The lessons that the bourgeoisie learned from the great systemic crisis of the 1930s have long been forgotten in Trump’s Washington.
Tomasz Konicz, 06.04.2025, Originally published on konicz.info on 03/28/25
Want some more? When it comes to tariffs and trade barriers, the U.S. president is known to be extravagant. In response to the EU’s announcement of retaliatory measures for the U.S. tariffs on aluminum and steel, which include alcoholic beverages, Donald Trump responded by threatening astronomical punitive tariffs of 200% on European wine and sparkling wine. So far, this escalation strategy has worked: when Canada’s Ontario province announced a 25% tax on electricity exports to the United States as part of the North American trade war, Trump immediately threatened to double U.S. tariffs on all Canadian metal imports to 50% – Ontario then withdrew its export tax.
Link: https://exitinenglish.com/2025/04/01/protectionist-revenants/
The U.S. actually has a strategic advantage in these trade wars because of its huge trade deficit ($918.4 billion in 2024). This is likely to tend to decrease in the course of the trade wars, while most of America’s trading partners are likely to see shrinking exports. Trump is speculating that he can ride out the short-term turbulence that the major protectionist turnaround will bring in order to achieve the hoped-for long-term return of a re-industrialization of the U.S. before the next election. In fact, the U.S. wants to reindustrialize itself at the expense of those countries and economic areas for whose export industries the U.S. trade deficits have thus far served as a credit-financed economic stimulus program.
In fact, the world economy, which is increasingly running on credit, also functioned like this in the neoliberal era: the U.S. resembled a black hole of the global economy, absorbing surplus industrial production and being able to borrow in the world’s reserve currency, the U.S. dollar, on the rapidly expanding financial markets. In the context of ever-growing deficit cycles, gigantic export surpluses flowed into the U.S. as the center of capitalism’s neoliberal financialization, while a flow of debt instruments and bonds began in the opposite direction, making China, for example, the largest foreign creditor of the U.S. for many years (currently it is Japan). The global total debt, which in the neoliberal era has increased faster than global economic output (from around 110% at the beginning of the 1970s to more than 250% in 2020), was the lubricant of globalization precisely through these deficit cycles.
This neoliberal construction of towers of debt, which gave rise to the illusion of financial-market-driven growth in the United States, spawned a veritable global financial bubble economy that became unstable with the bursting of the real estate bubble in 2008 and unsustainable with the inflationary surge that began in 2020. Trump is thus a product of the crisis, whose protectionism is supposed to provide an answer to the processes of social disintegration that accompanied deindustrialization and the collapse of the financial bubble economy. And it is no coincidence that the whole thing resembles the protectionism of the 1930s, when the world system was hit by the greatest crisis to date.
The internal barrier of capital, which gets rid of its own substance, wage labor, through market-mediated rationalization, is now openly apparent: since new economic sectors that would valorize mass wage labor are nowhere to be found, each economic area must try to protect its remaining industrial capacities, as everyone is trying to support their industries through exports. Trump wants a qualitative break with the credit-fueled crisis delay methods of the neoliberal era – and the contradiction is almost tangible, for example in Trump’s eternal zigzag. The system can only run on credit – and at the same time the consequences of this global deficit boom are no longer socially, economically and, above all, politically sustainable.
But what does Trump want? Ultimately, the White House is currently destroying the system of American hegemony established in the post-war period, since the U.S. can no longer or no longer wants to bear the costs of this hegemony. Instead, Trump is setting about building a U.S. empire that no longer relies on a global network of institutions and rules in the exercise of power, but will presumably assert itself through direct and ultimately military force. And that is not a sign of strength, but of weakness. Trump’s narrow-minded crisis-imperialist calculation, which perceives the deindustrialization of the U.S. as a result of fraud by foreign competitors, will be exposed as such when these competitors no longer see any reason to accept the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency. The systemic cause of the geopolitical upheavals that are now shaking what is left of the “West” is the openly apparent internal limit of capital.
Originally published on konicz.info on 03/28/25