Original YouTube Source : https://youtu.be/9aWG51M-0l8
If the first month of Donald Trump’s second stint as President of the United States is indicative, then it appears that global capitalism with the U.S. as hegemon is in the process of an endogenously triggered process of restructuring. Among the many early signals from the Trump administration to switch U.S. policy at home and abroad, five initiatives stand out in the economic sphere.
First is the turn to higher import tariffs, on grounds varying from bringing back American production and accelerating the growth of output and employment to weaponising tariffs to achieve national security goals.
The second is the brazen facilitation of the capture of the state by big business. An executive order has sought to subordinate previously independent government enforcement agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), to the White House. Their functioning will be monitored and their decisions vetted. The immediate impact would be the dismantling of SEC efforts to rein in cryptocurrency trading and the FTC’s efforts under former Commissioner Lina Khan to curb monopoly and the power of platform companies such as Amazon and Meta.
The third initiative is aggressive demands on foreign partners on trade and investment and for access to and even ownership of strategic territory and facilities underpinning global commerce such as the territory of Greenland, the Panama Canal, or the Gaza Strip cleared of its Palestinian population. All this, while withdrawing U.S. spending that protects U.S. allies and strengthens U.S. soft power.
Fourth, quite explicit in Trump’s international manoeuvres is an effort to seize, by threat today and perhaps some force tomorrow, reserves and supplies of critical minerals, whether they be in Ukraine, Greenland, or elsewhere.
Finally, Trump’s approach to the rest of the world, epitomised by the pivot under him of the relationship between the U.S. and Russia on the one hand and Europe on the other, seems purely transactional: settle with Russia to get access to markets and materials; dump Europe that benefits from U.S. markets but does not pay for its own defence.
History since the beginning of the 20th century suggests that this dramatic turn in policy under Trump 2.0 can only be understood as an effort to privilege U.S. capital as part of the restructuring of a 21st century capitalism that has lost legitimacy and cannot continue to function as it has.
But this turn follows the structural shift in capitalism that occurred following the inflationary crisis of the 1970s in the U.S. and elsewhere in the Western world. Central to that shift was the jettisoning of Keynesian-style New Deal policies relying on proactive fiscal policy and the strong regulation of finance capital, and the embrace of financial deregulation, fiscal constraints, and monetary policy measures to drive growth fuelled by credit. The regime of accumulation that rides on financial bubbles to bolster the wealth of a few across the globe is proving difficult to sustain. It emerged out of the 2008 financial crisis, with the hegemon and its allies adopting a bizarre set of policies—an open declaration that the rules they enforce on the rest of the world do not apply to them.
This is a new form that inter-imperialist relations have taken. It is not the old form of inter-imperialist rivalry that precipitated world wars. Nor is it an era of the absence of such rivalry. Rather, it is an effort by one hegemonic power to selfishly subordinate all its former imperialist allies for the benefit of its own capitalist class, even if that implies sleeping with former enemies. The logic seems to be that you can prolong an unsustainable regime of accumulation within the jurisdiction of the U.S. state by colonising the rest of the world in some form. Theory and history tell us that this is a bizarre and futile exercise that will end badly for capitalism.
For a more detailed version of this article, see the Frontline.