USA - April 15, 2025

USA declares a trade war on the world by means of huge tariff barriers

√ It seeks to break the imperialist Europe of Maastricht, subdue Russia and surrender China to get its market

√ It attacks immigrants with fascist methods and deepens the Zionist massacre in the Middle East

US imperialism is once again dressing up as Trump to regain the hegemony lost in global politics and economics

For the internationalist unity of the working class to defeat the imperialist beast!

Draft International Document for the 7th Congress of the Collective for the Refoundation of the Fourth International / FLTI

Part I

The Biden administration prepared the conditions…
Now through Trump, USA “declares war”

1) Early this year, Biden left office having obtained two enormous accomplishments in favor of US imperialism.
The first was his fascist policy of commanding the state of Israel, which has already murdered more than 50,000 Palestinians in Gaza in a true ethnic genocide. Biden became the boss of genocidal Netanyahu. And he created the conditions for the return of the "greater Israel," which, over the blood of the Palestinian masses, will once again act as the US gendarme on all oil routes in the Middle East, invading and bombing southern Lebanon, Syria, and the West Bank, as an advance of the new Nakba that has begun.

On the other hand, Biden is leaving -and Trump is coming to finish his work- having divided Europe and disorganized the division of labor established by Maastricht, under the French-German axis, from Portugal to Russia. USA used Putin's occupation of oppressed Ukraine to do so.
Pictured by the reformist left as a "democrat", Biden and his party proved to be representatives of the most warlike gangs in USA.
Ukraine was thrown out as a pawn for Russia to invade in a war of partition and occupation. From the start of this war, US imperialism has cut off Russia's supply of cheap oil and gas to Europe, causing a severe economic crisis and increasing the price of raw materials dramatically, especially energy.
This has led, for example, to Germany suffering a 6% drop in production and entering a recession, perhaps the deepest one since the Second World War. German imperialism is even threatening to halt Volkswagen's automobile production… and, to survive, it is already planning to convert it to the war industry.
What USA began to achieve with the counteroffensive launched by Biden to regain its spheres of influence was to push the imperialist Maastricht regime further and further into an ever-narrower slice of the global market, and, as we have witnessed with the war in Ukraine, into the European market in particular. This was not done "peacefully", but rather through military wars and, as now with Trump, by unleashing a phenomenal trade war on the global economy.

Today, the European market, which had closed in on itself before the repeated blows of the US crash, has been split and divided. Ukraine has been occupied by Russia. Its national liberation struggle against Moscow's invasion threatens to be seriously defeated. It is on the basis of this defeat that Trump, seeking a pact with Putin, now pursues the goal of having the US take 90% of the spoils of that oppressed nation.
That is to say, Ukraine has been occupied by Putin… USA is keeping its “rare earths,” which are precious minerals for new high-tech production branches, with its gas and its agricultural income… And the flow of cheap energy from Russia to Maastricht Europe has been cut off. Despite these facts, the global Stalinist left and many of its followers of the renegades of Trotskyism have the nerve to characterize the war in Ukraine as one “between NATO and Russia”… Today, the lies and infamy with which they covered up the occupation and devastation of the oppressed Ukrainian nation have come to an end.

Now, with zero tariffs on Russia, Trump leaves the door open for Russia to submit to the US plan in Europe... or else the alternative will be war.
This is still a shaky agreement that USA must conquer, but the US are already beginning to control the gas and oil pipelines that supply Europe, whether through Ukraine or from the Caucasus, through Turkey to the Mediterranean.

2) As we have discussed, Biden launched this US counteroffensive because in recent years, the European market had continued to strengthen. With each blow from the global crisis erupting from Wall Street, it increasingly closed its customs borders, extending them to Russia. Even today, there are over a dozen countries from the East and the former Warsaw Pact region waiting to join the European Union...
The imperialist Maastricht was pushing USA further and further out of the world economy, while Japan was "silently" penetrating China with its financial capital and becoming the biggest investor in India.

The outbreak of new disputes among imperialist powers and the crisis of the international division of labor originated in 2008 and continued with the subsequent Wall Street crashes, as in 2017 and 2020.
Vast amounts of financial capital from the European imperialist powers had been caught up in the bankruptcy of banks and the stock market crashes and real estate bubbles in USA. More than 70% of the assets of European imperialist banks had been invested in Wall Street and vanished in just hours or days.
One of the most recent examples of this happened in 2023, when the stocks of vastly overvalued tech companies plummeted, leading to the collapse of all Silicon Valley-linked commercial banks in USA. This led to the bankruptcy of Credit Suisse, one of the biggest banks in Europe.
USA dumped its entire crisis on the world and its competitors, and Europe turned inward to protect itself, but not before its financial capital emptied the treasuries of the imperialist Maastricht states. This led to fierce attacks on the working class of that continent, as in France, England, Greece, Spain, etc.
China also closed its domestic market, while doubling its exports to the US and attempting to open its business with imperialist Maastricht by means of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a new "Silk Road", which from Beijing, passing through Iran, the major oil supplier, and across the Mediterranean, would reach Europe.
"Export-oriented China" largely sustained the US deficit with its trade surplus. In the last decade, it held more than $4 trillion in US Treasury bonds. At the first blow of the crisis, China began to silently dump them.
This is an example of what the Wall Street crash caused: the world was beginning to stop financing the US state deficit. To maintain it, USA had to raise interest rates for their government bondholders. This had enormous inflationary consequences within the US, which were passed on to the working class and the poor people, as we see today.

From 2008 to 2023-2024, the economic crisis spread like a spiral throughout the global economy. A new equilibrium was reestablished, where USA tended to become increasingly weaker in its spheres of influence. Thus, the US was losing its hegemony in the global economy.

Meanwhile, the French-German axis used Russia as a source of raw materials, gas, hydrocarbons, etc., in a division of labor that organized production and economic equilibrium throughout the European continent, as we have already said.

Germany, defeated in World War II and divided until '89, achieved hegemony in the European market, followed by France

3) This created a big paradox: Germany, the imperialist power defeated in World War II and which had not been a protagonist of the capitalist restoration in the former USSR and China in 1989, was the one that, once reunified, remained at the command center of European market business and led the extraction of Russia's wealth and the investments in that country. That was a true anomaly. It was UK-US imperialism, first with Nixon and then with Reagan and Thatcher, which had conquered the capitalist restoration in the former USSR, China, and Vietnam.
It had been Citibank, Morgan Banking and the City of London, which had suffocated the economy of the former USSR, strangling it more and more and surrendering the Stalinist bureaucracy, which saw the conditions to become a new ruling class, allied with imperialism... But Germany and France were instead the ones getting Russia's hydrocarbons and gas.

Thus, "Greater Germany", with its financial capital even quietly following the US "oil wars" in the Middle East in recent decades and the BRI with France to Beijing, became the great competitor of US imperialism. It did so by establishing itself in one of the most powerful markets on the planet, along with that of USA, which is the entire European continent.
Furthermore, together with Japan, Germany was competing with US companies for the Chinese domestic market, which had already been conquered by the US Americans since the mid-1970s.
France was not far behind, buying up a large portion of the shares of Chinese state banks, competing in this race with Wall Street banks.

Between 2001 and 2007, when various crises erupted in China, there were enormous leaps towards the opening of its economy.

USA and the entire global imperialism sought to transform China from an "exporting power" into an "importing power" in order to take advantage of the enormous domestic market developed as a driving force by the heavy imperialist investments established there since 1975.

From 2001-2007 transnational corporations used China as a countertendency to their crisis of overproduction. For example, annually, Hewlett-Packard sold 250 million computers and Volkswagen 20 million cars. But financial capital concentrated on controlling the 25% of each state-owned bank in China's provinces, as permitted by the Chinese regime. This gave US imperialism enormous superiority in holding bank shares in that country.
Now, USA wants everything, getting rid of their competitors from the other imperialist powers.

Seeing Japan today forming a bloc with China and South Korea, and signing a new economic and trade agreement as a response to Trump's trade war today allows us to draw conclusions about the process in which US was starting to decline in the Chinese domestic market, even though it had controlled a large part of it since the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
In response to this, the NATO secretary general quickly travelled to Tokyo and reminded Japan who they depend on, having the two largest US military bases on the planet on their territory... This is also what the "trade war" of Trump and USA is about, which, as in Europe before and now in Japan, they are using the full weight of NATO, the military alliance led by USA as the winner of World War II, against its competitors.

USA has launched its trade war after having severely dismantled and weakened the European market. Now, while seeking a definitive agreement with Russia, USA will try to regain their hegemony in the global market.

Wall Street re groups the US financial oligarchy to command Trump's trade war

4) In 2008, Obama tried "by fair means" to get imperialist Europe to open its custom borders. He began an endless negotiation on more than 130,000 products that would be tax-free, but the negotiations ultimately came to a dead end.
Meanwhile, car companies like Volkswagen, Renault and Citroën, as well as German laboratories, pharmaceutical and chemical companies, etc., were setting up in Mexico and Canada to export their products tariff-free into USA from those countries, relying on the NAFTA free trade agreement, something the US couldn't do in Europe.
Thus, it was Biden who upended US business with the "old continent."

Obama had hardened his policy toward China. Back in 2009, upon his inauguration, he declared the US a "Power of the Pacific" and formed a bloc in that region of more than 14 countries to besiege China. This proves that the trade war over China wasn't started by Trump...

Then, during the US counteroffensive, Biden collided with an already closed-off China. This created enormous tension to this day, including military tensions, such as the US manoeuvres in the South China Sea and its de facto (if not legal) recognition of Taiwan, while China has initiated a policy of getting defensive armament. It knows that the US gunboats present on its coasts are aimed at its commercial surrender.
Were the Chinese army to conduct military manoeuvres in the Gulf of Mexico or off the coast of Florida, or establishing military bases in Europe, Africa, or Latin America… US Imperialism would ensure that they didn’t last even two minutes.

Trump, the man representing the major US trusts, business managers of the US financial oligarchy, comes to wage a widespread trade war based on the enormous counterrevolutionary advances achieved by USA during the Biden administration.

The US is going after Russia (as a preliminary step, they are trying to seize most of Ukraine's wealth, agreeing with Putin to occupy it)...
USA, and its imperialist competitors, are also targeting China. They seek to directly control China's most important commodity, which everyone wants: its labor force. With plenty of US arrogance, Trump's vice president, Vance, called Chinese workers "peasants," but actually, they are complaining because they cannot fully manage the super-exploitation of that vast proletariat.

5) When he took office again as US president, Trump was surrounded by the biggest tech magnates and Wall Street's biggest business management funds: BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street. These included Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook/Meta), Sundar Pichai (Google), Tim Cook (Apple), among others.
Behind them, there were the true owners of Wall Street, the select club of families that control a large part of US and global GDP, such as the Morgans, DuPonts, Bushes, Rothschilds, Rockefellers... They gave Trump the green light for the new government to launch a fierce trade war to regain, as we say in the title of this work, the hegemony that USA lost in global politics and economics.

These large investment funds accumulate 80% of US financial and parasitic capital.
They manage more than $11 trillion in investments in EEUU and around the world, equivalent to more than 70% of global GDP in business, investments, and revenue.
These investment funds, called "large business managers" of the most important banks and transnational companies in USA, are the result of the enormous concentration of US capital that has occurred in recent years. This process took a huge leap forward following the bursting of the US real estate bubble in 2008 and the various stock market crashes and crises that continue to impact USA and the global economy.

Morgan Stanley, Citibank, McDonald's, Chevron, and dozens of other large companies and banks are currently managed by BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street, to name just a few examples.
These business managers own sufficient stock in each company and bank they manage to control their operations. This is what imperialism is all about: the emergency of finance capital, one of whose central features is acting as a usurer in the world economy.
Elon Musk and the rest of Trump's custodians upon his inauguration are nothing but the most representative parasites of these large funds like BlackRock, which must permanently distribute dividends and profits to millions of parasites who live by "cutting coupons" on the slavery and wage labor of the working class and the plundering of the colonial and semi-colonial world.

6) During the 2008 crash, $90 trillion in bonds, stocks and uncollectible debts, accumulated by imperialist banks and corporations, vanished away. These debts had no backing in the production of goods. This is what imperialism is all about: sustained parasitism by states that control the world economy and the source of raw materials, annexing and plundering oppressed nations.
Since 2008, the crisis has been unremitting, and in its various outbreaks, it has struck different parts of the planet and different sectors of production. As revolutionary Marxism suggests, where human labor has not produced goods, there are no currencies, securities, government debt instruments, etc., which can acquire value. The imperialist capitalist parasites in 2008 had already spent the profits that human labor had not yet produced. This was the starting point of an enormous crisis in the international division of labor and the equilibrium of the global economy.

In the banks of all the imperialist powers, so-called "derivative securities" are accumulating. They are bonds of nations' foreign debts, of totally overvalued real estate mortgages, of commodity and hydrocarbon future values, etc., which are uncollectible but appear as assets in banks and companies, constituting a true fraud on their balance sheets.
The question here is clear: who pays for these worthless bonds? In other words, which imperialist country makes others pay for them? Because, as the Leninist apothegm suggests, one imperialist power does well if the other does poorly.

These are the intrinsic conditions of the decline of the capitalist system that push it ever further towards war.

A huge spiraling crisis is sweeping throughout the planet, and it is US imperialism and the rotten global capitalist system that are throwing their crises and pestilences at the whole world.

Disputes over the new minerals for new technological branches of production are a component of the crisis and decline of the USA

7) The new branches of production of technological companies that have been developing in recent times, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other technologies applied first to warfare and then to civilian sectors, require enormous quantities of new minerals, essential for their production. The disputes over coltan, the so-called "rare earths" (which contain 18 key minerals), gold, platinum, lithium, etc., are fierce among electric car companies, artificial intelligence and, robotics firms and, above all and fundamentally, the high-tech military industry.

This need for new sources of raw materials, and the valorization of some of them by the vast market of technology companies that need them, is what drives and fuels the extreme exacerbation of clashes between the various imperialist powers, who are once again fighting over spheres of influence where these minerals are abundant, such as coltan in Congo, where transnational corporations are encouraging the war between it and Rwanda. This is also the case of lithium in the triangle of Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina, and also in Peru, and the "rare earths" that China and Ukraine have (which are included in Ukraine’s surrender pact imposed by Trump).

The fight for these sources of raw materials has already caused enormous massacres, such as in the Middle East, again in Congo and in Europe, with the war in Ukraine, where hyenas and lions are fighting tooth and nail for the prey.

This factor is another component that adds fuel to the fire of inter-imperialist disputes over the world economy and the control of new technological branches of production.

Part II

The imperialist crash once again reaffirms the insurmountable contradictions of the rotten global capitalist system

8) In its imperialist phase, capitalism, far from eliminating the anarchy in production, exacerbates it. As we see in inter-imperialist disputes and the fights for spheres of influence, imperialism resolves this key contradiction of the capitalist system with trade and military wars. In other words, in the imperialist era, competition has been brought to its knees. This is what the trade war launched by USA on the entire planet is all about.

With the emergency of imperialism as the highest and most decrepit phase of the capitalist system, monopoly emerges as an attempt to solve the serious contradiction that capitalism itself creates and develops, between social production and the individual appropriation of what the system produces.

In the imperialist phase, the era of decadent capitalism, there has been an enormous concentration of large masses of capital in the countries that first reached full capitalist development in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Then, a brutal crisis and contradiction has also developed between the enormous productive forces created and the national borders, which had constituted the market of the capitalist system in its youth and expansion, from where it integrated and traded in the world economy.
The concentration of banking and industrial capital as financial capital and its export to the world market was the imperialist "solution”, with the rise of monopolies, which allowed this rotten capitalist system to survive, exacerbating all its contradictions. These contradictions already make life unbearable for the exploited on the planet, which capitalism has transformed into a filthy prison.

Monopoly is the ultimate expression of the end of the era of national markets. For today's reformism, as for yesterday's Stalinism, the world economy is a sum of the production of national economies, which would enter global trade on an autarkic basis.
For any serious Marxist, it's exactly the opposite. We Trotskyists affirm that what exists is a world-economy, where the conditions of this economy determine the politics and economics of states.

Imperialism, then, sharpens to the extreme the contradiction that exists between the growth of the productive forces of the world economy and the borders that separate nations and states, whether oppressor or oppressed. Moreover, world wars are nothing more than the expression of a revolt of productive forces against national borders. Therefore, from 1914 onward, the era that opened has been marked by the iron alternative of socialism or barbarism.
We insist: the enormous productive forces created have been incompatible for too long with national markets. The productive forces of the most advanced countries have not found -and even less so today- enough room within the limits of national borders. This is why a division of labor has emerged marked by these enormous contradictions which we have referred to.

In this division of labor, different countries produce goods that the global economy needs and acquire those they do not produce.
The major imperialist countries enter the world economy with machine tools, high technology, and advanced military industries. Other nations provide food and agricultural products. Industry supplies the agroindustry with technology and fertilizers. In other cases, some countries provide auto parts or microchips for the war industry and various branches of production, while others, primarily semi-colonial countries, enter the world market by trading commodities, energy, and minerals.
There can be no national economy separated from this international division of labor.

It is finance capital which controls credit, state debts, global income, and the collection of royalties and patents left behind in the colonial and semi-colonial world.

With the 2008 crash, the division of labor, which had maintained a relative balance since 1989, entered into an open crisis and blew up.
Precisely, the current trade war is because US was falling behind and losing hegemony, to the benefit of imperialist Europe, which had established a single market from Russia to Portugal and a division of labor that allowed it to lock itself up.
Capitalism is a global phenomenon. The current trade war, like global military wars, is ultimately what we defined above: a brutal revolt of productive forces against national borders. Imperialism responds to this by either closing in on itself and its spheres of influence, or by closing its custom offices and opening those of the entire world, as USA is doing today, supported by its gunboats and its highly technological war industry.

The current US tariff offensive is a war, and therefore it has brought and will bring destruction, just as military wars do. Entire industries could even be destroyed. Those who remain standing and have won the trade war will rebuild their profit rate by taking advantage of the enormous reconstruction business, which will be as large as the military war itself.
It's time to explain to the global working class that in this trade war we are facing an enormous waste and destruction of productive forces, goods, and factories, created with the blood and sweat of the workers and the exploited masses of the world. This exposes the fact that this capitalist system, if it persists, is already leading civilization to barbarism. Which is already here...

9) This Marxist theory of the imperialist era was trampled underfoot, among others, by Stalinism, which, since the mid-1920s, claimed that "socialism in one country" could be built. This brutal deception and infamy of the Stalinist bureaucracy led to the ruin of the USSR and other former worker states, finally surrendering them in 1989.
The fact is that not even the most advanced imperialist country on the planet, including USA, even if it calls God to sit at its right hand, can produce everything it consumes. Moreover, the richest imperialist capitalist country is the one that needs the most the world economy to develop its productive forces, among other issues, because it needs cheap raw materials, control of most branches of production, etc.
Therefore, economic or military wars are a revolt of productive forces by which the imperialist powers fight for control of raw materials, surpluses, and financial assets.

The proletariat has powerful weapons for the battle against imperialism if it regains its consciousness and international organization and, by overcoming the traitorous leaderships, agents of its executioners, advances in an international struggle.

It’s enough to give an example to demonstrate it: if a break away with the IMF and a suspension of the repayments on the fraudulent and usurious foreign debts that imperialist banks impose on oppressed countries were decided by the latter, US imperialism and some of its partners would not last even 48 hours without a crash of their stock markets and financial capital blowing up in their faces.
There is no such thing as a "super Trump" or "ultra-imperialism". What exists is a trade war waged by imperialist gangs for supremacy in the world market, in which the working class must intervene decisively to prevent the developing of the catastrophe that is already here.
We must cut down with machetes the false consciousness and the cobweb that the traitorous leaderships plant in the workers’ heads to make them believe they are "weak" and that "imperialism cannot be defeated," when in fact, they hold the power to change the course of destruction of the entire civilization, ending with this global capitalist system, starting in the most developed capitalist countries.

10) Based on this revolutionary theory, since the 1920s, the Trotskyists, and later the Fourth International, have argued against the Stalinist scourge that the USSR ought not isolate itself from the world economy, and socialism could not be built in a single country, but rather by taking power in the most advanced capitalist countries, and at world level.
The USSR, as progressive as its nationalization of productive forces was, didn't produce everything it consumed. It needed the world economy, like a fish needs water. To trade within it, the workers' state needed gold, and later dollars. When it didn't have either, it had to go into debt and take loans, or suffer enormous crises of underproduction that caused unprecedented hardships for the proletariat of the former USSR, China, etc. This is what led the working class of the former workers' states in 1989 to refuse to defend even the nationalized productive forces, because they no longer had any kind of conquests.
In 1989, the whole USSR CP Central Committee was completely aligned behind the CEOs and shareholders of Citibank and the City of London, with Yeltsin and Gorbachev at its head. They depended on their loans and "commissions" to sustain the remaining pieces of the old USSR.

11) For all this, we will insist, Trump, the alleged "nationalist", who is closing the US market does so to open the rest of the world, as imperialist powers do when they go to war, which is not to lock themselves within their national borders, but to dominate the planet.
The scoundrel in the White House is the "most liberal of liberals." Ultimately, he is the one who comes to try to impose the restoration of "globalization" under US hegemony, as it existed after World War II and in the first two decades after the capitalist restoration of '89.

Reformists today speak of Trump's "nationalism," just as they had time ago spoken of "socialism in one country".

We must not forget that, after defeating the revolutionary uprising of '68-'74, the US launched a brutal trade war against the former USSR, China, Vietnam, Cuba, etc. to force them to open their borders and surrender. When the workers' states fell, the imperialist pirates didn't bring "nationalism" and "protectionism" to these countries, but rather the greatest opening of all in order to seize their wealth.

With his trade war, Trump is pursuing the restoration of "globalization" under US hegemony

He ipmposes tariffs to open markets all around the world

12) Undoubtedly, no one can believe that Trump wants a "world of closed countries," as some currents of the “pro-Maastricht” reformist left claim. This is not possible, and first and foremost, for the same US. Such kind of measures would be suicidal for imperialism, and for the US in particular, which needs the world the most, not only to control it, but also to obtain there what it doesn't produce, precisely because it is the strongest market on the planet. But if the US loses its hegemony in the world economy, it will lose a large part of its business. And it won't do so peacefully. It will first wage war, both commercial and military.

Some charlatans suggest that the US would seek to form some kind of Commonwealth like the one England established in 1932 with dozens of countries which were its plain colonies. British imperialism closed in on them and created a market where those countries could only trade with England.
But the US doesn't need a small slice of the market or its own domestic market. It needs the entire world economy, as it had conquered at Yalta after World War II (something all Pabloite reformists hide) and as it fully achieved starting in 1989, situation that has drastically changed today. This is a past to which the US can no longer return. There is no such thing as "super-imperialism," but rather various imperialist powers fighting over the planet.

Far from creating a "harmonious relationship" among the different imperialist powers, as reformism suggests, 1989 dramatically exacerbated the contradictions and clashes over these new markets that were directly introduced into the world economy.

Imperialism is historically exhausted. It's no longer able to advance as a bloc the way it did in the 19th century, during its reformist epoch. As Trotskyism asserts, this does not mean that certain branches of industry, as we see today in high-tech industries, and certain countries, for example, China, cannot progress at a pace never seen before. Since 1975 (as we have been explaining), the largest imperialist investments have been made to exploit the most concentrated mass of workforce on the planet.

But any capitalist progress in the imperialist epoch is and will be ever achieved at the expense of other branches of production and other countries. The production costs of the world capitalist system increasingly devour its profits and make it ever more parasitic, usurious, and warmongering.

The United States, accostumed to dominating the world at will, has clashed brutally with other parts of the world since 2008 and a new balance of power over its distribution has been established. The trade war is an expression of this. Therefore, the most significant contradictions of the current crisis are unfolding in the United States.

Ultimately, everything returns to "normal" in the imperialist era. Reformism's golden dream of a "super-imperialism" and its "harmonious expansion" across the planet has been shattered by like itself.

13) What this new Trump administration seeks, with the increase in tariffs, is of course, on the one hand, to strengthen the US market again. It was "weakened" precisely by its strength: by the enormous outflow of capital from the US to control the world economy, something that deepened after '89 (when the fall of the former workers' states such as the former USSR, China, Vietnam, etc., took place under US command). They benefited from China’s slave labor, sources of raw materials (as in Russia) and the control of new branches of production on the planet.
This is a contradiction inherent for every imperialist power: the more it increasingly dominates the world, the more it increasingly weakens its domestic market. This is due to the fact that it obtains cheaper labor and raw materials around the world and greater advantages from the currency inbalances and the exploitation of the working class in the countries it oppresses, at the service of its large monopolies and transnational corporations.

Let us not forget that when England dominated the world, it destroyed its own agriculture, since it was able to obtain commodities at rock-bottom prices from the rest of the planet.
In the 1980s, it liquidated all its mining operations and closed its coal mines, even laying off 600,000 workers who had been on strike for six months against the Thatcher government. Plundering Africa's minerals, as it is doing together with AngloAmerican, was much more profitable for its transnational corporations operating around the world.

As Trotsky stated in discussions against Stalinism in the late 1920s, regarding the theory of Permanent Revolution:
“The global division of labor and the supranational character of contemporary productive forces, far from losing importance, will retain it and even increase it doubly and tenfold for the Soviet Union as it progresses economically.
“Every underdeveloped country has passed through different stages upon joining capitalism, during which it has seen its relationship of interdependence with other capitalist countries increase or decrease; but, in general, the tendency toward capitalist development is characterized by a colossal increase in international relations, which finds its expression in the growing volume of foreign trade...”

Mr. Trump, like a bar bully, will not be able to resolve these contradictions without violence: trade and military wars to prevent the US from slipping back from that favorable division of labor, and keep controlling most of its spheres of influence. The fact is that the US is decisively dependent on the colonial and semi-colonial world which it plunders, exploits, and subjugates, even at the expense of weakening its own domestic market.
Trotsky developed precisely this position in his polemic against Stalinism, stating:

“From a qualitative point of view, India's dependency on England is evidently of a different nature than England's dependency on India (…) India is a colony, England a metropolis. But if England were subjected to an economic blockade today, it would perish before India.”

The fact is that all imperialist powers need raw materials: gold, platinum, minerals of all kinds, commodities, etc. They even depend on the same capital they have exported to the colonies and semi-colonies they oppress in order to take advantage of their comparative advantages, increase their rate of profit, and extract all the rents that allow them to distribute succulent dividends to the shareholders of their financial capital.

Undoubtedly, reformism presents imperialism as an undefeatable monster, but actually, the unity of the workers of the semi-colonial world with the working class of the imperialist powers in a common revolutionary struggle would create the conditions for a qualitative leap in the struggle for international socialist revolution. And these are the banners of struggle for which the Fourth International fights.

14) The current US influence in the global economy and the enormous amounts of capital it exported to control and plunder the planet have weakened its domestic market, which is once again a potencial big business in this time of US crisis. Trump is proposing to strengthen the US market again with a new investment cycle that would give the US greater autonomy at a time when the dollar is weakening and its federal deficit continues to grow.

What we state here can be exemplified by what Obama recounted in his memoirs: he asked the president of Hewlett-Packard (HP) why he didn't bring back his factories from China to produce in the US. The later replied: "Now it is not the right time. In my companies in China, we have workers sleeping in sheds inside the premises. When a purchase order arrives for any country in the world, we wake them up at 3 a.m., feed them a cup of tea with some crackers, and they go out to produce for as long as I need. Those conditions don't exist in the US."
Today, Trump wants to grant these conditions to US companies in the US itself, allowing them to do business there with a working class enslaved like at Chinese standards. That's the real plan. Everything else is demagoguery to drag a segment of the US proletariat behind an unrealistic dream.
It is the imperialist powers which need the most the world they oppress to control the sources of raw materials, plundering the oppressed peoples and super-exploiting the proletariat.

Apple has made a huge fuss, arguing that it can't quickly move its production from China to the US and that it would be extremely expensive to do so. Trump is asking them to be patient and is preparing the conditions for this.

But more importantly, these contradictions are the reason why the US need to defeat their own working class to regain control and production in their domestic market. That's why this tariff hike was accompanied by a fierce semi-fascist offensive to expel millions of immigrants from the US and imprison them, even in Guantanamo Bay. They seek to reduce the industrial reserve army in the US to force the white working class, now devastated, hungry, and unemployed, with neither a room, much less a home to sleep at, to work for pennies in the new jobs created by new capitalist investments within the US. This is what Trump is preparing: Chinese-style slavery conditions to reactivate the US domestic market.

15) While this issue is important, it is not the fundamental reason for such a global trade war launched by the US. The bottom line is that today, by closing their own market with widespread tariffs, the US is also seeking to force the opening of other imperialist powers’ markets that compete with them as well as of the entire world. This is what the trade war and Trump's "nationalism" are all about, as we have already stated.
Trump has been telling US companies: "Hang on. In every war, there are losses, but with these measures, all customs will begin to open." "Thus, we will return," he promises, "not only will we strength our domestic market and put American workers to work, as well as the Chinese ones (whom they contemptuously call 'peasants'), but also, and decisively, we will finally open the world market so that 'globalization' can return, but under our control. If not, we will lose all the positions we have gained in the world economy. And it won't be just Apple. Our federal deficit will skyrocket. Our banks, with their worthless bonds, will plunge dramatically. Europe will arm itself to the teeth and go after the Chinese market..."
Imperialism knows that monopolies are backed by their national flags and that relations in the world economy are based on the relationship between states: some of them oppressed, and some other, oppressors.

For US imperialists, seizing China's wealth, its powerful domestic market, the businesses of that country's powerful commercial and industrial bourgeoisie, and the exploitation of its working class is a decisive question. And that's why they are prepared to defeat, commercially for now and militarily later if they don't yield, the rest of the imperialist powers that are challenging them for these new markets, thus reaching Beijing's doorstep.

Thus, the US imperialists close their market as a veritable blackmail to get everyone to open theirs. Only lackey reformists can believe the fabrication of a US "super-imperialism" that operates outside the global economy. Ultimately, these currents of the reformist left are continuators of Stalinism, which believed that "socialism in one country" could be built outside the global economy of the capitalist system and without organizing and planning the productive forces on a global scale.

The heirs of Stalinism got lost in the midst. However, they always find their bosses, to save them from the proletarian revolution.

16) Today, imperialism is negotiating. Trump claims to be doing so country by country so that everyone will surrender, and he will open and close US borders according to what suits the US. He has by no means isolated the US from the global economy. But the economic relations of the "peaceful era" in the global economy are over.

The US imperialists know they have to make certain concessions, since the US is the one that needs global economy the most, as we have been demonstrating. Nevertheless, at the same time, if they do not intensify their trade war, they know they will lose its control.
"The trade war continues, but like with every rule, there must be exceptions," Trump declares. As we will see later, after effectively severing trade relations with China by raising tariffs to levels that make any trade impossible, the US government decreed tariff exemptions for electronic products. Apple will have time to continue exploiting Chinese "peasants" and maintaining its super-profits.
"But this won't be the case," the US vice-president retorted... "It will only be for the production of high-tech components for the military industry. The iPhone will continue as usual."

Part III

China: The most advanced battlefront in the trade war among the imperialist gangs of Wall Street that are going for everything

17) The US trade offensive began on April 2. After delivering an international tariff blow, Trump now announces that more than 75 countries have called him to negotiate. He will do so one by one, while suspending tariffs on these countries for 90 days, leaving a floor of 10% for all. In grotesque language, Trump claimed that these countries had "kissed his ass." He acts like a Wild West saloon bully.
Even Trump denounced Republican politicians who were calling for Congress to negotiate tariffs. He publicly denihrated them, claiming he is the one who knows how to negotiate.

Europe is backing down and trying to carry a negotiation, but one product by product, as it always has done, accepting zero tariffs on some and maintaining tariffs where they are competitive with the US economy. The US will not be able to accept this deal, as it did not before.

From the center of Maastricht, they call for "patience" ... But that's just a pose. While Meloni (Italy) runs to embrace Trump, countries like Spain are meeting with Xi Jinping to deepen its business with China.

France and Germany are increasing their defence budgets, and Macron threatens to place some of his nuclear arsenal in the Eastern European countries that once were a part of the defunct Warsaw Pact.

Besieged by tariffs, divided by the Ukrainian war and the looming pact between Trump and Putin, the Europe of Maastricht, which has lost its own market, is seeking to negotiate...
The German recession has become unbearable and opened up a massive social crisis and a bourgeois rupture within.

Wall Street has allowed relentlessly all these elements of crisis to develop and deepen.

Trump left Russia with zero tariffs, as we've already said, as a way to negotiate the partition of Ukraine, but fundamentally, to force it to submit to US imperialism and serve as a foothold for the US to encircle and break the imperialist Maastricht regime and advance over Eurasia.

Disconnecting Russia from imperialist Europe would be an enormous strategic triumph for the USA to directly colonize the former Soviet republics of the old USSR that are not currently part of the Russian Federation and keep Putin as a watchdog over their businesses. Let's not forget that there are enormous gas and oil reserves there, like those in the Middle East, such as in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan (where British Petroleum is already extracting the "black gold" from the Caspian Sea), etc.

18) The US aren't yielding in their greed for China... The Trump administration has launched a full-scale tariff offensive against China, announcing that if China doesn't give in, military action will be just around the corner.
Trump had initially decreed a tariff increase of 34%, to which China reciprocated with a 34% tariff on US products.
When there are sharp inter-imperialist disputes, such as in military world wars or the current trade war, the large native bourgeoisies use them to negotiate their dividends. These are the so-called BRICS, which Trump dismantled with his widespread tariffs, forcing each of them to negotiate individually with the US.

But China, for now, remains steady. The powerful national bourgeoisie in Shanghai knows that its fate and businesses are in question, but also the super-profits that certain imperialist companies obtain in its domestic market.
China also has an enormous concentration of US capital, its transnational corporations, and its financial capital. Many of the companies of the Chinese commercial bourgeoisie assemble products whose most important components are from the US, Germany, or Japan. These companies outsource their production or sell their patents to the Chinese government so that their products are sold as "Made in China," paying fewer taxes, receiving subsidies, etc. This is even the case with high-tech companies.
Thus, imperialist financial capital extracts enormous amounts of surplus value and profits, which are managed and controlled by the extremely wealthy Chinese commercial bourgeoisie.

Faced with China's harsh policy, the US doubled down and raised tariffs to 104%. This is how Wall Street shows which will be the heart of its attack. Trump responded to China's subsequent 84% tariff increase with an increase to 145%, effectively cutting off all trade relations.

19) Trump knows that China is currently being hit by a massive crisis of overproduction, that is, of goods that cannot find a market. China has 11 electric car companies that cannot compete in the global market. The imperialist countries hace closed their markets to them.
The protectionism of all the world countries against steel, which is abundant in China, is strangling this country economically, causing enormous losses to its banks, and forcing it to produce at cost or at a loss.

Xi Jinping is aware of the enormous US investments in China. But Trump seeks to make him understand that it's not about a particular company, but about who controls the entire Chinese market. The Americans are going after everything.

Unlike the imperialist powers that manage the client portfolio to place their products in the global economy, and also control the spheres of influence and oppress the colonial and semi-colonial world, China, which has an extremely powerful commercial bourgeoisie, does not enjoy the "privileges" that the different imperialist countries have. In fact, imperialism (although vulgar Marxism is impressed by China's "very high production") is essentially financial capital, not industrial capital, and therefore it is a parasitic one.

20) Wall Street wants to manage China's trade surplus, control 100% of its banks directly and also compete for business with the Chinese national bourgeoisie, which fiercely resists being left out. Such resistance is based on what it sees as inter-imperialist disputes. Before, with the US and then with Europe, the great Chinese native bourgeoisie survives by dribbling amidst these disputes and also maintains thousands of partnerships with Japanese imperialism.

This is a trade war. There are casualties on both sides of the trench. The question is who surrenders to whom. For the US, it's about conquering the Chinese market and the entire Pacific Rim, and, as we've already said, not just about the survival of one or another of their companies, which are merely a component of their financial capital.

Trump's blow is extremely harsh. China produces more than its market consumes and depends on the US to achieve and obtain a huge trade surplus. That is, to obtain fresh dollars. The productive forces developed in China violently clash with national borders. In the trade balance between China and the US, the US exports $134 billion to China, and China exports $375 billion to the US… The Wall Street bandits, who even have frontmen belonging to the Chinese big bourgeoisie, know very well what the trade war is about. That's why Trump is asking Apple and other companies announcing huge losses to remain calm.

Furthermore, the US imperialist cliques know that the blockade against China is sinking the yuan and completely revaluing the dollar. This would allow imperialist companies and banks to seize Chinese minerals and production for cheap in the future.
Xi Jinping's government has issued a ban on the purchase of dollars, calling for trading only in the yuan, since a devaluation of its currency would imply a massive devaluation and unsustainable inflation in China.

The Trade War: The US will not relinquish its role as victor of World War II and leader of the capitalist restoration in 1989

21) As we have seen a propos the escalating tariffs with China today, the US would not surrender the market that American financial capital has created in China since 1975 with the pact between Nixon and Deng Xiaoping. This traitorous Stalinist bureaucrat handed over the entire Southeastern China and the country's slave labor force to the US, a matter defined in 1989 with the restoration of capitalism throughout China. It was US imperialism that conquered this market, which contributed millions of slave workers to the world economy and with which transnational corporations were able to counteract the enormous tendencies to overproduction crises of the capitalist system.

Now, the US imperialists are going after China and Russia. They consider themselves not only the victors of World War II, but also of '89, namely the capitalist restoration in the former workers' states, surrendered by Stalinism.
To achieve this, they must defeat their competitors: imperialist Maastricht powers organized around the Franco-German axis, and stamp Japan on its head.

These are the tendencies that are deepening in the world situation: tendencies toward tariff wars and a military war, which are inevitable as long as this rotten capitalist-imperialist system still exists.
Hence the alternative precepted by revolutionary Marxism, not for the future, but as an immediate necessity, as reality proves it, of socialism or barbarism; international proletarian revolution or war.

22) Capitalism will not fall on its own. In the future, it will lead civilization to war and fascism. From the sewers of Wall Street, "Good old" Biden, a true war criminal, emerged; it is the same place this despotic monster called Trump comes from.
And from the sewers of the restorers of capitalism in '89, one of the most furiously anti-working-class bourgeois regimes emerged too: the Stalinist party in Beijing, one of the most important counterrevolutionary forces operating in the 20th century, along with the Stalinists in Moscow.

The international working class must try out again. What has failed was not socialism, since a cruel, opportunistic, and murderous bureaucracy either usurped the workers' states or was forced to take the lead in their conquest, handing those same states over to imperialism later, but not before strangling the international socialist revolution.
We must give it another try. And for this, history needs the Fourth International, the party that embraces the continuity of the revolutionary Marxist program of the 20th century and which has suffered a severe blow today when large sectors of former Trotskyists have moved over to the camp of reformism.
But the last word on this issue has not been written either. Reformism has been walking on very thin ice, which is almost cracking. Life, reality, and cruel and stubborn facts prove all the fallacies, lies, and betrayals carried on by the reformist left, trying to deceive the proletariat and expropriate its struggle.
Thus, alongside the trade war and the colonial wars, a period of "counter-reformism" has started.

After the partition of the European market, the war in Ukraine, and the German crisis, the US have focused their war on the Pacific
Forty percent of world trade passes through that region.

23) In the trade war with China, what is at stake is the Pacific market, where France, England, Germany, and Japan have deeply penetrated with their financial capital, particularly in China.
This is why big US financial capital is not yet mourning the losses some of its companies are suffering. It is the case with Apple, since its stocks have risen again, after they had plunged, as Trump backtracked on the "reciprocal" tariffs and suspended tariffs on technology products with China.
The US government is asking for patience and stating that this battle will be brief. The US seeks to subdue China, but before Apple goes bankruptcy and Wall Street's financial capital is challenged, it will undoubtedly land in Taiwan and obtain what it needs through wars, and not just trade ones.

24) Tech companies based in China know perfectly well that if they lose their value, they will receive enormous compensation in their profits and their stocks will rise again thanks to the war industry, which is where they come from. And meanwhile, they will continue collecting royalties on the patents they handed over to the Chinese bourgeoisie. But the real business of these companies lies in the parasitism they engage in and in the US military apparatus.
No one can hide that the US subsidizes high-tech companies and the military-industrial apparatus with more than $260 billion a year, and that all tech companies, including their development of artificial intelligence, have emerged from there.
The world seems surprised by the $800 billion that Germany and France would now spend on European rearmament. Come on! The US is the one with the gunboats.
Having the Royal Navy is what had allowed England to maintain its imperialist dominance in the 1930s after the US surpassed it in labor productivity and capital accumulation.

The US companies threatened in China by the trade war are part of finance capital, whose shareholders also control the US war industry, which sells weapons, supplies, and equipment to the US Armed Forces for $700 billion a year! Such is the budget to maintain its operations around the world, while receiving multi-million-dollar subsidies.

On Wall Street, there are no "crazy adventurers" pushing companies into bankruptcy. This trade war is commanded by a trading floor staffed by the 0.01% of the 1% of parasites who control 50% of the planet's wealth.

25) What the vulgar Marxist lackeys hide is that, as Lenin said, imperialism is an organized monopoly in the world economy as a consequence of the fusion of industrial and banking capital. In other words: it is FINANCE CAPITAL.
This is why, finance capital is primarily usurious and parasitic. It obtains superprofits not only in the industrial process by controlling global branches of production and defeating its competition, but also fundamentally by plundering oppressed peoples and controlling RENTS…
That is from where it gets the superprofits with which it feeds the labor aristocracies and bureaucracies with pennies so they defend the imperialist businesses and interests. This is an excellent definition by Lenin.

It makes these superprofits by granting usurious credits and loans, with which it has involved 40% of the world economy in the trap of debt, which it controls through, among other devices, with the.
Furthermore, this financial capital maintains its monopolies. In the case of the US, this financial capital and its subsidies are financed with funds from the world's reserves, which buy its state bonds as a store of value. As we have already said, its enormous deficit of $32 trillion is paid by the entire world, primarily by China and Japan.

This rentier finance capital also makes superprofits from the goods it extracts from living nature, that is, those that can be applied to the production process. It controls oil revenues, minerals, and commodities. These sources of raw materials are found in colonial or semi-colonial countries, which it must plunder and enslave. In this regard, we insist, the US was also losing its hegemony.
How is it possible that Turkey, a secondary imperialism, has ended up controlling, along with Iran, the order in the countries of the Middle East's "oil routes" after the US' forced withdrawal from Iraq?
The US finds this unacceptable. For it is Cargill, with its own army of mercenaries, which enters Ghana in Africa and enslaves children and steals cocoa for the food industry... and it is the infotech companies that, with more than 60,000 children, extract coltan from the Congo...And on and on…
That is why the US must restore order. The bombs falling on Gaza and Yemen, Moscow's silence, and the genocide by Zionism are a decisive and crucial factor in the ongoing trade war.

26) Without military wars where imperialism imposes discipline in its spheres of influence, trade wars don't work. Therefore, in the face of the trade war launched by Trump, as was inevitable, wars of colonialism and aggression are deepening.
Ukraine proves it clearly: Trump has just asked Zelensky for the whole of that country's gas, its "rare earths" and rich minerals, and its enormous agricultural income as compensation for the loans provided by the US for his war with Russia.

The "Liberation Day” of the US that Trump proclaims is nothing but Wall Street kicking the board of the world economy. It has re-entered the world like a hurricane, as it did in World War II to conquer it, and now it is doing so to maintain its control.

To march on China and Russia, the US must push imperialist Europe out of the way, disperse it, or blow it up.

27) As we have said, Trump will meet with Ms Meloni, Italian Prime Minister, in the coming days to discuss tariffs. Meanwhile, Germany and France announce they do not intend to fund NATO and are committed to developing their own military apparatus. They have also imposed a 25% tariff on US aluminium, steel, and automotive products, the goods over which Europe and the US are in open conflict and competition. In any case, Maastricht has proposed Trump that they would negotiate zero tariffs, product by product, the same old German proposal made to Obama.
The U.K. urges calm and not to rush. It does not want to lose relations with its partner in the plundering of the planet. But for the US, this war is against everyone: "America first," says Trump.

Imperialism is also annexationism. Trump wants to annex Canada and Greenland to strengthen US domestic market and seize vast sources of minerals and rich lands.
From London, they insist: "Let's go slowly," while the US have threaten to take Canada away from them, as, under the old Commonwealth pacts, it recognizes the English King as its own.

Spain meets with Xi Jinping for the second time in a year, to close agreements that involve importing electric cars produced in China into Europe.

After Macron said they were "not willing to be vassals of the US," France boldly proclaims its acceptance of defending Europe without NATO and threatens to take its nuclear weapons to Germany… What it is defending are the colonies it shares with German imperialism in Eastern Europe, where fratricidal clashes are predicted in the Balkans, led by Serbia.
In the Balkans, the smell of gunpowder is floating in the air… this time not from Ukraine. Serbia has demanded explanations for the military defense pact between Albania and Croatia with Kosovo, which are openly pro-US.
The imperialist powers are the ones organizing these blocs to use these countries to engage in fratricidal military clashes through third parties to defend their interests..

US plan, we insist, is to make a pact with Putin so that he submits; it also wants to let Eastern Europe dismember around the former pro USSR countries, and disperse the imperialist powers that control Maastricht.

28) The US has a plan to regain its hegemony in the world market, which no imperialist bandit is willing to surrender "peacefully." This plan, we will keep on saying, contemplates trade wars... and military wars.

The trade war unleashed opens a period that makes peaceful coexistence among the different imperialist powers unbearable in the midst of the global economic stagnation and crash. The world market has shrunk, and there are trillions and trillions of monetary values, debts, and bonds, in the hands of banks and states, which are unbacked by the production of goods in the world economy.

What is at stake is the dispute over spheres of influence, primarily Russia and China.
Unlike the former Soviet republics of the former USSR or Vietnam (which are now colonies or semi-colonies of imperialism), China and Russia are surviving in the world economy as capitalist countries in a state of transition, relatively independent. Imperialism cannot allow them to concentrate financial capital because there are too many imperialist powers in the world economy. That is why the fight over China and Russia is a fight to death, because the survival of the various imperialist powers also depends on which one takes them.

We are, then, facing a trade war to recolonize China and Russia and finish the work started by Anglo-American imperialism in 1989, which they have not fully achieved yet. Either the US achieves this, or it collapses. And before that, and to fight over this booty, wars will come, and not just economic ones.

29) We must always keep in mind that both the First and Second World Wars began with huge tariff increases and brutal protectionism by the imperialist countries.
At that time, Germany, which had lagged behind in the sharing of the world, became openly aggressive and contested two world wars, first with England and then with the United States, for the control of the spheres of influence.

The crisis today is inexorable, since the imperialist powers that lag behind in this new recolonizing offensive and lose hegemony are the ones that become aggressive, as is the case with the United States. Others submit, as Japan and U.K. are already threatening to do, after promising to wage a battle.

But if US imperialism succeeded in bringing the competing powers to their knees and they fall behind, it is them which will be the aggressive ones in the world market.

Part IV

Trump comes to level up his counterrevolutionary foreign policy with his regime and government within the USA
BlackRock and other Wall Street gangsters have decided it is time for Bonapartism

30) Since WWII, every time the US imperialism propelled decisive military offensives over the semi colonial world, it was not able to win or was defeated. This happened not only due to the heroic combats of the oppressed masses but also to the irruption of the US working class. This happened when the Korea war, the Cuban revolution, later on with Vietnam and more recently, with Iraq and Afghanistan. US workers have always entered combat and opened a front within the proper US that paralyzed its military machine outside the US.
This is the case today with the Palestine question: thousands of young people have taken on the streets and there are now hundreds of thousands combating all over the US against Trump´s policies and in support of Gaza.

When Trump took office, he immediately pardoned all his supporters who had carried on the fascist putsch against the US Parliament. Even though he has absolute majority in congress, he governs by decree. Wall Street prone judges would decide how far they let him go or whether they will control him, which they have not been able to do so far.

31) In the USA a crisis in parliamentarism has started… There is no room for a parliament in the imperialist crisis. The hour of Bonapartism has come. The Biden government and the “progressive democrats” launched the worst attacks on the US working class in the last decades. Before that, with the 2008 crack, Obama had taken away healthcare, pensions and other big conquests while subsidizing Wall Street banks in bankruptcy with over 1 billion dollars.
Due to a rising inflation that has allowed imperialism to finance its ruinous and parasitic trans-national companies, life has turned unbearable for the working class and the masses. Unemployment, led the white working class to desperation and ruin. Precisely, on this fragmentation of the masses and the existence of a desperate ruined middle class, Trump is setting his current counterrevolutionary offensive and also on the crisis of the fraud and lies of the Democratic Party that had turned again to its warmongering and discharged its Wall Street crisis to the masses.
As the Trotskyists program claims, democracy is only possible in very wealthy countries and USA is losing that rank. The current economic crisis is very serious. The financial crisis is the same in every national state, which brings closer the danger of war. This is an unprecedented social crisis. Over 300 million immigrants are seeking a place to live and work.

32) The new government tries to attack all democratic liberties but also defeat and smash the US worker movement and all its sectors, such as the immigrants. For these attacks, it gets social support through promises and demagogy toward the ruined white working class by talking of “going back to the past,” to “the American dream” of the WWII postwar

We insist: the Trump government seeks to match foreign policy of imperialism fascism and Bonapartism all over the world with its regime within the USA.

This is a time when Bonapartism is strengthened, the presidential figure, governing by executive orders, for congress to delegate its powers to the “monarch”… They need a regime of Bonapartist domination to let imperialism discipline its own masses and unify bourgeoisie gangs to be able to take greater political and military adventures. It is either that or losing its total domination of the planet, which will not be done peacefully.
This Bonapartist attempt within the US is also testing the conditions for fascism. Proto-fascist gangs are beginning to rise in various cities. The bourgeoisie knows very well that very harsh clashes with the Black labor movement are ahead. This is inevitable. Trump has the whip on the table: Elon Musk, who is already funding fascist groups across the country.

33) Trump is also coming to settle scores with the black movement that dethroned violently him in the 2020 prerevolutionary process and sent him 14 floors underground under the White House. Meanwhile, the youth in Minnesota and all over the USA fought for the abolition of the murderous police that had killed George Floyd.
The tragedy is that today Trump comes back after all the reformist left and the union bureaucracy had deflected those enormous fights by calling to support Biden and the Democratic Party. Through the electoral victory, both Biden and the Dems have shown to be the best to remove the masses off the streets with false promises while putting all the crisis over the workers’ shoulders and provoking one of the biggest genocides in Palestine.
Trump´s current plan could not have been even drafted without the invaluable help of his “opponent” Biden, who had taken the exploited out of the picture so that the new White House executioner could come for them. One (Trump) does not work without the other (Biden), each playing their part. Such is the ruling classes’ strategy of control. As we can see, Trump could not be ruling without the enormous job Biden did for the sake of Wall Street. Both of them come from the very same financial capital gutter.

This policy would have been impossible to apply without the collaboration of the traitorous leaderships seeking for the “progressive” bourgeois or the “workers’ friend” to subjugate the working class to its ‘democratic’ executioners and thus divert it from the revolutionary path and disorganize its revolutionary struggles, as we will develop later on.

That fascist gangs are already in the US Open air can be seen in Cincinnati, where the police encouraged fascists to enter a black neighborhood which led the black community to arm themselves and organize their own security. This is just a sample of the fact that the black people and the working class have not been defeated.

Trump is also attacking the rebel youth who is openly combating Zionist and US imperialist massacring in Gaza. Trump threatens with doing away with subsidies to universities where there are demonstrations supporting the martyrized Palestinian masses. This attack is carefully measured since the pro-Palestinian movement, which is massive in the US, mainly within the youth, has called not only to defeat Trump but also to face Biden and his sidekicks to whom they have accused as war criminals.

34) As we can see, both at an international level and within the country, US imperialism is obliged to go from thevtalking to the walking. This will be defined in the class struggle and the results are yet to show.

The US working class, due to its leadership’s treason, enters decisive battles with their files divided. In spite of Trump’s boasting, the US pirates are careful and seek to prevent premature defeats. They try to have their competitors and unruly agents of the world surrender with blackmail and hard trade wars and tariff barriers which will be paid by workers and the oppressed peoples with inflation and high cost of living.

A propos “globalization” and the revisionist pseudo-theory of the existence of a “super imperialism”
Once again, reform vs. revolution

35) “It is the end of the globalization era!” cry the imperialism cockatoos and every anti-Marxist group. And they weep and lament. Exponents of these servants claim that during the “Globalization” of the last 30 years, Imperialism “expanded democracy” here and there and moved productive forces forward. They say this is what happened until 2008 when “everything changed”.
This is a lie and a fallacy told by currents like PTS in Argentina. The only thing they do is to hide workers and the world masses’ spilled blood under the carpet after the great massacres that have been happening since 1989. That is the way the USA has “expanded democracy”: a million Iraqis murdered and a Balkan war much worse than today’s massacre in Gaza. They lie. As Trotsky used to say about the Stalinists, they belong to the club ¨Friends of Democratic Imperialisms¨.
Imperialism has imposed Bonapartist and horror semi-fascist restoration regimes in Russia and the former Soviet Union republics. In Moscow, two people get together in the main square and they are sent to prison. Since the friends of FIT-U say “democracy has expanded”, they may go build their group in Russia to see how that goes.
Not to say how imperialism has also “expanded democracy” through China with workers in prison-factories that not even Hitler dared to build.
This Argentine PTS’ position reaches the limits of cynicism. Their leadership should go enjoy the “democracy conquered” after Tiananmen massacre in China.
Or maybe they could visit Chechnya where KGB thug Putin imposed genocide on over 4 million inhabitants after the oppressed nation rebelled. Every male person older than 14 were then murdered.

This is very serious since they are concealing that the ‘Globalization’ they speak about no other thing that the treason of Stalinism to the world revolution that allowed it the handing over of Russia, China, Vietnam Korea and other former workers states to capitalist restoration.

This injected fresh blood into the veins of the ossified, dying capitalist system. That is what they call “Globalization expanding democracy”...
Fresh blood has run out. 2008 crisis means imperialism needs more blood to survive, which it will get through wars, both trade and military ones.
Many of those currents that proclaim the fallacy of “globalization” also speak about national imperialisms… another big lie. Beside circumstantial measures that the imperialist powers may take, this is a scam to confuse the working class, especially the US proletariat which is the one Trump wants to coopt. This is why he has invited US metal union leaders to sign “protectionist” decrees.

36) The only serious Marxist method to define the current situation of US offensive is to say that the international division of labor has exploded and the capitalist world economy equilibrium has been broken.
This equilibrium had been broken in 1989 with the fall of the workers states, and was rebuilt in a counterrevolutionary way; then, it worked i'm the new shape until 2008, when it broke again because the stewardship of the international division of labor was questioned when USA started to lose its hegemony.
This is why it is the US imperialists who are willing to deepen the crisis and break the world economy equilibrium in the current conditions. And they will use whatever method necessary. With the trade wars, USA seeks to shape the entire planet at its will. And this trade war is more and more linked to military wars. Ukraine war cannot be hidden, nor can Middle East massacres or Taiwan’s siege.

Part V

Trump’s trade war victory will not be defined by him, US imperialist competitors or the world bourgeoisie…
The last word rests to the international working class

37) Here and there Trump makes concessions to those who surrender. But imperialist and big bourgeois competitors are battling as well.
This war will not be defined only by Wall Street gangsters, Maastricht pirates, or Xi Jinping and Eurasia’s butcher Putin.

The coward native bourgeoisies, who asked Trump to negotiate and suggested a zero tariff, will not defeat the imperialist offensive.

In Latin America, the servant bourgeoisies seek to regroup as in CELAC or regional markets, like Bolivarians used to do. They do that in order to better negotiate their conditions to surrender. They keep paying foreign debts and handing in all their nations’ rich resources to imperialism. What a despicable people.
In Africa, with millions starving, the whole civilization is receding while the corporations that own the great technological industries on earth take away the most precious minerals, which are necessary for their state-of-the-art production.
Middle East native bourgeoisies have isolated Gaza and leave it to be massacred. In Europe, they dispute and rip away Ukraine, parted and occupied between the US, Russia and the French and English troops which guarantee the repartition of the nation wealth among all the imperialist gangsters.   

38) The other main actor in the world situation, who will define the current war, is the working class and the combats of the oppressed peoples, who are far from having surrendered as we can see in the Middle East. Class struggle will be a decisive factor to define this new period opened in which the political equilibrium has burst apart as well as the world economy. The “armed peace” period is over. 

Opportunist should not worry, trade war will not be paid by transnational companies which will be subsidized by the states: they will try to make the working class pay for it with recession, inflation and counterrevolutionary looting wars.

39) What explains this overtime of the dying, rotting capitalist system is the treason of the working-class leaderships that have betrayed the thousand combats, revolutionary and pre/revolutionary situations that took place over the whole planet during the 21st century, on which we could write a whole book.
Here we will only recall the decisive role of the US working class to prevent US imperialism from massacring in Palestine by the thousands, which is what it needs to control the planet.
The Gringos’ defeat in Iraq and Vietnam wars, was defined on the streets of New York and Maastricht Europe.
The Greek working class was the vanguard in helping thousands of refugees crossing the Mediterranean Sea, fleeing from counterrevolutionary massacres in the Middle East.
Historically, it has not been yet defined whether the Ukrainian proletarians, who have given their lives in the trenches, would accept a partition and occupation of their country. Neither have the Russian workers settled scores with the murderous Moscow bourgeoisie that have sent hundreds to be massacred to the war fronts for their business.

The chapters of this class clash have not yet been written.

40) The US working class is the great ally of the world working class. They have combated within the imperialist beast. Thousands of young people, who have confronted Biden -back then the Zionist chief-, and keep taking to the streets in spite of Trump’s hard repression. They are threating to take the US masses to a decisive combat to overthrow that arrogant murderer un the White Hall, who has emerged from Wall Street sewers.
It has been the “New Left” treacherous leaderships which submitted the US working class to the scoundrel Sanders who, in turn, kneeled before “Genocide Joe” Biden, a Middle East massacrer, and greatest exploiter of US workers. Now those Leftists cry and lament that the desperate masses have voted for Trump.

The charlatans of “Globalization” may go on blaming the working class for “not fighting” during those decades and they may keep talking about the “virtues” of imperialism “peaceful and democratic globalization” as they themselves call it. They may keep on lying and deceiving masses but sooner than later the advanced workers will understand the consequences of their leaderships having submitted the exploited masses to the imperialist regimes and the bourgeoisies in the entire planet.

Workers of the world need to remember former Stalinist Cuban bureaucracy restoring capitalism in La Habana and crying out loud that ‘Obama had been a great ally of the oppressed people.’ What an infamy. Meanwhile, that Democratic Party government massively fired workers in the automotive industry and removed pensions and other conquest from US workers. At the same time, it attempted to save US imperialism from the US masses after the defeat in Iraq. Obama’s predecessors, Bush senior and junior, invaded Iraq with 23 armies and murdered over a million Iraqis, and now they cry because of Trump? What despicable people.

Without Biden and the Democratic Party, who did very well comply their job of deceiving the people, Trump would not have reached the White House.

To free Chinese workers from wage slavery:
It is necessary to crush the murderous regime of the bourgeois scum of the new "mandarins," partners of the transnational corporations in the exploitation of the Chinese working class!

41) We all know about the cowardice of the commercial bourgeoisie in the face of imperialist pirates, who are their major partners.
The issue of Taiwan and its de facto recognition by USA also puts the trade war on the military level, and negotiations are conducted by arms demonstrations.

Xi Jinping will not defeat any counterrevolutionary offensive by USA or the imperialist Maastricht. He will negotiate a thousand and one times, or either he will be subdued in Taiwan.

The victory of the socialist revolution imposed by the Chinese masses at the end of the Second World War, despite the Stalinist leadership, along with the Korean War, is what managed to expel USA from Asia, by means of the class civil war.
The tragedy of China and Korea is the deeds of the traitors who surrendered their revolution, enslaved their proletariat with triple chains, and sooner rather than later will kneel before USA or imperialist Maastricht.

US arrogance will be defeated with a new worker and peasant revolution in China, but this time sweeping away the Stalinist traitors who had ended up restoring capitalism and transforming the Chinese proletariat into the most enslaved on the planet, while handing over its economy to international finance capital, and associating themselves with it.
USA will be defeated in China by the restoration of the dictatorship of the proletariat under revolutionary forms, this time under the Soviet program of Bolshevism and a revolutionary regime of workers' democracy, whose objective should be to extend the revolution to the entire Pacific.

42) The Chinese proletariat, together with the US working class, which are two decisive battalions of the international proletariat, have in their hands the power to be the vanguard in defeating the imperialist beast.
The struggle, we insist, should not be other than the one for the restoration of the dictatorship of the proletariat, or either China would sink into the worst misery, besieged by the imperialist powers that are after it. And it will be very bad for the world's working class if imperialism succeeds in defeating China.

In each cycle of crisis such as in 2002, 2007, 2017-2020, of the Chinese economy, the working class responded with enormous struggles against factory closures and unemployment, with more than 250 thousand revolts against hunger and the paralysis of companies, with the emergence of a radicalized youth that in 2019 began to coordinate with the workers in the setting up of factory committees, ignoring the nationalized union of Xi Jinping and other filth of the Chinese CP.

Trump is today waging the "mother of all trade battles" in China... There, the workers and peasants, with the program of restoring the dictatorship of the proletariat under revolutionary forms together with the US working class, are holding in their hands the future of the world working class and the opportunity to strike a heavy blow against imperialism, as they did with the 1949 revolution and the victory in the Korean War in 1952, both of which were kept in check by the Stalinist scum. This process had threatened with the expansion of the revolution throughout the Pacific.

In China, with the success of a new proletarian revolution, we must crush this bourgeois party of Stalinist origin but made of bourgeois millionaires, slavers, oppressors, and murderers of Chinese workers, and kick out US imperialists, this time not only to the 38th parallel in Korea as in 1949-1952, but -allied with the US proletariat-, until defeating them in the streets of USA.

For the restoration of the dictatorship of the proletariat under revolutionary forms, without the bourgeois scum of the new Chinese "mandarins"! For the United Socialist States of the Pacific!

The era of crisis, wars and revolutions is deepening
The proletariat must recover its militant internationalism
Open the road to the Fourth International!

43) As we have seen, the Trump administration's first measure was to attack immigrants through fascist methods. House-to-house raids, in the streets, at work. Mass deportations, even to concentration camps like Guantanamo and US prisons. Thus, he demonstrated to the global working class how imperialism intends to treat workers of its colonies and semi-colonies.

He also hit hard the anti-imperialist youth, who have taken to the streets to stop the genocide against the Palestinian nation by Zionism under Biden's command before and Trump's today.

To weaken the struggle of the US working class, they co-opted a section of the leaders of the US metalworkers' unions, leading them to what Trump called "Liberation Day," when he launched the trade war.
Thus, while Trump imposes martial law on the most exploited members of the US working class, as he did with the black labor movement, today he seeks, with infamous demagoguery, to make white workers, attacked a thousand times by Democratic Party governments, believe that he will lead them back to the "American dream" and that to do so, he must "close borders" so that "there will be American jobs for Americans again"...

UAW President Shawn Fain, who was a direct man of the Zionist scoundrel Sanders who supported Biden, is now enthusiastic about Trump's promises and declares: "We applaud the Trump administration for stepping up to end the free trade disaster that has devastated working class communities for decades."

But before the final shot of the trade war be fired, it will be white workers who, amid inflation, high cost of living, unemployment, and fierce repression, will follow the fate of immigrant workers.

44) Workers’ aristocracy and union bureaucracies are applauding Trump. They're already spending the coins this scoundrel will throw at them for betraying their class... Nothing different from what Biden did with his "leftist" servants of the Democratic Party, disguising themselves as "socialists", like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, who supported him in his genocidal offensives in the Middle East.

By way of vile deception and tricks, they are strangling the US working class. At one end of the rope there is the Democratic Party, which liquidated, absorbed, and disorganized the left wing of the US labor movement, such as black workers and the anti-war "Million March" movement. At the other end there is Trump, who paints himself as a "nationalist" when he is the greatest liberal and opener of borders and customs of any state in the world.

The UAW leader proclaims that "the free trade agreement with Mexico and Canada is finally over." In the maquilas south of the Rio Grande, imperialist corporations, primarily those from USA, make workers produce under slave wages in northern Mexico. The large transnational corporations will not return to the USA sharing profits, but quite the opposite. They will return only if they first defeat the US working class, and first and foremost, the metalworkers' unions, forcing them to work in conditions equal to or worse than those in the Mexican maquilas. The bureaucratic and miserable leadership of the US workers’ aristocracy has become a partner of the executioners of US and international workers.

The betrayals of their leaderships are the greatest tragedy for the world working class, and the US working class in particular, which has waged and continues to wage enormous and sharp battles within the imperialist beast itself and is the greatest ally of the working class and the oppressed peoples of the world.

This rotten workers’ aristocracy doesn't even remotely represent the majority of US workers. They're mere servants of imperialism.

45) On April 5th, with huge mass mobilizations, people flooded the streets in more than 1,200 US cities against the massacre in Gaza and the executioner Trump.
For the Palestinian cause, workers around the world are rallying today. Recently, broad sectors of society have staged an international strike in solidarity with the martyred masses of Gaza and the West Bank.
If Trump and the imperialist powers can advance today in their policy of throwing the entire crisis onto the workers’ shoulders, it is because of the enormous betrayal of their leaders.

According to Lenin, imperialism means, and reality confirms this, a split in socialism. That is to say, the imperialist powers can only sustain their counterrevolutionary policies by creating and recreating workers' aristocracy and bureaucracy, which they buy off with "the crumbs that drop from the banquet table of the superprofits from plundering the semi-colonial world."

46) It was the traitors of reformism, in recent decades, who have desynchronized these struggles, dispersed them, and laid them at the feet of the "progressive” or “democratic bourgeoisies”, as they call these executioners of the masses. They had already subjected them to the swindlers of the "Bolivarian Revolution" in Latin America, who ended up alongside Castroism, even guaranteeing the restoration of capitalism in Cuba.

In wars of national oppression and counterrevolutionary struggles, the reformists put the working class in the trenches of the enemies of the workers and the people, such as Putin in Ukraine and Assad in Syria.
In 2013-2014, every one of them embraced the "anti-terrorist front" organized by France and USA to crush the revolutionary processes in the Middle East, as happened in Syria and Yemen.

It was the so-called "New Left" that, falling for the "anti-Trump" front, subjected the US working class to Biden and his "leftist" allies such as the Borics, the Lulas, the Moraleses and the Petros, to divert the revolution in Latin America.
Stalinism's role was cruel in Africa, where it controlled the uprisings of workers and the exploited and subjugated them to the black bourgeoisie, as in South Africa, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Kenya. In sub-Saharan Africa, it was the bourgeois army officers who expropriated the anti-imperialist struggle of the oppressed masses.
In Europe, Stalinism surrendered, from the leadership of the unions, the struggle of the heroic French working class, ripping off many of its conquests. They betrayed the revolutionary process in Greece, where today workers and youth are trying to return and fight.

With Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the control of Russian military bases that discipline the masses in Kazakhstan, Belarus, Armenia, etc., was consolidated, while the European proletariat is punished and blackmailed by means of economic crises, layoffs, and inflation, as is happening today in Germany.

These are just a few examples of how it was the betrayal of the leaderships that diverted, subdued, and disorganized the mass offensives that allowed today this counterrevolutionary counteroffensive by Trump and the Wall Street gangs, BlackRock, and their fascist managers.

This time, with the masses in resistance, class clashes are inevitable. We have already seen that the Belgian proletariat greeted Trump with general strikes. In Argentina, independent vanguard uprisings are beginning against his agent Milei. The proletariat is coming from waging massive battles in countries like Kenya and Mozambique, while the South African working class remains strong despite Trump's provocation of sending the son of a white apartheid leader as US ambassador.
In order to deepen inter-imperialist disputes and fight for the world market, each imperialist power must have, as we have said, a free hand by having defeated its working class. This is far from being achieved. The outcome of this battle, which the proletariat has now wage in a defensive position due to the betrayal of its leaders, will determine the future of civilization: whether we go heads on to revolution and socialism, or we go heads on to war. The alternative is socialism or war.

47) It is during these sharp inter-imperialist disputes, when the working class can strike. The subjugation of the proletariat of the central countries to their own imperialist bourgeoisies is a vile betrayal. The battle cry of the workers of the imperialist powers must be: “The enemy is at home!” And thus, they can place themselves as the vanguard of the struggles of the workers and peasants of the oppressed nations that their bourgeoisies starve and plunder.

The tragedy is that the traitorous leaderships have subjected the working class to their executioners, such as the genocidal Biden, disguising him as “democratic,” or passing off jackal Putin as “anti-imperialist” and the butchers of Beijing as “progressive.”
Others, lackeys of the European imperialist powers, have been calling for a fight for a "social Maastricht," wanting to make the world masses believe that this den of imperialist bandits can be an ally of the workers and oppressed peoples.

What the working class needs is a revolutionary leadership that only under the flags of the Fourth International can rise to the challenge of destroying the global capitalist system.

The working class has not surrendered. It has fought and continues to fight

48) The working class has not left the scene. The future of human civilization lies in its struggle and in the socialist revolution. We will tirelessly repeat that a Third World War will begin as the Second World War ended. The contradictions that push toward it are developing and are intrinsic to the mode of capitalist accumulation in the imperialist epoch.
Is the road to World War III already open? That will be decided in the immediate period of the class struggle. Capitalists will make workers pay for their crisis, and it depends on their response and the historical course of events.
But what is clear is that the real crisis facing the proletariat, in order to give a way out of the crisis of civilization, is the crisis of its leadership.

The world working class must know that the USA is not only home to the imperialist beast, but also of its greatest ally: the US proletariat, whose youth are rising up today against the massacre in Palestine, just as they did against the wars in Iraq and Vietnam, and in thousands of battles for their demands.
There is no more decisive task for revolutionaries at the present time than to clearly define before the eyes of the working class who their allies and enemies are, and how the latter act to betray them.

For reformism, socialism is a matter of the future; however, the human civilization is already in the midst of capitalist catastrophe and one step away from opening the road to war.

For revolutionaries, the struggle for international socialist revolution is a matter of life and death as a present and immediate task. The working class must try again, or it will be severely punished by history, since war will come.
To claim, as the spokespeople of that sinister "Progressive International" do, that the proletariat can improve its standard of living and "expand democracy" within the framework of this bankrupt system, is not only a reactionary policy, but a dark counterrevolutionary one.

The masses have never missed the appointment. It's their leaders who have betrayed them.

49) If "socialism is for the future," as the reformist left claims, the present will be war, genocide, and counterrevolution. It is time to regroup the revolutionary ranks of the vanguard of the world proletariat: revolution, revolution and revolution... or war.

Capitalism does not and will not collapse on its own; rather, it will lead the entire civilization to disaster. Its gravediggers, the working class, must put an end to it.

The premise of the Trotskyist program remains fully valid: the crisis of mankind is the crisis of the revolutionary leadership of the proletariat.
The program of the Fourth International, founded in 1938, remains relevant and has passed the test of history, those who spoke in its name have not. Instead, they have betrayed it: They have even destroyed the Fourth International, the World Party of the Socialist Revolution.

The proletariat lacks an international general staff at the level of the war plans of its class enemies. That is the true crisis of the working class.

For a new revolutionary regroupment of principled Marxism and the revolutionary forces of the world proletariat!

Under the banners of the Fourth International!

The working class first and foremost!

For the masses and oppressed peoples to live, imperialism must die!

Carlos Munzer

For the Editorial Board of “The International Worker Organizer”