When Trump announced the reintroduction of tariffs, blanket 10% on most imports, rising to 20% for the EU, and up to 60% for Chinese goods, the reaction from liberal economists was predictable. Market instability, consumer price hikes, supply chain disruptions, the usual warnings. What’s more interesting is what wasn’t said: that this is not an aberration, but a sharpening of contradictions long latent in the global economy, a symptom of capital eating itself.
Marxists might be tempted to shrug. Protectionism is not new, and the working class has never truly benefited from either open markets or closed borders. Free trade, after all, is simply the ideology of one phase of capital accumulation; tariffs, another. The question is not whether Trump’s tariffs are good or bad policy, but what they reveal about the current stage of capitalism and the strategies of a wounded bourgeoisie facing political decomposition at home and economic fragmentation abroad.
Tariffs are often presented as nationalist instruments, but they are imperial tools as well. Trump’s “Liberation Tariffs” as one Fox anchor grotesquely styled them, do not aim to decouple the US from the world market. They aim to restructure the world market in ways more favourable to US capital, or at least to factions of it. The contradictions within the American ruling class are on full display here. Tech and finance recoil, manufacturing and fossil capital applaud. One faction sees its future in flows, data, capital, people; the other in walls and stockpiles.
For the British left, watching from the sidelines of post-Brexit decline, it’s tempting to view all this as yet another act in the American farce. But the economic consequences are global. Inflation in the UK is already back above 5% thanks in part to retaliatory trade measures and the higher cost of US goods, from cars to semiconductors. Jaguar Land Rover has already paused all shipments to the US. The EU’s threatened counter-tariffs will likely be shaped not to hurt the US, but to buffer German industry. Britain, caught between blocs, will pay the highest price while being the least able to respond.
We have seen this before. Marx and Engels wrote, in the Communist Manifesto, of how the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production and thereby the relations of production. Trump’s tariffs are not an attempt to reverse globalisation; they are an attempt to reorganise it along more coercive and militarised lines. Just as the US is shifting from soft hegemony to hard containment geopolitically (with China), it is also experimenting with new forms of economic domination, what we might call tariff-state capitalism. The goal is not autarky1, but a new hierarchy of dependency.
These are not the policies of confidence. They are the policies of a dominant class in decline. But as with all declines, they can be brutal, and carry the seeds of new authoritarian (neo-fascist) formations. Tariffs are being sold to the MAGA base as patriotic retribution, a kind of economic vengeance for decades of betrayal. It is not accidental that the tariff speech was given with images of American construction workers in front of Trump. This is the aesthetic of protectionism as masculinity, rigid borders, hard bodies, strong men.
Should Marxists be worried? Not in the sense of defending the old neoliberal order, free trade, the ‘rules-based’ global system, the decades-long consensus of capital in motion. But we should be alarmed by the direction of travel. Tariffs, in this context, are not tools of sovereign economic planning. They are weapons of class war, wielded by a parasitic bourgeoisie desperate to sustain legitimacy through spectacle and scapegoating. They will hurt workers everywhere, but especially in the Global South, as trade shrinks and remittances dry up.
There is a caution here for British politics too. Rachel Reeves has already gestured toward her own version of economic nationalism—‘securonomics’—but it is a form without force, slogans without substance. Starmer’s Labour will either follow the US into deeper protectionist rivalry or be punished for not doing so. And in both cases, the class character of policy will be the same: shelter for capital, exposure for labour.
What is needed is not a defence of globalisation, but an internationalist strategy rooted in working-class solidarity across borders. The antidote to Trump’s tariffs is not a better class of capitalist, but a politics that breaks with the logic of capital altogether.
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Footnotes
- Autarky, the fantasy of economic self-sufficiency, is what states reach for when the global circuits of capital begin to fray. It promises independence but delivers scarcity and repression. Rather than a rupture with capitalism, it signals its mutation: from expansive accumulation to bunker mentality, from exploitation abroad to intensified discipline at home. ↩︎
