TWO GOOD LOCAL HISTORY SITES FOR LEFT WING ALBERTA

The Edmonton Hunger March of 1932

Forgotten Edmonton

https://www.forgottenedmonton.com › blog › the-edmo...

Dec 20, 2022 — The Hunger March of 1932 is inextricably linked to the material and socio-economic conditions of Alberta during the Great Depression.

Bucking Conservatism

Athabasca University Press

https://www.aupress.ca › app › uploads › 12028...

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by Poundmaker staff member, Eugene (Devil inside) Plawiuk.13 In contrast to ... founding meeting of Canada's first national socialist party, the CCF, was held.

368 pages' 

 

Monday, May 02, 2016

THE ALBERTA NDP THE PARTY OF OIL WORKERS

THE COINCIDENTAL BIRTH OF THE NEW DEMOCRATS AND THE OIL INDUSTRY IN ALBERTA

Rachel Notley warned New Democrats that adopting the LEAP manifesto which demands the end of oil extraction from the Tar Sands as well as conventional and shale gas plays, and NO pipelines, would put the Eastern arm of the party in direct conflict with a party that is proudly Albertan and directly involved in the oil industry history in the province even more so than the long ruling party the PC’s.

It was the development of oil and energy in Alberta that created new wealth and a new industrial province after WWII. The discovery of oil not only brought the oil industry but also the oil and energy workers union, a small American union that had an arm in Alberta, the Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers OCAW. In Alberta it was beginning its organizing of workers in the field and in the new gas and chemical plants being built between Edmonton and Fort Saskatchewan.

This was the post war boom, the party in power was Social Credit, and while  there was no NDP there was an active labour political movement housed in the AFL and Edmonton Trades and Labour Council, members belonged to the Communist Party, the CCF and some still belonged to the OBU and IWW.

Edmonton had a history of electing labour council members as Mayor, Aldermen (women), school board trustees and Hospital Board members. Elmer Roper  longtime labour activist, CCF activist and candidate, owner of ABC Printing and publisher of Alberta Labour News would be elected Mayor of Edmonton after the creation of the NDP by the merger of the CCF with the newly created post war Canadian Labour Congress.

The sixties saw the growth of the labour movement in Canada and in Alberta, including the creation of an active movement of organizing public sector workers, provincially, municipally and federally. The Federal Workers Union originating in Calgary would merge with the Ontario based National Workers Union to create what we know as the Canadian Union of Public  Employees, the Civil Service Union of Alberta would become a union known as the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees.

But throughout the oil boom of the fifties and sixties the union most associated with the provincial NDP was the Oil Chemical and Atomic Energy Workers Union under the leadership of Neil Reimer and his assistant Reg Baskin

That’s right the party was brought to life in Alberta by Oil Workers in the provinces new Energy market. Its first party leader was Neil Reimer, who would meet a charismatic young politician a contemporary of Peter Lougheed and Joe Clark at the University of Alberta, Grant Notley who would go on to become party Leader and its first elected MLA.

Notley himself did not represent Edmonton but his home region, the oil rich north of Alberta, the Grand Prairie, and Peace River riding.

As it had since 1936 the Social Credit party of Alberta held power in the province as a one party state, under the permanent leadership of Premier Ernest Manning, Preston’s daddy.  The New Democratic Party of Alberta focused its energy not only on consolidating union power in the party as well as the voices of the left and progressives but in challenging that Social Credit domination of Alberta Politics.

This was also the time of the Cold War and the Anti Communist Witch Hunts, a time being anti war, anti nuclear war, pro labour, was considered suspect. Where union members who were left wing were exposed to police spying, where padlock laws in Quebec had been used to raid imprison and steal property belonging to those accused of opposing the Duplesis regime or who were suspect of being Reds.

Duplessis ‘s party in Quebec aligned with that provinces Federal Social Credit Party which was aligned with Alberta’s Party as well. In both provinces the left faced one party dictatorship which reminded many despite their democratic trappings of the forces they had been fighting against in WWII.

As in Alberta it would be the post war labour movement in Quebec under Louis Lebarge that would mobilize politically as well as economically against the Old Regime, his right hand was a young activist lawyer named Pierre Eliot Trudeau. And like Alberta they were building a provincial and national party; the Liberals.

This then is the historical basis for the differences between the left in Quebec and the rest of Canada and why it took so long to breech these two solitudes, as was done in 2012 under Jack Layton and the federal NDP.

Premier Rachel Notley, the daughter of Grant Notley, the first NDP MLA ever elected to the Legislature, the first opposition member elected against the Social Credit party of Ernest Manning  had this rich history as her prologue at this week’s national NDP Convention in Edmonton where the party adopted the LEAP manifesto which challenges the very energy economy that makes Alberta a modern industrial state.

This province created the NDP under the leadership of  Neil Reimer, an oil worker and oil union organizer.  Neil was the first leader of the Party, and Reg Baskin was his right hand in their union and the party.

Neil also created the modern Canadian Energy Workers union,  Neil and Reg first represented oil workers in the new industry in the province with the OCAW  oil chemical and atomic workers of Canada, which had one other base of expansion; Louisiana.  He and Reg made it the Canadian Energy Workers Union, which became CEP merging with the Canadian Paper workers unions in BC, and now has consolidated with CAW to create UNIFOR.

Neil’s daughter was Jan Reimer two term Mayor of Edmonton during the 1990’s and while party labels are not used in Edmonton municipal elections everyone knew that we had an NDP mayor.

Meatpackers, a union that disappeared in the eighties with amalgamation of the meat packing industry into a smaller and smaller oligopoly, was a militant base of union workers and activists including communists and socialists, that was a large base for the party, as was Plumbers and Pipefitters Local 488.

These were the post war unions that were the party’s base in Edmonton and across the province. Federally the postal workers were a strong backbone for the Federal Party, though there were two separate unions at that time, letter carriers and inside workers, the latter being more left wing and militant with OBU IWW communist, socialist and Trotskyist activist workers.

It was the discovery of tar sands oil that led to the growth of the province, the union and the NDP. It was also this discovery and its needed development during the Arab Oil Crisis of 1971 that led to the end of the Social Credit government, its movement, but not its essence. In its place came the newest members of the Alberta Legislature elected in 1967 for the first time, the Lougheed Progressive Conservatives. They would be joined by Grant Notley and the NDP in opposition in 1968, when Grant won a by-election in Spirit River.

The “Progressive” element in the Lougheed PC’s represented the post war Liberal base among the non Anglo ethnic communities in Edmonton and Calgary, such as the recent post war immigration of Ukrainians, Italians, Portuguese, Greek, European, Asian, and Displaced Peoples. The Liberals had no political existence in Alberta since they were wiped out by the United Farmers/ Labour Party coalition in 1921.

Even Lougheed’s conservatism was not the neo conservative Austrian school embraced by the republican lite Preston Manning cons of today, it was classical liberal capitalism, that progressive aspect of capitalism that sought to ameliorate through regulation what short comings capitalism itself may suffer from despite its idealism of being the ‘ideal’ system.

The history of the Alberta NDP is the history of the Oil Workers and the Oil Industry in Alberta, even more than it is for the current batch of Conservatives provincial or federal.  The NDP in Alberta grew up with the oil industry with its workers and their union. For the Alberta NDP to reject both the LEAP manifesto and those call for the end of pipelines is natural and should have been expected by those who know the party history in the province.

For those who fail to understand this historic base of the party in Alberta fail to understand the social democratic politics of the oil industry, the NDP has long supported a form of nationalization under public ownership and increased workers control through unionization.

This occurred in the case of Suncor which was the earliest of the oil sands operators, before the Syncrude conglomerate was created.  In the early seventies after the Lougheed government promoted the oil sands, Suncor began mining operations.  Neil Reimer’s new Canadian Energy and Paperworkers union, CEP, got its birth in a long and bitter historic strike at the Suncor operations.

CEP went on to organize refineries in Edmonton, Sherwood Park and Fort Saskatchewan.

It tried but failed to organize Syncrude due to its conglomerate ownership and its concerted anti union efforts over the decade of the seventies into the eighties. Today unionized Suncor has bought out Syncrude so this situation opens it up to unionization decades later.

The seventies and eighties saw massive growth in the province including growth in both private and public union membership.

This also saw the success of the NDP and the left in Edmonton. While Grant Notley was a lone NDP member in Alberta Legislature, Edmonton saw a left wing U of A Prof David Leadbeater elected alderman.  Notley was joined in the house by Ray Martin, from Edmonton.

The NDP elected Ross Harvey its first federal MP from Alberta in the eighties from the old packing plant and union district of Edmonton Beverly. This was at the height of the Arab Oil Crisis of early eighties, which the Conservatives in Calgary blamed on the NDP Liberal National Energy Plan, NEP, which included the creation of the Canadian Publicly Owned Oil and Gas Company PetroCanada.

PetroCanada was a success and saved Calgary and the Lougheed Government during this oil crisis, it was able to buy up, nationalize, American oil companies like Gulf Mobile, Texaco, Chevron,  as well as smaller Canadian and American oil companies that were going broke or bailing out of Calgary heading back to Dallas and Huston.

And CEP was there to unionize it. Today PetroCanada is no more the Liberals privatized during the Austerity crisis of the Nineties, and Paul Martins Liberal Government sold off the last of our shares prior to the 2006 election.

Ironically it is Suncor that bought them and then bought up PetroCan and absorbed it., just as it has done with its competitor Syncrude.

It would be during the late eighties and early nineties that under Ray Martin the NDP would gain a record number of seats, going from 2 to 23 and status of official opposition. But by the time of the middle of nineties and the Austerity panic of debt and deficit hysteria and the birth of the neo conservative movement that two city Mayors, Ralph Klein of Calgary and Lawrence Decore of Edmonton would battle it out for Premier of the Province, Klein for the PC’s and Decore for the Liberals. Both ran on Austerity budgets, one promised massive cuts the other brutal cuts. It was a close election the losers were the NDP who were wiped out as a third party.

In Edmonton we had a new NDP mayor to replace Decore, Neil’s daughter Jan Reimer, joined by another leftist alderman the bus driver Brian Mason. The NDP centred itself in Edmonton at this time and got elected the enormously popular  team of Pam Barrett and Raj Pannu.

The CEP was critical in supporting the NDP at this time, including having its past president Reg Basking become leader of the Party.

After the shocking early death of party leader Pam Barrett, former alderman Brian Mason ran in her riding, Highlands, which also covers the Federal riding of Beverly that Ross Harvey once represented and won her seat in the house. Raj Pannu became the first Indo Canadian leader of an NDP party in Canada.  After he stepped down Brian Mason became the leader of the party.

The party went from four seats to two to four until Brian stepped down and the party elected Grant Notley’s daughter, Rachel Notley, who had sat in the house with Brian through all those ups and downs in electoral success.

The party base is the labour movement and left across the province and no less important unions such as CEP, IBEW, Carpenters and UA488 all involved in the oil sands and the petrochemical industry in Alberta.

So why are the various wags and pundits surprised when the Alberta NDP does not LEAP off the edge of a cliff named STOP PIPELINES, STOP DIRTY OIL.

In the finest of social democratic traditions, the Alberta NDP will do no such thing nor should it be expected to. It will ameliorate the worst of the environmental damages that the fossil fuel industry has and can be expected to cause. They will create a green plan, and expand the carbon fuel tax the PC’s brought in.

 It will do what the conservatives would not do, and that is eliminating Alberta’s Socred PC dirty energy economic backbone: coal. And that is the real dirty energy in Alberta, coal fired utility plants. These plants are evenly divided between private ownership, with state support from the ruling Socreds and PC’s, TransAlta Utilities, and publicly owned municipal utilities EPCOR and ENMAX. TransAlta is the original P3 funded by taxpayers under the Socred and spun off to become a private company where government cabinet members retire to the board of.

Even Lougheed was tied to the coal industry representing his old employer Mannix Inc, as a board member of Luscar Coal, which during the nineties created a major controversy with its efforts to mine outside of Jasper National Park.

Contrary to Greenpeace and other environmentalists who claim oil sands are the dirtiest energy the real dirty energy on the Palliser Plains of Alberta and Saskatchewan is coal.

Coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel that needs to be kept in the ground. There is no such thing as clean coal!

There is however clean petrochemical fuels, that is the nature of refining, creating finer and finer grades of hydrocarbons; ethenes, benzenes, oil and gas for plastic production, diesel etc.

That is the reason for both the Joffre and Scotford massive refining projects and the plan for the heartland refining project, which would allow the province to crack and refine bitumen into secondary and tertiary hydrocarbons.

That is what the future of the energy is in Alberta, stopping the use of coal, refining hydrocarbons and shipping them south, east, and west.

Why would the NDP limit the provinces ability to ship what it processes.

As I have pointed out the pipeline west will probably go through the Peace River Athabasca highway route to Prince Rupert, which coincides with BC Site C dam development and its LNG  pipeline development, giving pipeline companies an alternative to going to Kitimat via the BC Sacred Bear Rainforest.

Energy East will be built and the NDP will promote as it did in the eighties, the idea that Alberta energy for a fair price should go east. What occurred instead was it was shipped to refineris in Ontario and Quebec at discounted prices where it was refined and sold to the US while oil was imported from the Middle East.

This was the original idea of the NEP that the NDP and Liberals promoted to Lougheed, and he agreed to! And like the NDP this was his vision for Alberta oil before he died.

While the LEAP manifesto is suitably left wing green etc, even shudder, anti capitalist ( read anti corporations) it is not something either the labour movement or NDP in Alberta will agree to do much more about than debate. Debate will be welcome, dictat not so much.

LEAP like most environmentalism today fails to take into consideration that even if workers had control of publicly owned energy companies, we would still be producing hydrocarbons, and will be even after the glorious Socialist Revolution.

The dirtiest energy causing climate change is not oil sands in Alberta or Venezuela it is coal and wood burning worldwide.  That is the challenge we face to shut down coal, and wood burning, not to accept the myth of Clean Coal, and to make sure we ameliorate environmental damage caused through hydrocarbon production.

You want to keep something in the ground its coal, and the biggest fight back in Alberta today is the utility lobbies who oppose the Alberta NDP Government ending of coal fired utilities.

In Alberta the NDP is the party of oil and oil workers. Never forget it. The old Social Credit of Preston Manning’s daddy’s day and the PC’s of Lougheed Klein were both parties of coal.

Not Your Usual Left Wing Rant

No Taxes for the working class. That should be the watchword of the Left.

Left blogger a Class Act bemoans the state of the Canadian left on his blog. He says; "When is the left going to quit trying to be like its opponents,and begin to define itself by it's own actions and ideology?Give the people a real choice,a choice that stands for something,but above all principaled."

Exactomundo. When the Reform party was created it based itself not on the neo-conservatism of the Reaganites but on Western Canadian populism, a populism based on the Left. Recall, referendum, the attack on taxation, were all antebellum left wing causes at the begining of the 20th Century.

Socialism as Class Act calls it. It included the ideology of the producer republic, Georgism in the United States, the Cooperative Commonweal in Canada and the UK. It included syndicalism for the working class, and producer cooperatives for farmers and small producers. It was anti-monopoly and anti-rentier, pro land ownership. See Rothbard’s Reds Redux


Socialism at the begining of last century was not yet tainted with Bolshevism. And I use that term deliberately to distinguish it from communism. For within the anarchist and statist socialist movements were movements of communism, which went farther and further in their critique of capitalism than the anti-state socialists did.

Unfortunately the socialist dream, or vision, was lost in the coming forth of the social democratic movement and its statist ideal of the welfare state. Far from dying at the end of WWI in Canada the CCF called for social revolution, as did many of the socialists of the day. They still had only had a small taste of government, in this case the Socialist Party of Canada had been crucial to maintaince of power for the provincial Liberals in B.C, in the last days of fin de sicle 19th century.

The Socialist movement in Canada coalesced around the CCF, the Communist party and the OBU. With the destruction of the later and the success of the former in gaining political power provincially and representation federally came the end of the extra parlimentary left in Canada.

By the 1960's the CCF and the labour movement had purged the radicals and were now liberal social democratics just like their German predecesors of the century before.

The extra-parliamentary left was centred around the anti-Nuclear Bomb movement, Our Generation magazine, and what could be loosely called an anarchist left. One that was sceptical that state power could change anything.

Today the NDP and its social democratic ilk are really liberals in a hurry. And thus the plight that Class Act finds us in. We go back to the orginal debate between State Socialists and Anti-State Socialists. Is socialism a set of principles and and ideal to strive towards or is it the pragmatic logic of gaining state power.
It is of course the former since the latter has been a historic failure.

Since I of course do not believe it is the latter, I hardly consider the NDP or even the Trade Unions on the left. That is they cannot concieve of a program of workers and community control that is a radical challenge to the corporate/financial and state monopoly. They in effect are , as the left communists call them, the left hand of capitalism. They merely wish to ameliorate the worst excesses of capitalism while maintaining the status quo.

Expect no real answers from them on how to change or challenge the system.

But thank goodness the long march to Ottawa by the neo-conservative right in Canada has finally ended in a minority government. Because they too called for a revolution in politics as usual. And they too have ended up being no such thing, just business as usual.

Where the left failed during the past two decades was to see that what Reform had harnassed was a real grass roots disgruntlement of the working class towards politics as usual. Not always reactionary, it was based on feeling powerless and wanting to feel in power over our own lives.

The Left never got it. Whenever the NDP called for taxing the rich, the guys in the Alberta Gas Plants, unionized, and paid overtime saw it as an attack on their wages. It didn't matter that the NDP meant the Rich, as in the 1% of Canadians that own all the wealth, or the corporations, their message was lost on the working class. And for good reason.

We hate taxes. We love services. And we will pay for services, but we hate taxes. And why shouldn't we, over the past fifty years the federal and provincial tax base has moved from the corporations to picking the pockets of you and me.

The NDP finally realised this simple fact during the 2004 election and during the last sitting of the house. They called for more tax breaks for the working class. But because this runs counter to their state socialism, they were faint hearted in their calls, faint hearted in their attack on the Liberals and Conservatives as parties of the rich and entrenched power. The so called special interests.

The fact is that the Conservative government in Ottawa is about to launch a massive assault on the working class through taxation.

They will fund their 1% GST cut by eliminating tax breaks the Liberals brought in. They will give out a baby bonus that will be taxed. They will fail to transfer funds to day care programs clawing them back.

The Left should be calling for no taxation for anyone who earns $100,000 a year or less. Period. That is the mass of the working class in this country.

No party currently will call for this and for the elimination of user fees and the GST. For these are the little taxes that hurt, the death by a thousand cuts that so irritate each and every wage slave in Canada.

Tax the Corporations NOT the People, should be the watchword of the Left. Want Daycare and Medicare, the corporations should pay, out of pre tax profits. It is social capital that they directly benefit from in their bottom line, its what makes them competitive against the American capitalist model.

Eliminate all corporate tax loopholes. Eliminate offshore investment havens for the Rich. And in the process this will eliminate the Tax Department.

The Left should attack the failure of the Reformers, who are still out there as the recent Fireweed Forum on Democracy showed, and the parliamentary reformers,
to address the real issue of political reform in Canada.

The need for real democracy, directly elected revocable delgates to constiuent assemblies. To the right to referndum, to a renewal of Canada as constitutional confederation of the people not a con job. See my Abolish The Senate

On economic renewal we should be calling for the creation of peoples banks, the deregulation of banking from the hands of the State into the hands of the people as pools of capital for usage with institutional pension funds and workers investments to build small and medium sized worker/producer cooperatives.
See Michael Alberts Economic Participatory Democracy project; Parecon.

This deregulation would also eliminate large banks as holders of capital in the national interest. That role should be continued by the Bank of Canada, which delegated it to the national banks twenty years ago under the Mulroney Conservatives.

We don't need a state in Canada we need a confederation of peoples and communities in a federal system not of Trudeau's making or Harpers but in the Proudhonist model of self government.


And this cannot be done through electoral means, it takes a social revolution. The Reform party tried to do this from the Right and the NPI and other attempts to reform the NDP did it on the left and the result is Jack Layton and Stephen Harper. Nothing changed.

So Class Act I agree with you that the Left needs renewal. And the Left needs first to divorce itself from the existing liberal social democratic parliamentary mileu.
Then and only then will it become an authentic voice for Canadians who are frustrated and pissed off with the system as it is. We have been told to embrace change for twenty years by the neo-cons as they privatized public services. That change for change sake ideology is deeply embedded in all of capitalism corporate and managerial structures now. It gives us a window to challenge the very system of capitalism with a real Left agenda of People Power.


Also see:

Unite the Left
A Peoples Program for Alberta

Left, Right and Liberty

State-less Socialism

Social Credit And Western Canadian Radicalism

Rebel Yell

Plutocrats Rule

WRITTEN IN 2006

 

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for OBU ALBERTA

Trump, protectionism and imperial conflict in global capitalism: An interview with Michael Roberts

By Michael Roberts Ashley Smith

Published 22 May, 2025

First published at Spectre.

The Trump administration has seized power in Washington, carrying out class war, scapegoating oppressed groups, and radically restructuring the US state. Paired with this domestic program, it has initiated a new grand strategy of America First unilateralism, imposing unprecedented protectionist tariffs, threatening annexation of sovereign countries, and pursuing transactional competition with other great powers over the division of the world into spheres of influence. Spectre’s Ashley Smith interviews Michael Roberts about Trump, the rule of his fellow oligarchs, and their  impact on the trajectory of the United States, global capitalism, and great power competition.

Michael Roberts is the author of The Long Depression: Marxism and the Global Crisis of Capitalism (Haymarket, 2016) and, with Guglielmo Carchedi, Capitalism in the 21st Century (Pluto, 2022). He is also coeditor of World in Crisis: A Global Analysis of Marx’s Law of Profitability (Haymarket, 2018) and Marx 200: A Review of Marx’s Economics (Lulu, 2020). He writes regular commentary and analysis on his blog, The Next Recession.

The Trump regime has just passed its first one hundred days. To say the least, it is fundamentally disrupting the political and economic order in the United States and throughout the world. It is vastly different than the first regime, which was both unprepared to rule and sharply divided between establishment Republicans and Trump’s new authoritarian nationalists. While the second regime is far more coherent and armed with a program in Project 2025, it is not homogeneous. It is divided between the MAGA far right (hardcore protectionists like Peter Navarro) and capitalists (like Elon Musk) who see tariffs as a means to get a better deal within global capitalism. What is the nature of the Trump regime? How do its various factions come into conflict? What political and economic program have they united to implement?

 

As you say, Trump 2.0 is different from his first term. Trump’s support still comes first and foremost from the MAGA crew ensconced in the ranks of the Republican Party — small businesspeople, television presenters, real estate agents, and a layer of outright fascists who back Trump to the hilt in anything he does, with the aim of rule by demagoguery, racism, ending “woke” (as they see it), and the repression of protest.

But now it also comes from a bunch of billionaire oligarchs not integrated into the financial and big business world of Wall Street. Elon Musk and his ilk are wild and dangerous cowboys who seek to grab as much US wealth for themselves — Trump is one of them. During Trump 1.0, the owners of the tech and social media monopolies were not Trump supporters. But they were stunned by Trump’s victory and his immediate attacks on the status quo (and possibly on them). So, they quickly moved behind him.

However, the wider sections of finance and big business are not so sure that Trump’s regime will benefit them; they have a more internationalist view — that is, profits are made more from investing abroad rather than in the United States. The bankers and hedge funds remain at arm’s length ready to sell US financial assets if Trump’s actions threaten to destroy their wealth. For now, they hope that the tariff tantrums will not be applied too severely and Trump will carry through his tax cuts on corporate profits and reduce government spending, so they are not in open revolt.

While whole sections of capital backed Kamala Harris for president, they ended up welcoming Trump into office, showering him with money and expecting him to back off his protectionist threats and concentrate on tax cuts and deregulation. Instead, on so-called Liberation Day, he imposed reciprocal tariffs on nearly every country in the world. But capital reacted negatively to this, crashing the stock, bond, and dollar markets and forcing Trump to retreat. He maintained an increased overall tariff at 10 percent, paused the higher ones to give time for negotiations, carved out exemptions, and focused his trade war on China. Why was capital on the whole so opposed to his reciprocal tariffs? What sections of capital support it? What does Trump’s retreat mean for his entire program of protectionism? Does he want to really disrupt the whole trade system or just get a better deal within it? For instance, can the United States and China really decouple?

 

Speaking to the US Congress after one hundred days in office, Trump claimed that the new tariffs on imports from the biggest trading partners of the United States would cause just “a little disturbance.” On April 2, which Trump called “Liberation Day,” he proposed what are called “reciprocal” tariffs on all countries sending goods exports to the United States. Using a crude formula for each country (the size of the US goods trade deficit with each country divided by the size of US imports from that country, then divided by two), Trump’s team arrived at the tariff hikes for each country. This formula is nonsense for several reasons. First, it excludes services trade, where the United States runs surpluses with many countries. Second, a tariff of 10 percent has been imposed even for countries where the United States runs a goods surplus. Third, it bears no relation to any actual tariff or nontariff barriers that a country has on US exports. And fourth, it ignores the tariff and nontariff barriers (of which there are many) that the United States itself has on other countries’ exports.

Trump’s aim was clear. He wants to restore the US manufacturing base within the country. Much of the imports into the United States from countries like China, Vietnam, Europe, Canada, and Mexico are from US companies based in those countries selling back to the United States at a lower cost than if they were based inside the country. Over the last forty years of “globalization,” multinational companies in the United States, Europe, and Japan moved their manufacturing operations into the Global South to take advantage of cheap labor, the absence of trade unions or regulations, and the use of the latest technology. But countries in Asia have dramatically industrialized their economies as a result and so gained market share in manufacturing and exports, leaving the United States to fall back on marketing, finance, and services.

Does that matter? Trump and his crew think so. Their eventual strategic aim is to weaken and strangle China to precipitate “regime change” and to take full hegemonic control over Latin America and the Pacific — to restore the Monroe Doctrine’s proposed US control over  the Americas and the Pacific. To do that, the United States must have a strong and overwhelming military force. Trump has announced a record military budget of $1 trillion a year. But US arms manufacturers cannot deliver on that budget. So, US manufacturing must be restored at home. Biden was keen to do this through an “industrial policy” that subsidized tech companies and manufacturing infrastructure. But that meant a huge rise in government spending that drove up the fiscal deficit to record levels. Trump reckons that imposing tariffs to force US manufacturing companies to return home and foreign companies to invest in (rather than export to) the United States is a better (that is, cheaper) way. He reckons that tariff hikes can increase manufacturing, spend more on arms, and reduce taxes for corporations while cutting back on government civil spending and keeping the dollar stable.

Is this going to work?  It seems that some analysts, even leftist ones, think it might. It’s true that many semi-vassal states of US imperialism will probably try to concede to Trump’s terms — already South Korea and Japan are attempting to, as is the United Kingdom. But that won’t be enough to turn things around.

Those who think Trump can succeed argue that the United States has successfully opted to change the balance of global economic forces in its favor in the past. To pay for its imports and its capital investments abroad, Nixon took the United States off the gold standard in 1971 and established the dollar as the hegemonic currency with the “exorbitant” privilege of being the only issuer of this currency. But that did not stop the United States from losing market share in manufacturing through the 1970s.

And then in 1979, the then Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker hiked interest rates to 19 percent to control inflation, which led to a deep slump both in the United States and globally. The dollar rose so much that US manufacturing began to move its locations abroad; it was the beginning of the neoliberal period. In 1985, the United States got other trading nations to agree to strengthen their currencies against the dollar through the so-called Plaza Accord. This eventually destroyed the industrial leadership Japan built up in the 1960s and ’70s, but it did not work in restoring US manufacturing at home.

It is not going to work this time either, especially just through tariff hikes. US manufacturing can only compete in world markets if it has superior technology, and can thus sharply reduce labor costs in production. Although the United States still has the second largest manufacturing sector in the world at 13 percent of world output (after China at 35 percent), US manufacturing employment has fallen sharply since the end of the golden age in the 1960s, mainly because US manufacturing profitability declined and technology replaced labor — not because of trade liberalization. Indeed, Trump’s team is talking about increasing manufacturing capacity at home through robots and AI, and so will deliver few extra jobs in the sector. So much for Trump’s claim that he was “proud to be the president for the workers, not the outsourcers; the President who stands up for Main Street, not Wall Street.”

The reality is that Trump cannot turn the clock back to make the United States the leading manufacturing economy in the world. That ship has sailed. Globalization has meant that the manufacturing value chain is now global, with components and raw materials spread across the world. As the Wall Street Journal pointed out: “Even if US-manufactured exports increased enough to close the trade deficit — an extremely unlikely event — and if employment grew proportionately, our manufacturing-workforce share would climb only from 8 percent to 9 percent. Not exactly transformational.”1

If Trump wants to restore US manufacturing, the sector needs massive investment at home, and US companies, already experiencing relatively low profitability outside the Magnificent Seven, are unlikely to oblige, except for military hardware paid for in government contracts. The reaction of Trump’s erstwhile advisor Musk to the tariff hikes is symptomatic of the reaction of US big business: Musk attacked Trumpist advisor Navarro, calling him a “moron” and “dumber than a sack of bricks” after Navarro suggested the Tesla boss’s opposition to tariffs was self-interested (which it is).2

Trump and his MAGA team believe that all these shocks are a price worth paying to restore US manufacturing hegemony. Once the dust settles, America will be great again, they argue. The destruction of world trade will have a “creative” outcome (at least for the United States). But this is a delusion. Trump’s slump will only confirm that trend.

Despite the inevitable failure of tariffs as a solution to reindustrializing the United States, Trump seems set on going through with his protectionist strategy. This can only be a trigger for a new slump both in the United States and in the major economies. It’s a trigger because already the major economies had been slowing to a crawl, even the United States. Usually when a recession is in the offing, government bond prices rise as investors look to a “safe haven” from a stock market crash. But this time, bond prices and the dollar rate are also diving — as fears of rising inflation and worries about the security of holding dollar assets take over.

So worried is the International Chamber of Commerce in the United States, that it reckoned that the world economy could face a crash similar to the Great Depression of the 1930s unless Trump rows back on his plans. “Our deep concern is that this could be the start of a downward spiral that puts us in 1930s trade-war territory,” said Andrew Wilson, deputy secretary-general of the ICC. So, Trump’s measures may go well beyond “a little disturbance.”

Adam Tooze has warned against “sane-washing” Trump’s erratic tariff policies. But, amidst all the threats and retreats, Stephen Miran (the chair of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers) has offered a coherent case for tariffs as a means to cut the US trade deficit, onshore manufacturing, and weaken the dollar to improve exports while preserving its status as the world’s reserve currency. There is even talk of a Mar-a-Lago Accord to rebalance currencies and trade. What do you make of Miran’s plan? Can it work? What problems will it create?

 

Contrary to Tooze’s view, I think there is method in this madness.3 On the external front, Trump aims to “Make America Great Again” by raising the cost of importing foreign goods for US companies and households and so reducing demand and the huge trade deficit that the country currently runs with the rest of the world. He wants to reduce that and force foreign companies to invest and operate within the United States, rather than export to it.

Despite Trump backing off for now from implementing his bizarre reciprocal tariffs imposed on every country in the world (including the penguin-only inhabited islands of Heard and McDonald, two thousand miles southwest of Australia), the tariff war is by no means over. The ninety-day “pause” ends in early July.

Trump backed down because the bond market was showing signs of severe stress that could lead to a credit squeeze, particularly for hedge funds that own a significant stock of US bonds. If bonds dived there might well have been bankruptcies for many companies, especially the heavily indebted so-called “zombie” companies that constitute about 20 percent of all companies in the United States. Bankruptcies could then ricochet through the economy, leading to a financial crash and slump.

That was not the only problem for Trump. The 125 percent tariff hike on imports from China potentially priced out exports of high-tech consumer goods by US companies based in China. US companies like Apple — who are the main exporters of iPhones and other goods out of China — would have been hit hard. Roughly 90 percent of Apple’s iPhone production and assembly is based in China. For instance, if you take an iPhone, less than 2 percent of its costs go to Chinese workers making the phone, while Apple makes an estimated 58.5 percent gross margin on its phones. Disrupting that supply chain would hit the United States more than China. US companies screamed and so Trump had to back down again. Now all consumer tech products imported from China, which are 22 percent of all US imports from China, are exempt.

The faulty logic of Trump tariff tantrums is also revealed by the fact the components going into iPhones and iPad are still subject to the tariff hike, just not the final product. According to the US National Association of Manufacturers, 56 percent of goods imported to the United States are actually manufacturing inputs, with a lot of that coming from China. Price rises there will feed through to many final products. The exemptions offered to consumer technology goods apply only to reciprocal tariffs. All imports from China, including goods exempt from reciprocal levies, are still subject to an extra 20 percent tariff. Moreover, Trump plans tariff hikes on semiconductor imports, which will hit the likes of Apple.

The United States imports a lot of basic goods from China: 24 percent of its textile and apparels imports ($45 billion), 28 percent of furniture imports ($19 billion), and 21 percent of electronics and machinery imports ($206 billion) in 2024. A 100 percentage-point increase in tariffs seems certain to show up in higher prices for businesses and consumers. So instead of hurting China, Trump’s tariffs will hit the US economy even harder. China actually has very little dependence on exports to the United States. They make up the equivalent of less than 3 percent of its GDP. US consumers and manufacturers will suffer sharp rises in prices — and indeed that is the experience of previous tariff programs.

In the current US case, the significant drop in crude oil prices is already putting the profitability of US oil production in jeopardy. US farmers are losing badly in world markets as China switches its food and grain purchases to Brazil. Already, the US share of China’s food imports has collapsed from 20.7 percent in 2016 to 13.5 percent in 2023, while Brazil’s grew from 17.2 percent to 25.2 percent in the same period. Now Brazil’s beef sales to China climbed a third in the first quarter of 2025 compared with a year earlier, while US agricultural shipments to China sank 54 percent.

China accounts for 7 percent of US goods exports, or 0.5 percent of US GDP. According to Pantheon Macroeconomics, the hit to US exports from aggressive Chinese retaliation will outweigh any boost to GDP from the cancellation of “reciprocal” tariffs. Trump and his MAGA advisors argue that the tariffs revenues will be used to cut taxes to corporations and so boost investment. But according to the latest estimates from the Tax Foundation thinktank — before Trump raised the stakes with a 104 percent tax on Chinese imports — tariffs would raise about $300 billion a year on average, significantly short of Trump’s $2 billion a day claim and basically peanuts compared to the loss of real incomes from the tariff measures.4

You refer to the economic arguments presented by Miran, Trump’s White House economic advisor. Miran argues that all the countries running a trade surplus with the United States must compensate the United States for its “sacrifice” in providing the dollar for trade and investment. But as Keynesian guru, Larry Summers, retorted: “If China wants to sell us things at really low prices and the transactions mean we get solar collectors or we get batteries that we can put in electric cars and in return we send them pieces of paper that we print, do you think that’s a good deal for us or a bad deal for us?”5

Back in 1959, Belgian-American economist Robert Triffin predicted that the United States could not go on running trade deficits with other countries and export capital to invest abroad and also maintain a strong dollar: “If the United States continued to run deficits, its foreign liabilities would come to exceed by far its ability to convert dollars into gold on demand and would bring about a “gold and dollar crisis.” Triffin argued that, when a country whose currency is the global reserve currency held by other nations as foreign exchange reserves to support international trade is forced to supply the world with its currency in order to fulfill world demand for these foreign exchange reserves, that leads to running a permanent trade deficit.

But both Triffin and Miran have the story back to front. The United States has been able to get cheap imports for decades and run a trade deficit to do so because countries exporting to the United States have been prepared to take dollars in payment and indeed invest back those dollars into US government bonds or other dollar instruments. The trade surplus countries are not “forcing” deficits on the United States; it’s just that US exporters cannot compete at least in goods trade (by contrast, the United States runs a large surplus in services trade). Luckily for US companies and consumers, the surplus countries will take dollars in payment, up to now. If they did not, then the US economy would be in real difficulty — just like many poor countries of the world without an internationally accepted currency are — and be forced to devalue the dollar or borrow at higher interest rates.

Under capitalism, there are always trade and capital imbalances among economies, not because the more efficient producer is “forcing” a deficit on the less efficient, but because capitalism is a system of uneven and combined development, where national economies with lower costs can gain value in international trade from those less efficient. What really worries the US capitalists is not that surplus countries are “forcing” them to issue dollars; it is that China is closing the gap on productivity and technology with the United States and thus threatens the economic dominance of the United States.

Nevertheless, some mainstream economists accept Miran’s ludicrous argument and the Triffin fallacy. The very much in vogue Chinese-based economist Michael Pettis argues that the likes of China have established trade surpluses because they have “suppressed domestic demand in order to subsidise its own manufacturing” and so forced the resulting manufacturing trade surplus “to be absorbed by those of its partners who exert much less control over their trade and capital accounts.” So, it is China’s (and until recently also Germany’s) fault that there are trade imbalances, not the inability of US manufacturing to compete in world markets compared to Asia and even Europe. Assuming no world governance and international cooperation on currencies, Pettis agrees with Miran: “The United States is justified in acting unilaterally to reverse its role in accommodating policy distortions abroad, as it is doing now. The most effective way is likely to be by imposing controls on the US capital account that limit the ability of surplus countries to balance their surpluses by acquiring US assets.” So not only tariffs on China’s imports, but also controls on their purchases of dollar assets.

In essence, this is just another way of devaluing the dollar in order to weaken China’s export advantage and boost the United States—a “beggar-thy-neighbor” policy in disguise. Miran-Pettis offer a policy to lower the value of the dollar in the same way that Nixon did in 1971 in taking the dollar off the gold standard and the US did similarly with the so-called Plaza Accord in 1985, which forced surplus nations like Japan to hike interest rates and boost the yen, thus reducing Japanese exports. Now the answer to China’s export and manufacturing success is apparently to wipe out its dollar assets and weaken the dollar.

But this policy won’t work. It did not save the US manufacturing sector in the 1970s or in the ’80s. As profitability fell sharply, US manufacturers located abroad to find better profitability in cheap labor economies. And this time, if the dollar is weakened, domestic inflation will rise even more (as it did in the 1970s) and, far from returning home to invest, US manufacturers will try to find other locations abroad, tariffs or no tariffs. If the dollar falls in value against other currencies, dollar holders like China, Japan, and Europe will look for alternative currency assets.

Does this mean dollar dominance is over, and we are entering a multipolar, multicurrency world? Some on the left promote this trend. But there is a long way to go before the dollar’s international role is trashed. Alternative currencies don’t look like a safe bet either as all economies try to keep their currencies cheap to compete — that’s why there has been a rush to gold in financial markets. The so-called BRICS are in no position to take over from the US dollar. This is a loose grouping of diverse economies and political institutions, with little in common except for some resistance to the objectives of US imperialism. And contrary to all the talk of the dollar collapsing, the reality is that the dollar is still historically strong against other trading currencies, despite Trump’s zig zags.

What will end the US trade deficit is not tariffs on US imports or controls on foreign investment into the United States, but a slump. A slump would mean a sharp fall in consumer and producer purchases and investment and thus engender a fall in imports, reducing the external deficit. So, Trump can end the external deficit by having a slump at home.

Trump’s tariffs on China will raise prices on everything from cars to Barbies. Channeling Marie Antoinette, he’s told people to tough it out and children to make do with fewer toys. Such callous indifference aside, Trump’s tariffs will drive up inflation while slowing growth if not causing an outright recession. That reality has brought the Trump regime into conflict with Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell who has kept rates steady, high enough to try and stop inflation and low enough to sustain growth. But Trump wants lowered rates to stimulate the economy. Trump has gone so far as to threaten to fire Powell and replace him with a more pliant banker, until capital again forced him to retreat. Why is Trump placing so much pressure on Powell? Why is Powell resisting? What’s at stake for capital in this conflict? Where is it headed?

 

Prices in US shops will soon be rising sharply as imported consumer goods from Asia rise in price, and commodity and components imports do the same for US companies. Many of Trump’s highest tariffs are focused on countries such as Vietnam (food, consumer goods) and Taiwan (semiconductors). The Yale Budget Lab thinktank forecasts a 4 percent increase in the price of vegetables, fruits, and nuts, many of which are imported from Mexico and Canada. Overall, the Yale Budget Lab estimates US households will spend an average of $3,800 more each year from 2026 as a result of tariff-induced inflation.

The “war against inflation” is also being lost by the US Fed. The Fed’s target is 2 percent a year for US personal consumption expenditure price inflation. In March, core consumer expenditure prices (excluding food and energy) were still up 2.6 percent a year. At its latest meeting, the Fed reckoned that “the risks of higher unemployment and higher inflation have risen.” In other words, there is a “whiff of stagflation” in the air. And the impact of Trump’s import tariff hikes is still to be felt. Indeed, the US Federal Reserve is now in a serious dilemma. Should it keep interest rates steady to try and control inflation, or lower them to try and avoid a slump?

Trump is demanding interest-rate cuts, but the financial elite want inflation kept down. Fed chair Powell will resist Trump and support the financial sector — at least for now. But if a slump in Main Street begins to emerge, he will cut rates fast. For now, the US economy seems stable, but it’s like a ball balancing on a precipice.

Trump’s protectionism is a decisive break with Washington’s neoliberal consensus of free trade globalization. Neoliberalism has been the predominant capitalist strategy used to overcome the crisis of profitability that capitalism hit in the 1970s. The combination of class war, industrial restructuring, state austerity measures, and globalization spurred a recovery of profitability, but not of course to the levels of the postwar boom. But the neoliberal expansion definitively ended with the 2008 financial crisis, ushering in what you have called a long depression of low profitability, stagnation, periodic crises, and weak recoveries. Trump’s protectionism seems to be an attempt to restore US capitalist supremacy and profitability at the expense of other countries and their corporations. Can it work to restore profitability, or will it end up protecting uncompetitive and unprofitable capital? What would be necessary to restore profitability?

 

While Trump has broken with the neoliberal policies of “globalization” and free trade in order to “Make America Great Again” at the expense of the rest of the world, he has not dropped neoliberal policies for the domestic economy. Trump wants to free his US public limited company (PLC) from any restraints on making profits. For Trump, the sole objective is profits, not the needs of society in general. That means no more wasteful expenditure on mitigating global warming and avoiding damage to the environment. The US corporation should just make more profits and not be concerned with such “externalities.”

Trump sees the United States as just a big capitalist corporation of which he is chief executive. Just as he did when he was the boss on The Apprentice, he thinks he is running a business and so can employ and fire people at his whim. He has a board of directors who advise and do his bidding (US oligarchs and some MAGA economists and politicians). The traditional institutions of the state are a hindrance. So, Congress, courts, state governments, and so on are to be ignored or told to carry out the instructions of the CEO.

Like the real estate agent he is, Trump thinks the way to boost his corporation’s profits is to make deals to take over other corporations or to make agreements on trade to ensure maximum profits for his corporation. Like any big corporation, Trump PLC does not want any competitors to gain market share at his expense. So, he wants to increase costs for rival national and continental corporations, like Europe, Canada, and China. He is doing this by raising tariffs on their exports. He is also trying to get other less powerful corporations to agree to terms on taking more of US corporations’ goods and services (health companies, arms, food and energy, and so on) in trade agreements (such as the United Kingdom). And he aims to increase the US corporation’s investments in profit-making sectors like fossil fuel production (Alaska, fracking, drilling), proprietary technology (Nvidia, AI) and, above all, real estate (Greenland, Panama, Canada, Gaza).

All corporations want to pay less taxation on their income and profits, and Trump aims to deliver that for his US corporation. He and his “advisor” Musk took a wrecking ball to government departments, their employees, and any spending on public services to “save money,” so that Trump can cut costs — meaning, reduce taxes on corporate profits and high-paid super-wealthy individuals who sit on his US corporation board and carry out his executive orders.

But it’s not just taxes and the costs of government that must be dismantled. The US corporation must be freed of “petty” regulations on business activities like safety rules and working conditions in production; anticorruption laws and laws against unfair trading measures; consumer protection from scams and theft; and controls on financial speculation and dangerous assets like bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. There should be no restraint on Trump’s US corporation to do what it wants. Deregulation is key to Making America Great Again.

Trump has directed the Department of Justice to pause all enforcements under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (an antibribery and accounting practices legislation intended to maintain integrity in business dealings), for 180 days. Trump aims at eliminating ten regulations for each new regulation issued to “unleash prosperity through deregulation.” He has fired the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and directed all employees to “cease all supervision and examination activity.” The CFPB was created in the wake of the 2007–08 financial crisis and is tasked with writing and enforcing rules applicable to financial services companies and banks, prioritizing consumer protection in lending practices.

Trump wants more speculative tokens and crypto projects (as launched by his sons), and has started his own meme coin. Newly proposed changes to accounting guidance would make it much easier for banks and asset managers to hold crypto tokens — a move that pulls this highly volatile asset closer to the heart of the financial system.

Yet, it’s only two years since the United States was on the brink of its most serious set of bank failures since the financial storm of 2008. A clutch of regional banks, some the size of Europe’s larger lenders, hit the skids, including Silicon Valley Bank, whose demise came close to sparking a full-blown crisis. Silicon Valley Bank’s crash had several immediate causes. Its bond holdings were crumbling in value as US interest rates pushed higher. With just a few taps on an app, the bank’s spooked and interconnected tech customer base yanked out deposits at an unsustainable pace, leaving multimillionaires crying out for federal assistance.

Taxes will be cut for big business and the rich, but the aim will also be to reduce the federal government debt and cut public spending (except for arms, of course). This year, the US budget deficit will be almost $2 trillion, of which more than half is net interest — about as much as the United States spends on its military. Total government debt outstanding now stands at $30.2 trillion or 99 percent of GDP. US debt as a percentage of GDP will soon exceed the Second World War peak. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that by 2034, US governmental debt will exceed $50 trillion — 122.4 percent of GDP. The United States will be spending $1.7 trillion a year on interest alone.

Trump has let Musk loose to massacre federal government spending, close down departments (possibly closing the Department of Education), and sack thousands of public employees to “reduce wastage.” The problem for Musk is that most of the “wastage” and spending is on “defense,” but he will no doubt plough on reducing civilian services and even “entitlement programs” like Medicare.

Trump aims to “privatize” as much of the government as he can. “We encourage you to find a job in the private sector as soon as you would like to do so,” the Trump administration’s Office of Personnel Management’s said. As Trump sees it, the public sector is unproductive, but not the finance sector, of course. “The way to greater American prosperity is encouraging people to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector.” Of course, these great jobs were not identified. Moreover, if the private sector stops growing as the trade war intensifies, those higher productivity jobs may not materialize anyway.

Trump’s beggar thy neighbor trade war seems tied to a dramatically new strategy for US imperialism. In place of the United States superintending the so-called rules based international order of free trade globalization, Trump is committed to a strategy of America First nationalism, carving out its sphere of influence through threatened annexations of Greenland and Panama in competition with other great powers like China, Russia, and the European. Of course, the contradiction in that strategy is that their respective spheres overlap, especially in Asia and Europe. All of this ominously seems like the pre-First World War period. Are the long depression, trade wars, geopolitical competition, and increased military spending driving us toward imperialist war in particular between the United States and China? What are the deterrents against this trajectory? What conflicts would be the triggers of a war?

 

In the 1930s, the attempt of the United States to “protect” its industrial base with the Smoot-Hawley tariffs only led to a further contraction in output as part of the Great Depression that enveloped North America, Europe, and Japan. Big business and their economists condemned the Smoot-Hawley measures and campaigned vociferously against them being implemented. Henry Ford tried to convince then President Hoover to veto the measures calling them “an economic stupidity.” Similar words are now coming from the voice of big business and finance, the Wall Street Journal, which called Trump’s tariffs “the dumbest trade war in history.” The Great Depression of the 1930s was not caused by the protectionist trade war that the United States provoked in 1930, but the tariffs then only added force to the global contraction, as it became “every country for itself.” Between the years 1929 and 1934, global trade fell by approximately 66 percent as countries across the world implemented retaliatory trade measures.

Trump’s strategy is the culmination of what has happened to the world economy after the Great Recession and the ensuing Long Depression of the 2010s. China did not play ball in opening up its economy to the West’s multinationals. That forced the United States to switch its policy on China from “engagement” to “containment.” And then came the renewed determination of the United States and its European satellites to expand its control eastwards from Europe to ensure that Russia fails in its attempt to exert control over its border countries and permanently weaken Russia as an opposition force to the imperialist bloc. This led to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And it led to the horrendous destruction of Gaza and the millions of Palestinians living (and dying) there.

Globalization and cooperation between capitalist countries will only return if and when capitalism gains a new lease of life based on enhanced and sustained profitability. That seems unlikely to happen this side of another slump and maybe more war. We can echo the words of Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank: “The single most important factor influencing international currency usage is the strength of fundamentals.”6 This means that the heavy military and financial dominance of the United States and its allies stands on the chicken legs of relatively poor productivity, investment, and profitability. That’s a recipe for global fragmentation and conflict.

The long depression can only be turned into a long boom with wartime-like measures, namely massive government investment, public ownership of strategic sectors, and state direction of the productive sectors of the economy. John Maynard Keynes himself said that the war economy demonstrated that “it seems politically impossible for a capitalistic democracy to organize expenditure on the scale necessary to make the grand experiments which would prove my case—except in war conditions.”

The hope in this terribly grim scenario of depression and imperial conflict is the waves of uprisings of workers and the oppressed throughout the world. In the United States, a new resistance has emerged really since the April 5 protests. We just witnessed hundreds of thousands pour into the streets on May Day, bringing together migrants and trade unionists. One of the challenges though is the politics of the new resistance, in particular on the question of tariffs. Many in the working-class movement have been convinced that trade is the main cause of job losses in manufacturing. Sean Fain, the reform president of the United Auto Workers, has gone as far as to support Trump’s protectionism. What is the problem with this analysis and support for tariffs? How does it fall into Trump’s trap of great power nationalism, racism, and militarism? What should the international left put forward as an alternative to both protectionism and free trade?

 

Labor leaders should not be fooled into supporting tariffs as a way to “save jobs or domestic industry.” The story of McKinley’s tariff propaganda of the 1890s proves that. Trump referred to McKinley when announcing his executive orders to raise tariffs. “Under his leadership, the United States enjoyed rapid economic growth and prosperity, including an expansion of territorial gains for the Nation. President McKinley championed tariffs to protect US manufacturing, boost domestic production, and drive US industrialization and global reach to new heights.” This is a travesty of the history of tariffs.

In 1890, McKinley as a congressional representative proposed a range of tariffs to protect US industry. This was adopted by Congress. But the tariff measures did not work out well. They did not avoid a severe depression, which began in 1893 and lasted until 1897. In 1896, McKinley became president and presided over a new set of tariffs, the Dingley Tariff Act of 1897. As this was a boom period, McKinley claimed that the tariffs helped to boost the economy. Called the “Napoleon of Protection,” he linked his tariffs policy to the military takeover of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines to extend the US sphere of influence—shades of Trump. But early in this second term as president he was assassinated by an anarchist who blamed McKinley for the suffering of farm workers during the recession of 1893–97. Protectionism never saved jobs or boosted workers incomes.

Another diversion for labor is the idea that increased military spending will create jobs for workers in the arms industries. Above all, military Keynesianism is against the interests of working people and humanity. Are we in favor of making arms to kill people in order to create jobs? This argument, often promoted by some trade union leaders, puts money before lives.

Keynes once said: “The government should pay people to dig holes in the ground and then fill them up.” People would reply, “that’s stupid, why not pay people to build roads and schools?” Keynes would respond saying, “Fine, pay them to build schools. The point is it doesn’t matter what they do as long as the government is creating jobs.” Keynes was wrong. It does matter. Keynesianism advocates digging holes and filling them up to create jobs. Military Keynesianism advocates digging graves and filling them with bodies to create jobs. If it does not matter how jobs are created, then why not dramatically increase tobacco production and promote the addiction to create jobs? Currently, most people would oppose this as being directly harmful to people’s health. Making weapons (conventional and unconventional) is also directly harmful. And there are plenty of other socially useful products and services that could deliver jobs and wages for workers (like schools and homes).

The way to raise living standards and meet social needs is not through import tariffs or military spending, but through public investment in industry, technology and public services. And the way to ensure workers obtain good jobs with training and proper pay is by organizing unions to fight for them. Public investment can only be successful if it is based on public ownership of the major financial institutions and big businesses. A plan for investment and production could then provide full public services, adequate pensions, universal healthcare and education without debt, as well as support for small businesses to provide proper wages and working conditions.

US labor needs to build links for joint action with workers in the rest of the Americas and Europe, as well as in Asia. The future for working people in the United States does not lie in trying to destroy the economies of other countries, but in building workers’ organizations in every country that can gain political power to remove the control of capital globally and end nationalism, militarism, and imperialism.

Ashley Smith is a socialist writer and activist in Burlington, Vermont. He has written in numerous publications including Truthout, International Socialist Review, Socialist Worker, ZNet, Jacobin, New Politics, Harpers, and many other online and print publications. He is currently working on a book for Haymarket entitled Socialism and Anti-Imperialism.

• 1

  Jared Bernstein and Dean Baker, “Tariffs Won’t Bring a Boom in American Manufacturing,” Wall Street Journal, March 26, 2025, https://www.wsj.com/opinion/tariffs-wont-bring-a-boom-in-american-manufacturing-risk-recession-trade-policy-d37c7dca.

• 2

  Tweet by Gorklon Rust (@elonmusk), X, April 8, 2025, 9:47 a.m., https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1909604085025956133; Tweet by Gorklon Rust (@elonmusk), X, April 8, 2025, 9:52 a.m., https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1909605316121198860.

• 3

  Adam Tooze, “Chartbook 363 Stockholm syndrome in Mar-A-Lago: The belief that “something must be done” and the sanewashing of economic policy in the age of Trump,” Chartbook (substack), March 19, 2025, https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-363-stockholm-syndrome.

• 4

  War,” Tax Foundation, May 9, 2025, https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/trump-tariffs-trade-war/.

• 5

  “Tariffs, Decline, and the Promise of AI,” YouTube video, 112:56, posted by “University of Austin (UATX),” April 9, 2025,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sy-fn5MWFIk.

• 6

  Christine Lagarde “Central Banks in a Fragmenting World: Speech by Christine Lagarde, President of the ECB, at the Council on Foreign Relations’ C. Peter McColough Series on International Economics,” European Central Bank, April 17, 2023, https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/key/date/2023/html/ecb.sp230417~9f8d34fbd6.en.html.