On January 16, when Canadian and Chinese capitalist bosses signed a trade agreement to retaliate against U.S. tariffs, they exposed the decay of U.S. imperialism, the surging global volatility on the road to world war, and the rising fascism faced by the working class. At the World Economic Forum, millionaire banker and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney bluntly noted that the old U.S.-led “rules-based order is fading.”
Though no two nations are more economically tied than the U.S. than Canada, there is no honor among thieves. As the international crisis of capitalism intensifies, old alliances will be cast aside. With everything up for grabs, the junior rulers of the world–from Sub-Saharan Africa to the Arctic, the latest arena for global rivalry–must try to guess which imperialist power gives them the best chance to survive.
Workers know no borders and have nothing to gain by choosing one set of parasitic capitalists over another. There are no good bosses. When their profits are at stake, every one of them will sacrifice millions of our class sisters and brothers. In their anti-tariff protests in Europe and across the U.S.-Canada border, workers around the world are organizing and fighting back. They are showing us each day that WE can lead society. But only the communist politics of Progressive Labor Party–infused into struggles on the job, in our schools, in the streets, and in the military–can empower our class to turn these trade wars, and the shooting wars to come, into communist revolution.
“Donroe” Doctrine deepens U.S. imperialist decline
The snatch-and-go bandits led by Trump are imploding the foundations of the post-World War II U.S. empire. Rather than take on arch-rival China and project U.S. power throughout East Asia, South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Trump’s “Donroe” Doctrine puts the Americas, from Venezuela to Greenland and Canada, in the crosshairs of U.S. imperialism (Read about attacks on Cuba on page 5). Meanwhile, long-term U.S. alliances with Europe, Japan, India, and Australia are in jeopardy. In defiance of Trump’s threats, Canada agreed to slash tariffs on a small but symbolic number of electric vehicles manufactured in China. Across the other U.S. border, 20 percent of cars sold in Mexico come from China as well (Mexico News Daily, 1/15). Trump’s strong-man bluster has pushed these and other allies into the waiting arms of the fiercest U.S. imperialist rival. In a similar vein, amid Trump’s ongoing threats to take over Greenland, the European imperialists convened an emergency meeting in Brussels to consider counter-tariffs against the U.S. and expanded partnerships with China (Channel News Asia, 2/2).
It would be a grave mistake to see these developments as dictated by the whims of a deranged and increasingly unhinged maniac. Trump’s Donroe Doctrine represents the interests of the Small Fascist, Fortress America section of the U.S. ruling class. These gutter racists came to power after decades of failures, corruption, and brutality from the Big Fascist liberals of finance capital. Fascism does not spring from the impulses of a madman. It grows when the entire capitalist system is in crisis. All we are now witnessing, from ICE murders and abductions to the frantic scrambling of global alliances, reflect this crisis. The origin of today’s mass deportation, hyper-militarized surveillance state traces back a quarter-century to 9/11. Every president since, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama and Joe Biden, has done his part in the rise of U.S. fascism. While Trump may be making a qualitative leap, we can’t save our class by voting his party out. The Democrats’ next great liberal hope will have no choice but to pursue the same lethal trajectory. Only masses of organized workers, led by communist politics, can stop the bosses in their tracks. And only a communist revolution can destroy capitalism and fascism for all time.
The Arctic: new imperialist battlefield
As the world warms from capitalist-caused climate change, the commercial and military significance of two Arctic passageways, the Northern Sea Route and the Northwest Passage, makes them objects of desire for Canada, the U.S., Russia, and China. In 1996, spurred by the already apparent melting of the polar ice caps, these rivals joined with several Scandinavian countries to form the Arctic Council, a vehicle to manage the competition over the region’s vast reserves of oil, coal, and rare earth minerals. But three decades later, such cooperative arrangements are now relics of the past.
In 2019, the U.S. Defense Department published its “Arctic Strategy” to limit Chinese and Russian leverage in the region. Trump’s threats to move into Greenland and even Canada are simply more belligerent expressions of these long-term strategic goals. Beginning in 2023 under Biden, U.S. and NATO troops engaged in military exercises to deploy “a combat-credible force to enhance the power in NATO’s northern flank” (Newsweek, February 2023). Last month, as the old coalition splintered, NATO members Denmark, France, Germany, Sweden, and Norway felt compelled to send troops to Greenland to counter Trump’s threatened aggression. While communist revolution won’t immediately stem the tide of global warming, it’s safe to say that a world run by workers won’t be turning melting ice caps into an opportunity for further degradation of the planet–or for profit-driven war.
Down with all bosses and their borders!
The popular anti-Trump slogan–“Canada is Not For Sale”-- belies the fact that the racist Canadian bosses have been brutalizing workers for centuries. Even as it celebrates the “world’s longest undefended border,” Canada “incarcerates thousands of people on immigration-related grounds every year,” with longer and harsher detentions for Black workers (CBC, 6/17/21).
Canada has a long, ugly history of racist terror against Indigenous workers, whose children were forcibly removed from their families and interned in government schools. Indigenous women and girls were targeted for racist, sexist violence. These atrocities are not relics of the distant past. A 2017 analysis found that Indigenous workers were more than 10 times more likely to be shot and killed by police (CTV News). “Despite making up just five percent of Canada’s population, 30 percent of the country’s prisoners are Indigenous. Across the prairie provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta – regions that have higher populations of Indigenous people – that number rises to 54 percent” (Al Jazeera, March 2021).
For the workers of the world, there is no good choice between the imperialist, viciously racist nationalism of Trump’s U.S. and the “underdog” nationalism of Canada and other junior capitalist powers. Whether delivered with Trump’s truculent buffoonery or Carney’s slickness, nationalism is a deadly trap. It aims to bind workers to “their” ruling class, all the way to the concentration camps and killing fields, to war and fascism and genocide. PLP organizes around internationalism, the idea that workers worldwide must unite to defeat this racist, sexist profit system. Only by smashing all bosses and borders can we build a world that workers deserve.
