the so-called “myths”. The presentation will reflect on this evidence. It illustrates how capitalism used/ uses deindustrialization as a way to dismantle economies and turn brownfield (as well as greenfield) sites into profit extraction.