Not the Democrats, But Workers Action Against Mass Deportations and Layoffs!

Trumpland USA:
Lurching Toward Authoritarian Rule

Against Police-State Repression: Fight for Workers Revolution!

APRIL 29 – Ever since last November’s elections in the United States, the entire world, it seemed, was waiting with baited breath to see what the first day of Donald J. Trump’s second presidency would bring. And now, since January 20, it’s been all Trump, all the time, every day. It started with a tsunami of executive orders, 26 churned out on Inauguration Day (January 20) alone. As of today, he’s up to 141 decrees in his first 100 days in office, an all-time record. This wannabe autocrat revels in issuing “laws” that nobody gets to vote on. We had headlined, “Trump 2: Gearing Up to Rule by Decree” (The Internationalist No. 74, September-December 2024). That is exactly what he has done, with a vengeance. We are all under attack!

Trump declared undocumented immigrants “enemy aliens” in a supposed invasion of the U.S. by a foreign power (Venezuela?!), using an 18th-century law to order to kick off his vicious program of mass deportations. He repealed 78 executive orders and actions by his predecessor, Democrat Joseph Biden, on everything from climate change to racial “equity.” He declared “America First” to be official U.S. policy in all things international. He ordered the elimination of all programs of “diversity, equity and inclusion.” He ordered the end of “weaponizing” of the legal system “against perceived political opponents,” in order, precisely, to weaponize the Department of “Justice” to go after his political enemies. And much more, all on Day One.

As the barrage of decrees targeting one group or institution after another has kept up, with a new abomination every day, fear has spread among vulnerable populations across the United States. Immigrants subject to mass deportations retreat into their homes, federal employees subject to mass firings sit at their desks waiting for the email saying they are out of a job, educators worry about funds being cut if schools refuse to stop teaching about racism. Then, with Trump’s April 2 announcement of astronomical tariffs on imports, stock markets gyrated, investors stopped investing, central bankers started selling their U.S. Treasury bonds. Everyone, even Trump supporters, talks of the chaos, but the avalanche of actions shows a well-prepared plan.

Internationally, the U.S. president declared that he was going to take back the Panama Canal, “get” Greenland “one way or another” and make Canada the 51st state. At the dawn of U.S. imperialism, as U.S. Marines invaded Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Nicaragua and Mexico, a U.S. admiral termed the Caribbean “an American lake.” Now Trump rebaptized the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.” By this both meant the United States alone, the colossus of the north, arrogantly dismissing the other countries of America, North and South. In the face of would-be strongman Trump’s muscle-flexing, capitalist rulers from Latin America to Europe went into shock.

We also noted that the elections were a turning point in recent history, marking the end of the “era of U.S. global hegemony since World War II.” This, too, has been confirmed, as imperialist alliances have been turned topsy-turvy, Yesterday’s allies have become competitors in a global trade war, and the new administration seeks to normalize relations with the U.S.’ declared military adversary for the last 80 years, the Soviet Union and now Russia. As Democrats and establishment Republicans in Washington wring their hands at the turn of events, and their fellow imperialist rulers of the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) military alliance are at their wits’ end, the result will be massive militarization.

Back in 1990, as Republican president George H.W. Bush launched the Persian Gulf War, he proclaimed a “new world order” of peace and harmony, “under American leadership,” revving up the imperialist-led counterrevolution that destroyed the bureaucratically degenerated Soviet workers state and its allied East European deformed workers states. A few years later, Democratic secretary of state Madelaine Albright declared the United States “the indispensable nation,” which Democratic president Joe Biden repeated, saying he was “running the world” only days before dropping his reelection bid. But the U.S.-dominated world disorder was marked from the start by nationalist and imperialist “wars without end” and it breathed its last in the failed U.S./NATO imperialist proxy war against Russia over Ukraine.

Democrats Paved the Way for Trump – Twice!

The waning of U.S. military strength went together with the hollowing out of its industrial base. The “globalization” of capitalist production, through overlapping free trade pacts and the World Trade Organization, led to massive closure of factories in the industrial Midwest. Better-paying blue collar union jobs in the U.S. were eliminated as employers hired workers at poverty pay in low-wage countries. According to official statistics, 950,000 U.S. factory jobs were lost due to the North American Free Trade Agreement alone. Having helped turn vast industrial areas into a “rust belt,” the Democrats ostentatiously pandered to Wall Street while pushing militarism abroad and presiding over unending racist police repression at home. Not once but twice now, the Democrats paved the way for Trump.

Real wages (adjusted for inflation) today have only slightly advanced since the 1970s, and for the 62% of the U.S. population that does not have a college degree, they actually fell from 1979 to 2019, and have hardly risen since. This is also the part of the electorate (portrayed in the press as synonymous with the working class) that voted most heavily (56%) for Trump in 2024. This has been the single most defining feature of recent U.S. elections, leading to the demise of the Democrats who once pretended to be “friends of labor.” But now, with whole industries gone, in the short run even Trump’s top tariffs can’t bring them back. The result will likely be rampant inflation and stagnation, the “stagflation” of the late 1970s.

The reality is that decaying imperialism can’t even provide for basic needs of the population, with living standards falling, social services slashed and millions of lives lost in the COVID-19 pandemic due to abysmal public health measures. Yet as hospitals loaded corpses into reefer trucks in the capitalist countries, the Chinese deformed worker state held deaths to barely 5,000 for three years by mobilizing its resources in what is still, despite dangerous capitalist inroads, a centrally planned economy. Trump’s economic plans won’t bring prosperity for working people, instead he’s gearing up for war. While Biden and his left-over Cold Warriors were careening toward World War III, Trump is systematically preparing for war with China.

U.S. and European imperialists have portrayed themselves as defending a “liberal democratic rules-based order,” although it was hardly liberal or democratic and the rules were those dictated by Washington. Talk of “human rights” only served to justify military aggression, from Iraq and Afghanistan to Ukraine. (They can’t even use that lying rhetoric to cover U.S./Israel genocide against the Palestinian people of Gaza.) Today, economic decline and rising militarization are accompanied by stepped-up repression, and a drive toward conservative authoritarian rule. And it is the liberal/conservative warmongers, in the U.S. Democrats and establishment Republicans, who have prepared the ground for sinister figures like Donald Trump.

The Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth International have consistently called and fought for international class-struggle action against the wars and depredation by all the imperialist rulers. Against Bush II in Iraq and Afghanistan, against Obama and Trump in Afghanistan and Syria, against Biden over Ukraine and Gaza, the IG/LFI has fought for mobilizing workers action in the struggle to defeat the imperialist assault. On Ukraine we are for defense of Russia against the U.S./NATO proxy war and for the defeat of the fascist-infested puppet regime in Kiev. Over Gaza, we take the side of those fighting against the U.S./Israel genocidal war, and defend Iran, Lebanon and Yemen as well, while calling for an Arab/Hebrew Palestinian workers state in a socialist federation of the Middle East.

In the United States, where there has no real action to stop Trump’s onslaught, just a couple of well-attended but impotent marches led by Democratic “progressives,” the IG and its fraternal allies in Class Struggle Workers – Portland and Class Struggle Education Workers have taken the initiative to form labor committees to defend immigrants, citywide and in various workplaces, and to fight for workers action in the struggle to stop deportations. And while pro-capitalist bureaucrats chain workers to the bosses’ politicians, we call to break with the Democrats, Republicans and all capitalist parties and to build a revolutionary workers party.

With the Democrats catatonic, the U.S. left is still mostly tailing the liberals and burying itself in low-level union reform struggles. Yet as the economy putrefies, post-World War II “welfare state” capitalism is dead and gone. There is no reformist alternative to the drive for a “strong state” based on a militarized police apparatus. All factions of the imperialist rulers, in the U.S. and worldwide, seek to beef up the forces of repression, in order to put down the resistance that their program of intensifying war, racism and impoverishment will provoke. Against this rancid reaction, it is urgent to raise transitional demands pointing the way to international socialist revolution, not in the sweet bye-and-bye but in the here-and-now.

First on Trump’s Hit List: Immigrants

On the domestic front, arrests by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) police have been staged with TV reporters and cameras in tow to maximize the fear factor. Their boss, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) chief Kristi Noem, glammed up in a bulletproof I.C.E. vest to tag along for a photo op as federal agents staged pre-dawn raids in the Bronx. Hours after Trump signed his “enemy aliens” decree, a DHS memo gave a green light to barge into schools, hospitals, courthouses and religious sites. In addition to undocumented immigrants, many in Temporary Protected Status or applying for refugee asylum are on the pick-up lists. Trump’s vile “border czar” Tom Homan wants to cause panic so that immigrants “self-deport.”

As of mid-March, the Trump administration had “removed” some 3,887 immigrants per week. To keep things in perspective, Democrat Obama removed 5.3 million people in eight years, which works out to 12,740 a week. And Democrat Biden removed 4.6 million immigrants in four years.¹ The difference is that the overwhelming majority of the “removals” by Obama and Biden were from the border area, while Trump wants to deport millions who have lived in the U.S. for a decade or more. The reality is that both major capitalist parties are enemies of immigrants. That’s not to say that the Trump administration isn’t an enormous threat – it is – but that it is just getting started with its racist program of “ethnic cleansing, American style.” And as we have insisted, and has been shown yet again throughout recent weeks and months, you can’t fight Trump with the Democrats. Breaking with them is key to unchaining workers power in order to wage a real and effective fight against the assaults on the rights of us all.

The whole Trump deportation operation is a horror show of governmental arbitrariness, wanton cruelty and chaos, mainly to prevent immigrants from exercising their constitutional right to due process. On January 23, the acting DHS director issued a memo expanding the use of “expedited removal” from border areas to the whole of the United States. Under this procedure, immigrants can be summarily deported unless they can show they have been in the U.S. for two years or more. On January 29, Congress passed the Laken Riley Act, with a lot of Democratic votes, requiring deportation of undocumented immigrants charged with certain crimes, including theft. In New York, entering the subway without paying is classified as “theft of services.”

On February 4, a first group of a dozen Venezuelan immigrants was sent to the U.S. base at Guantánamo (on land stolen from Cuba), where the administration planned to hold 30,000 detainees, in order to get them off U.S. territory where they could challenge their detention. But when a federal judge in Boston ruled that detainees could still appeal, by mid-March the government emptied the camp and sent over 200 deportees to the maximum security CECOT “anti-terrorism” in El Salvador, notorious for torture and mistreatment, where the U.S. is paying up to $15 million to hold the deportees. It was claimed they were members of a Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua, but no proof was given and families have challenged that.

As weeks passed, new scandals about deportations surfaced almost daily. On April 7, Border Patrol agents tried to enter two Los Angeles elementary schools, supposedly for a “wellness check” of unaccompanied immigrant children. School authorities denied them entry because they did not have a judicial warrant. This week news media reported that three young children who are U.S. citizens were deported along with their mothers to Guatemala, including a four-year-old with cancer who was sent without medications. In another case, the DHS removed a two-year-old child from her parents’ care, supposedly for her own “safety and welfare,” while the father was sent to El Salvador and the mother deported back to Venezuela.

On Day 98 of Trump 2, April 27, the feds really got going, with a drug raid on an underground nightclub in Colorado Springs where they detained 114 undocumented immigrants, plus 14 on-duty military personnel who were acting as security. In Florida, I.C.E. – the hated migra – abducted 780 immigrants in a week-long raid in cooperation with local and state police. And on Day 99, Trump issued another emergency order, declaring that local and state officials who refuse to cooperate with the federal immigration police are engaged in “lawless insurrection,” calling on the Attorney General to “stop the enforcement of State and local laws” of “sanctuary jurisdictions,” and to cancel in-state college tuition for undocumented students.

In particular, Trump is going after the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. That is where it is established that all “persons” in the United States (i.e., not just citizens) have the right to “due process” and to “equal protection of the laws” – rights that the new regime is denying not just to immigrants lacking some official papers but to all non-citizens, including legal permanent residents. The 14th Amendment also declares that “all persons born in the United States” are U.S. citizens. On January 20 Donald J. Trump decreed the end to “birthright citizenship.” Both of these attacks on basic rights are blatantly unconstitutional. It took the Civil War and the abolition of slavery to win the 14th Amendment, and Trump asserts he can abolish it with a stroke of his Sharpie pen.

Meanwhile, his administration is defying a judge’s order to stop sending immigrants to the CECOT prison in El Salvador without affording them due process, and ignoring a Supreme Court order to “facilitate the return” of Kilmar Abrego García, a Maryland trade-unionist who had a court order blocking his deportation. We’re getting ever closer to the situation of Argentina under the 1970s military junta when unmarked Ford Falcons prowled the streets “disappearing” leftists. Certainly, the ghoulish White House deportation chief Homan would be up for it, and suspicious unmarked vehicles have already been spotted in various places.

On May Day, in New York the Labor Committee to Defend Immigrants will march with banners calling to “Bring Back Kilmar Abrego García, Free Them All!” and “For Workers Action to Stop Mass Deportations.” The Internationalist contingent will be carrying a banner calling to “Smash I.C.E. Gestapo with Workers Revolution.” On the West Coast, International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 10 in the San Francisco Bay Area will hold a stop-work meeting and march with a banner calling “For Workers Actions to Stop Mass Deportations & Mass Firings! No Military Cargo for Israel’s Genocidal War Against Palestinians! Defend the Rights of ALL of us!”

Academia in the Trump Regime’s Crosshairs

The new regime in Washington is aiming to turn the USA into “Trumpland,” pushing reactionary policies to “roll back” U.S. society to what he remembers as the “good old days” of Jim Crow segregation and Cold War conformity. In line with Christian nationalist ideology, the White House has launched sadistic attacks on the rights of gay, lesbian and transgender people. Trump decreed in an executive order that there are only two genders – as if he can change reality by fiat. The administration is institutionalizing racism in the guise of being “colorblind.” Textbooks are being examined for any reference to racial justice, in order to ban them. Another decree, on “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” calls for enforcing “patriotic education.”

And it is stepping up domestic repression. In March, the focus turned to academia as Secretary of State Marco Rubio ordered the deportation of Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, arrested as he was entering his apartment building along with his wife, who was eight months pregnant. A couple of weeks later, Tufts University doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk was abducted in the street by federal agents in balaclava face masks with no ID. These brazen arrests set off a wave of fear among international students, as intended. And so far, even their energetic defense lawyers have not been able to free them from the feds’ clutches.

Simultaneously, Trump went after universities that he deemed insufficiently tough on the Gaza solidarity encampments last year, or which had pro-Palestinian professors. He started with Columbia, demanding control of its Middle East studies program and threatening to cut $51 million in federal funds. Columbia capitulated, although its new president told a faculty meeting she had only done the minimum required. The White House declared it not enough, forced her to resign as well and stopped $400 million in research grants. Then it went after Harvard, threatening to cut $2.2 billion in federal funds over DEI (“diversity, equity and inclusion” policies). Harvard with great fanfare vowed to resist, sending a wave of hope through academia. But today it, too, bowed and gutted its diversity program.

Also in March, I.C.E. without notice canceled almost 5,000 visa registrations of foreign students by simply dropping their information from its SEVIS (Student and Exchange Visitor Information System) listing. This was based on a quick search of a federal database, tagging anyone who had had minor brushes with the law, even if charges were dropped. Many schools blocked the students from taking classes, sometimes only a few weeks before graduation. This arbitrary action sparked hundreds of lawsuits, and after several weeks, the Department of Justice informed courts that the action had been reversed, though future action against the students may be pending. The status of students whose visas were revoked for participating in pro-Palestinian demos was left unclear.

This assault on universities marks a new wave of McCarthyism. In the early 1950s, at the height of the anti-Soviet Cold War, Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy and his allies, such as the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), sought to drive “reds” out of academia, as liberal Democrats had done in the late 1940s red purges in the labor movement. But today the Trump gang has raised the stakes, taking aim at the universities themselves. They are out to transform academia, and particularly elite universities, from bastions of liberalism into bulwarks of conservative reaction. In a 2021 speech to the National Conservatism Congress titled “The Universities Are the Enemy,” JD Vance – today Trump’s veep – declared, “Professors are the enemy.”

There is a broader program behind this, beyond visceral hatred. In a July 2024 interview with The Federalist, Vance called to remake U.S. society from the top. He said conservatives have “lost big business, we’ve lost finance, we’ve lost the culture, we’ve lost the academy. And if we’re going to actually really effect real change in the country it will require us to completely replace the existing ruling class with another ruling class.” We have characterized Vance as a fascistic ideologue, and his call to form a new ruling class recalls the Nazis’ Gleichschaltung, or regimentation of German universities in the 1930s. As Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler said in 1937, their aim was to forge “a ruling class destined to last for centuries … a new aristocracy.”

21st-Century McCarthyism

The administration sought to justify the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil – who was the negotiator and one of the most prominent spokesmen for the Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia a year ago – citing a proviso of the 1952 McCarran-Walter Nationality Act of 1952 that any noncitizen whose “presence or activities” would have a “serious adverse foreign policy consequences” could be deported. This Cold War law was passed at the height of the McCarthyite witch hunts in order to deport communists for their ideas. The government grotesquely accuses Khalil of participating in “antisemitic” protests – the smear it uses against any pro-Palestinian protesters – and absurdly labeled him “pro-Hamas.”²

Here again the Democratic Party helped pave the way for Trump with the bipartisan slander equating opposition to Israel’s Gaza genocide with antisemitism. And, of course, Trump’s “MAGA movement” is rife with blatant antisemites and white supremacists. The idea that Trump’s rampages are aimed at “defending Jews” is a transparent falsehood.

While earlier Supreme Courts have ruled provisions of the McCarran-Walter Act as an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment’s “bedrock principle” of freedom of speech, with the current Court majority of rightist reactionaries in black robes, who knows? And now we have McCarthyism on steroids – or, more precisely, on AI. Shortly after the seizure of Khalil, it was revealed that an Iranian scholar at Yale, Dr. Helyeh Doutaghi, was fired after being doxed by a Zionist publication that used artificial intelligence to comb through thousands of websites for Gaza solidarity statements by academics. Khalil’s arrest, too, was sparked by a hardline Zionist doxing him for protesting disciplinary measures against pro-Palestinian demonstrators.

This close connection of private witch-hunting and government repression is a distinguishing feature of the Trump 2 regime. The Israeli government has long budgeted tens of millions of dollars annually (through its Ministry of Strategic Affairs and other channels) to spy on, defame, disrupt and combat anti-Zionist groups on U.S. campuses. After the stunning 7 October 2023 attack led by the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) on the Israeli military forces imprisoning the Palestinian population of Gaza, and the Islamists’ indiscriminate terror attack on Israelis in nearby communities, the Zionists combined their U.S.-financed and -armed genocidal war on Gaza with stepped-up operations against pro-Palestinian individuals and groups in the U.S.

As always, the Anti-Defamation League is at work defaming anti-Zionists, spreading the lie that U.S. campuses are hotbeds of antisemitism. In addition, the surge of sinister actions to smear and set up defenders of Palestinian rights for repression or violent attack over the last year and a half has been led by the ultra-rightist Accuracy in Media outfit that sponsored doxing trucks at Harvard, Columbia and the City University of New York, and has for decades gone after leftist professors.³ And there is the shadowy Canary Mission⁴ (closely linked to Israeli intelligence) and the fascistic Betar US, who “have amassed dossiers about pro-Palestinian student activists“ (Forward, 25 March), imitating the anticommunist blacklists of the 1950s.

This is 21st-century McCarthyism, but with an important distinction. The Cold War regimentation of U.S. society associated with McCarthyite witch hunts was ultimately overcome by the black struggle for civil rights, beginning with the drive to integrate public schools following the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and the 1955 Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott. But McCarthy was brought down in 1953 when he attacked the U.S. Army. That was when the president (and former general) Dwight Eisenhower, who had earlier facilitated McCarthy’s inquisitions, decided to put a stop to the bloodletting. Today, the witch-hunters operate out of the White House.

The Method in Trump’s Trade War “Madness”

While imitating President William McKinley’s “Manifest Destiny” brand of swashbuckling U.S. imperialism from the turn of the 20th century, on April 2 Donald Trump launched a tariff war against almost every country on the planet. Instead of the low-to-no tariffs of various “free trade” pacts, and the rules of the World Trade Organization in which imports are supposed to be treated the same as domestically produced goods, the U.S. president announced a minimum 10% tariff on the value of goods imported into the United States, and a series of “reciprocal tariffs” on a whole list of countries ranging up to 49%. He earlier imposed a 25% tariff on steel and aluminum imports, and later applied that to automobiles and auto parts.

Trump had long complained that the enormous U.S. trade deficit with the rest of the world (almost $1 trillion a year) was due to other countries ripping the U.S. off with a variety of non-tariff barriers, export subsidies and other devices. Actually, the huge deficit is mainly because the U.S. no longer produces many of the finished goods it imports in large quantities, which in part reflects that U.S. capitalists have shifted production to lower-wage countries. As a result, much of U.S. exports (about a third) consist of basic commodities, including agricultural products, fuels and raw materials. In any case, it was well-known that Trump would introduce substantial tariffs, but few if any on Wall Street, in central banks or economic forecasting agencies expected anything on this scale.

The response around the world was explosive. Wall Street panicked. The SP 500 stock index of the largest publicly traded companies fell by over 10% in two days, the worst drop since the selloff at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Governments from Canada and Mexico to the European Union and China threatened to retaliate, and by April 8, the day before the tariffs were to go into effect, the S&P 500 was down by 18.9% since its peak in February when the markets expected to boom under the new administration that promised less regulations and lower taxes on capital. Some $9.6 trillion in market evaluation (fictitious wealth) was wiped out in the plunge. (The entire gross domestic product of the U.S. in 2024 was $29 trillion.)

But at the last minute, Trump pulled back and declared a 90-day “pause” on the punitive (“reciprocal”) tariffs. These were calculated on a bizarre formula of the country’s trade surplus with the U.S. divided by its exports to the U.S., and then reduced by half, because, Trump said, he was being “kind.” This pseudo-economic rationale had the effect that poor countries that have relatively large exports to the U.S. and few imports – like Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Vietnam – were hit with astronomical tariffs. But there is no way they could eliminate their trade surplus, as they can’t afford to buy U.S. products. So for these countries, Trump’s threatened tariffs represented total disaster. But even for advanced industrial economies like Europe they spelled trade war.

In the space of three months, the average U.S. tariff rate rose from 2% to 23%, the highest it has been in a century. And while European Union leaders talked of retaliation, China matched Trump’s number and imposed a 34% tariff on imports from the United States. Trump went ballistic and raised the rate on China again, so that including levies imposed on them by Trump in his first term (and maintained by Biden) the total tariffs on Chinese imports were now 145%. To which China responded by raising tariffs on U.S. imports to 125%. Numbers at those levels go beyond a trade war. Rather than raising prices, they are stopping trade altogether. Shipments from China are being redirected to other countries while at sea. China returned three Boeing 737 MAX aircraft to the U.S. Total shipments from China to the U.S. have plummeted by 60%.

Preparing for War on China

With China it has gone beyond trade war, with tit-for-tat tariff increases, to economic war. Trump demanded that management of the ports on either end of the Panama Canal be taken over from the Hong Kong-based Hutchison Holdings. (BlackRock formed a consortium for the takeover.) China has 115 overseas port projects as part of its Belt-and-Road trade program, from the Indian Ocean to Europe, including 17 with majority Chinese ownership, among them the port in Sri Lanka, the port in Piraeus, Greece, as well as ports in Jamaica and Brazil. The U.S. is taking aim at these as well. China and the U.S. are in competition in Congo over mines that produce cobalt for electric vehicles and cotan for your cellphones.

Meanwhile, China has half of the world’s refining capacity of lithium, and a 100% monopoly of refining for the “rare earths” that Trump has been desperate to get his hands on in Ukraine (which has almost none). On April 4, two days after Trump’s tariff blow, China announced that export licenses would be required for seven key rare earths, essentially stopping exports until those are issued. These are used to make heavy magnets, which are key to auto manufacturing and military production. All this is not about trade deficits and price levels but control. And here China holds the cards, to use Trump’s terminology when dressing down the Ukrainian puppet president for not acting like a true puppet and obsequiously fawning like the rest.

If all, or most, trade with the U.S. were stopped tomorrow, it would create difficulties for China, but no disaster. China can easily get soybeans and pork from Brazil, electrical machinery from Europe and mineral fuels from Russia. Household products produced for export could be sold by increasing consumption in China. This could be easily done by sharply increasing the utterly inadequate old-age pensions and other measures to increase demand. With a centrally planned economy such shifts are easily accomplished. Nikita Khrushchev did it in the Soviet Union after 1956, quickly increasing housing with pre-fabricated apartment building construction, increasing protein in the diet.

The United States, on the other hand, will be hard-put to replace imports from China. Some 76% of all toys sold in the U.S. are made in China, 78% of computer monitors, 82% of blankets, 90% of microwave ovens, 93% of children’s books, 97% of baby strollers.⁵ The U.S. simply has no production capacity to make these and a host of other consumer products. If companies wanted to set up new plants to make them, they would have to get machine tools from China (30% of world production), or Europe (40%). To be efficient, these new manufacturing facilities would need robots, 85% of which are built in China. Meanwhile, thousands of small businesses dependent on importing relatively cheap Chinese products would go bankrupt.

Only a couple of days before the tariff blow, the Washington Post (29 March) published an article about a leaked document by the U.S. secretary of defense Pete Hegseth with considerable detail about U.S. war plans, including: “China is the department’s sole pacing threat and denial of a Chinese fait accompli seizure of Taiwan, while simultaneously defending the U.S. homeland, is the department’s sole pacing scenario.” In other words, the Trump administration is singularly focused on preparing for war with China. And a couple of days before that, excerpts from the Signal chat with Hegseth and other top administration figures about plans to strike Yemen were published in which they bellyache about “bailing out Europe again,” since most of the commerce that passes through the Red Sea is for and from Europe.

Only Socialist Revolution Can Stop World War III

So while telling Chinese leaders that the trade skirmishing is leading up to a shooting war with the U.S., the Trump team informed the European “allies” that they are considered rivals. This and the drastic tariffs have led to a sharp escalation of  inter-imperialist rivalries, which never disappeared, although they were dampened in the united U.S./NATO imperialist proxy war against Russia over Ukraine. But while EU members have been talking about developing a “European defense capacity” there is little they can do about it. The Europeans do not have their own 5th-generation (stealth) jet fighters, and their missiles cannot function without connection to the U.S. satellite system, just as is the case with those delivered to Ukraine.

In the U.S., Trump’s tariffs were greeted by a number of union leaders, notably of the United Auto Workers, who have been calling for protectionist tariffs for years. But those tariffs could only bring a small amount of auto production to the U.S. from Mexico, at least in the short run, because the Big Three manufacturers only have limited spare production capacity. Plus the wage differential is so great (U.S. auto workers make ten times as much as their Mexican counterparts) that even with 25% tariffs, it will still be cheaper to produce in Mexico. This underlines the shortsightedness and treachery of the pro-capitalist union bureaucracy, which sides with the rampaging imperialist Trump against U.S. workers’ Mexican class sisters and brothers.

While protective tariffs in a semi-colonial late-developing capitalist country like Mexico can be justified to counter imperialist domination, in an advanced industrial country they reflect national chauvinism. In general, it is the dominant economic powers that favor “free trade” – Britain in the 19th century, the United States in the 20th. The fact that Trump is abandoning this in favor of “reciprocal” tariffs reflects the decline of U.S. economic dominance and imperialist hegemony. The actual result of the tariff war will be sharply increased inflation, shortages (no toys for Christmas) and unemployment. Trump may soon come to regret his comment that he “couldn’t care less” if the price of new cars in the U.S. increases.

In different ways both the Biden and Trump presidencies have reacted to the decay of U.S. imperialism, and in the end they both (along with their European imperialist allies and rivals) see the only way out as pushing for counterrevolution in the Chinese deformed workers state in order to completely open up the second-largest (and soon to be largest) economy in the world for capitalist exploitation. The bureaucracy that governs the Chinese People’s Republic is wedded to the Stalinist policy of “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism, but the imperialists are not interested in peacefully coexisting. The logic of this standoff, and the policies of the imperialist leaders, point straight to a thermonuclear World War III. Unless they are stopped.

Over a century ago, amid the carnage of World War I, Russian Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin, wrote his 1916 treatise on Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, which served as preparation for the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Today, the only way out of the spiraling conflicts leading inexorably to world war is for the working class to overthrow the decrepit imperialist system and oust the bureaucratic misleaders who vainly seek to make peace with it. As we fight against Trump’s mass deportations and mass layoffs, against the bipartisan war drive against China and the continuation of Biden’s wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the stark reality is that only by forging a revolutionary workers party here and around the world, based on the program of Lenin and Trotsky, can the working class defend its rights and the very existence of human civilization. ■

To contact the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International, send e-mail to: internationalistgroup@msn.com

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