Behind Trump Tariffs Is Capital’s Warfare Against the Working Class – William Robinson/truthout
“Trumpism seeks to profoundly restructure state power into a more direct instrument of capitalist domination under fascist leadership, involving a vast expansion and concentration of presidential power. The goal is to expunge the remaining elements of the ‘great class compromise’ that emerged during the Great Depression of the 1930s and resulted in the New Deal, or the social democratic welfare state. Under Trump, U.S. members of the TCC (transnational capitalist class) have seized even more direct control of the state. Trump has tapped an unprecedented 13 billionaires for his administration and appointed the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, as unelected co-president. Corporations and billionaires — especially from the tech, financial and energy sectors — funneled unprecedented millions into the Trump Inaugural Committee in order to ensure that their interests would be represented…
“Nonetheless, Trumpism 2.0 is a fundamentally contradictory program. Trump is a Frankenstein, a monster conjured up by transnational capital’s reliance on the state to keep mass discontent under control and to resolve the problem of chronic stagnation. The TCC wants to have its cake and eat it too. It may embrace Trumpism for its plans to compress wages and control workers, to deregulate and cut taxes on capital and the rich. But it is doubtful that Trump’s trade wars will actually succeed in convincing transnational capitalists to relocate production to U.S. territory. The TCC has consistently opposed protectionism and state interference in accumulation strategies. Capital’s rationale for going global was to escape any national constraints on its worldwide freedoms and it has no intention of returning to the confines of the nation-state.”
Meanwhile, China’s communist rulers may be reviving the reputation of the country’s capitalist elite: