EDITORIAL
Economic Crisis, Trade War and Shooting War

Apr 18, 2025

Donald Trump’s plan to place sweeping new tariffs on almost every country and island in the entire world has disrupted trade and sowed economic chaos. Workers now face more big price hikes on food, clothes, cars, insurance, etc. There are already signs of more job cuts, bankruptcies and plant closings. Retirees also risk their retirement savings going up in smoke, as Wall Street’s promised safe investments blow up.

Trump’s promises about bringing jobs back to the U.S. by putting up trade barriers are complete nonsense. The economy long ago outgrew national borders. Big companies like Boeing, GM, Ford, Exxon, Walmart, Coke, Pepsi--you name it--operate on a world scale. The famous iPhone, for example, is a product of the entire world, with materials, components and software produced in dozens of countries on every continent. The same is true of distribution, services and sales. And there’s no going back.

What should represent a huge step forward for humanity instead only brings more suffering, poverty and wars to the working class. The entire world economy is under the control of a tiny minority, the capitalist class, which uses that control to increase its own profits and wealth off the backs of the working class and the plunder of the world’s resources

It’s true that jobs are disappearing in the U.S. and workers’ standard of living is dropping. But it isn’t because jobs are going overseas. Workers everywhere face job cuts and worsening exploitation. And in the poorer countries it is much worse than it is here, with civil wars and famines that force people to uproot themselves and migrate to other countries in order to survive.

The tariffs and trade barriers are just one more symptom of this worsening crisis. In fact, they are going up everywhere in the world. When the global economic pie stops growing, individual capitalists rely on their own governments to fight to defend their own private interests. Workers all over the world are paying the price. All Trump has done, given his “me-first” style, is greatly aggravate the situation.

And that’s not all. “A tariff is an act of war,” said Warren Buffett, one of the richest billionaires on the planet. “It may not draw blood immediately, but make no mistake--it’s an act of aggression that invites retaliation.”

That’s what history shows. The trade wars and tariff barriers of the 1930s Depression were the prelude to World War II. So, too, have Trump’s rapidly escalating tariff barriers against China brought the two biggest economic powers into a head-to-head confrontation. No one knows how it will end. But it certainly brings the possibility of an all-out war much, much closer. This is a war that the U.S. government has been already preparing for, surrounding China with its own military forces, as well as those of its allies. The Chinese government has responded with its own military build-up.

They are turning the economy into a wartime economy, with big hikes in military spending. Working people pay for this, while the capitalist class fattens its profits off military contracts.

The cuts carried out by Musk and DOGE are just the beginning of planned cuts to jobs and social programs to make the working class pay for this war. Trump’s attacks on immigrants and dissenters, the growing powers of the police and government authorities, are also a preparation for war.

This is sheer madness. But it is a madness that comes out of the very functioning, the very logic of the capitalist system and its organization of society. And it is proof that the capitalist system has far outlived its “expiration date,” and that the working class has got to get rid of it.