A Socialist Response to the New Trump Tariffs

Statement from the National Executive Committee (4/8/2025)

Last week the Trump Administration announced a series of sweeping tariffs on more or less every country on the planet, including even some territories inhabited only by penguins with no exports. This is the latest in a series of moves to impose higher costs on the countries with which the US trades. The effect these moves will have on the working class is crystal clear: they will make goods and the needs of everyday life more expensive. For many the rise in costs may be the margin that makes ends no longer meet, that forces them to choose between affording food or medicine, that makes them fall that much farther behind. All of the hardships an unnecessary trade war will cause regular working people to suffer is to be endured in service of rightwing ideological fantasies that benefit only the elite. This is just one more of the perversities of a "democracy" that holds the working class powerless and hostage to the dual parties of capital.         

All of these actions, in addition to the President's mania for firing government workers, are part of a concerted rightwing effort - long in the making - to shape the country and its future. Trump has merely given free reign to the kinds of ideologically inspired hatchet men that have fantasized about doing exactly these types of actions for sometimes decades. Reducing the size of government - both the number of agencies and total employees - and curbing its regulatory powers have been a longstanding aim of rightwing politicians. Returning manufacturing to the US has also been a chief concern of especially hawkish capitalists who harbor more fear for US national security than concern for the welfare of American workers. In both cases the capitalist elite, Democrat and Republican, are more than willing to have everyday working Americans foot the bill to pay for realizing their ideological dreams.

However odious Trump and his ilk are, the Democrats offer no real alternative. Working people have watched time and again as Democrats have failed to do anything to address the problems they face. Instead of open hostility like the Republicans, the Democrats offer empty words and gestures of support to labor organizing. In 2008 they bailed out Wall Street and left its victims in the lurch. The last increase in the federal minimum wage was passed in 2009. 

The only path forward for working people is to reject the terms of our artificial confinement, to move beyond the dual parties of capital, and begin to build socialism.