EDITORIAL
No to Free Trade!
No to Tariffs!
For a Working Class Policy Instead!

Mar 9, 2025

Trump’s on-again, off-again, on-again tariffs were called off—once again—just as the UAW supported what it called Trump’s “aggressive action” to end the “free trade disaster.”

Whatever Trump’s “aggressive action” finally will be, we can be sure that Trump will enrich himself. But his primary aim will be to let the capitalist class protect itself against the long-term economic crisis its own policies have created. And that has nothing to do with protecting workers’ jobs and standard of living, which grow worse by the month.

How did we get here? The UAW, like other unions, blames it on “free trade,” which supposedly shipped our jobs overseas, putting us in competition with low-paid workers in other countries, reducing our standard of living.

It’s true, the policy of U.S. capitalism ever since the end of World War II was to open up the whole world for its trade and investment. That eventually led to a global system of production and services organized by an increasingly global financial system.

Could this have benefited the peoples of the whole world? Well, the world’s resources taken altogether could be used to make production and distribution more efficient. But this system was organized on a capitalist basis, so they were used to let the capitalist class amass more profit, profit stolen from the work of the world’s laboring population, leading to greater impoverishment.

And that includes here. The U.S. may be the wealthiest country in the world, but the average standard of living is lower here than in most other developed countries. Life expectancy is shorter. Access to food, habitation and medical care is worse. And the gap between the very wealthy and the rest of the population is bigger here than elsewhere, and growing bigger by the year.

Why did it happen this way? It wasn’t fated.

Look to history. When the world was reconstructed after World War II, the working class might have used its forces to organize an economy whose aim was to benefit the population. But to do that, it would have had to organize its forces for a fight. It would have had to wrench control away from the capitalist class. In some countries it tried. But nowhere did the working class succeed.

And nowhere in the world did the unions ever propose it. They couldn’t imagine the working class might organize its forces to fight to get rid of capitalism and build a working-class power.

Instead, the unions called on workers to compete, to improve the situation of their own capitalists. Look overseas, they said, that’s supposedly where “our” jobs went.

"Our” jobs did not go “overseas.” They got lost in the push for greater labor productivity—and that’s how we still lose them today. So long as capitalism is in control, it pushes to use our own productivity against us to cut jobs.

Well, this time, things need to be different. This time, the workers need to fight for our own policy, which is neither “free trade,” nor “tariffs.” Whether or not the unions are ready, working people need to fight to keep the benefits from our own increasing productivity at work. It can be used to shorten the work day, used to give more vacation and days off, used to increase wages. Productivity can be used to organize work in a humane way.

When Trump says he will “make America great again,” he doesn’t mean America. He means American capitalism. Sucking up to Trump, the UAW is ready to hide that fact of life. Just like it did over the years, when it worked to tie the working class to Biden and Obama.

We don’t need a capitalist America. We need an America the working class will create—which will be part of a socialist world that workers everywhere will build.