EDITORIAL
Tariffs—Weapons in the Capitalists’ Wars

May 18, 2025

"Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, and maybe the dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally.”

That was Donald Trump, pretending that the problem with his tariffs boils down to unreasonable children, who want too many toys.

No, the problem is not greedy children. The problem is the greedy class of multi-billionaires like Trump. Their mania to amass more wealth has brought their financial system to the very edge of another collapse, like 2008–09, but worse.

These parasites feed on an enormously distorted economy, resting more on financial dealing than on productive investment in the goods and services the population needs. It’s an economy that no longer builds houses for ordinary families because there’s not enough profit in it. It no longer builds vehicles in this country that working people could afford to buy. It out-sourced even the making of dolls because there wasn’t enough profit in it. There was more money to be made in buying and selling stock, more money to be made in crypto-currency speculation.

But the multi-billionaires like Trump have driven their economy into a swamp, and they can’t get it back out. They want a government bail-out.

That’s what tariffs are—a bail-out for the capitalist class that has misdirected, disorganized, and super-expropriated the productive economy. Tariffs are a bail-out, just like the government budget is a bail-out, ratcheting money away from services the population needs, directing it to the capitalist class.

But let’s talk about tariffs. In simple words, a tariff is just a tax, like a sales tax. But it’s a special tax, tacked onto merchandise brought into another country for sale. The cost of this tax falls mostly on working people, because it’s been imposed on the things we buy. Given the current rate of tariffs set by the U.S. government, ordinary households will pay $2,800 extra this year.

On the scale of the world, the economy has been in a mess for decades. And the capitalists of different countries have been competing with each other to grab a bigger part of the world’s wealth for themselves. It’s a vicious economic war.

Workers all over the world pay the price for it. We pay the tariffs on what we buy. That’s why, in Trump’s world, children can’t have dolls. It’s also why children in many countries starve to death. It’s why families try to migrate.

All of this is part of the economic war. And working people pay the price for all of it. We pay the price when the capitalists push to get greater productivity out of us, no matter in which country we work. We all pay the price as each set of capitalists pushes to reduce the wages it pays. We all pay the price as money is drained away from public services and social services into things like tax cuts for the billionaire class.

No matter where we work, we are all caught today in the capitalists’ economic war.

We shouldn’t let ourselves be suckered into supporting one group of capitalists against the capitalists of other countries. They are all our enemies.

Twice before, the capitalist class pushed the world into an economic war like the one heating up today. And when that wasn’t enough for them, they took the peoples of the world into a shooting war. They are ready to do it again.

For workers, the worst thing would be to support our own set of capitalists who want us to line up behind them, condemning other countries, hating other people. All of this is a patriotic preparation, getting us ready to enlist in their shooting war tomorrow.

In this world, the only division that matters is the one that opposes the workers, who produce everything and keep everything running, to their exploiters, the capitalists who benefit from our labor.

The people of the world will have neither peace nor prosperity so long as the capitalists hold power. The workers have the capacity to throw the capitalists out. They are the only ones who can.