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Vol. 82/No. 12 March 19, 2018
(front page)
Free trade or protectionism: Workers go to the wall either way
BY SETH GALINSKY
The Wall Street Journal calls President Donald Trump’s proposed hefty
tariffs on steel and aluminum imports “the biggest policy blunder of his
presidency.” The tariffs — announced on the pretense of protecting
“American” jobs — “will benefit a handful of companies,” the Journal
asserts, but lead to layoffs at others.
MarketWatch, a Dow Jones website, took the opposite view. “Tariffs on
steel, aluminum are long overdue,” Robert Scott writes, and are needed
to protect U.S. bosses from “unfair trade.”
Capitalist trade policy — free trade or protection — always favors some
section of the bosses at home and abroad at the expense of others. Far
from benefiting, workers “go to the wall” either way, Karl Marx
explained over 170 years ago.
The Huffington Post tried to have it both ways. The left-liberal news
site complains that the new tariffs don’t go far enough in putting the
hurt on bosses in China, but mistakenly harms “allies” in Canada and the
European Union.
Chinese companies produce more than 800 million metric tons of steel a
year, the Post complains, compared to just over 70 million made by U.S.
bosses. U.S. companies charge that their Chinese competitors dump their
“excess” production at super-cheap prices.
United Steelworkers union officials jump on the bandwagon, fearing their
dues-paying membership might decline as a result. They back the bosses
on this instead of mobilizing workers to unite, stand up to the bosses
and offer solidarity across borders.
“Steelworkers and Ohio Lawmakers Welcome Trump’s Tariff on Dumped Steel”
was the headline in the March 2 People’s World, the internet-only
newspaper of the Communist Party USA. The article favorably quotes
United Steelworkers President Leo Gerard, who uses pro-imperialist
rhetoric to back the tariffs. “Hard-working Americans,” Gerard said,
“expect national security, the foundation of which is built with steel
and aluminum, to be protected.”
Politicians of both capitalist parties line up depending on which bosses
live in their area. “You’d expect a policy this bad from a leftist
administration, not a supposedly Republican one,” Nebraska Republican
Sen. Ben Sasse said. Like other tariff opponents, he worries it could
set off a “trade war” that would harm corporate farmers and big business
in Nebraska.
Trump’s response? U.S. capitalists would win any trade war. History
teaches workers that trade wars have a way of turning into shooting
wars, and the working class would be the cannon fodder.
Stance of class-conscious workers
What stance should class-conscious workers take?
The bosses push their trade policies as what’s “good for America.” But
there is no abstract America — there are two major classes here, as
elsewhere, with diametrically opposed interests. On one side are the
capitalists and on the other the working class that owns nothing but its
labor power.
“We start with the interests of the working class, which is an
international class,” Socialist Workers Party National Secretary Jack
Barnes said in “Our Politics Start with the World,” published in New
International no. 13. “We’re unconditionally opposed to the rulers of
the United States imposing protectionist barriers of any kind under any
pretext on imported goods.”
“We do everything possible to expose the ‘free trade’ demagogy of
finance capital,” Barnes said. “It aims to advance the national
interests of the exploiting class, including balancing the conflicting
profit needs of capitalist sectors that are vulnerable to competition on
the world market to quite different degrees.” That’s why you get bosses
on both sides of the issue.
“Under the banner of free trade, the U.S. government uses so-called
antidumping clauses, ‘environmental’ and ‘labor standards’ restrictions,
‘human rights’ demagogy, and other measures to carry out brutal and
aggressive trade wars not only against its imperialist rivals,” Barnes
says, “but with special ferocity against the semicolonial countries.”
The U.S. rulers and all the big capitalist powers have clawed their way
to the top of the heap by plunder of the semicolonial world. The
imperialist powers buy up the raw materials and products of light
industry from semicolonial countries at low prices and sell back the
finished products to them at higher prices. And high interest loans sink
those countries deeper in debt.
The workings of the world capitalist market guarantee the looting of the
semicolonial world, Barnes explains, not primarily due to “unfair” terms
of trade, but as a result of “the differential value of labor power and
the gap in productivity of labor between the imperialist countries on
the one hand and those oppressed and exploited by imperialism on the
other — a differential that not only underlies unequal exchange but
relentlessly reproduces and increases it.”
That’s why class-conscious workers back efforts by oppressed nations to
protect their economies.
The capitalist rulers use both free trade and protectionism to try to
outsell their rivals. Most trade deals — like the North America Free
Trade Agreement and the failed Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact
advocated by Barack Obama — combine both.
We can’t let the bosses pit us against each other. We need to offer
solidarity to fellow workers around the world and refuse to be suckered
into the nationalist anti-free trade campaigns.
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