The ‘panicans’ are right: President Donald Trump’s assault on the international system of trade — inaugurated at the White House “Liberation Day” ceremony on 2 April — has set off a seismic shift in the global economy.
Mainstream coverage of Trump’s tariffs has either belittled their illogic or bemoaned their injury to the ‘liberal international order.’ But Trump’s intentions are as clear as they are continuous with his predecessors: his administration, like many that came before it, seeks to maintain the United States’ imperial advantage in the world system.
After World War II, the United States underwrote an imbalanced trading system that funnelled the fruits of the labour, land and resources from across the world. The Marshall Plan, billed as a generous gesture of post-war reconstruction, guaranteed its economic dominance on the ‘old’ continent. And the Bretton Woods institutions, headquartered in Washington DC, supported the flow of value from economies in the ‘new’ continents of the global South.
But cracks soon emerged. The collapse of formal colonialism in the 1950s and 60s sparked movements for economic sovereignty across the global South, as newly independent nations sought to reclaim their resources and industrialise their economies. Meanwhile, US allies — Germany, Japan and later South Korea — began outcompeting American manufacturers. By 1969, the US share of global output had plummeted to just over a quarter, down from half in 1945.
Faced with a worsening balance of payments, runaway military spending and domestic unrest, the US ruling class engineered two pivotal shocks in the 1970s to restore its dominance: Nixon’s abandonment of the gold standard in 1971 and Volcker’s unprecedented interest rate hikes from 1979 onwards. These moves shattered worker power at home while forcing the Global South into debt crises — enabling the IMF and World Bank to impose structural adjustment programs that reversed efforts towards sovereign development.
That formula of the Washington Consensus supercharged inequality in favor of US capital. The US exploited its dollar hegemony to run perpetual trade deficits, recycling surplus dollars into Wall Street assets. Meanwhile, workers’ share of income collapsed, corporate profits soared, and the South’s resources continued flowing northward.
For decades, the US rested comfortably on these terms of unequal exchange. Yet over time — and through the very same institutions that the US once established to enshrine its eternal privilege — poor countries sought to pursue paths of development that could both secure their industrial capacities and insulate their countries from US coercion.
And none has been more successful than the People's Republic of China.
Once a subordinate producer of cheap goods for Northern consumers, China has since advanced rapidly toward economic sovereignty — eradicating absolute poverty, innovating in advanced technology, and drastically reducing unequal exchange with the North.
By 2015, according to the Autonomous University of Barcelona’s Jason Hickel, the ratio of exchange of labour, materials, land and energy had fallen from 34:1 to 4:1. China's US Treasury holdings, meanwhile, have fallen from a high of $1.3 trillion 2013 to $770 billion today — a 40% reduction. That effort has gone hand in hand with Beijing’s broader de-dollarisation push on the global stage: its share of global yuan trade settlements has risen from 0% in 2010 to 50% in 2024.
It is little coincidence, then, that Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs have spared all but one of its targets: China. But the United States is no longer satisfied with its efforts to tariff Chinese exports or cripple its technological development through mechanisms like the Biden administration’s CHIPS Act. In recent days, the Trump administration has escalated its attacks on China into an outright call for civilisational war in defense of the “West” and its “way of life.”
Immigration authorities are expelling Chinese academics from US universities and stripping students of their visas. Members of Congress are proposing legislation to eradicate the PRC’s “malign influence” in the Western Hemisphere. Administration officials are pressuring EU allies to “pick a side” and isolate China from their continent. Defence companies like Palantir are championing the West’s “innate superiority” and baying for a “new Opium War.” And Vice President JD Vance is denigrating Chinese workers — the industrial base of nearly all US prosperity — as mere “peasants.”
The task of progressive forces is to resist this siren call to civilisational war — to remain steadfast to the principles of dialogue and diplomacy that will form the basis of a new multipolar order, even as the US seeks to divide it into irreconcilable camps.
That is why the Progressive International traveled to China this week. At the invitation of Fudan University, scholars from across the world landed in Shanghai for a special forum on ‘Socialist Perspectives on Global Governance in a Multipolar World,’ seeking to strengthen mutual understanding with our counterparts in the People's Republic of China.
Professor Jason Hickel delivered the keynote speech at the conference. In it, Hickel articulates the staggering scale of imperial extraction that has resulted from unequal exchange in the world system: **826 billion hours of Southern labour (more than the annual work of all US and EU workers combined), 820 million hectares of land (twice India’s size), and 21 exajoules of energy (more than the annual energy use of the entire African continent) siphoned northward annually.
But Hickel’s speech also points to the unique opportunity afforded by the success of China’s process of sovereign development — both for the 1.4 billion citizens of China, as for the billions more across the global South. “China,” he writes, “can play an important role in helping the rest of the global South by providing them with an alternative source for finance, technologies and capital goods, thus enabling them to reduce their import dependencies on the core and develop their own industrial base.”
Even as the Trump administration advances an aggressive agenda of unilateral coercive measures, then, Hickel’s conclusion is optimistic. “We are at a juncture in history. The existing arrangement is not working for the vast majority of humanity. The capitalist world-system cannot deliver meaningful development in the periphery. This system can and must be overcome. The Southern struggle for liberation is the true agent of world-historical transformation, and this is the generation that must bring it about.”
Read the full speech on the Progressive International's Wire now.
UNI Global Union has called on the EU Commission to introduce a digital services tax, or ‘Amazon Tax’ in the face of the US’ trade war. The global union federation argues that Amazon benefits from a double unfair economic advantages in the EU: low tax rates and lucrative public contracts. The call comes as Amazon workers in Italy, with their union CGIL, go on strike.
Following Ecuador’s election — contested by candidate Luisa González on allegations of fraud, corruption and intimidation — the government of Daniel Noboa has reportedly compiled a blacklist of around 100 opposition figures at maximum risk of detention. Members of Luisa Gonzalez's campaign — including vice presidential candidate Diego Borja — have already suffered severe harassment by migration authorities.
The military cargo ship Nexoe Maersk has docked in Barcelona, Spain — before departing again to transport weapons to Israel. The Progressive International joined RESCOP and allies across Spain to demand the immediate detention of the Nexoe — before it is too late.
War and Peace is a painting by Polish artist **Pauł Sochacki, named after Russian author Leo Tolstoy’s literary work set during the Napoleonic Wars. Like others in the exhibition Self-reflection, the painting departed from a meditative dichotomy of Rothko’s colour fields. Rothko was associated with the abstract expressionist movement, which the CIA financed from 1950 to 1967 to promote the US as a free market as part of a cultural imperialist agenda.
Self-reflection also included La Folia, named after one of the oldest remembered European musical compositions, evoking the fragmentation and decline of the West, symbolised by a lone flautist on a sinking Ionic column. The opening of Self-reflection hosted the launch of the first issue of Arts of the Working Class, a multi-lingual street paper “on poverty and wealth, art and society,” of which Pauł Sochacki is the co-founder. The paper is sold by street vendors internationally who keep 100% of the revenue. From 2014–2016, Sochacki ran a gallery inside a tea shop specialising in Chinese whole leaf teas in Berlin, and as an artist has exhibited widely.
