By DAVID MCNALLY*
Donald Trump has no program to unleash a new wave of global capital accumulation. He treats the world economy largely as a zero-sum game.
Did neoliberalism end this week with Donald Trump’s tariffs, a friend asked. We were asked to answer in five sentences or less. Here’s what I wrote:
“If neoliberalism was an institutionally embedded program to restore profitability and accumulation, then after a period of considerable success (1982-2007) it entered a massively destabilizing crisis in 2008-9. This crisis was not solvable by market means alone, except through a global depression.
But the “solution” (bank bailouts, ultra-low interest rates, and continued attempts at wage compression) has inaugurated a regime of low growth and heightened social and geopolitical contradictions and antagonisms. Trumpism is a particular expression of the latter, designed to shift antagonisms onto “foreign threats,” both internally and externally. There are a number of mutations within neoliberalism that have profoundly altered its core operations but have not yet produced a stable new form.”
Let me add now that in evolutionary biology, some say that a set of new mutational forms produces “hopeful monsters.” Most mutations turn out to be nonviable. I believe that Donald Trump’s monstrous mutations will also prove nonviable—that is, to reproduce successfully over a quarter century or more as a viable social form.
Donald Trump has no program for unleashing a new wave of global capital accumulation. He treats the world economy largely as a zero-sum game in which larger shares of world incomes should be transferred to U.S. capitalists—horizontally by workers and vertically by capitalist rivals, including China. But this formula is a formula for brutal stagnationism—increasing intercapitalist conflict in the midst of a low-growth economy.
Our “hopeful monster,” of course, is the international working class—which will need new mutational forms of its own to be up to the task of overthrowing global capital. That is another story, and ultimately the most crucial one.
*David McNally is a teacher of history at the University of Houston. Aauthor, among other books, of Capitalism and Slavery: A New Marxist History (University of California Press).
Translation: Sean Purdy.
Originally posted on the author's social media.
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