President Donald Trump threatened to levy sizable tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico, seeking to achieve a political goal — to force their governments to send troops to more tightly secure their borders with the U.S., to cut down on immigration and drug trafficking. His protectionist threats prepare the ground for further conflicts between the three governments.
He also increased the tariffs that Washington imposes on Chinese products, as it tries to push back the Chinese capitalists’ expanding reach worldwide.
Clashes like these play a special role in the imperialist epoch, as national ruling classes are driven to compete for markets to secure their own survival at the expense of their rivals. There are no new sources of raw materials and markets in today’s world. Sharpening trade conflicts preceded the slaughter of World Wars I and II, as the imperialist powers fought to redivide the world to their advantage.
Washington, the weakening but still dominant imperialist power, uses both free trade and protection to advance the U.S. rulers’ efforts to outsell their rivals. Karl Marx, the founder of modern communism, explained that whichever trade policy capitalist governments pursue, workers “go to the wall” either way.
The U.S. rulers always try to mask their trade policies as a defense of our common “American interests.” But the U.S. is class-divided: bosses on one side and workers on the other. Our fundamental interests are counterposed, a division that underlies all political questions. The capitalists’ foreign policies advance their class interests against ruling families abroad in battles over which of them gets to appropriate the biggest hunk of the wealth workers produce.
Workers have an opposite class standpoint. Our advance cannot be based on competition with fellow workers elsewhere, but on the common interests we share. We are part of the one truly international class.
The labor movement needs its own working-class foreign policy, one based on solidarity with struggles of fellow workers and oppressed peoples worldwide. Its number one opponent is the bosses and bankers here at home. A working-class foreign policy would call for an end to the crushing debts imperialism imposes on governments in the semicolonial world and would back struggles for national independence.
Trade conflicts do lead toward shooting wars, including worldwide cataclysms like in 1914 and 1939, but only if the capitalist rulers find a way to turn the working class into cannon fodder. This can’t happen without explosive class battles taking place first in which workers will have the opportunity to take power.
The imperialist system is marching toward fascism and a third world war. Organizing our own political party, a party of labor, to lead workers’ struggles today and to organize to take power from the capitalist warmakers is the road forward for working people.
On that basis workers worldwide can join hands in the struggle for a socialist world, ending capitalist exploitation, national conflicts and the bloody wars that threaten the existence of all humanity.
This revolutionary working-class perspective is at the heart of the Socialist Workers Party campaigns for office around the country in 2025.