Viewpoint on Tariffs & the World-System

Wes Vanderburgh

PRESIDENT TRUMP’S TARIFFS are on every­one’s minds. And for good reason: they represent a sharp departure from his party’s principles. But the economic debate over the tariffs’ usefulness tends to obstruct a more meaningful interpretation rooted in a world-systems analysis.

Tariffs cannot change the United States’ position in the world-system. So why the hullabaloo? Instead we ought to consider why they have been promulgated at this specific moment. What tariffs mean, in other words, is a better question to ask than what they do.

For this administration, tariffs mean a) an attempt to wrestle with a world-system that has already determined the United States’ position within it. They mean b) an attempt to recover the productive moment for the American working class. They mean c) a highly performative but ultimately useless rebellion against a liberalism that is content with the United States’ current role.

They will likely fail on all three fronts. To see why, we need to sneak behind the debate to understand what’s not being said.

The world-system has allocated two primary roles to the American working class since at least the end of the post-World War Two phase of U.S. hegemony beginning around 1970. First is that of the world’s chief consumer of commodities.

The American working class has been allowed to accumulate the most wealth of any other working class, in order to maintain a bastion of elevated demand in the core. Why is this?

We must note that crises in capitalism tend to result from the overproduction of goods and services. The reverse side of this is under-consumption. Therefore, an effective means of delaying the next inevitable crisis is by stimulating demand — in other words, by creating and maintaining a class of consumers sufficiently wealthy to buy the commodities offered on the market.

The U.S. working class, as the wealthiest, has played this role well. But another piece is that — according to the corporate, liberal version of what happened — the cost of American labor became too high to justify for-profit commercial activity.

In reality, organized labor became powerful enough during the peak of American hegemony (1940s to 1960s) that it threatened to wrest influence away from profiteers and capitalists.

Enter neoliberalism, which was aimed precisely at chopping up American labor. Offshoring, the relentless ubiquitization of debt, globalization, “free” trade, and the massive weakening of organized labor’s power were the strategic intentions of a ruling class looking to rebalance, in their favor, the relationship between labor and capital.

From Hegemony to Consumption

To these observations we can add that turning the American working class into primarily a consuming class worked toward liberally defined national interests, a cheap way to maintain the United States at or near the center of the world-system even as its hegemony slipped away.

The United States leveraged its obscene wealth to transform itself into the world’s chief buyer, essentially deploying quasi-monopsony on the world stage to maintain strategic dependencies and alliances, artificially preserving its influence in an otherwise changing world order. And it worked well.

The second, no less important role allocated to the U.S, working class has been that of devaluing work. For as they embraced their role as consumers, workers’ role as producers has slipped from their fingertips.

Critical to the neoliberal and now post-neoliberal projects of rescuing profit from the hands of organized labor has been the devaluation of work, its stagnation in the marshes of inflation and inferiorization of goods and services. American workers have been more alienated from their work so that they could much more easily consume the work of others around the world.

In effect, this strategy has consolidated the turning away from industrial capitalism. Industrial capitalism was defined by its proximity between the means and ends of work. Workers in the core countries were given colonially-appropriated raw materials to make into finished goods, goods that they themselves could consume (though many were exported back to the colonies and dependencies).

While this model fabulously enriched the core at others’ expense, it also carried the seeds of its potential destruction. For every advance the capitalists made was accompanied by one for the workers.

The modern factory was the microcosm of this process. While it increased productivity and thus profitability for capitalists, it also concentrated workers and educated them (at minimum, only enough to work the machines), and was thus the symbolic site of class conflict.

This process reached its zenith in World War One, the height of class conflict, after which moves were made to distance profit from such intimate reliance on labor. Those moves only matured after the United States had attained and lost its hegemony, i.e. in the neoliberal era.

Imagined Futures

As a result of these twin histories, the U.S. working class has been left stranded. The mutual understanding between it (or its leaders, at any rate) and the capitalists has been severed. National prosperity now no longer means a rising tide lifting all boats, but rather a coming home to roost of methods of exploitation first honed on the semi-peripheral and peripheral working classes.

Accompanying this has been a progressive socio-psychological disdain for work and production, leaving the American working class more dependent than ever on its foreign siblings to supply it with the goods and services it has been made to believe it needs. Thus as the real rewards of work have slipped away from them, workers doubled-down on their identities as consumers.

This situation is appropriate to a country that has lost the hegemonic mantle. Its elites maintain leadership and profit by using up the reserves of long-term military and economic relationships instead of investing back into the domestic production process. It’s no longer competitive to do so, as other regions of the world-system have accepted this burden and by now have developed competitive advantages.

But those long-term relationships are becoming exhausted, as new arrivals to the global core, like China, begin to flex their hegemonic ambitions.

Since liberalism celebrates this global order as inevitable and even desirable, sectors of the American working class have turned toward illiberal ideologies, attempting to rationalize this sad state of affairs.

As a gross simplification, while socialism uses the emotional pull of an imagined future, fascism relies on that of an imagined past (Make America Great Again).

Importantly, what has happened to U.S. society is not a result of bad policymaking or a corruption of values, but is rather inherent in the country’s role in the world-system. There is nothing that any American regime acting on its own could do to restructure the world-system as dramatically as either socialists or fascists want.

The world-system changes constantly, and epoch-making changes are visible only as a result of longer-term trends coming to head. When those opportunities present themselves, only then do actors have the chance to affect which of the possible futures comes into being.

But this is not what’s happening with Trump’s tariffs. Instead, they are an attempt to reverse the lost, undignified, cheapened conditions of production for American workers. A socialist (or at least a trade-unionist) regime might very well have made some of the same moves. In any event, tariffs cannot resurrect a former status quo because the worldwide conditions underpinning it have already moved on.

The liberal consensus is that American workers will not produce, or least will not produce anything worthwhile, and instead mainly consume. American workers themselves are mad at this, or regret having supported Trump, only because they have accepted their consumer status.

Tariffs are indeed quite inconvenient for consumers of internationally sourced products, no matter how beneficial they may be for workers making products for domestic consumption. Trump’s executive orders merely bring this tension into view.

World-systems analysis demonstrates that the terms of the current debate on the tariffs already elide the real stakes at hand. It does not matter how high prices for imported goods will soar. It does not matter that folks will find alternative markets to satisfy their wants and needs.

What to Do?

The U.S. working class is hemmed in by systemic, structural forces beyond the control of any of its leaders. That Trump has been willing to state this out loud, and rebel against it, no matter how performatively or hypocritically, is why so many working-class Americans voted for him.

The left would do well to take note. It should not defend “free trade” and do liberals’ work for them. Nor should it collapse into a conservative parochialism either, as if the interests of the U.S. working class could be severed from those of the rest of the world’s working classes.

Instead we should develop a politics as large as the world-system itself, for only by harboring such ambitions could the left’s politics threaten to crack the edifice once more. Only then could it develop a pull attractive enough to win back those workers currently enamored by the right. Only then could it recover its world-historical consciousness.

Until it does so, we will be locked in a static binary of either voting for or against tariffs, either supporting or rejecting the world-system. The task instead is to transform it.

July-August 2025, ATC 237