“No explanation will be satisfactory unless it takes into account the sudden nature of the cataclysm. As if the forces of change had been dammed up for a century, a torrent of events is now being unleashed upon humanity. A global-scale social transformation is leading to unprecedented types of wars in which many states have clashed, and from a sea of blood, the outlines of new empires are emerging. Yet this fact of demonic violence is only superimposed upon a current of rapid and silent change that devours the past—often without causing the slightest ripple on the surface! A thoughtful analysis of the catastrophe must explain both the stormy action and the quiet dissolution equally.”

Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time.

«The global impact of Trump’s tariffs brings the average U.S. import tariff on goods to 26%, the highest level in 130 years.»

Michael Roberts, “Trump’s tariffs -some facts and consequences-from various sources”

Translated by Cristopher Vallecillo Gómez from “Liberation day” (¿o el día del “derrumbe” del viejo orden?)

We will now provide a quick and as conceptual as possible overview of the recent and dynamic events that have been pouring out following the highly meaningful occurrence that the second presidency of Donald Trump is proving to be, particularly the so-called “Liberation Day.” We will do so by drawing on previous texts of ours such as “Trump’s New Government: Initial Notes,” “The Geopolitics of Trumpism,” and Marcelo Yunes’ “The International Economy and Geopolitical Changes,” as well as other recent articles from our international current, all available on Izquierda Web. [1]

Naturally, there’s another interpretation of «Liberation Day» in the Northern Hemisphere, referring to the celebration of the end of World War II, which was formally marked on May 8, 1945. However, this perspective, likely the one Trump is trying to tap into, seems absurd given the current circumstances, especially considering the fact that the United States never faced the hardships of either World War on its own soil.

1.

It is at the very least peculiar for an imperialist country to talk about a «Liberation Day.» It’s understandable that Marxist intellectuals in imperialist countries wouldn’t instinctively embrace this angle, but for those of us who are militants and study from the Global South, it stands out. The United States was once an English colony and gained its independence with the American Revolution of 1776. After that, it spent nearly a century developing, conquering a large part of Mexican territory, fighting a civil war, expanding westward, and acquiring territorial conquests under President McKinley at the end of the 19th century (the remnants of the old Spanish empire: Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Cuba, the Guam Islands, etc.), while also taking control of the Panama Canal in the early 20th century. This all contributed to the U.S. transforming into one of the most important emerging imperialist and industrial powers.

In both world wars, the United States entered a bit later than the other «Allied» powers. In World War I, it joined in 1917 on the side of the Entente, contributing to the defeat of the Central Powers (the German Second Reich, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and what remained of the Ottoman Empire). In World War II, it entered in December 1941, immediately after the Japanese attack on the Pearl Harbor base, where, by coincidence, the U.S. aircraft carrier fleet, which was not at the base at the time of the attack, saved the Pacific fleet from total destruction.

The Allied victory in World War II left the United States as the hegemonic power at the center of imperialism. The country did not suffer attacks on its territory, unlike all the other imperialist powers (Great Britain, occupied France, destroyed Germany, humiliated Italy, Japan suffering two atomic bombs and terrifying bombings) and the former USSR (which endured the greatest share of destruction and the loss of 26 million lives in its fight to defeat Nazism).

The United States emerged from World War II as the undisputed hegemonic power. The former USSR, which gained territorial concessions in Eastern Europe, never fully recovered from the material and human losses of the Second World War; the destruction was immense. The «dust» was swept under the rug, and the Soviet people’s struggle against the invader was marked by an unparalleled heroism (with elements of civil war due to the extermination war waged by Nazism on its territory), but the physical and, especially, the human destruction took a long time to overcome or were never fully overcome: from a demographic perspective, even with restoration, present-day Russia still has fewer inhabitants than the former USSR did in 1939, before the outbreak of World War II. It is also important to remember that the USSR had already gone through the devastations of World War I and the post-revolutionary civil war, not to mention the Stalinist disasters of forced collectivization in the countryside—six million killed—and the Great Purges—another million killed.

Japan remained for a time under the status of a U.S. colony, with General MacArthur in charge, and Germany was divided until 1989. Both countries quickly recovered industrially thanks to U.S. policy to help them contain the «communist threat,» but they were largely demilitarized, almost to this day.

In the United States, things were different. By the end of the war, it had become an unmatched economic power, producing 50% of the world’s GDP and reshaping international institutions to control the global economy in service of an increasingly globalized world order. The IMF was created to keep global finances in check. The World Bank was set up to oversee economic reconstruction and assist certain countries. The Marshall Plan was launched to rebuild the economy of imperialist Europe. At the same time, the United Nations (UN) was established as a facade, a kind of ‘world government’ tasked with peace and international law.

The economic and political dominance under the leadership of the United States, with the support of Great Britain, France, Canada, West Germany, Japan, and Italy, gave rise to what later came to be known as the «trio» that governed traditional imperialism until today (actually, until somewhat before today). A multitude of nations achieved their national independence through a process of decolonization. Among them was China, the most significant anti-capitalist revolution of the postwar period and the second-largest social revolution of the last century, alongside the Russian Revolution. The latter was a workers’ and socialist revolution in every sense, while the former was a major anti-capitalist peasant revolution.

Meanwhile, the USSR, still under Stalin’s leadership, took control of a vast empire in Eastern Europe, occupying the former GDR, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, and the Baltic States. Greece was handed over, through betrayal, to Great Britain and the United States. The former Yugoslavia, under Tito, rebelled against Stalin’s intentions and followed an independent bureaucratic course, eventually becoming one of the leading countries of the «Non-Aligned Movement,» which gained some influence in the 1950s and 60s.

The collapse of the former USSR and other non-capitalist countries in Eastern Europe, caused by a combination of internal decay, pressure from international capitalism, and the inability to renew said experiences due to Stalinist repression of anti-bureaucratic revolutions, briefly left the United States as the world’s only superpower. The 1990s were the years of undisputed U.S. hegemony and its and its reflection in the global economy: a process of economic globalization like never before in history. The precedent for this was the 19th-century European Pax and the rise of the first liberal phase under Britain’s leadership.

However, there were underlying processes that gradually undermined U.S. hegemony both economically and politically. The expansion of the global market, resulting from the capitalist restoration in the former USSR and Eastern Europe, but especially in China, the recovery of a third of the world for the mercantile capitalist economy, represented a huge opportunity for the re-expansion of global capitalism. U.S. capital poured heavily into China, as did overseas Chinese capitalists, as Giovanni Arrighi analyzed in Adam Smith in Beijing. Japan had already experienced its revival, and in the 1980s, it posed a certain economic challenge to the United States. South Korea was also part of this capitalist revival and became a major economic power to this day. At its level, Taiwan experienced similar growth, becoming a major player in semiconductor production, along with financial hubs like Hong Kong (now under full Chinese control), Singapore, and other countries or city-states (island states). Even Vietnam recovered as a capitalist country from the devastations of the war for its independence (1945/1973, with intermittent periods and prior division into two countries), which, along with China’s growing emergence as a global economic power, shifted the economic center of the world to the Pacific and Southeast Asia. However, the Atlantic focus, so to speak, remained a part of the other major global economic center—let’s keep in mind that the EU currently monopolizes 30% of international trade.

The American Pax of the 1990s, the investment opportunities in the vast Chinese market—China and India are the two most populous countries in the world—the search to lower costs «at home» (that is, in the United States), led to significant economic offshoring, mostly to China, and later to Vietnam and other Southeast Asian countries, as well as to Canada and Mexico. Meanwhile, the European Union expanded eastward. Germany offshored automotive and other industries to Poland and other countries.

The logic of imperialist capitalism at the peak of the golden age of neoliberalism, in the 1990s, was that of a de-territorialized capitalism, with global supply chains, capital flows returning to the United States, Germany, and others, and the dominance of international institutions by the G7.

However, a parallel underlying process was taking shape. In China, the Communist Party of China (CPC) never lost control of power. It learned from the collapse of the USSR and allowed a return to capitalism without losing control of the process: it transformed into a state capitalism and an ascending imperialism that today clearly challenges U.S. hegemony, with a GDP that, combining both measurements (in dollars and purchasing power parity), is comparable to that of the United States (we are not concerned here with how much more or less China is compared to the United States; we are simply acknowledging the «raw fact» of its rise).

On the other hand, industrially weakened and reduced to a country primarily exporting raw materials, but with a strong military and technological industry inherited from the USSR and a vast geography surrounding it, Russia began to recover with the rise of Putin to power in the early 2000s. The project to once again become an imperial-imperialist country took shape, strengthening its previously mentioned attributes (the war in Ukraine since February 2022 is part of this).

The Great Recession of 2008 and the pandemic behind us, we reach the present moment: the arrival of Trump to a second presidency. And what does he find? An evident weakening of U.S. global hegemony. In reality, one of the defining features of this 21st century: an increasingly harsh and bloody conflict for world hegemony between the United States and China (eventually allied with Russia and other countries), with the European Union beginning to make its presence known through its accelerated rearmament plan, along with other regional hegemonic centers such as Saudi Arabia, India, Pakistan, Turkey, all of which are sub-imperialist powers, etc.

That is to say: a profoundly modified scenario, both at the level of the globalized capitalist world market and at the level of the world system of states.

And then the big question arises, which divides the U.S. bourgeoisie, in addition to the very complex internal developments within the United States, a country with much more wealth and diversity of traditions than is often seen from the Global South: What to do to stop the loss of hegemony that the United States is experiencing in relation to the world?

And here comes Trump and his «Liberation Day» (which, for the liberal magazine The Economist, appears as a «Ruination Day»).[2]

2.

The first two months of Trump were chaotic. He unleashed offensives on several fronts, along with lies and various forms of Bonapartism: a) he authorized Netanyahu to complete a new Nakba in Gaza and the West Bank, developments that are still ongoing; b) he threatened Greenland, Panama (more specifically, the Panama Canal), and even Canada with occupation; c) he launched a witch hunt within the United States against immigrants and pro-Palestinian activists in universities; d) he placed Musk in charge of DOGE, a quasi-governmental body, to carry out a brutal and incoherent adjustment of foreign humanitarian spending and domestic U.S. state expenditure, with a dark, obscurantist angle; e) he declared that he does not recognize transgender people and that he would expel those who identify as such from the Armed Forces; f) he attempted, so far unsuccessfully, to divide Ukraine with Putin; and g) the central point of this article: he unleashed the most significant international trade war in a century with his «Liberation Day,» which is causing markets to collapse worldwide and threatening a double effect: a new rise in inflation—as happened in the post-pandemic period, affecting the entire traditional imperialist world—and downward trends in GDP in the United States and globally. In short: stagflation.

The tariff increases and the cross-tariff war are covered in too many articles – which we have published in this edition of our theoretical-political supplement «Marxism in the 21st Century» – for us to develop them in detail here. What interests us is to address a series of more fundamental definitions about the ongoing developments, a conceptual framework to attempt to characterize more globally what is happening within the mass of information being produced given the epochal nature of the event.

3.

It is obvious that Trump’s reciprocal tariffs opened a crisis and chaos whose consequences cannot yet be quantified: the issue is to interpret, in the most concrete and simultaneously conceptual way possible, what is actually happening [3]. What is concrete is that Trump’s protectionist measures show that a gap has opened between the states and the global economy. From a state or quasi-state hegemony (that of the United States plus the G7) that aligned with an international economic hegemony based on the idea of a single, unified globalized world market, governed by a series of international trade rules established by the World Trade Organization, a hegemony – mainly U.S.-led – that dominated in areas like foreign trade, productivity, and the balance of payments, we move, with Trump I and especially Trump II, to a dynamic in which the U.S. state and a segment of its bourgeoisie feel that they are losing the hegemonic race against the rest of the world (primarily with China, although Trump antagonizes the whole world) and overturn the table by unleashing an economic, tariff, and trade war. Traditional imperialist politics and the state try to assert their authority over the economy: now politics dominates the economy, just as under neoliberalism and classical liberalism, the economy dominated politics: from the economy over states to states over the economy. The British Marxist economist Michael Roberts puts it well: we return to a logic where «each state is on its own,» the typical circumstance of interstate conflict in the global context.

As we pointed out in point 1, there were two major periods of globalization, one liberal and the other neoliberal. The first was the period of British hegemony in the world market in the second half of the 19th century. The second was the U.S. hegemony of the post-World War II period, with its peak in the 1990s following the fall of the USSR; let’s recall the impressionistic impact this circumstance had on Negri and Hart in their influential but also ephemeral book Imperium, where it was claimed that there were no more states: imperialism’s dominance had become deterritorialized (which reflected a kernel of truth about the transitional moment of the 1990s), something that led many authors who consider themselves Marxists, such as Claudio Katz, to assert at the time that inter-imperialist wars had become «impossible» due to the international nature of supply chains (an economicist definition that overlooked the character of the era opened by imperialism, which we debated with Katz at the time).

Far from the idyllic picture painted in Imperium, Trump is taking measures to assert the U.S. imperialist national state that tend to break or «disorder» the harmony of the globalized supply chain, and seek – in a rough and brutal way! – to assert the interest of the U.S. state over capital flows. Something happened in the U.S. in recent decades that made foreign capital flows no longer compensate for economic offshoring, the investment outside of U.S. territory.

Here, the «Washington Consensus» of full neoliberal economy from the 1980s and the consensus of international trade institutions, the IMF, the World Bank, the Bretton Woods agreement, etc., from the post-World War II period, are either broken or at least questioned.

It is still difficult to fully understand the maneuver and how the U.S. would benefit from this, because it is a brutal move full of unintended consequences [4]. But it triggers a trend – one that was previously outside the international landscape – towards the fragmentation of the world market, where subregions or whatever else could be formed, but tending to break the unity of the international market, the homogeneity we have seen in recent decades (keep in mind that the WTO does not accept tariffs above the very low level of 3%, and today Trump has imposed reciprocal tariffs on imports that, in some cases, reach as high as 48%).

The European Union will not break up because of this; rather, Great Britain is regretting Brexit [5]. But if this triggers a dynamic of reciprocal tariffs, the world market could become so filled with tariffs that it may break or fragment; the competition between companies shifts more to a competition between states. Economic competition becomes politicized and, eventually, militarized, because in the logic of relations between states, there are, logically, power relations, and the extreme case to measure them is military confrontation.

Economic competition between companies is «bloodless,» but competition between states can be violent: the profits that are not obtained from an economic standpoint, how will they be obtained? Trump praises McKinley – the last U.S. president of the 19th century – who raised tariffs by almost 50% at the birth of U.S. imperialism, during what is called «the era of infant industries.» Michael Roberts says that the problem is that today the U.S. doesn’t have «infant industries»; it’s a mature economy with industrial decline. But Trump also praises McKinley for achieving territorial conquests for the U.S.: “Trump referred to McKinley when he announced 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 (…) We need to look back at the 1890s, the 1880s, McKinley, and take a look at the tariffs, which was when we were proportionally wealthier,’ said Trump» (Michael Roberts, «Trump’s Trade War and the Debate on Its Consequences»). [6]

In the same vein, our comrade Marcelo Yunes expresses himself in a valuable text of his authorship published on Izquierda Web: “Trump threatens to put into action the concept that the U.S. ‘must be a growing nation,’ that is, one that ‘increases its wealth and expands its territory,’ formulated no less than in his inauguration speech (…) The only U.S. president that Trump mentioned in his [inaugural] speech (…) obscure and unknown to most [was] William McKinley (…) [His] presidency was marked by two policies: territorial expansion and the imposition of protective tariffs” (“International Economics and Geopolitical Changes”). And Yunes adds: “(…) unless there are massive upheavals, there is no way that ‘Make America Great Again’ means significant territorial acquisitions” … or is there? (idem).

His vassal, Israel, is clearly trying to push the people out of Gaza and eventually from the West Bank. So, how does Trump win this protectionist battle? By gaining territory? Roberts convincingly argues that it’s impossible to win it with tariffs; that the underlying problem for the United States is the lack of strategic investment and stagnation of productivity, and he cites an author discussing an «investor collapse» in the U.S. in recent decades; if this is true, perhaps he’ll have to win the battle through military confrontation (primitive accumulation methods, we’ll return to this later). Military confrontation regimes are more bonapartist; in the EU, militarization started in full swing, although the regime is mostly – at least still – bourgeois democratic. [7]

4.

A dynamic of fragmentation of the world market was unleashed, and a situation of “replacement” of competition between companies by the struggle between States: “(…) the source and matrix [of liberalism in its classical age] was the self-regulating market. It was this innovation that gave rise to a specific civilization. The gold standard [today, still, the international empire of the dollar threatened by Trump’s protectionist measures] was only an attempt to extend the internal market system to the international field, the balance of power system was a structure erected on the gold standard and in part forged through it; the liberal State itself was a creation of the self-regulating market. The key to the institutional system of the nineteenth century was found in the governing laws of the market economy” (Polanyi, 2007: 49).

Roberts states that there are two immediate effects on the world economy and in particular on the U.S.: one is the rise in prices – like the one that came after the pandemic and weakened Biden’s presidency – and the other is recession, the drop in output from 0.5 to 1% expected in the U.S. by 2026. So, there is a contradiction, because Trump says “Make America Great Again” … and ends up losing from an economic point of view (at the same time, his popularity is already falling in the United States).

World stock markets continue to fall (April 4 was a “Black Friday” for global markets), and a recessionary dynamic is emerging, as we just pointed out. It is difficult to return to a “national borders” economy, an internal market like in the immediate postwar period, when the starting point is a globalized, deterritorialized economy. “Unearthing” fixed capital, which is what hard investment is all about, “sinking capital,” is difficult and extremely costly. Under these conditions, fully relocating production again is very complex, especially in such an abrupt manner – this is something that only happens in times of war; for example, Stalinism relocated manu militari virtually all of the USSR’s western industry behind the Urals so it wouldn’t be destroyed by the Nazis–.[8]

In this tariff war, there are unfinished products that cross borders several times before they are completed; to claim that increasing tariffs will automatically lead to a relocation of investment in the U.S. is an economic absurdity that doesn’t withstand the slightest scrutiny: “(…) Pettis fails to acknowledge the obvious: that the United States in the 21st century is not an emerging industrial power that needs to protect new blossoming industries from powerful competitors. Instead, it is a mature economy with a declining industrial sector that will not be meaningfully restored by tariffs on Chinese or European imports (…) This point of view is a false Keynesian analysis that ignores the supply-side forces of strong investment in technology that reduce unit production costs to gain a competitive advantage in international trade. Germany and China are outperforming American industry through increasingly better technology and productivity growth” (Roberts, “Trump’s Trade War and the Debate on Its Consequences”). And in another piece, Roberts adds: “The reason the United States has been running deep trade deficits is that its industry cannot compete against stronger competitors, especially China. The U.S. economy has not seen any significant productivity growth in 17 years (…) [Economic analyst Obstfeld puts it clearly]: ‘what we are mostly seeing is an investment collapse [in the U.S.]’” (Roberts, “Liberation Day”).

5.

Let us point out, before continuing, that we believe Roberts makes two overly categorical claims regarding Germany and China in relation to their competitiveness: he places both above the United States. [9] Regarding Germany, he does not take into account that it is undergoing an industrial crisis: “West Germany, former FRG, inherited in the postwar period low wages, as well as industrial capacity and new technologies from the Nazi economy that, contrary to widely repeated assumptions, survived the war almost intact (…) [However] (…) Oil and gas imports [from Russia], which for a long time were viewed with suspicion by the U.S., are undoubtedly the most significant part of Germany’s trade with Russia, but not the only part. Torn between its political alignment with the U.S. and its profitable trade exchanges, the German government (…) led by Olaf Scholz, broke its ties with Russia after the latest invasion of Ukraine. This was compounded by a new spike in energy prices that had already remained high after the COVID recession. In the context of U.S. efforts to contain and push back China, as well as pressure on Germany to reduce its trade with China—Germany’s main trade partner and a privileged destination for German direct investment abroad (…) the U.S. shift from neoliberal globalization to escalating sanctions and protectionism in the name of national security has caused high levels of uncertainty within the German bourgeoisie. Added to the secular stagnation after the very brief recovery following the COVID crisis and the deflation of the Chinese boom, this uncertainty has led to a drop in the investment rate (…) The Economist has once again labeled Germany ‘The sick man of Europe,’ and then the author explains that this is the basis for the rise of the far right in that country, a rise that, for now, remains more limited than expected” (“Les spectres du fascisme et du communisme hantent la politique allemande à l’ère de l’incertitude”, Ingo Schmidt, Inprecor, 4/02/25).

And regarding China, Roberts, a sympathizer of that country’s regime, asserts too categorically that China has already won the competitive race, while other specialists on the Eastern country, such as Pierre Rousset, have a different opinion. For our part, besides being clear that China is an “imperialism under construction,” on the rise or already relatively built and modernized in monumental fashion in its urban centers (the subsisting rural backwardness in its vast hinterland is another issue), we leave this question a bit more open—one that, in any case, is exerting pressure behind Trump’s behavior (an element of rationality within his “irrationalism”). In our view, only a military conflict will be able to demonstrate the actual comparative strength of these two powers in the 21st century.

Roberts and Yunes seem to be on the same page here; we don’t currently have access to Pierre Rousset’s texts. In any case, we can’t overlook a vivid glimpse of Chinese urban development shared by The New York Times’ long-time columnist Thomas Friedman, whose recent visit seems to support Roberts’ analysis—albeit in a more descriptive than analytical way: “(…) the enormous new research center, about the size of 225 football fields, built by Chinese tech giant Huawei (…) An American businessman who’s worked in China for several decades told me in Beijing: ‘There was a time when people went to the U.S. to see the future—now they come here.’ [I] had never seen a campus like this Huawei one. Built in just over three years, it includes 104 uniquely designed buildings, immaculate gardens, and a Disney-style monorail connecting the entire complex. It houses labs with space for 35,000 scientists, engineers, and other workers, along with 100 cafeterias, gyms, and other perks meant to attract the very best tech talent, both Chinese and foreign” (“I just finished seeing the world of the future, and it’s not exactly in Trump’s United States,” La Nación, 4/03/25).[11]

6.

Amid the trends toward economic and political fragmentation within the old and new imperialism (the U.S., the smaller imperialist powers of the G7, China, and Russia), what we are witnessing at the moment is a sort of “competition” between three economic-political models (three distinct constructs of imperialism).[12] One “half” of the U.S. bourgeoisie tends to be bonapartist, national-imperialist, and territorialist, much like Russia at its “limited” level;[13] China is bonapartist and globalist (today, China, an ascending imperialism, is the champion of free trade); and Europe – and the other half of the U.S. bourgeoisie, essentially the Democrats, though perhaps some Republicans as well –[14] remains democratic-bourgeois and liberal-social-imperialist, and now, more bellicose.[15] Thus, there is a trend toward fragmentation (the extent of which remains to be seen) at the global market level, within the global system of states, and in political regimes, which manifest differently in both economic and political terms.

The first half of the 20th century was marked by a crisis of international hegemony, which was only resolved with the destruction brought by two world wars: 70 million dead, many more millions injured, traumatized generations, extermination camps, massive destruction of cities and infrastructure, and a long etcetera—destructions that, with the irrational logic of capitalism, laid the material conditions for the long post-war boom in the West.[16] Now, we are living through a period of hegemonic crisis and a dangerous development that amplifies the trend toward militarization (we will soon explore the deeper meaning of this).

The bureaucracy in China is unified behind the autocrat Xi Jinping (at least it seems so, because those who doubt it are purged—one only needs to remember the example of Hu Jintao, abruptly removed from the room at the last CCP Congress); the European liberal social-imperialist globalist bourgeoisie is also unifying (Georgia Meloni is faltering and rapidly transforming from Euroskeptic to Europeanist, and Marine Le Pen was knocked down a peg with the corruption conviction).[17] The far-right outside the U.S. seems to be losing with Trump, or at least fading into the background, at least for now.

Delving into the realignment and division of the American bourgeoisie, we can take notes from Kyle Chayka: “The class of leaders in Silicon Valley was insinuating itself into politics in a way that recalls what [author Janis, RS] Mimura said about the elite of bureaucrats who took political power and led Japan into World War II: ‘These are experts with a technological mindset [which reminds us of Albert Speer’s relationship with Nazism, RS] and ‘backing’ in the field, usually engineers, who now began to play a role in government’ (…) The result is what, in her book ‘Planning for the Empire,’ 2011, [historian Janis Mimura, RS] called ‘techno-fascists,’ authoritarianism led by technocrats. Mimura points out: There is a sort of technologization of all aspects of government and society [the technological fetishism, so powerful in American society, RS]” (“Techno-fascist comes to America”).

And the author adds: “One tries to apply technical concepts and technical rationality to human society, and then you’re getting something almost totalitarian (…) Apple recently announced its own investment of 500 billion dollars in a campaign of investments in the U.S. for the next 4 years, including building AI servers in Texas (…) On his social network Truth Social, Trump posted approvingly that Apple’s plan demonstrated ‘confidence in what we are doing’” (Kyle Chayka, ibid), which means that, then, the U.S. is not so «defenseless» and that there is a logic behind the support of the mega-tech entrepreneurs for Trump.

Even more: «Erin McElroy, a geographer at the University of Washington who studies Silicon Valley, has used the term ‘siliconization’ to describe how places like San Francisco or Cluj Napoca, Romania, where many Western tech companies have outsourced their AI services, have been rebuilt in the image and ideology of Silicon Valley» (Chayka, ibid).[18]

So, as we pointed out in ‘The Geopolitics of Trumpism,’ a ‘pulse’ has been opened: a conflict between States that takes us into an unknown world where nothing is settled. The ‘hard’ hegemonic struggle has only just begun!

7.

The shift from an economic fight to a struggle between states is dangerous: it amplifies anti-democratic and Bonapartist tendencies within each country (this is undeniable). In the short term, it is having an evident effect on democratic conquests in the U.S.: it is clear that the situation there is reactionary, although on Saturday, April 5, there was an extremely important nationwide street action against Trump and his followers. The attack on immigrants, arbitrary or not deportations, military-style detentions of pro-Palestinian activists as if they were members of Hamas, the pressure and capitulation of universities like Columbia, especially within the schools of Oriental Studies, etc., are just some of the expressions of the current adverse situation in the United States. However, this situation could shift, as was seen during Trump’s first presidency when the anti-racist rebellion in his last year of office (2020) cost him re-election. (Labeling Trump as a “fascist” regime is an exaggeration that weakens the argument, although today it is undoubtedly a hard-right regime, there is no doubt about that).[19]

Simultaneously, an asymmetric bipolarity, if there ever was one, in other places there are renewed expressions of popular rebellion: here are the cases of South Korea, Greece, Serbia, Turkey, Romania, Hungary, and others that have not coincidentally been appearing in recent months, as well as the simultaneous difficulties of Milei in Argentina and Bolsonaro in Brazil.

Most analysts – both interested and impartial – point out that Trump will not achieve his objectives with tariffs: he will succeed in raising prices and inducing a recession, both in the U.S. and, eventually, internationally. These effects could also end up strengthening his competitors. China first and foremost, but also Putin in Ukraine, or waking up the EU from its postwar Atlanticist lethargy, transforming it into another competitor (Trump has few unconditional allies: Netanyahu, Orban, his «chihuahua» Milei, Bukele, and not many more).

For interested reasons, obviously, the Wall Street Journal defines Trump’s protectionist measures as «the stupidest trade war in history.» The New York Times, the Financial Times, the flagship liberal magazine The Economist, etc., all of these so-called «independent» and prestigious imperialist liberal media are against Trump and his measures (they are free traders, pro-free markets, and generally in favor of bourgeois imperialist democracy): «Globalization is over, and with it the possibility of overcoming domestic crises through exports and foreign capital. And this is the crux of the reasons for the sure failure of Trump’s tariff measures to restore the U.S. economy and ‘make America great again’: it does nothing to address the underlying stagnation of the U.S. domestic economy; on the contrary, it makes it worse» (Roberts, «Liberation Day»).

But if this is the case, what is the underlying logic of «Liberation Day»? One could think that Trump is an egocentric fool, enamored with his own ideas and intuitions, and without professional training. But there must be some method in his madness, as the saying goes: there’s a reason he has McKinley, the colonizing president who ruled by military force, as his historical figure of reference. It’s no coincidence that Trump has threatened Greenland, Panama, Canada, demanded «war reparations» from Ukraine in rare earths and mining, and claimed that he could turn Gaza into a “Riviera of the Middle East.” He seems like a fool, or a madman, and indeed he is, but it’s also true that he holds enormous power in his hands; it is almost certain that he will unleash more barbarity, wars, reaction, and revolutions: he will surely reap what he has sown!

Trump is unlikely to achieve major relocations (although it’s possible that an agreement within the framework of the USMCA is underway with Mexico and Canada).

Given these circumstances, the only way to achieve real gains is by seizing territories, which would trigger military conflicts or imitation effects (Putin becoming more «capricious» with Ukraine, Xi Jinping getting enthusiastic about Taiwan). Michael Roberts states that the U.S. has already lost the competitive race to China, but we find this statement premature.

But it seems evident that a sector of the U.S. bourgeoisie said «this is how we are losing» and decided on this radical 180-degree shift that challenges not only the consensuses forged since the 1980s but also those of the post-World War II era.

The macro neoliberal world is coming to an end — on a micro level, not at all — the globalist world of the global market and the UN is ending, and a new world is emerging (all said in an exaggerated way, without taking into account the counter-trends and nuances within the framework of both new and old imperialism), where, as Roberts points out, «each state is on its own,» a world of bonapartisms and exacerbated “between States” competition, both economic, political, and military. (We repeat that we are making this «stylized» assertion, overlooking the nuances that exist and, above all, that the shift the world is experiencing in the character of imperialism is still a work in progress.)

8.

The return of the «imperial logic» of the 19th century makes comparisons, indeed, with the 1800s inevitable: the era of empires and the «grabbing» of territories. Going even further back, this speaks to a kind of «new era of primitive accumulation» (here, we recall the concept used by Marxist geographer David Harvey of «accumulation by dispossession,» although now it would apply on a larger scale). Marx’s concept of pre-capitalist primitive accumulation (which created the conditions for proper capitalist accumulation, meaning exclusively economic accumulation) is precisely extra-economic accumulation; it’s not through competitiveness, but through violence. The conquest of the West in the case of the United States, as well as the occupation of parts of Mexico, then the McKinley administration’s management of the Philippines, Cuba under the Platt Amendment, the colonial empires of Great Britain, France, Russia, the Netherlands, Belgium. In the current case, Putin’s Russia in Ukraine, Xi Jinping’s threats over Taiwan, Trump jumping on the international bandwagon with Greenland (a Danish island vying for its independence located strategically in the Arctic with only 56,000 inhabitants, though it has its own unique society), the Panama Canal, which, beyond the submissiveness of its presidents, has a society with a deep anti-imperialist sense (there, those who were extraterritorial inhabitants of the canal zone, hyper-privileged and of American origin, are despised!). In other words, the violent appropriation of geographies, territories, natural resources, agricultural rents, hydrocarbons, etc.

Trump advocates for the tariff war, which also breaks with the law of value.

It is important to note that, from a principled standpoint, we are neither free-traders nor protectionists. The mainstream global press is against protectionism, but any society transitioning to socialism will need protectionism if it wants to develop its economy in parallel with the world revolution (of course, this would change in an imperialist country).

We are neither free traders nor protectionists in general; we are anti-capitalists and socialists. In specific circumstances, we defend protectionism for dependent countries and societies in transition in underdeveloped nations (the rupture of the law of value is inevitable if we want to develop industries).

The concept of primitive accumulation is useful for understanding Trump II. What cannot be gained immediately through productive investment and productivity could be obtained through methods of primitive accumulation: the direct colonization of territories, including (obviously, very long-term) Mars and space conquest as proposed by Elon Musk.

So, «Liberation Day» has the «density of the event»: a strategic event that links the immediate and the structural, so dense in consequences that it is impossible to draw all conclusions in an instant (the weight of the event is something we highlighted in our previous texts: «Auschwitz: Marxism and the Holocaust»).

We are, we repeat, under the «weight of the event,» an occurrence that in the «long term» might not seem significant, but turns out to be a break: the dialectical law of the shift from quantity to quality, so criticized by the Althusserians!

9.

Are we in a pre-1914 or pre-1939 situation? We don’t know. In the immediate term, no. But circumstances could accelerate, chain together, or generate unintended consequences from actions, pushing geopolitical actors toward that threshold. So far, China had been very measured in its statements and continues to say it wants to «negotiate.» But, for the moment, it has imposed a 34% tariff on all U.S. imports.

The thing is, the player who kicks the board has no clear understanding of the consequences of his actions, as Trump himself just acknowledged. He claims that “the patient has left the ICU” (sic). But it seems, rather, that he has just entered it!

For now, everyone is defending themselves while markets are collapsing. No one knows the strategic consequences of the measures Trump has taken.

And, as we pointed out, it makes no sense for this to end here: “The retaliation from other countries will lead to a decline in U.S. exports. In 1930, after U.S. President Hoover imposed the Smoot-Hawley Act on tariffs, retaliation from other powers caused a 33% drop in U.S. exports and a downward spiral in international trade known as the ‘Kindleberger-Spiral’: a cycle where tariffs reduced trade, followed by more retaliation which reduced it further, then more retaliation (what Trump calls ‘reciprocal tariffs’), and the first and second effects on production, then more tariffs and more retaliation, until global trade fell from 3 trillion in January 1929 to 1 trillion in March 1933” (“Trump tariffs – some facts and consequences – from various sources”).

Years later, without forgetting the Great Depression and the dynamics of revolution and counterrevolution generated by the Russian Revolution, World War II was triggered: «For years, the order that has governed the global economy has been eroding. Today it is close to collapse. A worrying number of factors could trigger a descent into anarchy, where might is right and war becomes a resource for the great powers» (Yunes, ibid).[20]

Bibliography

Valerio Arcary, “Trump nao e um mal menor”, Valerio Arcary’s Facebook.

Kyle Chayka, “Techno-fascism comes to America. The historical parallels that help to explain Elon Musk’s rampage on the federal government,” The New Yorker, 26/02/25.

Kaan Kangal, “MEGA [From the historical-critical dictionary of Marxism],” Historical Materialism, 2/04/25.

Thomas L. Friedman, “I finished watching the world of the future and it’s not exactly in Trump’s United States,” La Nación, 3/04/25.

Michael Roberts, “The trade war of Trump and the debate about its consequences,” Viento Sur, 6/03/25.

• “Liberation day,” blog of Michael Roberts, 2/04/25.
• “From welfare to warfare: military Keynesianism,” blog of Michael Roberts, 02/04/25.
• “Trump tariffs – some facts and consequences (from various sources),” blog of Michael Roberts, 5/04/25.

Karl Polanyi, La gran transformación. Los orígenes políticos y económicos de nuestro tiempo, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Argentina, 2007.

Ingo Schmidt, “Les spectres du fascisme et du communisme hantent la politique allemande à l’ère de l’incertitude,” Inprecor, 4/02/25.

Marcelo Yunes, “La economía internacional y los cambios geopolíticos,” Izquierda Web.

[1] In this edition, we publish recent texts by the English economist Michael Roberts, who, despite our deep disagreement with him regarding the characterization of present-day China, is conducting serious coverage on the economic measures of Trump, their context, and potential consequences. We will also cite other Marxist and non-Marxist authors in this note.

By the way, we clarify that the quote from the economist born in Budapest, Karl Polanyi, with which we begin this note, is from his main work, first published in 1944, which is dedicated to analyzing the collapse of the first liberal capitalist order, which ended with the outbreak of World War I in 1914.

[2] Marcelo Yunes points out: “The previous imperialist order is being questioned and is in a state of flux; all actors perceive this, and no one wants to be the last to prepare for what will undoubtedly follow: a reconfiguration of that order or the constitution of a new one, whose terms will be settled not by ‘adherence to Western values’ but by brutal force” (“La economía internacional y los cambios geopolíticos,” izquierda web).

[3] It is “paradoxical,” but what is “conceptual” is more concrete than the sum of empirical data.

[4] The unintended consequences of an action are those that are uncontrollable or result in the opposite of what was intended. They are characteristic of sociological analysis because they place the action in the specific context in which it occurs, showing the dissonance between cause and effect.

[5] The English SWP made the grave mistake of supporting the reactionary Brexit movement instead of abstaining from the debate on Brexit or remaining in the EU by the UK. It aligned itself with one of the warring bourgeois factions, the so-called Trumpist side; as far as we know, they have not backed away from this ridiculous position.

[6] Setting aside the territorial issue for a moment, Roberts refutes in this note that the tariffs will have the effect that Trump claims. He recalls that Engels already pointed out in his time that “when a capitalist economy is dominant worldwide, it favors free trade and no tariffs, as Britain did in the mid-19th century and the United States in the 1950s-80s. But the long depression of the 1880s and 1890s caused Britain’s manufacturing dominance to decline, and British policy shifted to protectionist tariffs for its vast colonial empire” (Roberts, ibid).

[7] The militaristic shift of the European Union and the fantasies of «military Keynesianism» as an economic driver for Europe are well analyzed in another recent article by Roberts: «From welfare to warfare: military Keynesianism,» on his blog, and now also published in this edition of Izquierda Web.

[8] This monumental relocation operation of industrial production at a frantic pace was one of the key reasons the USSR was able to defeat Nazism, an operation led by the great Soviet planner Nikolái Alekséyevich Voznesenski, purged by Stalin in 1947, and died in the Gulag in 1950. It demonstrated that planning, even if bureaucratic, retained a certain degree of effectiveness, at least under the «moral drive» of a working population that knew Nazism was coming for their very existence (we address these circumstances in «Causas y consecuencias del triunfo de la ex URSS sobre el nazismo,» Izquierda Web).

[9] Michael Roberts; the American Marxist magazine Monthly Review, including its star Marxist intellectual, Bellamy Foster; Giovanni Arrighi in his final work before his death, Adam Smith in Beijing; the ineffable Valerio Arcary (always looking for an apparatus to cling to!); various intellectuals from militant currents of Trotskyism, etc., many of them «paint China pink,» supposedly arguing that it is not a capitalist nation (sic), or at least not an imperialism on the rise…

We follow the definitions of Au Loong Yu, a diligent Marxist intellectual and militant of Hong Kong origin, now exiled in London, with whom we had a beautiful conversation last November. His definition is that China is a bureaucratic state capitalism and an ascending imperialism that, paradoxically, still has unresolved national tasks. (Taiwan is one of them, but at the same time, China defends the island’s right to self-determination, definitions with which we agree; we defend Taiwan’s right to self-determination, not independence. But we oppose an invasion of the island by China, just as we opposed Beijing’s Bonapartist grab in Hong Kong that liquidated the island’s autonomy.)

On the other hand, we cannot fail to point out that Arcary changes positions as easily as he changes shirts. Regarding the conflict in Ukraine, at the beginning of the Russian invasion, he considered it a double conflict; later, he shifted to a position of it being solely a proxy conflict (inter-imperialist). The left that expected something from Trump in Ukraine held a position that was at least ridiculous, but statements like the following from Arcary are embarrassing for a revolutionary socialist: “It is true that those who supported Ukraine when they considered the war ‘just’ for their right to exist as an independent state made a serious mistake. But the war in Ukraine was, from the beginning, an unjust war, a war between the Triad and Russia, although it was Russia that invaded Ukraine” (“Trump nao e um mal menor,” Facebook of Valerio Arcary).

So, it turns out that the Ukrainian national defense against the invasion is not legitimate, no matter how it is directed or exploited by NATO… If that’s the case, we assume Arcary will be in favor of Trump and Putin carving up Ukraine to end this “unjust war.” The pressure from the apparatus is fierce on these super-structuralized intellectuals: in addition to being pressured by Lula, the PT, and the Popular Front, he´s also pressured by China and Russia, something that is clearly visible in his analyses and his Marxism of the type seen in the Second International.

[10] Yunes does not hesitate to point out a weak point in Chinese bureaucratic planning: «An additional problem, reminiscent of what happened under the Stalinist bureaucracy in the last decades of the USSR, is that the directives of the central plan are not always followed with the necessary zeal by middle and local officials. And not due to incapacity or real dissidence, but out of fear of the continuous purges within the party that affect the ‘bad officials.’ There is no institution more feared than the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) (…) In the last decade, the CCDI sanctioned six million officials» (Yunes, ibid).

[11] It should be added that Chinese universities, surprisingly or perhaps not so much, are incorporating world-class Marxologists who are part of the MEGA 2 project or the Chinese scientific publication projects of the complete works of Marx and Engels (not without the bureaucratic-capitalist Chinese state having its hand in this!). For more on this, see the section dedicated to China in the article “MEGA [From the historical-critical dictionary of Marxism],” Historical Materialism, 2/04/25, a text translated into English by Kaan Kangal, a Marxist philosopher who works precisely in China.

[12] By construct we mean a concept that is forged in the fusion – in each specific case – between economy and politics, the concrete form that each imperialism assumes.

[13] Attention that Trump is not so idiotic nor purely territorial: he taxed the import of goods, but did not impose taxes on services nor, of course, on finance, both of which are areas in which the U.S. runs surpluses in its service and capital exchange balances; another thing is the U.S. state debt, today at 33 trillion dollars, 99% of its GDP.

[14] It must be taken into account that, in any case, the policy toward China showed continuity between Trump I and Biden, and the concern to shift direction already existed under Obama. Moreover, so far there has been a bourgeois realignment of the tech sector toward Trump, expressed through Musk but not only him (we don’t know if this will continue with the stock market crashes and all that). Among the other bourgeois sectors, we assume oil, gas, and mining are also backing Trump, but we haven’t really studied this issue in depth nor have we seen major essays on the matter, beyond the evident alignment of the “tech world.”

[15] European rearmament is colossal: “Weapons propaganda has reached fever pitch in Europe,” states Roberts. Obviously, as we noted during the international meeting of our current, the “ecological transition” is over; now it’s all about the transition to a revitalized war industry, along with expectations that this will rejuvenate the European industry as a whole (expectations that Roberts qualifies). It also serves as justification for a new round of historic attacks on what remains of the welfare state in Western Europe (with very different circumstances from country to country). See “From welfare to warfare: military Keynesianism.”

[16] The destruction of fixed capital reduces the organic composition of capital, whose simplified formula is pv / c + v — that is, surplus value (unpaid labor) divided by constant capital (dead labor) and the value of labor power (living labor). The point is that the reduction in the organic composition of capital (one of the terms in the denominator of this formula, C) magnifies capitalist profits, and thus, reconstruction following destruction becomes a great business opportunity for the capitalists who survive the destruction (as was the case in the 1930s during the Great Depression and the world wars).

[17] The condemnation, beyond any bourgeois geopolitical considerations, is viewed by us as progressive and as an auxiliary point of support for extra-parliamentary mobilization to crush the far right. Shamefully, magazines like Jacobin (U.S. edition) published a position against the condemnation of Le Pen, while, in general, other Trotskyist currents claimed that the condemnation “changes nothing” (sic).

[18] Chayka even discusses the well-known internal rift between Bannon and Musk, explicitly quoting the former’s words about the latter: “They [referring to the tech mega-entrepreneurs, R.S.] must be stopped. If we don’t stop them, and if we don’t stop them now, they are going to destroy not just the country, they’re going to destroy the world,” and adds: “Bannon described Musk as ‘one of the greatest accelerationists,’ referring to another tech-infected ideology that flirts with chaos and inevitability” (Chayka, ibid).

[19] Many tendencies define Trump plainly and simply as “fascist,” among them the humanist current of Kevin Anderson. But it seems to us that such exaggeration does not help in accurately gauging the enemy’s strength—or our own—besides the fact that Trump’s fate will depend as much on what happens in the U.S. as in the rest of the world.

That warmongering pushes toward Bonapartism is a fact, but it is not yet a fact that a fascist regime has been established in the U.S., even though Trump is clearly pushing in that direction with his rhetoric about wanting a “third term.” Indeed, the turn he seeks to express would require more than one term to carry through: it’s true that Trump aims for the lifetime rule of a Putin or Xi Jinping; whether he achieves it is another story.

[20] This reminds us of a text by Trotsky from the time of the First World War, where he quoted the Foreign Minister of the German Empire (Second Reich), who said, verbatim, “might is right”—which brings to mind something from Carl Schmitt: that it is force which founds law ex nihilo (from nothing or from the origin). Or, in other words, that the foundation of law is an extralegal act (Giorgio Agamben).