Trump's tariffs and the bourgeois state

Turns out the state has some autonomy from capital after all!

Trump’s so-called Liberation Day has come and gone, his precious tariffs are in place, and the stock market is crumbling. If you can take your mind off of the immense suffering that’s going to follow from this for just one moment, this is an absolute supernova of dark comedy. Trump is doing things like enacting tariffs on uninhabited islands, evidently because they just copy+pasted their list of target countries from CIA.gov. They calculated their tariff rates simply by dividing trade deficits by exports, and they’re defending this by complicating the denominator with multipliers that equal one. As a result CNN reports that the stock market is being driven by “extreme fear”, and stocks are tumbling across the board.

A lot of pundits seem to be speculating that Trump has enacted these tariffs as part of some scheme to enrich his allies — either political allies or class allies — but while this is absolutely the correct instinct, it just isn’t true in this case. There is no silver lining to these tariffs for anyone, even among the bourgeoisie. The plan to reshore manufacturing only works if tariffs make reshoring profitable, but investors cannot have any confidence that they will be in place long enough to actually invest. In the meantime, even industries he hopes to help like the auto industry will suffer from higher prices on imports. As always the ruling class will try to exploit this situation to its advantage — in particular, as even Mark Cuban notes, by price gouging — but the economic damage Trump has already inflicted will far outweigh those benefits.

In any case, if Trump accomplishes nothing else, he is at least teaching leftists an important lesson about the relationship between capital and the state.