Trump’s announcement on tariffs for the imports of steel and aluminum in the United States shook politics and the world economy. A trade war has begun between the victorious imperialist powers of the year 2008, particularly between the United States and Germany.
However, on the contrary to what the imperialist press and the global left say, the increase in tariffs is not an isolationist measure of US imperialism. Wall Street banks and monopolies exploit the world market. Since the second post world war, its productive forces have crossed national borders. The US transnational companies are 50% of the world’s transnational companies. These productive forces will never be able to close themselves again in their national market. The only “domestic market” of US imperialism is the world.
To affirm that Trump is isolationist, like the currents of the reformist left do, is to pretend to go back in time to the first half of the 20th century, and that the big American trusts and banks reduce their production and the volume of their capitals to the proportions of the American domestic market. This is an anti-Marxist brutality.
Trump needs to reserve the great North American market for his monopolies. But, far from it all, the tariff for the imports of steel is a defense of the interests of the banks and the confidence of the Americans in a world market that has been reduced, to make the competition to kneel down and maintain the ruling of US finance capital.
Trump’s plan is not the “whim of a crazy man”. It is to negotiate country by country to force the competitors to open their markets. “America first” means “if you want to continue selling in my market, pay or open yours”. Thus US imperialism disputes the markets and spheres of influence. His last reserve is the war fleet and the 800 military bases around the world. Only the American working class prevents new military adventures, after the “Vietnam syndrome” in Iraq.
However, the imperialist bandits have a great agreement: to impose labour slavery on the working class. The fictional reproduction of capital that has characterized the recent 2015-2017 growth cycle cannot continue indefinitely. Capital must return to the productive process and for that it needs to impose conditions of worker slavery as in the nineteenth century. This is why the real masters of the world, the 8 families that own the superbanks such as Bank of Americas, JP Morgan, Rothschild, Lazard, Mitsubishi; the ones that control the G20, the IMF, Davos, the big oil, minerals and food cartels, etc.… All of them aligned their governments and agents inside the workers movement and declared war on the working class.
They have in their favor the victories over the revolution in Syria and Ukraine, two very hard blows dealt to the world working class. The trade war comes hand in hand with the division of the working class and the emergence of social-chauvinism, promoted by the imperialist bourgeoisie and the treacherous leaderships. For that reason, Trump, demagoguery promises the return of the “American dream” to the American working aristocracy that Obama plunged.
But the working class, in spite of its leadership, is fighting in France, in Iran, in Argentina, in the last trenches of the revolution, with the international strike of working women of 8M, in the United States.
Huge social, economic and even military convulsions are coming. Syria begins to knock on the doors of the exploited of the world. In the midst of capitalist barbarism, the beginning of the trade war, the increase of military budgets, of Bonapartism and fascism, etc. The New Left parties of the Stalinists, of the renegade “anti-capitalists” of Trotskyism like the British SWP and the NPA, spread the poison of “real democracy”, of the “democratization” of capitalism.
They are social-chauvinists, servants of their imperialist bourgeoisie and defenders of the exploitation of millions of colonial and semi-colonial slaves. The defense of “democracy” is a political crime of these empty-handed reformers. The capitalist system does not advance. As it was stated by the revolutionary Marxism, the working class has only two alternatives ahead: revolution or barbarism. The last word is not said. Death to imperialism! Open the road for the socialist revolution!•
