World
capitalism creates so many problems it is hard to know which one to
focus upon. While most issues affecting the capitalist class do not
affect the vital interests of the working class, they invariably
serve the purpose of confusing the working class and, more important,
of distorting or concealing entirely what workers' interests really
are. Workers do not own the state or the industries, and they have no
meaningful say over either of them.
American
capitalism was built behind a wall of 19th-century protective
tariffs, and that was the century in which it stripped most of our
forests and much of our other natural resources away. Trump seeks to
repeat the past and today he cries out for protective tariffs to keep
foreign commodities off U.S. markets. Other capitalists protest such
protectionalism because American business enterprises, by and large,
is more competitive than its foreign rivals. It is more competitive
because American labor, on the whole, is still the most productive ,
which is only another way of saying that American capital exploits
American labor more efficiently than any of its rivals. There are
exceptions, such as the steel industry, of course, and where Trump
deemed it expedient apply certain protective measures.
As for the
Chinese “threat”, the World Socialist Party of the United States takes a back seat to no one
when it comes to supporting the rights of workers to organize,
politically and economically, to defend themselves against their
oppressors and exploiters and to advance their own interests. China,
despite its socialist pretensions, is a dictatorship dominated by a
despotic ruling class. Are Chinese workers -- and by implication, the
workers of other developing countries -- right to worry about losing
their jobs to cheap America imports produced by cheap American labor? Yes, they are. U.S. workers put in the longest hours on the
job in industrialized nations, they take fewer vacations and get less
paid sick-days. Just who are the coolies and the sweat-shop
wage-slaves?
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