Tariffs as Bourgeois Warfare

Class Struggle in the Guise of Trade Policy

 

By Debashis Chakrabarti

When Donald Trump announced a 25% tariff on Canadian steel and Mexican automobiles in March 2025, he stood before American workers and declared it a patriotic stand for “economic sovereignty.” In reality, it was nothing of the sort. These tariffs—like those before them—are not measures of protection but of plunder. They are the blunt instruments of a rotting global capitalism desperate to stave off its own contradictions by sowing division among workers and entrenching monopoly power.

Behind the red, white, and blue bunting of "America First" is the cold logic of class warfare.

Economic Nationalism as Theatrics for Capital

Trump’s trade war is not a rupture from capitalist orthodoxy—it is its grim perfection. Wrapped in the spectacle of economic nationalism, the tariffs were sold as a rebuke to “globalist elites” and a lifeline to the American heartland. But the numbers betray the lie.

The steel and aluminium tariffs imposed during Trump’s first term cost U.S. consumers billions. Washing machine tariffs alone spiked prices by 12%, benefitting Whirlpool shareholders while squeezing working-class families. These are not anomalies—they are the intended effect. As the Federal Reserve Bank of New York made clear in 2019, tariffs operate as “a transfer from consumers to protected industries.” A subsidy for monopolies masquerading as a defense of labor.

But even this transfer is unequal. The largest corporate players carve out exemptions while workers foot the bill. The Congressional Research Service confirmed what many already suspected: higher costs for everyday goods, job losses in export-dependent sectors, and no evidence of long-term job gains in tariff-protected industries.

This isn’t protectionism. It’s extraction—of profit from labor, of discipline from dependency, and of obedience from economic desperation.

The Global South: Collateral in an Imperial Game

If the American working class is collateral damage in this war, the Global South is the primary battleground. Consider India: facing threats of reciprocal tariffs, the Modi government dutifully lowered duties on everything from steel scrap to cancer drugs. In exchange, it received a hollow promise of preferential trade terms—while being nudged to abandon Russian arms deals and pivot toward American suppliers.

This isn’t trade; it’s tutelage. Tariffs, in the neocolonial playbook, function as tools of geopolitical discipline. The United States weaponizes its economic power to force strategic realignments, displace Chinese influence, and tether nations to its own supply chains.

The outcome is tragically familiar. Raw resources extracted from the Global South; value-added goods dumped back in. India slashed apple tariffs from 50% to 15%, while opening markets to American dairy. Mexican workers face massive job losses, with 3.6% of the national workforce threatened. Canada, whose economy is tethered to U.S. exports, stares down a similar abyss.

This is not a rules-based system. It is an imperial order in decline, metastasizing into ever more volatile forms.

Tariffs and the Contradictions of Capital

What Trump’s tariffs reveal is not merely poor economic foresight but the underlying irrationality of capitalist trade. The OECD projects that Trump’s trade war will shave off 0.72% of U.S. GDP, 1.3% of Mexico’s, and 0.64% of Canada’s. Goldman Sachs warns of a 35% chance of recession. The IMF, usually a cheerleader for market liberalization, concedes that tariffs throttle innovation and growth.

What these institutions tiptoe around, Marxist theory lays bare: capitalist trade is not about mutual benefit but the global extraction of surplus value. Tariffs, rather than anomalies, are mechanisms to consolidate capital in fewer hands by destabilizing others.

The contradiction is total: the system claims to reward efficiency, yet tariffs insulate inefficiencies. It claims to foster competition, yet rewards monopolies. And it claims to serve workers, even as it sacrifices them.

The promise of “reshoring” American industry—an idea both parties now parrot—is pure fantasy. Tariffs cannot conjure back industries long offshored to low-wage economies. Nor can they outpace automation. If capital can replace workers with machines, it will. If it can offshore to Vietnam or exploit gig labor at home, it will.

Tariffs, in this framework, are not tools of economic planning but of crisis management—a desperate, nationalist bid to keep capital accumulation on life support.

Trade Wars as Class Wars

From the tenant farmer in Uttar Pradesh to the auto worker in Tijuana to the barista in Detroit, the story is the same: the global working class is being held hostage by a system in terminal decline. Capitalism, far from producing shared prosperity, has weaponized scarcity to divide workers by nationality, pit them against one another, and fragment collective resistance.

Trump’s trade war is not a deviation from this logic—it is its most honest expression.

In the late 19th century, U.S. tariffs reduced productivity by over 30%, as monopolies entrenched themselves and innovation declined. In the 21st century, we see the same pattern: corporate consolidation, regulatory capture, and wage stagnation.

The cycle is familiar: the crisis hits, the ruling class blames “foreign competition,” and the answer is tariffs. Then come the layoffs, the bailouts, and the deflection of rage downward—onto migrants, minorities, and “outsiders.” It is the oldest trick in the capitalist playbook.

Breaking the Cycle: Toward Proletarian Internationalism

The answer to trade wars is not fairer trade. It is not a gentler capitalism. The answer is global class solidarity—a politics that sees through the nationalist mystifications of both Trumpian right-populism and liberal market fundamentalism.

Three strategic interventions are urgent:

1. Democratize Production: Key industries—energy, healthcare, tech—must be placed under collective, worker-led control. Planning must replace profiteering. 

2. Dismantle Capitalist Institutions: The WTO and IMF are not neutral bodies; they are enforcers of global inequality. New international institutions, accountable to workers not capital, must rise in their place. 

3. Build Transnational Labor Power: Trade unions in Detroit, Dhaka, and Durban face the same enemy: capital. It is time for coordinated strikes, mutual aid networks, and international labor agreements that can pressure states and corporations alike.

The EU’s drift toward China in response to U.S. tariffs does not herald a new world—it merely shifts the axis of exploitation. A genuinely emancipatory internationalism must transcend these rival imperialisms altogether.

Beyond Tariffs, Beyond Capitalism

What lies ahead is not a policy challenge but a civilizational reckoning. Tariffs are not the root of the crisis—they are a symptom of a system that has exhausted its legitimacy. A system that has made war on workers, commodified the planet, and now offers only austerity and authoritarianism in return.

We must not mourn its decay. We must organize its replacement.

The global working class has the numbers, the tools, and the historical clarity to forge a new order—one in which trade is not a battlefield but a commons. One in which value flows from need, not profit. And one in which solidarity replaces scarcity as the organizing principle of political life.

As the old world burns, the task is not to reform it. 

The task is to bury it.

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Debashis Chakrabarti is a political economist and commentator writing on global labor struggles and the crisis of neoliberalism.