It seems the right will do anything but name capitalists as their enemy. While “globalism” can mean many things—including recognizing the global impact of local actions—the right tends to use the term as a sort of conspiratorial umbrella with which to shade their centrist opponents. In this vein, a globalist is someone who advocates trading off national sovereignty to a multinational governing body, such as the European Union or United Nations. Previous years have seen fixation with the World Economic Forum and their “Great Reset Initiative,” an alleged scheme to end personal property ownership through mind-controlling vaccines and outright seizure.
From a Marxist perspective, the frustrating aspect of the right wing globalist conception is the truth embedded within it. Globalization is characterized by multinational firms outsourcing employment, corporate-drafted free trade agreements, international warfare and the financial takeover of the economy by hedge funds, asset managers and banks. These trends have been a chimera for the left for some decades now, and past protests in Quebec, Seattle and New York attest.
The membership of corporate clubs like the WEF is drawn directly from the global capitalist ruling class. Meanwhile, international trade agreements like the USMCA and political organizations like the UN and OECD are subsidiary to the reality of global commerce and economic interdependence. In other words, “globalism” is a mental image projected by the actually existing liberal capitalist economic order. The right seeks to alter the image while the left wants to smash the projector.
Incredibly, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels perfectly diagnosed the problem in 1848:
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.1
The “great chagrin of Reactionists” toward globalization during Marx’s lifetime has clearly never gone away—it is the root of the “globalist” slur. Many millions of people around the world rightfully bemoan the loss of local industries and a cosmopolitan economy that rapidly revolutionizes culture. But the right has never wrapped their arms around the problem, as evidenced by reflexive conservative support for corporate-friendly rates of taxation and deregulation that lubricate the globalization machine.
The reason why corporate-funded media and think tanks are so hostile to socialism is because it is the only remedy to what ails the capitalist economy. Unfair trade and the outsourcing of labour and capital is impossible under a system of nationalized finance, rational economic planning, public ownership of strategic industries and worker owned enterprises. Exceptionally low rates of taxation on workers are also possible under a system that allocates public sector surpluses toward infrastructure, as China proves. Facts are stubborn things and capitalism will one day have a final reckoning that puts an end to the contrived “globalist” contention once and for all.
“Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill! You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close! I’m the reason why things are what they are.”
—William Golding, Lord of the Flies.
For anyone thinking that Putin had overstepped boundaries when he invaded Ukraine, it turns out he was only ahead of the curve. Since that time we’ve had genocidal warfare visit Palestine, a president kidnapped from Venezuela, a starvation blockade imposed on Cuba and a criminal aerial bombardment come to Iran. Multiple crimes, in other words, and committed by successive presidential administrations of the West’s flagship state. No wonder the United Nations Secretary-General recently denounced international relations as a “law of the jungle.”
The Jungle Book
It must be a vestige of colonial history that conjures images of undulating spear tips and blood-stained fur whenever the jungle is invoked. This sort of iconography probably accounts for the jungle island setting of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, the story about a group of schoolboys who get marooned during a military evacuation amidst a nuclear war. Initially, the boys are quite “civilized.” They elect a chief, hold orderly assemblies using a conch shell and maintain a signal fire to attract rescuers. But it doesn’t take long for these trappings of civilization to melt away under the tropical heat. Conflict divides the boys when the signal fire goes out and the hunting of a pig arouses primitive instincts, culminating in a spree of orgiastic violence. The aggressive faction of boys consumes the other by way of floggings and outright murder, and they eventually set the island on fire in an effort to flush out their first elected chief.
The great pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus wrote: “Fire of all things is the judge and ravisher.” We see this in Lord of the Flies, with the signal fire representing civilized order and the brush fire representing the desperate plunge into chaos and savagery. Golding possessed a cynical view of human nature that sees people animated by sadistic impulses in the service of selfish interests and power. This is a common position on human nature, also articulated by Chinese legalist philosophy and Thomas Hobbes’ “war of all against all” that characterizes life in a state of nature. Sigmund Freud adopted this position in his later writings as well, asserting the existence of a “primary mutual hostility of human beings” which civilization must tame by setting “limits to man’s aggressive instincts.”1
One commonality between Golding, Hobbes, Freud and the Chinese legalists is that they were all heavily influenced by the demoniacal experience of warfare.2 Witnessing first-hand the human capacity for violence leaves scars on the human psyche that are well documented. Through allegory, Golding asserts that Satan’s captain, Beelzebub—the Lord of the Flies—is not an external supernatural force, but is actually a force inside us, a force within. Freud appeals to the death instinct in order to explain human aggression, similar to Hobbes and the legalists who view aggression as a simple fact of our nature.
Human Nature?
Once that view of human nature is accepted, it is explained that human beings enter a social contract and form civilization as a refuge from our own terrifying base instincts. Violence and corruption in the world can be chalked up to inherently brutal instincts that inevitably infect all of our carefully designed social institutions and best laid plans. Although civilization can never be perfect, it remains the thin red line between orderly society and the violent anarchy of nature.
The only problem with that argument is that it isn’t true. There is real world evidence that rejects the cynics and supports a view that humans are naturally cooperative rather than hostile: in 1965 a group of six teenage boys from Tonga found themselves stranded on a remote Pacific island. Far from descending into an orgy of violence, they built shelter and divided chores. They worked together and planted a garden, hunted feral chickens, collected rainwater in deadwood and rotated cooking duties. They maintained a fire and strummed a makeshift guitar and sang songs in the evenings to lift their mood.
The experience of the Tongan castaways gels with Raymond Kelly’s “Prehistoric warlessness” hypothesis, asserting that conflict and violence between human groups was virtually non-existent up until the Neolithic Revolution.3 That does not mean that there were no instances of homicide or executions within groups—nobody has that answer—but systematic warfare was simply not a feature of the Paleolithic economy that dominated human evolution for hundreds of thousands of years. This is because incredibly low population densities, combined with relatively high natural abundance, provided no incentive for humans to engage in inter-tribal violence.
In our actual state of nature, warfare offered little gain in terms of resources but had the potential to destroy both warring parties with only a few casualties on both sides. It was therefore preferential to seek new territories on which to hunt and gather rather than fight over them. This is what explains human migrations out of Africa and our species’ rapid spread around the globe.
In a footnote, Karl Marx argues that philosophers “must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch.”4 Our human nature in general demands that we eat, drink, breathe, shelter, reproduce, etc. Modern human behaviour, such as language, art, music, abstract thought, planning and tool making arose to meet those needs. We can recognize that the universal behavioural traits of humans could not have been achievable in a Hobbesian “war of all against all” state of nature—every one of them required positive social intercourse in order to become characteristic of our species. It follows that cooperation in the context of low population density and relative natural abundance was the state of nature that defined our prehistoric evolution and are suggestive of “human nature in general.”
Civilization of Corruption
On the other side of the ledger is “human nature as modified in each historical epoch.” While our general characteristics concretized during the epoch of primitive communism, the expression of human behaviour began to vary wildly as environmental changes led to sedentary living, resource scarcity and class divisions that gradually permeating the social structure. The biological demands on human beings led us to developing a potential for many behavioural expressions—including turning our hunting spears on one another. But this potential for warfare and organized violence went unfulfilled until population growth and sedentism made it an economic necessity for one group to defend territory against another. From the Neolithic Revolution onward, a technological arms race and complex division of labour emerged to satisfy our biological needs. The resulting base and superstructure is history.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau rightly scolded Hobbes for taking modern, “civilized” people and ascribing their flaws to nature.5 The philosophical question is this: does human nature corrupt civilization or does civilization corrupt human nature? Marx and Rousseau affirmed the latter, and that is also where the preponderance of anthropological evidence lies. It is not our nature that commands a world plagued by corruption, greed, ecological destruction and warfare. Indeed, our ability to recognize these things as defects affirms a natural revulsion towards them. Although we have the capacity for greed and violence, we also have instincts that lead us toward love, generosity and cooperation.
Resource scarcity has prodded human beings into unleashing some of their worst potentialities. The good news about our current capitalist mode of production is that scarcity has become largely artificial by way of tremendous leaps in productive technology. It is entirely possible to defeat scarcity with a new, cooperative mode of production that finally unleashes our best potentialities. Until then, we are ruled by a Lord of the Flies, but not in the way that Golding imagined. The Lord of the Flies is not an internal, but an external force; an alien process of capital accumulation and rigged market forces that determines our class standing and incentivizes our worst behaviours.
Thanks for reading!
Footnotes:
Sigmund Freud, The Freud Reader edited by Peter Gay (W.W. Norton, 1989): 750. ↩︎
Specifically World War II, the English Civil War, World War I and the Warring States period of China, respectively. ↩︎
Raymond C. Kelly, “The evolution of lethal intergroup violence,” in PNASVol. 102, No. 43: 15294-15298. ↩︎
Karl Marx, “Conversion of Surplus-Value into Capital” in Capital, Vol. One. He is specifically critical of utilitarians here, pointing out the utility of human behaviour can vary wildly depending on the mode of production available. ↩︎
What is the outcome of the U.S.–Israeli attack on Iran?
Thanks!
Kora.
[Sent via Bluesky]
Hi Kora,
By many accounts Americans and Israelis approached this military attack with different objectives. For the Americans led by Trump, the objective after the decapitation strike was the quick emergence of a compliant leader that would submit to Washington’s demands on the state. Israel no doubt knew that this outcome was unrealistic but nonetheless were elated to have American assistance with their ultimate goal, which is the total destruction of Iran as a functioning country.
Alas, nothing has rationalized Iran’s notorious slogan of “Death to America! Death to Israel!” more than this joint U.S.–Israeli attack, which has already blown up children at a school in Minab and brought calamity to the entire population of Tehran. Assassinations and aerial bombardment have led Iranians to rally around the flag and this alone has frustrated American and Israeli designs. Even further, Iran has demonstrated the ability to hold the Strait of Hormuz and Gulf states hostage, while simultaneously inflicting heavy damage to Israeli infrastructure and American bases in the region.
Iran has a strong hand to play as they try to end this war on their terms: war reparations from the U.S. and Israel, along with international security guarantees against future strikes. Ultimately, this war is one of attrition between Iranian missiles and regional interceptors. Whichever side runs out first will lose.
If the United States and Israel neutralize Iranian weapons and prevail, the global status quo will remain depressingly the same. Trump will continue to mark more and more countries for imperialist expansion and Israel will solidify itself as the undisputed Middle Eastern military power without any counterweight.
But the spectre of an Iranian victory against the West’s flagship militaries should not be taken lightly. In the Middle East, perceived strength matters more than anything else. This is how Israel and the United States have managed to expand their influence over Arab politics during the past few decades, despite those countries being massively unpopular amongst the Muslim populace.
An Iranian victory replete with reparations would shatter the myth of Israeli invincibility and demonstrate U.S. military presence to be a security liability rather than an asset. The net effect would be a much smaller military footprint for the U.S. in the region as they lose control control over the Persian Gulf. Meanwhile, the prestige of Iran’s theocratic government in the Islamic world would soar to new heights.
The Iranian conflict has already become a black hole for critical global energy supplies and western investment in the Gulf. This will weaken the ability of European capitals to aid Ukraine at a moment when Russia expects a windfall from its oil exports. If there is a U.S. defeat by Iran, don’t be surprised if Ukraine is the next western ally to settle a conflict on unfavourable terms.
The Europeans have been on the receiving end of continuous insults and threats from Trump regarding tariffs and territorial annexation. Having witnessed the limits of U.S. military capability overseas, the next crop of European leaders should pursue a new security regime for their continent that includes a durable peace and trading relationship with Russia.1
In Asia, the story is much the same. Their energy costs and stock markets have been hit hard by Trump’s decision to illegally attack Iran. They have also been subject to Washington’s erratic tariff policy. But luckily for Asians, they share their continent with a burgeoning superpower that has routinely demonstrated stability and restraint—and has invested in all the right places. China has weathered the oil shock with relative ease, thanks to long-term planning and allocations in green energy and battery technology. For Asia, the increasingly obvious limitations of American security only underline the benefits of deepening economic relations with Beijing.
The stakes are obviously a lot higher than Trump realized when he decided to take a ride to Tehran with the genocidal prime minister of Israel. Israel, by the way, will be lucky to survive an Iran war loss over the medium term; war-addicted and Spartan countries only function so long as they win the conflicts they start. Across the world, we can expect the Middle East to lurch toward Iran, Asia to lurch toward China and Europe to lurch toward Russia. American military prestige will take a massive hit and the oil shocks this war has caused will do immense harm to Trump’s fossil fuel-driven economic agenda.
The war is not yet over. But if the zenith of American hegemony passed over the sands of Iraq and Afghanistan, it may be Iran where the nadir is found.
The concept of civilizational decline has been a staple of the far-right at least since the rise of fascism in Europe a century ago. While the right has always fixed its consternation with fast moving cultural changes and the erosion of “traditional values,” they are ideologically incapable of linking their grievances to the capitalist economic system that constantly revolutionizes our way of life.1 But the first quarter of the 21st century has had the experience of successive wars and economic crises and political realignments against the backdrop of a rising China. The anti-capitalist left has therefore embraced the decline narrative, given the extraordinary challenges of environmental deterioration and affordability amidst a rising concentration of wealth and power into the hands of an elite western oligarchy. Throw in the demoralizing Epstein revelations and a rupture to the political order by a berserk President Trump and even western liberals are acknowledging decline.
If there is one shibboleth of the West that deserves scrutiny at this moment in history, it is liberal democracy. Liberal democracy has been the veneer over western capitalism; a moral ornament obscuring the ransacking of colonies around the world and used to coordinate a unified western response to competition from emergent powers. This has not always been a bad thing—the alliance between liberal capitalist states and the Soviet Union was fruitful in tearing down Nazi Germany, for example.
In the period post-World War II, western liberal countries could lay claim to progressive achievements on the home front—such as civil rights, accessible education and affordable housing—even while supporting many heinousregimes abroad. Free speech and multiparty elections appeared as great strengths under a regime of centralized news media that gave citizens a common information platform, while high union membership in domestic manufacturing ensured a reasonable distribution of profits.
Today that regime has changed. Private sector unions have fallen off a cliff and the digital age has turned media consumption into a “Choose Your Own Adventure” story. In a dialectical reversal, yesterday’s free speech and partisan competition have become forces that propel their own demise: conspiratorial misinformation, foreign subversion, online mobs of neo-Nazis, unchecked corporate power, the ascent of dictatorial right-wing populists into office. While smartphone apps and AI models rush out like a waterfall, public infrastructure is achingly slow to build. In Canada it can take 41 years to cut the ribbon on a simple light rail transport—to say nothing of badly needed doctors, schools, energy generation and bridges. The refusal to scrutinize liberal democracy out of some fear that its only alternative is dictatorship must be admonished because capitalism has already put us on an openly authoritarian trajectory with accelerating speed. If the democratic veneer that the West has placed over its society is no longer compatible with the communications technology and global economic structure in existence today, then it is high time to say so.
Washington’s Warning
In his farewell address, the first president of the United States foresaw exactly why liberal democracy would cease to function. George Washington argued that partisanship would fragment the common interest into competing factions. A citizenry that identified with a political party rather than the country would lose its principles; they would fail to identify policies affecting the common interest and concern themselves only with gaining power at the next instance. Political parties turn society against itself and create countries within countries: “Thus the policy and will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.” In the partisan political environment, Washington said, jealousies prevail and a “spirit of revenge” takes over, clearing the way for “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” to take over on the back of “foreign influence and corruption.”
“I’d rather be a Russian than a Democrat.” George Washington warned that partisan animosity would destroy national unity and invite the foreign subversion of national interests.
The body politic is now terminally ill with the viruses that Washington identified centuries ago. Liberal societies divided by political allegiance has turned the digital space into a playground for foreignactors. While weaker countries like Georgia and the Philippines are sites of proxy wars between East and West influence, the president of the United States openlyaccepts foreign bribes and Canadian separatists collaborate with agitators from the U.S. government. Elections have turned into sports matches where the politicians are the players, the voters are the fans and corporate CEOs own the teams.
The Brexit referendum was dominated by Britain’s wealthiest individuals and the OECD has already acknowledged that capital interests have saturated public discourse through industry-funded think tanks, lobbying and direct corporate political advertising. Representative government is powerless to reverse these trends because it is baked into the system; whoever holds power has necessarily benefitted from the existing framework or they wouldn’t be in office. Major reforms therefore hold little incentive but face massive pushback from an elite minority eager to retain its influence.
Contemporary liberal governance aligns with Washington’s description of “a frightful despotism” that negates the common interest in favour of permanent minority rule. In Canada, pollution reduction measures have been rolled back while oil companies have received billions in new subsidies—despite a two-thirds majority favouring clean energy and climate protection. A full three-quarters of Canadians give failing grades to their government in assisting with the cost of living crisis. The Canadian government does not possess the tools to meaningfully direct economic outcomes and the majority of people are plunged daily into the hazards of the market. Meanwhile, Canada’s central bank receives no input from labour or consumer stakeholders and the CEO-drenched Business Council of Canada has emerged as the prime minister’s top advisor.
When majority opinion is fragmented between multiple elected parties, it is only economic elites who maintain consistent influence through successive governments. In the United States, this is especially true; studies analyzing popular opinion and political legislation have concluded that average Americans “have practically zero influence on government policy.”
On policy, Democrats, Independents and Republicans agree with each other far more often than not. Large majorities in the United States favour public health insurance, ending the embargo of Cuba, ending mass incarceration, avoiding confrontation with Iran and Venezuela, reducing military expenditures, cutting support for Israel and adopting a pro-Main Street economic approach. Yet this is ignored by administration after administration resulting in rock-bottom public trust in government. As little as 17% of Americans trust their government “to do what is right most of the time.”
A United States that was subordinated to the popular will of Americans would immediately be a gentler, more sustainable global power with an economy that doesn’t cannabilize its own people for profits. But a government anchored by popular opinion would hurt margins across multiple industries—which is a red line for the capitalist regime. Partisan competition therefore exists to exploit wedge issues and keep the democratic majority as far from power as possible.
Toward a People’s Democracy
In The State and Revolution, Lenin described liberal democracy as “the best possible political shell for capitalism” because it allows corporate oligarchs to establish their power “so securely, so firmly, that no change of persons, institutions or parties in the bourgeois democratic republic can shake it.”2 The western dictatorship of capital donned respectable attire for the purposes of winning hearts and minds during the Cold War. But since the dissolution of the Soviet Union it has shed its clothes once again.
Although the People’s Republic of China is derided in the mainstream as an authoritarian country, their decision-making process gathers more input from their citizens than most western countries do. Through online platforms, opinion polling, surveys, telephone hotlines and direct elections of local officials, the people of China give their local governments long lists of actionable items and provide guidance to the strategic Five Year Plans that have modernized their country at warp speed. This does not mean many aspects of the Chinese political system would be palatable to western society but it does expose the arbitrary criteria by which one country is deemed “democratic” while another is smeared as “authoritarian.” After all, if the “democratic” label can apply to a country that grants its citizens zero input in legislation and locks up more of its own people than any other in history, what good is the label?
The object of liberal democracy represents a major barrier to class consciousness, even among the left. A misplaced faith in this unworkable system has led to disastrous outcomes for the economic security of western workers; for the debt loads of governments; for slums of the Global South; for the biosphere. This is not a world designed by the democratic majority. To earn the label of democracy, the West must rethink the utility of career politicians making decisions on behalf of the population. Corporate influence must be ruthlessly suppressed and a public sector economy servile to the material wants and needs of the democratic majority must be constructed. With the commanding heights of the economy under public control, fertile ground for cooperative enterprises can finally be laid.
If a one party state is a bridge too far, we should consider alternative power structures that could exalt the great mass of working people over special interest groups. For example, power could be vested to non-partisan people’s assemblies chosen by lot. Such assemblies would supervise the bureaucracy and hire expert panels that implement the laws and economic plans determined by direct referenda. It is this, direct democracy, that reconciles the people with their government instead of alienating them from it.
Contrary to the musings of thinkers like John Stuart Mill, the “tyranny of the majority” is not a historical reality. Every tyranny in history has rested on minority power and the forfeiture of rights to elites. Capital interests have co-opted the democratic title and deformed the concept beyond recognition. But liberal government must be viewed as an enemy in the struggle against elite power. As Marx and Engels said, “the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.”3 As things now stand, that “battle of democracy” has yet to begin.
Thanks for reading!
Footnotes:
Recalling Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto (Arcturus Publishing, 2017): 37. “Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.” ↩︎
Vladimir Lenin, “The State and Revolution” in Essential Works of Lenin: “What Is To Be Done? And Other Writings (CreateSpace, 2012): 382-3. ↩︎
There are huge increases to military budgets around the world and a lot of talk about a wider war with Russia, conflict with China over Taiwan and the “Donroe Doctrine” in the Western Hemisphere. Are countries preparing for World War III?
Thank you,
Kyle.
[Sent by email]
Hi Kyle,
The situations in Ukraine, Venezuela and Iran demonstrate an aggressive push for hegemonic consolidation: the U.S. is determined to put all of Latin America into a stranglehold and knockout Israel’s last major stronghold of resistance in the Middle East, while Europe is now tasked with keeping Russia out of their sphere. Throw in the rise of China, and these developments have the world starting to resemble the European balance of power that collapsed into World War I.
In a world balancing on the weight of military strength, countries are compelled to invest in armaments or be tossed from the scale. Japan has rubber stamped a record-setting military budget and Taiwan has done the same. Canada wants to triple its military spending; Australia is under pressure to raise theirs by 75%. India, Germany and France all have proposals to double their military spending, with Emmanuel Macron adding: “To be free in this world we must be feared. To be feared we must be powerful.” Without parsing what that means to the freedom of those cowering in fear, Trump seems to agree with Macron by proposing a 50% increase to America’s already-whopping $1 trillion military budget. His proposed $1.5 trillion military spend doesn’t sound like a peacetime budget—that’s a budget for war.
In this political context, worrying about World War III is not unreasonable. Against a similar arms race backdrop in 19th century Europe, Friedrich Engels predicted World War I:
I imagine that the plan is not to push things to extremities, to more than a sham war. But once the first shot is fired, control ceases, the horse can take the bit between its teeth…Eight to ten million soldiers will massacre one another and in doing so devour the whole of Europe until they have stripped it barer than any swarm of locusts has ever done.1
Bombing countries like Iran or kidnapping the presidents of countries like Venezuela might not get us there. But desensitization to this uptick of radical interventionism makes a miscalculation more likely, as happened between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Serbia once upon a time.
The timing of this global rearmament could not be worse, given the present state of the environment and the residue of an inflationary crisis already aggravated by global conflict. Marx held complex views about the role of the military within the broader capitalist economy, but in the Grundrisse he noted: “The impact of war is self-evident, since economically it is exactly the same as if the nation were to drop part of its capital into the ocean.”2 Warfare vanquishes the resources that could be used to build an economy of human flourishing into plumes of blood and fire. In a competitive world of amplified scarcity such as it is, the proliferation of advanced weaponry and nuclear bombs adhere to a quest for economic dominance—consequences to human survival be damned.
The ominous parallels between the first world war and a possible third recall Freud’s compulsion to repeat: we live in a neurotic civilization containing “a demonic character” whereby repressed traumas override the pleasure principle and are revisited again and again and again in order to “re-encounter our identity.”3 Given the violent and domineering history of capitalism, revisiting past demons in a nuclear-armed multipolar world would be nothing short of biblical.
There was an estimated 8.8 million military deaths during World War I, making Engels’ prediction exceptionally accurate. A further 6–13 million civilian casualties are estimated, resembling that “swarm of locusts” stripping Europe bare. ↩︎
Predictions may be a fool’s errand but there is always some low-hanging fruit. Democrats will sweep midterm elections, Canada’s prime minister likely obtains his coveted majority government and plastic pollution continues to worsen. Marxists understand the relatively low stakes of these surface-level tendencies. The world we are living in is one where power has long been consolidated by an elite corporate class; yawning economic inequalities and corrupted liberal democracies are only symptoms of this fact. I do not foresee any challenge to ruling class power in the near term, which means that the direction of 2026 has already been set.
For all its Trump-related pandemonium, 2025 did not really move the needle away from trajectories previously established. Inflation continued to eat away at pocketbooks around the world. Russia and Israel aggressively redrew the maps of their respective neighbourhoods. China held on to its massive gains in global exports and new technologies. The Western world, including Canada and the European Union, have once again proven politically adrift without the tide of American leadership. The artificial intelligence economy—buoying the world’s stock markets by hype—has turned flat without reaching any clear tipping point. Venezuela has invited condemnable aggression from Washington and this is the fate of any Latin American country daring to exercise sovereignty over their national resources.
With the big stories of 2025, you’ll notice there was not a lot that was new; events have all unfolded around past momentum. Even an objective change, like US tariff polilcy, has only accelerated the existing trend of Western decline relative to a rising East. Populist movements demonstrate a world clamouring for catharsis but 2026 won’t be the year to deliver it. That is because the economic forces at play tell a story of near-term easing rather than escalation. Inflation is slowing down. AI investors have begun to exercise caution amidst talk of a bubble. The prospect of a Russia–Ukraine ceasefire signal the willingness of both to prioritize economic repair over military objectives. And the erraticism of the Trump White House has only spurred China to stay its course while the West begrudgingly flounders. The fate of Venezuela’s Maduro government may be an open question but, whatever happens, it will be a movie we have seenbefore.
The tense stability which looms over the globe this January does not portend any major improvement. Financial strain, environmental deterioration, warfare, oligarchic power, political impulsivity and social unrest will all continue to simmer under the heat of the recent past. The ancient Greek philosopher Anaxagoras said that to “separate off” elements from one another takes a revolution.1 Likewise, the West will need to “separate off” its current ruling class in order to realize a change to its set trajectory. History shows us that revolutions do not occur unless class conflict reaches a raging boil. Although we will be waiting past the new year for that, let’s raise a glass to 2026 and try our best to enjoy the simmer.
Why is Canada getting hit so hard with American tariffs? It’s among the top five nations in terms of the relative tariff rate. Canada’s new prime minister, Mark Carney, had taken a tough tone toward Washington during the spring election, but he’s been very agreeable since taking office and eager to get a trade deal behind him. What is holding up the US side?
Thanks,
Ian.
Hi Ian,
For all the oceans Canada touches with its long borderlines drawn out over maps, there is one geographical disadvantage that has come with the northern territory: there is only one neighbour, and it’s a juggernaut of economic and military proportions. Trump sees a geographic dependency and is determined to use it as a cudgel to extract concessions from Canada.
However lopsided the relationship may appear on paper, it is a mistake for any resource-rich country to play the pauper and beg to be relieved of their abundance. Yet that is exactly what Carney has done. When the US raised tariffs over laughable fentanyl export allegations, Canadian Liberals responded with a multi-billion dollar border security package. When Trump threatened a halt to trade negotiations over the digital service tax—applied to the harvest and sale of personal data by tech giants—Ottawa scrapped it. When the Ontario government ran an anti-tariff ad that Trump didn’t like, it was immediately pulled from the airwaves with a profuse apology from Carney. Despite this, Washington has suspended negotiations with its northern neighbour, preferring to leave the full brunt of tariffs intact.
Epictetus said that bullies may mock your principles but, “if you let these people dissuade you from your choice, you will earn their derision twice over.”1 Trump, no doubt, sensed an opportunity the moment that Carney put his elbows down and went hat-in-hand to the White House shortly after winning his election. In that moment he had dutifully earned Trump’s derision—and it has been Carney dancing to Trump’s tune ever since. Why should the US negotiate tariffs when so much can be extracted with them in place?
The tariffs may be disastrous policy but that is unseen in Washington. Although the Business Council of Canada has tasked Carney with having the American president see the light, the opposite has occurred. As a global banker, Carney is powerless to look beyond the facts and figures of the neoliberal order. Meanwhile, Trump has invented a new genre of politik somewhere between the real and ideal—gutpolitik—and Carney is squirming within its sweaty fold.
It is unlikely he’s going to slither out. Ottawa should be leveraging the public appetite for a hardline on trade negotiations in order to open up a new relationship with China, including Belt-and-Road participation. Ottawa should be rescuing its environmental commitments and stabilizing unemployment with a worker owned enterprise program. Ottawa should be minting crown corporations in order to expand the national manufacturing of cars, homes and military equipment for domestic use. Instead automobile factories will shutter, knowledge will go to waste, corporate bailouts will accumulate, and billions will be shed abroad on arms purchases.
The neoliberal era is over. Trump is only a sign of the times. Until the public understands this, the slide into the abyss is irresistible.
The artificial intelligence gold rush has been well underway since the release of ChatGPT. Technology companies within the computational ecosystem have seen their shares explode along the ongoing rush toward new data centres, more advanced chips and supporting energy infrastructure. Competition for AI researchers within the United States have seen employee poaching between companies and pay packages of up to $100 million. Trump’s unveiling of the Stargate project, intended to turbocharge domestic AI capabilities, makes clear the national importance of this emerging technology.
Across the Pacific, China’s release of DeepSeek was the first shot across the bow of American dominance over the space. DeepSeek is a large language model AI which rivals ChatGPT in capability but was developed for a fraction of the cost. China has taken an all-hands-on-deck approach to developing AI, cracking down on the video game industry in order to direct resources toward strategic technology, while fusing together civilian and military research to avoid compartmentalization. China is in the process of integrating AI in all facets of the economy and their rapid progress has led to fears of an AI arms race between the “democratic” West and “authoritarian” East.
AI Apocalypse?
Before you fret over the outcome of this battle for technological superiority, first consider that it may not matter. There is an ominous hypothesis that has casted a shadow over the topic of AI since its conception; namely, the total annihilation of humanity. Just in case there weren’t enough existential crises for us to worry about in this late stage of capitalist alienation, computer scientists Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares have done the podcastcircuit promoting their book about artificial general intelligence: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. A title like that needs no elaboration.
The historian Yuval Noah Harari has issued a similar warning about AI, as have many prominent figures in the field including Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Mustafa Suleyman, Sam Altman and Elon Musk. It’s interesting that leaders of this industry have chosen to be up front about the catastrophic risk their product imposes rather than gaslighting the public post-hoc for years, as oil and tobacco companies did.
The AI doomsday scenario has been a staple of science fiction for a long time. The Matrix, Westworld, The Terminator and I, Robot come to mind. Machines become sentient and immediately treat their creators as an obstacle to be destroyed, or so the trope goes. No wonder so many people imagine the arrival of superintelligence ringing out like the battlecry of Krishna: “I have come forth to destroy the worlds.”1
Ghost in the Machine
It’s worthwhile to address this subject head-on, as no discussion of AI technology can be useful to anyone who believes that meaningful advances in the space will instantly kill us all. Firstly, the malevolent sentient machine of Hollywood lore is certainly impossible, as the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer attests. Schopenhauer was a cynical thinker but, as the progenitor of psychoanalysis, he understood that drives correlate with biological need and consciousness correlates with knowledge.2 A computer, like any inorganic “body without organs,” may have pre-programmed compulsions but it will not have drives; it may have a vast repository of information but it will not have knowledge.3
The apprehended Idea is the true and only source of every genuine work of art…Machines mince very fine and mix up what is put into them, but they can never digest it, so that the constituent elements of others can always be found again, and picked out and separated from the mixture.4
Machines cannot apprehend an idea because that requires a conscious will to life subsumed by the sensuous world. Capable brains are not the only requirement for consciousness, as cases of feral children demonstrate. Consciousness requires minds in constant negotiation with the opposing demands of our biology, social relations, physical environment, a shared language, subjective emotions, sense perception and received knowledge. As one starts a fire by rubbing sticks, it is a dialectical friction that sparks consciousness in humans and expresses our drives. Inorganic matter, including complex AI systems, simply cannot have that. Pursuing abstract “superintelligence” will always be fantastical, akin to running for the horizon in order to touch the clouds.
But AI could endanger us without conscious decision making. We are talking about revolutionary technology and, returning to Schopenhauer, “with every human undertaking there is something that is not within our power, and does not come into our calculations.”5 What distinguishes AI from software is the ability to interpret data, process new information, make predictions and operate hardware. The momentum of its energy makes an AI system capable of formulating unpredictable goals such as “to count the grains of sand on Boracay, or to calculate the decimal places of pi indefinitely, or to maximize the total number of paperclips in its future lightcone.”6
One can see how AI could execute a decision to sweep humanity away if we come between its calculated actions. The scenarios by which we are swept away are not yet apparent. Hypothetically, an AI with access to unwitting accomplices or robots could formulate a supervirus or as-yet-undiscovered weapon of mass destruction and unleash it right from under our noses.
Technological Disempowerment
It is a common belief that Big Tech is taking our species on a one-way trip aboard a kamikaze plane because this is their own narrative. There is a salient point to be reckoned with here: if both the majority of the population and the leaders of industry are fully aware of a human extinction event resulting from AI development, but are powerless to mitigate the risk, then we must already be enslaved to our system of production. A free and rational person does not accept certain death as the outcome of their work. Only a slave does that.
It is the economic system that renders us powerless—and this is the real threat confronting society. It isn’t AI. AI has the potential to deliver cures for cancer, fix climate change, detoxify the environment, rapidly research new energy breakthroughs for space travel and defeat material scarcity on the cheap. But that won’t happen on its own. For a tool to realize its positive potential it needs to be used for the right reasons.
Technological progress in capitalism has the feel of “one step forward, two steps back.” Automobiles are great—except for the emissions and roadkill. Smartphones have put computers in billions of pockets—but now people are addicted to them. Plastic has opened up a new paradigm of construction—but it’s clogging the oceans. The Internet has achieved global connectivity—but conspiracies and misinformation destroy lives and kill political discourse. The reason this happens is simple: unleashing these technologies is profitable and mitigating their harms is not.
It’s easy to imagine AI as a destructive force because we already live in a society twitching to the fetishes of tech oligarchs. Their capacity to inflict immense social harm should not be underestimated. Because China has subordinated industry to government planning, they have been able to efficiently mitigate the risks of technology by placing the common good over profit. Electric vehicles and renewable energy for cleaner air; shrinking deserts with afforestation; hard-limits on screen time for Chinese youth; suppression of AI slop and misinformation; restricting single-use plastics as a step toward tackling the pollution crisis.
In terms of AI, a recent article in Foreign Affairs highlights China’s superior rollout, scaling automation and robotics with the goal of complete economic integration by 2030. This is China’s strategy to alleviate demands on an aging workforce, with an eye toward future material abundance and socialist distribution. Realization of carefully formulated concrete targets is what will make AI useful.
The West needs to make a direct democratic analog to socialism with Chinese characteristics. Within the realm of public ownership and democratic decision making, AI would be a powerful tool to develop universal human flourishing and abundance. Within the narrow realm of tech oligarchs and the financial elite, it is nothing but a profit generator turbocharging fossil fuel consumption, economic inequality and chatbot psychosis. We can use AI to raise ourselves to heaven—or let them cast us into hell.
Thanks for reading!
Footnotes:
The Bhagavad Gita trans. Laurie L. Patton (Penguin, 2008): 131. ↩︎
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Volume One (Dover Publications, 1969): 203. ↩︎
Nick Bostrom, “The Superintelligent Will: Motivation and Instrumental Rationality in Advanced Artificial Agents,” Minds and Machines Vol. 2, No. 22: 73. ↩︎
China is one of the most misunderstood countries in the West for all of the predictable reasons: the far-away geography, the curious culture, the unfamiliar politics, the ferocious economy. It is either portrayed as a one-dimensional menace to democracies or, less often, as the last hope to save the biosphere or the Global South. China can be the rigid communist or the wild capitalist—it only depends on the point of view of the observer. Dan Wang is the latest to re-cast China, an engineering state in contrast to the lawyerly society of the United States. He hit the shore of this discovery when it occurred to him that many of America’s founding fathers were lawyers and Deng Xiaoping had promoted a lot of engineers in the 1980s. According to Wang, this is the reason why China builds a lot more stuff than the U.S. today. But he’s wrong.
What Wang discovered is only a basic difference between Marxist-Leninist societies and liberal capitalist ones. The Soviet Union was dominated by engineers, as China and Vietnam are today. Even Cuba has been described as “a society of engineers.” Conversely, western bourgeois revolutions were all dominated by those with legal backgrounds; Thomas Jefferson in the U.S., Oliver Cromwell in Britain, Maximilien Robespierre in France—to name only the most notorious. The first prime ministers of Canada, Australia and India were also lawyers. But if the American “lawyerly society” was able to out-build and outproduce the Soviet engineering state, why can’t it do the same against the Chinese?
The answer has little to do with lawyers or engineers and everything to do with economics and governing ideology. Whereas the American commitment to capitalist class power led it directly into a deindustrialized, cannibalistic financial economy, China’s commitment to building socialism led it to becoming the greatest workshop in human history, in command of entire supply chains and advanced technology. America had built a great industrial power by the early twentieth century and organized labour had won considerable political power throughout the New Deal and Cold War eras. But this unravelled almost the moment the Cold War wound down. The disciplining of the western workforce was inevitable in an economic system pursuing profit for the sake of profit, and it arrived in the form of offshore manufacturing, real estate speculation, vulture capitalism, super-exploited migrant labor and intensified corporate lobbying.
Marxism-Leninism in China
China, meanwhile, was an accident of epic proportions. Whereas other Marxist-Leninist states in the Soviet bloc were successfully marginalized from the global capitalist economy, the U.S. under Nixon and Kissinger embraced China in a successful effort to defeat Moscow by exploiting the Sino-Soviet split. Successive presidential administrations gambled that global capitalism would so thoroughly corrupt Chinese socialist aspirations that the country would abandon Marxist thought altogether. This has turned out to be a bad bet if the words of paramount leader Xi Jinping are any indication: “If we deviate from or abandon Marxism, our Party would lose its soul and direction. On the fundamental issue of upholding the guiding role of Marxism, we must maintain unswerving resolve, never wavering at any time or under any circumstances.”
Statements like this from Chinese leadership mystify western audiences, both left and right. Too many people view socialism through the narrow paradigm of the Soviet system or left wing politics at home and conclude that China has hopelessly deviated from Marxist theory. But what if it is the western left that is aimless and the Soviets who were forced to deviate? Western politics is so saturated with capital that even nominally “progressive” forces don’t understand the corporate interests being served by mass migration crises and obsessional identity politics. And the Soviet Union, facing multiple foreign invasions at the outset, rapidly nationalized most of its economy and placed it under a central command in order to first stave off European aggression and then counter American containment strategies. The Soviet Union was able to achieve incredibly high levels of human development and military superpower status, but balancing these two priorities against western counter-pressure proved unsustainable over the long haul.
China pursued somewhat similar policies to the Soviets until American rapprochement came in 1972, when Nixon visited Mao. Imperial pressure against China was lifted, culminating in large amounts of western commercial investment by 1979 and a U.S. State Department upgrade for China to “friendly, developing nation.” This is where the great misunderstanding of China began: for the left, China was seen as selling out the socialist movement to imperialists and for the right, China was increasingly seen as a nascent capitalist champion. Neither side was completely right or wrong.
China did embrace capitalist investment in a way that was not geopolitically possible for other Marxist-Leninist states. The private sector of China is notoriously wild and cutthroat. At the same time this does not represent a reversal of the Marxist course in China, as originally charted by Mao. Consider the Chinese flag: four small stars representing the national bourgeoisie, petit bourgeoisie, the working class and the peasantry. Mao, while fiercely antagonistic toward rent-extracting landlords, had a different understanding of China’s domestic capitalists:
The national bourgeoisie differs from the imperialists, the landlords and the bureaucrat-capitalists. The contradiction between the national bourgeoisie and the working class is one between exploiter and exploited, and is by nature antagonistic. But in the concrete conditions of China, this antagonistic contradiction between the two classes, if properly handled, can be transformed into a non-antagonistic one and be resolved by peaceful methods.1
In Marxist theory, capitalism is seen as a major progressive advance over the feudal mode of production. When Mao came to power, China was largely a feudal state. For this reason Mao favoured China’s capitalist elements over the landlords of the feudal order. Mao proposed a five-tiered structure of ownership during China’s transition phase which has been applied throughout the country: state-owned enterprises, cooperative land ownership, individually owned businesses, private corporations and public-private partnerships. The Communist Party of China, while it bristles under imperialism, has always recognized this classical Marxist principle: capitalism is the mother of socialism, not its enemy. Karl Marx:
The bourgeois period of history has to create the material basis of the new world—on the one hand universal intercourse founded upon the mutual dependency of mankind, and the means of that intercourse; on the other hand, the development of the productive powers of man and the transformation of material production into a scientific domination of natural agencies. Bourgeois industry and commerce create these material conditions of a new world in the same way as geological revolutions have created the surface of the earth. When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch, the markets of the world and the modern powers of production and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous pagan idol who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.2
Having built a mass-party of over 100 million members, the CPC believes that China has already completed its great social revolution and have set themselves the task of mastering “the results of the bourgeois epoch.” In Building Socialism with a Specifically Chinese Character, Deng Xiaopingdescribes foreign investment as “a major supplement in the building of socialism,” with the goal of “highly developed productive forces and an overwhelming abundance of material wealth.” This is a redux of Engels, who said that the forces of production “must be multiplied to the extent necessary for the creation of a communal society” before private property can be abolished.3
Whereas the advanced capitalist countries were able to develop their productive forces through a historical process involving colonial extraction, debt bondage, slavery and corporate-driven markets, China is doing the same with a combination of foreign capital investment, state owned enterprises, domestic start-ups and state-dominated markets operating under the umbrella of five year plans and consultative democracy.
The Limits to Capital
Since the dawn of civilization, Marx noted, the property relations of an economy eventually become barriers to the further advancement of technology and production.4 In feudalism, there was only so much progress that was possible in an economy dominated by illiterate subsistence farmers paying rent to lords. The limits inherent to the feudal order are what eventually provoked daring exploration missions leading to the discovery of the Americas, European mercantilism, the plantation economy and subsequent Industrial Revolution.
As industry has progressed, it has gradually given way to rent-seeking financial monopolies and Big Tech companies which are posing enormous barriers to production in western economies. Even our Gross Domestic Product (GDP) data can no longer be trusted, as the economist Michael Hudson explains: “Bank penalties and fees are now counted toward GDP rather than as an economic cost. GDP accounting is now a travesty that credits finance as producing a product rather than zero-sum transfer payments.”5 Our system cannot solve this problem because our system is the problem—and no quantity of Trumpian neofascist rebellions will change the fundamental contours of the western economy. Only a revolution can do that.
Post-revolutionary China, on the other hand, has seen enough to avoid these pitfalls. Financial capital currently plays an important role allocating resources toward innovation and productivity but, left to its own devices, it will devolve into debt predation, real estate speculation and inflating unproductive assets like stocks and cryptocurrencies. According to Marxian economics, money has a price but only production can create objective value. Banks in China are state owned and directed to fulfill the five year plans that build their country. Salaries and compensation for financial service managers have been reigned in and regulatory frameworks ensure that Chinese hedge funds invest in domestic products like DeepSeek rather than asset prices. It’s been said that the West can never produce like China and this is why.
Projects from state owned enterprises, clockwise from left: Raffles City, Huajiang Grand Canyon Bridge, China Energy Engineering Corporation. The public sector can build according to use rather than profit.
Marx and Engels supported free trade and industrial competition as a means of provoking technological revolution and working class development.6 China has used both instruments to build out world-leading high speed rail, renewable energy infrastructure, electric vehicles, high tech skyscrapers and record-setting bridges. Unlike capitalist countries that over-promise and under-deliver on almosteverything, China’s public sector consistently beats its own targets. They have a working class of 772 million people, of which 500 million are considered middle class. But the contradictions created by technological change, fluctuations in value and financially ruinous competition often spur crises, and these crises promote changes to economic relations and political orientation.
Socialism with Chinese Characteristics
For China, crises precede expansion of the public sector. Banking, land and resources are already under socialized ownership. Further, there are 362,000 state owned enterprises in the country comprising 60% of total market capitalization. With many people forecasting future economic turbulence, economists Minqi Li and Lingyi Wei see a China that is well-positioned to:
Either take over the remaining capitalist enterprises or invest in new socially owned enterprises to replace the bankrupt capitalist enterprises. Eventually, this could pave the way for social control over economic surplus, to be used for the free development of all individuals in manners to be determined by democratic decisions.7
Throughout their work, Marx and Engels stressed the need to not simply oppose capitalism but to go beyond it.8 Neither the workers’ state of the Soviet Union nor the welfare states of western nations have actualized this concept.9 By prioritizing production over distribution, China is doing exactly what Marx outlined in his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and Engels in his Principles of Communism: driving the forces of capitalist production to their technological limit before crossing the barricade that capitalist relations inevitably impose.
The colossal solar plants, hydro dams and wind farms that China is constructing are not just for show. They are the building blocks of a fully-automated robotic economy powered by the Sun. Under social ownership, an advanced economy of this type makes class distinctions extinct. It makes economic democracy viable, free development of individuals possible and the Communist Party unnecessary—as Mao envisioned.10
In America, plantation slavery funded industrial capitalism and industrial capitalism, in turn, made slavery obsolete. In China, capitalism is funding a high-tech socialist economy and socialism, in turn, will make capitalism obsolete. Marx wrote in The Poverty of Philosophy: “The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.”11 China finishes the thought: “And the socially-owned robot gives you society without class.”
Karl Marx, “The Future Results of British Rule in India,” Dispatches for the New York Tribune: Selected Journalism of Karl Marx (Penguin, 2007), 125. ↩︎
Karl Marx, “Preface” of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: “At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or—this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms—with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto.” ↩︎
Michael Hudson, “Finance Capitalism versus Industrial Capitalism: The Rentier Resurgence and Takeover,” in Review of Radical Political Economics, Vol. 53, No. 4: 12. ↩︎
Karl Marx, Capital Volume II (Penguin, 1992): 250. ↩︎
Minqi Li and Lingyi Wei, “Surplus Absorption, Secular Stagnation & the Transition to Socialism in China,” in Monthly Review Vol. 76, No. 5: 25. ↩︎
Erich Fromm, “Marx’s Concept of Socialism” in Marx’s Concept of Man: “Marx, the man who every year read all the works of Aeschylus and Shakespeare, who brought to life in himself the greatest works of human thought, would never have dreamt that his idea of socialism could be interpreted as having as its aim the well-fed and well-clad “welfare” or “workers’” state. ↩︎
Mao Zedong, On Contradiction and On Practice (Midnight Press, 2023): 47. “To build the Communist Party is in fact to prepare the conditions to eliminate the party and all parties.” ↩︎
To be honest, I did not pay much attention to China until I learned that a number of my colleagues were using DeepSeek and preferred it to the American ChatGPT. Since then I have become aware of their advanced renewable megaprojects, electric vehicles and 6G technology, the Great Green Wall, their leading high speed rail network and epic skylines and bridges.
After the recent military parade, a number of people have told me that the advanced equipment on display may not be real, that the West still leads in terms of military power and computer chips. But considering the other ways they have left Western nations behind, I am not so sure. Are they the new superpower? Is China for real?
Thanks,
Bruce.
Dear Bruce,
You’ve answered half of your own question: if the existing civilian technology and visible infrastructure in China is more advanced than anywhere else, why wouldn’t their military be the most advanced as well?
There are obvious safety reasons explaining why live explosives aren’t going to be marched down the centre of Beijing. But given China’s successful track record deploying technology, it is likely that the weapons on display are already operational or will soon be in production. There were many potential customers in the audience, after all.
China is definitely for real. The question about superpower status is difficult to answer and I’ll refer you to a previous article about where things currently stand between Chinese and American supremacy. Questions of that sort are often only apparent in hindsight. Ten years from now, we may look back at the 2025 China Victory Day Parade as a decisive turning point in world history.
The doubters will claim that the power of these weapons is unknowable until they are tested in battle, as if rooting for war. If Xi Jinping has learned any lessons from the great Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, let’s hope it was this: “The skillful leader subdues the enemy troops without any fighting.”1 With a U.S. shift away from Asia on the horizon, Xi’s parade may have done the trick.
There must be no doubt that the transformation of constitutional conservatism into a politics of populist reaction is attributable to the rapid societal changes of the past two decades. The ubiquitousness of smart phones, the totality of social media information, the sharp visibility of immigrant and LGBT populations, cultural backlash against perceived “woke” authoritarianism and the economic tumult of subprime mortgages and COVID have all contributed to this transformation. Throw in several years of historic inflation and the world now sits in the barrel of a second Trump presidency, much more aggressive than the last.
For the Marxist school, Trump’s re-ascendance was mighty predictable. Within the milieu of the aforementioned social changes, we have artificial intelligence revaluing labour and China revolutionizing global trade and renewable energy and “people seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before.” According to Marx, it is in times like these when many people “anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, in order to present this new scene in world history [with] time-honoured disguise and borrowed language.”1
The early returns of the second Trump administration have given us time-honoured symbolism in spades—military parades, the return of Mount McKinley and the freshly minted Gulf of America. The mass deportation orders are an echo of Eisenhower’s cringily-named “Operation Wetback” and Trump’s economic policy rests on an antiquated foundation of import duties, also known as tariffs.
Past and Present
American tariffs on imports now reach heights not seen in a century and this is very on-brand with Trump’s glorification of the past. 100 years ago, tariffs were a staple of independent governments looking to do two things at once: efficiently collect tax revenues at shipping ports while sheltering burgeoning industries from outside competition. Generally speaking, items that could be supplied domestically were subject to a tariff, while important raw materials supporting other industries might be exempt. Then came the Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930 that blanketed imports with an effective tariff rate of 47%. This sparked a global retaliation that froze international trade just as the West entered the Great Depression. The presidential administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt began winding down many of these tariffs through bilateral deals shortly after taking office—but with so little capital circulating after a period of deflation, the harmful effects did not really reverse until the conclusion of World War II. From that point onward, the United States promoted a low-tariff, liberalized trade regime between capitalist countries.
The American posture on liberal trade was upheld through successive administrations but the current Trump White House has folded it in dramatic fashion. But how do these tariffs stack against the historical record?
We can see that the earliest application of tariffs were used to efficiently gather taxes at ports without the need for a sophisticated bureaucracy capable of calculating sales and income taxes. These tariffs do not appear to have had any disastrous consequences for the economy at the time—bearing in mind that this economy was much more simple and agrarian compared to today. Under the Smoot-Hawley Act, the American economy was much more industrialized and complex compared to years prior, and the tariffs were much steeper. It is seen as disastrous but only in hindsight; during the desperation of economic depression, throwing up a barrier to the outflow of capital made intuitive sense.
Trump’s rapidly evolving tariff regime does not overlay neatly on either of these historical examples. On the one hand, the effective tariff rate at the time of writing is 18.6%—quite mild compared to the Smoot-Hawley rate of 47%. On the other hand, the American economy is more complex than ever, with commodity production and financial capital often crossing dozens of borders before valorization. In the simple, low-tax colonial economies that were developing in the Americas over a century ago, tariffs were not so imposing. But dropping duties onto supply chains that were established during an era of liberalized trade is bound to cause blockages to the existing circulation of productive and financial capital. This will suppress consumption but the full extent remains to be seen.
A novelty between past tariff regimes and the Trump tariffs is the strategy inherent to each. Trump’s tariffs do not seem to amount to any sort of regime or logic—there is clearly an impulse to apply them universally, but the rates are up and down on a whim. Canada is threatened with tariffs over plans to recognize a Palestinian state. Brazil gets slammed with a 50% rate for court proceedings against the former president. India, likewise, is slapped with an identical 50% rate for buying Russian oil—while Russia’s other customers in Europe and China receive no consequences. Resulting is a geopolitical shot string, and the consequences to American hegemony will take years to reckon with. Suffice to say, the only constancy to Trump’s approach is uncertainty itself—and that’s the one thing multinational conglomerates and their army of lobbyists loathe.
Why Tariffs?
But Trump, consummate capitalist that he is, would not maximize market uncertainty or collapse American hegemony or create capital blockages and suppress consumption intentionally. In fact, the Trump White House believes that tariffs will have the opposite effects from those listed here: capital will consolidate at home, jobs and domestic consumption will boom and American hegemony will rejuvenate, the world dancing to Washington’s ultimatums, the market nurtured under the eagle’s wing. So how does this play out?
As with most everything concerning the motion of capitalism, Marx and Engels addressed thisquestion of duties back in the Victorian era. Engels:
Protection is at best an endless screw, and you never know when you have done with it. By protecting one industry, you directly or indirectly hurt all others, and have therefore to protect them too…By taxing raw materials, it raises the price of the articles manufactured from them; by taxing food, it raises the price of labour. In both ways, it places the manufacturer at a disadvantage compared to his foreign competitor.
We see this observation playing out in real time. Food costs are up over the early months of the Trump administration and will increase further with tariffs. Producer inflation is soaring as the cost of economic inputs rise. Automakers are shedding billions, largely due to tariffs on necessary steel and aluminum. For the crown jewel in American capitalism’s catalogue of death—the F-35 stealth fighter—prices have rocketed upward thanks to the higher cost of raw materials. No sooner does Trump clamour for weapons sales and he raises the price of everything across the entire defence industry!
Marx, likewise, saw free trade as hastening a country’s “accumulation and concentration of capital” with workers being hurt by “greater use of machinery” in production. What this has meant for the United States is a bloated credit and debt system, a largely automated manufacturing sector and an abundance of monopolistic financial firms and multinational conglomerates that export their capital around the world looking to realize profits in the American market. It’s as if Trump’s tariffs are meant to throw wrenches into the wheels of the economy that are turning well, while doing nothing to jumpstart the others. The motivation for American protectionism is similar to what Engels described in England in 1888: “She is relatively losing ground, while her rivals are making progress.” America is losing its sole superpower status and “it is to stave off this impending fate that Protection, scarcely disguised under the veil of ‘fair trade’ and retaliatory tariffs, is now invoked with such fervour.”
Wither the Empire?
When Trump opened a trade war against China during his first term, the Chinese looked outward. Since U.S. tariffs came into effect in 2018, the value of Chinese exports has increased by 50%, they became the top automotive seller in the world and they are the top trading partner to 150 countries. Now that Trump has launched a trade war against the entire world, China sees an even greater opportunity. They have unilaterally implemented a zero-tariff policy for all of the world’s least developed countries plus the entire continent of Africa. As students of Marxian economics, China has taken steps to suppress the financial capital system that has ravaged the American Main Street, instead directing investments into the productive sectors of their economy and expanding its global Belt-and-Road Initiative. China has made moves to bolster trade with India, Vietnam, the European Union and Britain, while strengthening relations with Latin America and the rest of the Global South. Renewable energy and automation technologies—key pillars of a future socialist economy—are progressing at rapid speed. China is almost single-handedly lowering global emissions while the West languishes under the shock of American protectionism.
What are the future results of Trump’s tariffs? We will not know in the near term. Trump may not even live long enough to find out. But he probably won’t like the answer.
Thanks for reading!
Footnotes:
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. ↩︎
