‘International Socialism’ Journal’s Mistaken Illusion of Chaos: Trump’s Tariffs as Symptoms of Systemic Decay

An alternative to ISJ's superficial focus on personality and policy

Oct 22, 2025

The lead article in the current International Socialism Journal, “Trump, tariffs and economic chaos” (by Rob Hoveman), correctly identifies the empirical chaos and the risk of economic instability, but its explanatory framework is constrained by viewing these outcomes largely as a consequence of political volatility and poor economic management. By focusing predominantly on the specific political actor and the immediate policy announcement, the analysis fails to articulate the deep, underlying material contradictions that compelled the US state to abandon neoliberal orthodoxy in the first place.

A Marxist analysis must reject this superficial focus on personality and policy. Tariffs are not the cause of chaos; they are desperate, incoherent symptoms of systemic decay. The failure to grasp the material roots of this decay—the structural crisis of capital, the constraints of finance, and the emergence of new accumulation regimes—means the analysis cannot provide meaningful strategic guidance.

The ISJ and Hoveman must be taken seriously. As the theoretical journal that reflects the views of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in Britain and its International Socialist Tendency, it is among the most credible journals published by any Marxist tendency in English. Hoveman has been an SWP member for most of the last 40 years, playing a leading role in its work in the Socialist Alliance and Respect party. While Hoveman was not an SWP member for a while, following disagreements over his work for then-MP George Galloway, he remained within the SWP’s broader intellectual and activist community, closely aligned with the SWP’s politics. He is now again a member. He has continued to contribute articles to Socialist Worker, the party’s newspaper, and has appeared as a speaker at the SWP’s Marxism festivals, repeatedly in the last few years.

Trump as the motor force for tariffs

In his International Socialism article, Hoveman presents the April 2025 tariffs as primarily a manifestation of Trump’s political rhetoric and personal economic strategy. He acknowledges the tariffs as a response to the “Make America Great Again” narrative, noting they found support among workers who felt left behind during the neoliberal era. Hoveman recognizes a broader context of US economic decline, particularly the hollowing out of the manufacturing base and the large balance of payments deficit, suggesting the tariffs are not entirely random but rooted in genuine economic concerns.

However, this article argues that Hoveman’s analysis remains fundamentally descriptive, focusing more on Trump’s individual agency than on the deeper structural dynamics of capitalism.

An Interjection: Have we misread Hoveman?

Rob disagrees with this article’s assessment of the ISJ article. He thinks that anyone with that reading either misunderstood the article or didn’t read it. You should read it yourself rather than take anyone’s word for it.

If you read it, you’ll read that Rob’s account of Trump’s tariffs vividly documents the immediate impacts—such as the sweeping 10 percent basic tariff and the quote from Paul Krugman describing it as the “greatest shock to international trade in world history.” However, he falls short in fully connecting these actions to the broader systemic imperatives of global capitalism. Instead, his portrayal tends to frame the tariffs primarily as manifestations of chaotic political preferences and unpredictable policy decisions, rather than as strategically motivated responses grounded in the structural contradictions of capitalism.

Systemic Context of Trump’s Tariffs

The ‘Further reading’ section at the end of this article include several sources, including analyses from CEPR and other economic think tanks, which agree that Trump’s tariffs serve strategic geopolitical and economic objectives. They are part of a broader movement towards s-called “strategic capitalism,” where state interventions aim to address perceived threats from China, reassert US industrial strength, and challenge the global dominance of the dollar. These policies are embedded in a geopolitical struggle over global economic influence, illustrating how tariffs are instruments in an overarching effort to recalibrate US imperialist power within the framework of international capitalist competition. 1

The Structural Contradictions of Capitalism

These economic analyses highlight that such tariffs are responses to the systemic contradictions of contemporary capitalism—particularly the decline in profit rates, the hollowing out of manufacturing, and the structural imbalance in global trade. For instance, the rise of China as a manufacturing powerhouse and its integration into the global economy through WTO membership have challenged US dominance, prompting protective measures that ostensibly aim to “counter rip-offs” and unfair trade practices. These measures aim to defend national sovereignty and strategic interests but are also intrinsic responses to the crises of overaccumulation, declining profitability, and the global reorganization of production. 2

Political Choices and Systemic Pressures

Hoveman’s account, as reflected in the critique, appears to overlook the extent to which these tariffs are interwoven with the systemic imperatives of capitalism—namely, the need to restore profitability, reassert imperial dominance, and manage the contradictions between finance and production. Instead, his emphasis on the undeniable chaos and erratic nature of Trump’s policies ignores the underlying logic that such interventions often emerge from systemic crises, rather than random political whims.

Recent Academic and Analytical Perspectives

Recent scholarly and policy analyses, including reports on the economic fallout of tariffs, emphasize their role within a strategic contest over trade dominance, global influence, and control of raw materials and high-tech sectors. These actions are coherent with the broader tendency of capitalism to resort to protectionism in times of crisis, underlining the connection between Trump’s policies and the systemic contradictions of capitalism.3

I. The Structural Critique: Methodology and Theoretical Precision

The analysis of Trump’s tariffs demands a methodological approach that transcends superficial political narratives. As our critique of Hoveman’s article suggests, a truly revolutionary framework must penetrate the “concrete totality of capital” by exposing its inherent long-term contradictions.

Lens A: Ernest Mandel: Long Waves and the Structural Crisis of Capital

Ernest Mandel’s theoretical contribution provides the foundational lens for understanding contemporary economic volatility. His theorization of long waves (Kondratiev cycles) reveals capitalism as a dynamic system characterized by structural transformations rather than linear progress.

Key aspects of the Mandel framework include:

Long Wave Dynamics
- Capitalism oscillates between expansive (Phase A) and depressive (Phase B) periods
- The current epoch, initiated in the early 1970s, represents a prolonged Phase B of structural stagnation
- Stagflation emerges as the defining symptom: simultaneous inflation and economic stagnation
Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (TRPF)
- The fundamental contradiction of capitalist accumulation
- As capitalists invest increasingly in technology (constant capital) relative to labor (variable capital), the overall rate of profit declines
- Protectionist measures like tariffs represent desperate attempts to secure valorization channels for overaccumulated capital
Objective Socialization vs. Private Appropriation
- A core tension: increasing social interconnectedness of labor contrasts with private ownership
- Technological advances create potential for collective productivity, yet remain constrained by capitalist property relations

Lens B: Francisco Louçã: Financial Hegemony and Institutional Rigidity

Francisco Louçã’s analysis extends Mandel’s framework by examining the institutional mechanisms of capitalist adaptation:

Depressive Long Wave Characteristics
- Incomplete realignment of social and economic institutions
- Neoliberal solutions as a response to structural crisis:
  - Liberalization of financial flows
  - Privatization
  - Precarization of labor
  - Globalization of markets
Fictitious Capital and Financial Accumulation
- Financial claims divorced from real productive capacity
- A “financial norm of minimum profitability” that filters out non-profitable projects
- Systematic generation of speculative booms leading to abrupt devaluations

Lens C. Cédric Durand: Techno-Feudal Power and Accumulation Regimes

Cédric Durand’s framework illuminates the emerging structure of contemporary capitalism:

Neo-Industrial State
- State increasingly aligned with digital oligarchies
- Subsidization of platform monopolies
- Technological rivalry as a key mechanism of geo-economic conflict
Rent Extraction Structures
- Shift from traditional profit generation to parasitic rent capture
- Digital platforms as new sites of value extraction
- Technological control as a primary mode of accumulation

Synthesis: A Dialectical Approach to Crisis

The integration of these frameworks reveals capitalism’s current phase as characterized by:

Declining productive investment
Rising financial speculation
Increasing state intervention to secure digital rent extraction
Structural inability to resolve fundamental contradictions

Methodological Implications

This approach demands:

Rejecting surface-level political analysis
Understanding economic phenomena as manifestations of deeper structural dynamics
Developing a revolutionary methodology that can comprehend capitalism’s total movement

The tariffs are not chaos, but a symptomatic response to systemic contradictions—a desperate attempt to manage an increasingly unstable accumulation regime.

By adopting this rigorous theoretical framework, revolutionary movements can move beyond reactive struggles to develop a comprehensive strategy for systemic transformation.

Combining the Lenses: Tariffs as Systemic Symptomatology

Mandel’s Perspective: The Falling Rate of Profit as Structural Compulsion

From Mandel’s long-wave analysis, the tariffs represent a classic manifestation of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (TRPF). The US manufacturing base’s hollowing out is not an aberration but a structural necessity of late capitalism. As technological investment increasingly replaces living labor, the fundamental value-generating mechanism of capitalism breaks down.

The 10% global tariff and punitive measures (up to 46% on countries like Vietnam) are not random policy choices but systematic attempts to:

Artificially prop up domestic manufacturing
Create protective barriers against international competition
Secure valorization channels for overaccumulated capital

The tariffs reveal capitalism’s inherent contradiction: the system must constantly generate new mechanisms of value extraction as its primary productive logic becomes increasingly unsustainable.

Louçã’s Financial Hegemony: Fictitious Capital’s Disciplinary Power

Through Francisco Louçã’s lens, the tariffs expose the coercive power of fictitious capital. The bond market’s immediate seven-day intervention demonstrates that political economic decisions are fundamentally constrained by financial accumulation regimes.

The tariffs represent an attempt to:

Maintain creditor confidence
Generate new financial speculation opportunities
Create alternative valorization mechanisms when traditional productive investments fail

The financial norm of minimum profitability filters out less profitable projects, compelling increasingly desperate and volatile economic interventions.

Durand’s Techno-Feudal Interpretation: The Neo-Industrial State in Action

Durand reveals the tariffs as a manifestation of the emerging techno-feudal power structure. This is not merely protectionism but a strategic reconfiguration of global technological and economic control.

Key dimensions include:

Securing strategic technological assets (semiconductors, rare earth minerals)
Restructuring global supply chains
Aligning state power with digital oligarchies
Creating new rent-extraction mechanisms through technological control

The tariffs represent a shift from traditional market competition to a more centralized, technologically mediated form of economic governance.

I’ll craft a new section drawing directly from the Viento Sur article that can be integrated into the existing draft. Here’s a proposed section:

The Factional Landscape of US Capital

Drawing on Cédric Durand and Benjamin Braun’s analysis in Viento Sur, we can understand the tariffs as a complex negotiation between competing fractions of capital. Their article reveals a critical insight: Trump’s economic strategy represents a precarious balancing act between multiple, often contradictory economic interests.

Competing Capital Factions

MAGA Nationalist Faction
- Seeks to rebuild US manufacturing
- Advocates protectionist policies
- Supports restrictive immigration measures
Private Financial Sector
- Prioritizes tax privileges
- Demands systematic deregulation
- Seeks access to new investment pools (particularly 401(k) funds)
Tech Oligarchies
- Desire global digital platform control
- Seek to maintain technological hegemony
- Increasingly aligned with state power
Fossil Fuel and Defense Tech Companies
- Benefit from nationalist-militarist policies
- Support expanded state intervention in strategic sectors

The tariffs emerge not as a coherent strategy, but as a complex negotiation between these factions. Each group attempts to leverage Trump’s political momentum to advance its specific economic interests, creating a volatile and potentially unstable economic configuration.

The Braudelian Twilight

Referencing historian Fernand Braudel’s concept of imperial “autumn”, Durand illuminates how these tariffs represent more than economic policy—they are symptomatic of a hegemonic power in systemic decline. The tariffs reveal a system frantically seeking to maintain its global economic position through increasingly desperate and incoherent interventions.

This fractured landscape exposes the fundamental contradictions of contemporary capitalism: the increasing tension between global financial flows, technological control, and traditional modes of industrial production. The revolutionary challenge is to understand these dynamics not as isolated phenomena, but as interconnected expressions of a system in profound structural crisis.

Systemic Contradictions Laid Bare

The tariffs thus reveal three fundamental systemic contradictions:

Productive Capacity vs. Accumulation Logic
Capitalism’s need for continuous expansion conflicts with its diminishing capacity to generate value through traditional productive mechanisms.
Financial Abstraction vs. Real Economic Needs
The supremacy of fictitious capital creates increasingly volatile and disconnected economic interventions.
Technological Control vs. Global Labor Dynamics
The emergence of techno-feudal structures fundamentally transforms traditional relationships of production and exploitation.

Revolutionary Implications

These tariffs are not chaos, but a desperate institutional response to capitalism’s structural crisis. They demonstrate the system’s:

Increasing irrationality
Diminishing capacity for sustainable growth
Fundamental inability to resolve its internal contradictions

The revolutionary task is to expose these systemic limitations, develop internationalist working-class strategies, and create alternative modes of economic organization that prioritize human needs over capital accumulation.

The tariffs thus become a critical diagnostic tool, revealing the deep, structural mutations of contemporary capitalism—a system frantically seeking survival mechanisms while simultaneously accelerating its own potential dissolution.

II. The Organizational Imperative: Concrete Strategic Guidance

A superficial analysis that focuses on the political surface is politically dangerous, as it risks reducing revolutionary struggle to “reformism from below” (fighting only for immediate wages), leading to a failure to articulate the necessary program of systemic rupture.

The structural analysis provides the necessary framework for strategic intervention:

1. Transitional Demands and Programmatic Rupture

Revolutionary organizations must adopt a strategy of transitional demands to prepare the working class for power. This movement requires confronting fundamental systemic failures rather than merely correcting inequities via fiscal redistribution, which is condemned to being a “labour of Sisyphus” within capitalism’s limits.

The core objective is summarized as ensuring “common decency”: assuring all individuals guaranteed employment and/or income, access to quality public services, and a decent planet.

A program for transformation must follow a systematic approach:

Rupture:
This involves taking immediate steps to protect against predictable retaliation and to build dual legitimacy. This includes establishing social legitimacy by prioritising lower incomes and minimum social standards.
The Next Step Forward:
The essential economic demands that articulate rupture include the reduction of working time and the State acting as employer of last resort. These necessary ruptures imply a degree of social confrontation that reformist social-liberalism is unwilling to assume.
Defining the Goal (Democratic Planning):
The fundamental alternative to the chaos of market mechanisms is socialist planning. This planning must be democratic, pluralistic, and involve continuous worker control over production and resources, which is crucial for ferreting out unused production capacities. Planning must shift priorities away from market logic, for example, prioritising the building of schools and working-class housing over luxury flats, even if the former yields zero “profit”. The ultimate aim is the withering-away of money economy, classes, and the state.

2. Building the Revolutionary Vanguard

The victory of a revolution requires conscious preparation, including the development of experienced militants and a sound political program.

The key task is to insert yourself in the service of the working class, not to adapt to the average level of consciousness, but to systematically prepare for the moment of crisis, which can and will break out in the next months and years in all of most of the important Western countries.
Revolutionary cadre must build nuclei to make concrete propositions to show the workers and our allies how to make the next step forward beyond immediate demands.
Revolutionary organizations must prioritise solving the central problems of the current period, otherwise they risk falling into sectarianism, where defending a single doctrinal point becomes a “shibboleth” and subordinates activity to that defence.

III. International Solidarity and Global Strategy

The structural crisis of capital is a global phenomenon, necessitating an internationalist response.

1. Rejecting National Retreat

The US imperialist bourgeoisie cannot pursue world domination without assuming leadership of the entire capitalist world. The analysis in International Socialism must be critiqued for failing to provide an analysis of the world system that shows the interaction between the crises in the East and the West.

Necessity of Global Strategy:
Anti-capitalist forces must oppose the international counterrevolutionary strategy of Big Capital with a corresponding world-wide, global strategy.
Utopian Nationalism:
A case in point is the SWP’s support for Brexit. It is totally utopian to believe one working class could meet the challenge by retreating into self-defence measures on a national scale. Measures like protectionism risk offering an opportunity to the state to appear as the protector of both the bourgeoisie and workers of the same nation, diverting attention away from social conflict.
Imperialism and Opportunism:
The high monopoly profits secured by imperialist powers make it economically possible to bribe an upper strata of the proletariat, fostering opportunism and splitting the working-class movement. The fight against imperialism is a sham, as Lenin says, unless it is “inseparably bound up with the fight against opportunism”.

2. The Global Revolutionary Process

The global class struggle must encompass the three sectors of the world revolution: the imperialist countries, the countries under bureaucratic dictatorships (Cuba, North Korea), and the developing countries.

The Permanent Revolution: The theory of permanent revolution argues that socialist revolutions are inevitable and unavoidable in backward countries if they are to save themselves from misery, ignorance, and backwardness. Only where capitalism has been overturned and the bourgeois state destroyed has there been a real agrarian revolution and subsequent economic growth (e.g., in the Soviet Union and China).
The International Imperative: The struggle for a Socialist World Federation is the central issue of our epoch. The internationalisation of capital compels the growing unity of action among workers worldwide to oppose multinational corporations. The International is our “real fatherland”.

Conclusion: Synthesis of Strategic Insights

The episode of Trump’s tariffs, far from being political chaos, confirms the deepening structural contradictions of late capitalism. The system is compelled by the crisis of overaccumulation to rely on a permanent arms economy (PAE) as “substitutive investment”, while simultaneously facing rigid institutional constraints imposed by financial hegemony.

The practical conclusion for revolutionary movements is clear: the current conjuncture increases the volatility of the situation. The revolutionary task is to build a strong, internationalist alternative based on socialist planning and democratic rupture, preparing the working class to seize the opportunities presented by crisis and prevent the high social cost of capitalist adaptation. The focus must be on liberating the creativity that capital suffocates by offering a concrete program for “common decency”.

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