Aranceles

 · From a Comrade · The tariffs are a great example of how Trump and his team seem to just not even understand the way the empire they’ve taken control of works. Trade deficits with the third world are not a sign of failing American hegemony. These are raw materials and cheap manufactured consumer goods coming into the United State. Those trade deficits represent Americans buying all the neat stuff the world harvests and mines and manufactures. The loss of American manufacturing wasn’t some great theft of jobs the rest of the world pulled on us through underhanded trade tactics. American companies just moved a bunch of manufacturing overseas to countries where labor was poorer due to post colonial conditions and where the state was willing to repress labor unions and offer up a low wage workforce, low taxes, and cheap access to natural resources. 

This move allowed American companies to make bank while driving down wages at home and forcing unions into concessionary bargaining under threat of further outsourcing. Companies also turned to exploiting prison labor, undocumented workers, and the low wage workers in the right to work states (especially the South) in the same race to the bottom. In exchange for this Rust Belting, American workers get cheap consumer electronics and vehicles, cheap textiles, and the benefits of a global system of resource extraction. America still has a manufacturing sector, but it’s more mechanized, usually higher tech products, more Southern, or is more reliant on precarious workforces like undocumented immigrants or prisoners. The manufacturing jobs that left the Great Lakes region were not high wage jobs just because manufacturing is a naturally high waged industry. These were industries that were historically low waged, and became unionised through decades of organizing and struggle, which is what made them high wage. The outsourcing was the corporate counter-attack to dismantle labor’s victories after a few decades of relative labor peace. Getting manufacturing jobs back does not mean those jobs will be good jobs, especially if we’re getting them back by promising right to work, tamed unions with concessionary contracts, tax breaks, and a workforce that has been disciplined into accepting low wages. What would bring good jobs back, is organizing the service economy that replaced the manufacturing economy, and organizing the emerging manufacturing sectors such as panelization or solar energy.

Trump’s tariffs, though, are unlikely to bring manufacturing back to the US at all. They are most severely blocking and taxing imports from the countries that import the most to the US, maximising disruptions to supply chains. I am waiting to start a manufacturing job and am seeing these tariffs throw every timeline into confusion as investors don’t know what to do or what costs will look like six months from now with all the unpredictable policy swings. This is a recipe for a market crash and a depression. The flip side of this is that in his flailing attempts to re-secure the American empire, Trump is doing immeasurable damage to it on nearly every front- just taking a chainsaw to this international liberal order of globalized free trade, international institutions built and maintained by the great powers, and a united western bloc acting as world enforcers. This collapsing of American power and prestige opens the door for new possibilities in the world, but the main possibilities stepping through that door are other forms of exploitative class society and imperialism.