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
Apr 28, 2025
The current tariff fight that Trump is carrying out isn’t just Trump. Tariffs have been going up all over the world at the fastest pace since the Great Depression. When Biden was president, he kept all of Trump’s tariffs from Trump’s first term in office, then added on to them. As for the left-wing Democrats, like Bernie Sanders, they have always blamed NAFTA for the loss of manufacturing jobs. Today, the Democrats’ only criticism of Trump is the chaotic nature of how Trump has been doing it, claiming that the tariffs should be more targeted.
According to the politicians and the big news media, tariffs are being imposed in order to address a dramatic loss of manufacturing in this country, what they often call deindustrialization. To illustrate this decline, they compare the percentage of manufacturing jobs to the rest of the work force, and look at how this has changed over time.
In fact, this is really misleading. They don’t show that the number of jobs is declining, which is what this argument seems to say. It doesn’t show that industrial production is declining in this country—which is what most people today believe. But that is not at all true.
By the end of World War II, production was really booming. Then, it increased pretty constantly, with temporary drops during periods of recession. That happened all the way up to 2008, during the Great Recession, when there was a substantial drop. After that, there was something of a recovery. There was another big drop in 2020 during the Covid shutdown, and then a recovery to about the same level, if not a little more. There has been little meaningful growth in industrial production since 2008—which is a sign of a worsening economic crisis, more than anything else.
Actual industrial production is ten times higher today than at the end of World War II. See the chart below. And it is twice as high as it was in 1980. During this whole period, we were being told that production was in a steep decline, that the U.S. was swamped by imports, that we don’t make anything anymore in this country, that everything is made in Japan, or China or Mexico—BUT actual industrial production continued to go up.
We are not trying to paint a pretty picture here. We are not trying to say that things are really great when things are awful. Things are awful. There has been a tremendous amount of deindustrialization. Entire regions have been gutted. But the real reason for this has to do with the chaotic nature of how capitalism operates.
The biggest elimination of steel jobs is due to the change in technology. Old integrated steel mills have been replaced by mini-mills that operate with electric arc furnaces. In the process, steel mills close in one part of the country and open in another and nine-tenths of the steelworker jobs are eliminated.
There is very little underground coal mining. Instead, giant machines take off the tops of mountains and other giant machines scoop out giant amounts of coal in open pits, thereby destroying most coal mining jobs.
The Detroit 3 auto companies gave up their monopoly control over the U.S. car market in order to concentrate on only the production of the most profitable segments of the car market. So, auto manufacturers owned by Asian and European companies produce cars today—but in different regions of the country. At the same time, auto companies contracted out much of the work that they used to do in-house to other companies, with the contractors often operating in the very same plant as the company workers, for much lower wages and benefits. And, at the same time, the work is being done not just in one country, but it is being done all over the world, with a worldwide division of labor. So, the companies are constantly shifting the work and the workforce, in the process destroying millions and millions of jobs.
We can go on and on…. Older industries die out, or move out of the country. But they are replaced by other industries. There might be less light manufacture, such as garment, but there is more high-tech manufacture, more airplanes, military goods, MRI machines, more manufacture of machines that make machines. Etc.
There is one constant in all this chaos: the growth of productivity. There is more work being done—but with fewer and fewer workers. Since 1945, worker productivity increased by between four and five times. Put another way, a worker today produces what five workers used to produce in 1945.
But the workers didn’t benefit from these productivity gains.
Sure, there was an increase in living standards after World War II, as the employers tried to buy labor peace, confronted by a working class that still had a tradition of striking, along with a gigantic movement of the black population, that is, the most oppressed sections of the working class. But that increase was temporary. And it coincided with a brief period after World War II when the economy was still expanding to make up for all the war’s destruction. But all those gains went out the window after the economic crisis hit in the early 1970s.
The capitalists have used the workers’ productivity gains against the workers, imposing greater unemployment, more long-term joblessness and worse working conditions. The lives of millions of workers were ground up, destroyed, leading to worsening desperation and despair, worsening social ills and falling life expectancy.
This is not unique to the U.S. The same process is taking place all over the world—and yes, even in China, which has become celebrated as such an industrial and export powerhouse. An article in the New York Times on April 17 about the plight of workers in China says, “For China’s workers, financial security is further out of reach than ever.” As a result, increasing parts of the Chinese workforce have had to depend on a gig economy in order to survive, including delivery and ride share drivers. According to the Times, there were already 200 million people in the Chinese gig economy in 2020, and their number has been skyrocketing ever since.
Whether workers live in a country that has more exports or has more imports, their lives and living standards are still being ground up by the capitalist class. There is nothing normal about this in human terms. But it is the normal way the capitalist system functions.
Here is how Marx described what happens to workers during this constant churn of the workforce in the 1860s:
“The laborers that are thrown out of work in any branch of industry, can no doubt seek for employment in some other branch…. Even should they find employment, what a poor look-out is theirs! Crippled as they are by division of labor, these poor devils are worth so little outside their old trade, that they cannot find admission into any industries, except a few of inferior kind, that are over-supplied with underpaid workmen. Further, every branch of industry attracts each year a new stream of men, who furnish a contingent from which to fill up vacancies, and to draw a supply for expansion. So soon as machinery sets free a part of the workmen employed in a given branch of industry, the reserve men are also diverted into new channels of employment, and become absorbed in other branches; meanwhile the original victims, during the period of transition, for the most part starve and perish.”
Those lines could have been written to describe what’s happening to workers today. There is no let-up in the class war that the capitalist class wages on the working class. But the big difference is that when Marx was writing, the development of capitalism was increasing productive forces and thus laying the material foundations of a communist society, despite the barbaric way it was being done. What is happening today is much worse, because it is happening under a capitalist system that long ago stopped playing its positive role and is instead descending into barbarism.
Today, the government and the news media falsely claim that the loss of jobs, especially manufacturing jobs, is due to other countries lying and cheating. That is how they justify their big tariff increases and trade war. They want workers to ignore the class war and instead support their trade war. They want to convince the population that it is in the population’s interests to not only support that war, but to sacrifice for it, accept higher prices, more unemployment, still lower living standards.
And in the future, the capitalists expect the workers to give their lives in another shooting war. In other words, they want the workers to sacrifice in the interests of their own slave drivers and executioners. It’s what all the propaganda from the news media, the politicians, the economic experts, as well as the trade union apparatuses, is all about. If workers accept this, they will go down to destruction tied to their own capitalist class.
The world becomes a smaller and smaller place. There is too much productive capacity, too much money chasing too few productive investments. The clash between capitalist groups becomes more threatening and violent.
The rush to war is not exactly the same as it was for either World War I and World War II. Those wars were fought between imperialist powers to settle which power would be top dog. The U.S. was already the biggest and most powerful. But it was only beginning to impose its domination over the other imperialist powers. By the end of World War II, that process had been completed. U.S. imperialism had emerged as the predominant and unquestioned imperial superpower.
For a whole period, this domination kept the ongoing conflicts and competition between the different imperial powers from breaking out into the open, although often that competition played out in proxy wars fought in the poorer, underdeveloped countries. This period has been hailed by liberal apologists as a period of so-called peace, even though there was no peace, not ever.
The worsening of these conflicts, many of which are unending forever wars, such as the wars in the Middle East, the growing numbers of casualties and refugees fleeing those wars, are all signs of the breakdown and rot of this imperialist order.
Now, spurred by the worsening trade war, the conflict between the U.S. and different imperialist powers, along with Russia and China, are coming out into the open, and preparations for war are accelerating once again, both here and abroad.
We do not know in advance what this war will look like, how the sides will line up, or how quickly and to what extent the war will develop. But we do know that the potential for destruction and death is many times greater than anything we have seen before. The rapid advance of science and technology in the hands of the capitalist class increasingly yields only much more horrible engines of death and destruction.
On November 1, 1914, at the beginning of the first imperialist war, Lenin wrote: “Imperialism has placed the fate of European culture at stake. After this war, if a series of successful revolutions do not occur, more wars will follow. The fairy tale of a ‘war to end all wars’ is a hollow and pernicious fairy tale…”
In 1940, Trotsky wrote: “Workers, call this prediction to mind! The present war, the second imperialist war is not an accident; it does not result from the will of this or that dictator…. It derived its origin inexorably from the contradictions of international capitalist interests. Contrary to the official fables designed to drug the people, the chief cause of war as of all other social evils—unemployment, the high cost of living, fascism, colonial oppression—is the private ownership of the means of production together with the bourgeois state which rests on this foundation.”
But Trotsky also saw the way out of this disaster: “With the present level of technology and skill of the workers, it is quite possible to create adequate conditions for the material and spiritual development of all mankind. It would be necessary only to organize the economic life within each country and over our entire planet correctly, scientifically, and rationally, according to a general plan…. State power and domination of the economy can be torn from the hands of these rapacious imperialist cliques only by the revolutionary working class.”
That perspective is even more valuable today, when capitalism condemns most of humanity to a barbaric existence.