Skip to main content

New (Global) Order?

This is a good perspective that has helped me have a clearer picture.

  • The tariffs are not a response to the decline of American capitalism.
  • The legitimation crisis from which Trumpism emerged was a result of the strength of American capital, not its decline.
  • Trump claims that the result of concessions made by prior administrations in order to bring other states into the US-led system have diminished American economic and political supremacy.
  • A plan that would involve pushing finance off its pedestal and replacing it to some extent with domestic manufacturing.
  • Globalization cannot simply be reversed at the stroke of a pen. Its unravelling would involve much more than simply imposing tariffs*; it would require an array of capital controls as well as a comprehensive industrial policy – measures that would constitute a more serious challenge to the dominant fractions of capital than anything Trump is willing to contemplate.
  • Tariffs on their own are insufficient to reverse globalization*, and these specific tariffs will do nothing to strengthen working-class power, nor improve living standards; in fact, they may well do the opposite.
———
*– Harold James of Princeton University: “The amount that the United States gets from tariffs at the moment is something like $86bn. And the tax revenue, that’s about $2.5tn. So these are just orders of magnitude apart from each other.”
 – Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times: … the other thing is that globalisation that we’ve constructed over the last 40 years relies on these immensely complex supply chains, which were put under a lot of pressure during the pandemic. If Trump keeps going in this direction, even if he tries to narrow it down just to China, do you think international business can continue in the way that it’s been doing, or will they have to fundamentally restructure?”
 – Harold James: “Well, they will have to restructure, and they’re also gonna be very uncertain, because who knows how long these tariffs will be in place. So if you’re thinking about a long-term strategy, do you really want to put a lot of investment? Having a new chip factory is a tremendously costly exercise – you can’t just build it overnight. It takes years before it comes online. Like, there’s a new plant in Arizona, it takes a long, long time for it to actually be made. And so, in that time, things might change again and the world might be different…
I think there was likely to be somebody like Trump, so in that sense, he’s caught a particular mood and a mood of anti-globalisation. So that sense that globalisation hadn’t worked, that it wasn’t working for many people, is absolutely there, and Trump is the response to it. But there are so many idiosyncratic things about Trump, and I think in particular, the way in which the decision is made and the lack of consultation and the lack of anybody who can stand up to him is in a way, it’s a frightening example of the way in which a particular personality can prevent the finding of rational solutions. 
And so it seems to me that the tariff decision and the way that it’s made is a bit like the decision that President Putin made in February 22, where there aren’t people who — in the military or in the intelligence services — say, President Putin, you can’t assume that you’re going to knock out Ukraine that quickly, you’re gonna decapitate the government that quickly. And what I think Trump believed was that this measure on the second of April would quickly lead to a world in which everybody agrees to America’s terms and that America becomes top dog again. And that is purely a fantasy.”
 (Financial Times, 10 April 2025)

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Qarmatians (Al-Qaramita)

By Nadeem Mahjoub Documentary film-makers G. Troeller and M. C. Defarge once asked a cabinet minister in South Yemen, why socialistic ideas were so readily acceptable in that part of the Arab world. He replied: “Because we have been communists for a thousand years! My mother was Qarmatian.” Official Muslim scholars and clerics, and many so-called moderates (whether individuals or groups) oppose sedition ( fitna ). Tensions and contradictions in society should be solved peacefully and even if the ruler was unjust and impious, it is generally accepted he should still be obeyed, for any kind of order is better than anarchy and sedition. “The tyranny of a sultan for a hundred years causes less damage than one year’s tyranny exercised by the subjects against one another.” Revolt was justified only against a ruler who clearly went against the command of God and His prophet.” 1 Here we look at not what happened in the minds of people who call for calm, oppose dissent and preach the re...
Post a Comment
Read more
John Gray, the Guardian, 03 March 2015: "To a significant extent, the new atheism is the expression of a liberal moral panic." "There is no more reason to think science can determine human values today than there was at the time of Haeckel or Huxley. None of the divergent values that atheists have from time to time promoted has any essential connection with atheism, or with science. How could any increase in scientific knowledge validate values such as human equality and personal autonomy? The source of these values is not science. In fact, as the most widely-read atheist thinker of all time [Nietzsche] argued, these quintessential liberal values have their origins in monotheism." "The reason Nietzsche has been excluded from the mainstream of contemporary atheist thinking is that he exposed the problem atheism has with morality. It’s not that atheists can’t be moral – the subject of so many mawkish debates. The question is which morality an atheis...
Post a Comment
Read more

Capitalism

Some of this reminds me of how five or six years ago in a class of seven students in a UK elite university three of them (two Germans and one British) were in favour of a "benevolent dictator" (in the Arab context). The bloody horrors of Pinochet showed how capitalism will react when it's threatened
Read more
Varoufakis "speaks of how great it was to have the support of Larry Summers, Norman Lamont, and other figures on the Right, but it was support for whom, for what, and in whose class interests? Class analysis is far from the foreground of the picture sketched out here. Closed rooms and class war
Post a Comment
Read more
"A second position argues against transition, which is transitology itself. It is well known—especially among economists—as the sudden mobilization of a considerable mass of experts who are generally foreigners,generally Western, who come to preach the good word and to propose ready-made models of democracy. The science of the transition has become a financial windfall, a market. And the word transition has of course become a reflex of language, a term of reference, a call for tenders ( appel d’offres ) to which the whole society was supposed to respond.  Consequently, the reticence that one can express is the following: our history is framed, transition is a heteronomy. Every democratic revolution is henceforth supposed to take a unique, imposed path, which is, at the same time, indistinctly democratic and liberal (or neoliberal). A more or less non-“negotiable” package.  It is necessary to highlight the imposed character (and imposed from the outside) of this coming to t...
Post a Comment
Read more
"By 2003, the Libyan government had entered into relations with the International Monetary Fund, privatizing a number of state-owned enterprises. In 2004, Libya opened up 15 new offshore and onshore blocs to drilling. Campbell also chronicles the burrowing actions of the “Western-educated bureaucrats [who] worked to bring Libya into the fold of ‘market reforms,’ and the deepening commercial relations with British capital.”  In 2007, British Petroleum inked a deal with the Libyan Investment Corporation for the exploration of 54,000 square kilometers of the Ghadames and Sirt basins. It also signed training agreements for Libyan professionals, helping create a base for neoliberalism within the government. By 2011, 2800 Libyan professionals were studying in the United Kingdom, learning “Western values” of destatization and thus the removal of the possibility for production and power to be responsive to the demands of the people.  Libya under Qadhaffi was mercurial, but against ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Europe's Refugee Camps

"Just three and a half years after the signing of the refugee deal, these camps have become symbols of Europe's failure to protect those who knocked on its door for help. These camps, with Moria chief among them, are now places where already traumatised people are stripped off their dignity." The invisible violence of Europe's refugees camps
Read more