From trade war to world war
The trade war promoted today by Trump’s United States is clear proof that we are living under the imperialist phase of capitalism, the phase of transnational monopolies, which—as Lenin said—has opened an era of “crises, wars, and revolutions.”
First of all, it must be clarified, as we have already demonstrated in due course, that neither Russia nor China are new imperialist powers. They cannot be so when their GDP per capita is today barely half the GDP per capita of Portugal, the most backward colonial power in Europe. What has happened is that uneven and combined development led imperialist investments to Russia, and above all to China, in order to exploit cheap labor, indirectly producing the industrial development of some of their main cities—a situation later used by the State to invest abroad, always as a junior partner of the U.S., Western Europe, and Japan.
Proof of this is what occurred in Iraq, where a Chinese state-owned company today owns half of its oil following the Yankee invasion of 2003. Another proof is Peru, where the U.S. imposed its Free Trade Agreement in 2006, and only three years later China imposed its own under the government of Alan García, a direct agent of Washington. Thus, the Chinese State—not its almost non-existent financial capital—acts as a junior partner of the U.S. in its global incursions, a partnership cooked up between Mao himself and Nixon in the 1970s and consolidated by Deng Xiaoping and Carter in the 1980s. The Tiananmen massacre of 1989 was precisely meant to show imperialism that the Chinese Stalinists would be good watchdogs for its investments.
What Trump is really doing is breaking this pact, preparing the conditions for a military intervention against China under the pretext of protecting its quasi-colony of Taiwan. And he does this with an eye toward his future clash with his true rival power: Germany. Indeed, German financial capital has already set in motion the rearmament of its Armed Forces and is preparing to dispute world dominance with the U.S. and its junior partner, China. As its new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, recently said: “Germany is back.” And in this it not only has the support of the new right-wing Alternative for Germany, but also of the so-called “Social Democratic” Party, long since transformed into a bourgeois imperialist party.
In this scenario, the U.S. alliance with Russia only seeks to separate it from Western Europe in order to fight the latter under better conditions. Russia, which cannot even prevail over a poor country like Ukraine, can only play the role of a semi-colonial pawn in the future Third World War that is approaching. The current tariff war that the U.S. has declared on the entire world, and which could trigger a global recession, is therefore preparatory to a new world war—a war that will pit the real powers that dominate the global economy against each other.
The years of globalization ideology and of reformist stupidity such as Empire and Multitude are over. The old colonial States have taken off the costume of citizens of the global village and are openly declaring war on one another. This is how capitalism functions in its old age: with supposedly “free-trade” periods that never really are, and openly protectionist periods that foreshadow crashes, conflagrations, and insurrections. The statistical trick of the bourgeoisie has always consisted in transforming the temporary tendency of a given period into the advent of a new era.
They refuse to understand that the only qualitative change possible under current conditions is the transition to world socialism. That is the only path available to working humanity if it is not to sink into a new global conflagration.
DOWN WITH IMPERIALIST WARS!
LET US REFOUND THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL!
