America's and China's Trade War

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?