Editorial for issue 13 of The Communist. Subscribe now or buy a copy from MarxistBooks.com!

The largest trade war in history, now unfolding, is an object lesson in the absurdity of capitalism. The titanic conflict between the two greatest economic superpowers on the planet threatens to plunge us back into a 1930s-style catastrophe. And for what? To decide which nation’s ruling class will amass more wealth and power, both country’s working classes will suffer devastating hardship. In the process, half of the world’s productive  forces will be pitted against the other half. The world’s technology, scientific expertise, supply chains, and division of labor will be wastefully torn apart.

In effect, Chinese capitalism has become too advanced for the limits of the world market. Its manufacturing sector is too strong, too efficient, too sophisticated. Its industrial infrastructure and global supply chain are too integrated and precise. A third of the world’s physical products are now made in China. The output of a single industrial region now satisfies global demand for goods like steel and solar panels.

These advances in the productive forces are colliding with the narrow limits of capitalist profit-making. At humanity’s fingertips is an immense technical capacity that could be harnessed to shorten the working hours of the global workforce; feed, house, and educate billions; eradicate diseases, and live in abundance. Under capitalism, all of this progress is converted into grounds for a conflict on the scale of a new world war.

The limits have been reached

Marxists oppose capitalism, not out of some irrational hatred of this system, but because we recognize that it long ago fulfilled its useful historical mission. We have always explained that the profit-driven market had a progressive role to play at an earlier stage. It gave an incredible push forward to the world’s productive capacity—making it objectively possible to move on from a society based on exploitation to a socialized planned economy without classes, prisons, borders, wars, or hunger.

Capitalism completed its progressive mission at the peak of the industrial revolution in the 19th century. The horrific slaughter of two world wars in the 20th century signaled the system’s utter ripeness for overthrow. Instead, it was saved not once, but twice, by unique events that gave it a new lease on life. The first came at the end of WWII, when the destruction of Europe—which needed to be rebuilt­—and new technologies from wartime production created massive markets for profitable investment. This led to a 30-year upswing that lasted until the early 1970s.

The collapse of the USSR in 1991 provided yet another lifeline for the system. Together with the restoration of capitalism in China, it injected hundreds of millions of consumers and low-wage workers into the market.

What do these two turning points  have in common? Both temporarily expanded the limits of the world market. The capitalists could expect more demand tomorrow than today, so they invested more in production worldwide.

Today, the limits of the world market have been truly maxed out—and there are no more “leases on life” on the horizon, i.e., no large populations holding out on the margins of the world market. Capital has finally nestled everywhere, saturating the entire planet to an unparalleled degree.With nowhere else to turn, the world market is now consuming itself.

American capital got complacent

The overthrow of world capitalism is now more than a century overdue. When the healthy due date of a social order is postponed, when the new world is forced to remain in the womb of the old one for far too long, freakish distortions and dangerous complications ensue.

The predicament facing American capitalism is one of the starkest contradictions of our time. The world’s richest nation has subjected its working class to an increasingly unbearable quality of life for half a century, while its ruling class rested on its riches, confident it would dominate the planet forever. US capitalists closed down over 90,000 factories between 1997 and 2020. Since 1997, idle corporate cash assets grew from $1.3 trillion to an all-time high of $8.2 trillion last year. Now, they want American workers to proudly wave the red, white, and blue, while venting their boiling frustrations at “foreign cheaters” like China.

Meanwhile, for the last 30 years, Chinese capitalists have done what American capitalists refused to do, partly as a result of heavy-handed state compulsion: they invested in improving productive technique. Slowly but surely, they overtook US industry in one sector after another.

A new stage in the crisis

So what comes next? Trump is losing room to maneuver, and all signs point to “stagflation” in the short term: a recession combined with a spike in the cost of living. Whether he manages to avoid a full-fledged depression, and whether this spells the final political ruin of Trumpism remains to be seen. The cheap consumer goods that “took the edge off” for the last 30 years are coming to an end—but the jobs are not coming back. The globalization era was a disaster for workers, but protectionism will be no better. The Democrats will try to seize on the backlash from a “Trump slump,” but the status quo they defended was just as unviable. They were just as committed to an eventual clash with China as Trump is, and they’re just as responsible for the chaotic period we’ve entered.

There is only one off ramp from the coming madness and misery. The exit is called socialist revolution, and the chance to take it is approaching. •