the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
We publish workplace bulletins every two weeks. Below is the most recent editorial from our workplace newsletters. Older editorials are linked to the right.
Apr 6, 2025
Donald Trump announced Wednesday he was imposing tariffs on incoming goods from most of the world’s countries. He said they were ‘reciprocal’ tariffs, pretending that the tariffs he imposes, essentially taxes, were the same as what each country imposes on the U.S.
Not true! In fact, the formula Trump showed everyone had nothing to do with what other countries set as taxes on the U.S. Instead, a made-up number was devised. It was based on what the trade deficit with each country might be. Somehow, this tariff amount is supposed to magically re-balance the trade deficit that the U.S. has with countries where tariffs are threatened.
This tariff policy makes no sense. All economists agree that it does not address the U.S. trade imbalance. Each tariff is a number that underlings were told to come up with.
But make no mistake, Trump’s tariffs are just another step in the ongoing process of attacking the working class. Trump represents the billionaires. Protectionism, or tariffs, are designed to protect billionaires—not workers.
Trump is very clearly orchestrating what he likes to see, with every inch of his tiny ego. He loves to see the world bend the knee to his declarations, and he loves to see the world crawl and bow to him. He even said, “Every country is calling us. That’s the beauty of what we do. We put ourselves in the driver’s seat. If we would have asked these countries to do us a favor, they would have said no. Now, they will do anything for us.”
That’s part of what’s going on. But it is not everything. Trump, no matter the heavy-handed way he is going about it, is addressing a very real issue that the world bourgeoisie has been wrestling with for decades.
The U.S. has been the world’s preeminent economic and military power since World War II. It established a world order that put the U.S. on top, with European countries as its junior partners, since then. But that post-war order has been breaking down.
The world’s economy has been weakening since at least the economic crisis of 2008, when the U.S. mortgage crisis threw the entire world into a deep recession. Ever since then, the world’s capitalist classes have been wrangling to get ahead of each other, and the post-war order has been fraying. This is what Trump is actually responding to, in his stupid and heavy-handed way. Trump just declared that the U.S. will flex its economic muscles to reinforce that the U.S. is still the top dog in the world.
And despite pretending this will help workers, everything Trump is doing is done to ensure that the capitalist class is protected. The working class here and around the world will be made to pay for the attacks the ruling class brings about.
Everything Trump is doing is designed to shift blame for the bad economy that workers face, onto the different parts of the working class. Everything he’s doing is designed to get one group of the working class to blame another, for the loss of living standard that workers are feeling here and all around the world.
In the first place, those taxes will be felt by working people when we buy anything that has been imported, in higher prices. And you can bet that companies will find a way to raise their prices, even if they are not impacted by tariffs!
But in the second place, these tariffs are a way to blame workers in other countries for the attacks we have been experiencing right here. Workers have not lost jobs primarily because they have gone overseas; we have lost jobs because the major companies have been cutting jobs and making the people still working do more! But all the focus has been on this idea that workers overseas have been taking “our jobs".
But this is not a war for workers: wherever they live, workers will pay the extra costs and risk losing jobs, before being thrown into the war altogether.
More than ever: workers around the world need to unite against our capitalists!