Posted in full

We are publishing here “On the international class struggle and the building of the IWA-RFC,” the fourth of six resolutions adopted unanimously by the Ninth National Congress of the Socialist Equality Party (US), held from August 2–7, 2026. The resolution was introduced in a report by Tom Hall.

1. The period since the Eighth Congress has seen a significant acceleration of the class struggle on every continent. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, 458 strikes were recorded across just eight European countries, including five general strikes at the national or regional level: national general strikes in Belgium and Italy, regional general strikes in Andalusia and the Basque Country and a general strike in Northern Cyprus. A national general strike swept Argentina in February; some 1.7 million state employees struck in the Indian state of Maharashtra; and general strikes have swept Africa.

2. The class struggle is also intensifying in the United States. Sixteen major strikes erupted in the first five months of 2026, ahead of the pace of 30 for all of 2025. These included the strikes by 31,000 Kaiser healthcare workers, 15,000 New York City nurses, 42,000 University of California workers, 6,400 San Francisco educators, 3,800 JBS meatpackers and the ongoing rebellion among auto-parts workers in the Midwest, expressed in massive contract rejections at Nexteer, Dana and other plants. Alongside the strike movement have come the “No Kings” demonstrations involving millions and the mass protests against ICE raids in Minneapolis and other cities.

3. This Congress affirms the assessment made in the opening report to the 2026 International May Day Rally, that the first months of 2026 “mark the point at which the resistance of the working class has emerged as a global force, contending against the offensive of the oligarchy on a scale that places the fundamental questions of the epoch—war or peace, dictatorship or democracy, socialism or barbarism—directly on the historical agenda.”

4. These struggles are unfolding increasingly in direct conflict not only with employers and governments, but with the trade union bureaucracies that function as an anti-strike corporate police force. This Congress reaffirms the analysis developed in the 2018 resolution “The Resurgence of Class Struggle and the Tasks of the Socialist Equality Party” and the Seventh Congress resolution “Build the IWA-RFC in the United States!” (2022), which stressed that the nationally based, pro-corporate bureaucracies, whose degeneration is rooted in the globalization of production, are structurally incompatible with the defense of an internationally integrated working class.

5. Against the apparatus, this Congress advances the building of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), founded by the ICFI in April 2021. The IWA-RFC is based on an international strategy. Its purpose is not to influence the existing trade union bureaucracies but to organize a rank-and-file insurrection against them and to transfer power to the growing network of factory, shop floor and workplace committees. The rank-and-file committees assembled under the banner of the IWA-RFC are the fighting organizations and schools of revolution of the present period, as the committees of correspondence and safety were the schools of the American Revolution in 1773–76.

6. The strategy of the SEP proceeds from the understanding that the development of the class struggle creates the conditions for the growth of socialist consciousness, the building of revolutionary leadership and the conquest of power. There is no revolution without the entry of the working class into struggle. Conversely, the artificial suppression of the class struggle by the labor bureaucracy over the past 45 years has produced a massive reversal in the social position of the working class—labor’s share of GDP has fallen to the lowest level on record, going back to 1947—and created the conditions for the domination of right-wing politics and reaction. To this must be added the bureaucracy’s relentless promotion of economic nationalism and “buy American” chauvinism, which has fed directly into the poisonous atmosphere on which the far right thrives. The building of rank-and-file committees is aimed at breaking the grip of the bureaucracy and creating the means through which the enormous social opposition now developing can find a revolutionary expression.

7. This strategy is counterposed to that of the tendencies that rejected the fight for socialist consciousness in the working class and devoted themselves instead to the supposed reform of the bureaucracy. The Teamsters for a Democratic Union, founded a half century ago, is the model. Promoting one “reform” bureaucrat after another, it blocked the development of the political struggle of the working class at every point, even as the bureaucracy integrated itself into the structure of corporate management and the capitalist state. Fifty years later, these tendencies have themselves been absorbed into the apparatus they promised to reform, where they function as anticommunist defenders of war and of the suppression of workers’ democratic rights. TDU’s chosen “reformer,” Sean O’Brien, appeared on the platform of the Republican National Convention.

8. This Congress gives its strongest support to the campaign of Will Lehman, the Mack Trucks worker and socialist, for president of the UAW in the 2026 elections. In the 2022 elections, Shawn Fain was presented as a “reformer” by the pseudo-left organizations that operate in and around the apparatus and the Democratic Party, including Jacobin, the DSA, Labor Notes and others. Over the past three years, Fain has presided over the betrayal of tens of thousands of auto and auto parts workers, collaborated with the Trump tariff regime, preemptively shut down academic-worker struggles, and suppressed all opposition at the 2026 Constitutional Convention, while the court-appointed monitor recently documented a “toxic culture of division and retaliation at the highest levels of the organization.” The bureaucracy cannot be reformed. It must be abolished.

9. The Lehman campaign’s program gives concrete form to the perspective of the IWA-RFC: the end of the dictatorship of the Solidarity House apparatus and the transfer of power to a network of rank-and-file committees on the shop floor; the replacement of nearly 50 years of pro-corporate policies with a strategy of class struggle; full recovery of wages lost to concessions and inflation, a zero-layoff policy, company-paid healthcare, and a 30-hour week with no loss of pay to stop automation-driven job cuts; the repudiation of the bureaucracy’s nationalism, counterposing an international strategy based on the unified struggle of American, Canadian and Mexican workers against transnational corporations; the defense of immigrant workers against the ICE raids and deportations; and the mobilization of the industrial power of the membership against dictatorship and war.

10. The fear of the apparatus towards the rank-and-file rebellion embodied in Lehman’s campaign has now found expression in open death threats. On July 16, a high-ranking UAW official and prominent Fain supporter, until recently the assistant director of Lehman’s own region, posted a death threat on Lehman’s campaign page: an AI-generated image depicting Lehman bound and gagged, blood running from his mouth, with a masked gunman aiming a rifle at his back. This Congress calls for the broadest campaign in defense of Will Lehman, demanding the public repudiation of the threat by the UAW. The defense of Lehman is the defense of the democratic rights of the entire working class against the gangster methods of the labor bureaucracy.

11. This Congress resolves to mobilize workers and youth behind the Lehman campaign and the campaign to defend him against the death threat issued by the UAW apparatus; to build rank-and-file committees in every factory, workplace, school, and neighborhood in which the party is active; to extend the IWA-RFC into logistics, healthcare, education and the public sector, and to develop its international coordination with the sections of the ICFI in the fight against the global assault on jobs and against war and dictatorship; to defend science and culture as social rights, connecting the struggles of educators, scientists and artists against censorship and the profit-driven assault on intellectual labor to the fight to make the cultural achievements of humanity accessible to all; and to recruit the most class-conscious workers into the SEP.

Hi comrades. I am a Trotskyist and I’m looking for advice on which Trotskyist party to join. Does anyone have some good recommendations? My last post on this subreddit was about my DSA meeting and some comrades recommended some parties that are more aligned with my politics, so I’ve been looking into some of those.

The latest attempt at a genealogical-style "family tree" of international Trotskyist tendencies, taken from Spartacist (English Edition) No. 71 (September 2026) by the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), appearing in the article "Fourth International After World War II: Why Trotskyism Fractured" by Vincent David.

https://iclfi.org/content/periodical/spartacist-en/issue/71/4th-intl/img/trotskyist-movement.png

Source: https://iclfi.org/spartacist/en/71/4th-intl

On June 24, the strongest earthquake to strike Venezuela in 125 years killed more than 6,500 people and left tens of thousands missing. Two months later, with much of the population still living in tents on plazas and sidewalks, Donald Trump announced that the United States government is taking control of Venezuela’s oil.

On Friday evening, Trump boasted on social media that Washington had secured “majority US control of more than 65 billion barrels of proven oil reserves in Venezuela.” This amounts to one-fifth of Venezuela’s reserves, the largest in the world. However, Washington is effectively asserting control over the entire industry.

The Wall Street Journal has since documented that a private company led by Venezuelan businessman Alejandro Betancourt will receive century-long rights to develop 17 oil fields. The Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital will take a 35 percent stake through penny warrants—equity at virtually no cost—along with preferential rights to buy 20 percent of the output at cost.

In sum, the Department of War of the United States is seizing the oil of a country it invaded eight months ago, not as mere broker or financier, but as an owner.

This is the clearest demonstration yet that the incipient third world war now unfolding is a war of colonial conquest and repartition. The oil is being seized to fuel Washington’s wars against Iran and Russia and war preparations against China. 

The measure is also inseparable from the trade war against Canada, the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario, and Trump’s National Security Strategy that asserts American domination over the entire hemisphere. The Americas are being converted into a resource base and staging ground for global war by US imperialism.

Two things stand exposed. The first is the gangsterism of the US ruling class, which has abandoned its former pretense of upholding international law, human rights and democracy. The second is the venality and cowardice of the Latin American bourgeoisie and its petty-bourgeois apologists—above all the Chavista movement, hailed for two decades by Pabloite, Stalinist and academic tendencies as a new road to socialism. It now presides over the surrender of Venezuela’s national wealth to the Pentagon.

...

What Chavismo actually was

What was presented for two decades as “Socialism of the 21st Century” was, from its origins, the diversion of a revolutionary upsurge into national reformism funded by oil rent.

Leon Trotsky’s analysis of Lázaro Cárdenas’s nationalizations in Mexico supplies the clearest explanation of this phenomenon. A national bourgeois government in a semi-colonial country, he wrote, “veers between foreign and domestic capital,” governing either as the instrument of foreign capital or by maneuvering with the proletariat to gain limited room against it. Trotsky was explicit that it would be “an outright deception” to claim the road to socialism runs through nationalization by a bourgeois state.

Under Chávez, the private sector’s share of GDP reached 70 percent—higher than in 1998. The employers’ share of national wealth against labor hit a record 48.8 percent in 2008, while real wages fell. In 2012, Venezuela had the world’s most profitable banks and its best-performing stock market. The misiones expanding social assistance and services were real and temporarily lowered poverty. But nothing altered the country’s dependence on a single commodity and, through it, on imperialist finance capital.

When prices collapsed and Obama declared Venezuela a national security threat, the whole edifice fell apart. Chavismo and its apologists had systematically suppressed the sole force capable of opposing imperialist aggression, the independent struggle of the working class, and their own “anti-imperialism” was exposed as empty rhetoric.

In 2024, Rodríguez herself denounced the US-backed opposition for wanting to hand Venezuela’s oil, gas and gold to its “masters” in Washington. In September 2025 she told the New York Times that the Pentagon had always had the strategic objective of obtaining Venezuelan reserves. She knew exactly what was coming. She now helps administer it.

Following a recent interview with Rodríguez, TIME described the result as a client state: Rubio supervises the administration of oil revenues and public finances; export earnings are held in escrow and released as Caracas meets conditions; Rodríguez consults Rubio on the appointment of her defense minister; and there is near-daily contact by phone and WhatsApp.

The completeness of the capitulation was underscored when Nicolás Maduro Guerra—a National Assembly deputy, son of the abducted president, and himself named in the narcotrafficking indictment—issued a formal communiqué on official Venezuelan letterhead thanking Trump and Rubio by name for their role in the agreement, even as his father sits in a New York prison cell.

...

Three and a half decades of continuous warfare—Iraq, Yugoslavia, Somalia, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Sudan, Palestine, and now Iran and Venezuela—constitute a single protracted campaign to liquidate, state by state, every obstacle the anti-colonial movements of the 20th century had erected against unrestrained imperialist rule. Imperialism’s objective is to remake the world as though the October 1917 revolution and the anti-colonial upheavals had never occurred.

Venezuela is where this process finds its most naked expression. The Pentagon now holds ownership over Venezuelan crude; Chinese purchases have been cut to zero, and Russian joint ventures have been terminated.

Ramírez, the former president of the state oil company, warns that the arrangement stands on clay and Venezuelans will not accept it. The looting rests on social austerity and mass poverty, and is being imposed on a population that has just buried over 6,500 people and faces total devastation. And Washington has exhausted every political instrument for containing the anger it is generating: the right-wing opposition remains hated and the Chavistas are openly administering the plunder and unable to posture as anything other than Washington’s puppets. What remains is brute force through the Bolivarian National Guard and US Marines.

The political perspectives developed by the International Committee of the Fourth International have been entirely vindicated by these events, at a time when the working class represents a vastly greater social force than at any other moment in history. Its conscious unification across Venezuela, the United States and the Americas under the ICFI’s program of world socialist revolution is the only answer to recolonization and world war.

Marxism, AI and Der Spiegel’s fear of revolution - World Socialist Web Site

... As early as 1848, Marx and Engels noted in the Communist Manifesto that capital converts “the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science” into its paid wage laborers. Today that process is reaching completion: as the promise that education secures a professional future collapses, so does a central mechanism of capitalist stability.

Accordingly, the protagonists of the article are laid-off tech workers and unemployed university graduates. Workers in car plants, warehouses, slaughterhouses, hospitals and delivery services, whose wages and working conditions have been under attack for decades and are also threatened by further automation, do not receive a mention anywhere in the lengthy piece. Yet capitalism objectively links the fate of both groups, as it now proletarianizes ever larger sections of the academically trained layers of society as well.

Objectively, millions of engineers, software developers and university graduates today face the same question as workers in the factories: capitalism has nothing left to offer them but poverty, war and dictatorship. But how can this be overcome? The answer requires a serious engagement with Marx.

That it is precisely this conclusion which unsettles the editors of Der Spiegel becomes clear from their own argument. The article quotes sociologist Mathias Albert: “But with AI, aimlessness is turning into hopelessness. We all know that it is not the parties of the centre that benefit from this, but the political extremes.” Their concern is directed, not least, at a growing interest in Marxism.

How acute the editors consider this danger to be is shown by the fact that editor-in-chief, Dirk Kurbjuweit, felt it necessary to supplement the cover story with a commentary headlined, “Marx or Musk? Neither,” in which he explicitly states: “The answer to this is not Marxism. In practice, it has created its own catastrophes.”

What is meant here is Stalinism. But equating Marxism with the crimes of the Stalinist bureaucracy is intended precisely to prevent Marx’s analysis from becoming the basis of a political program. The Stalinist bureaucracy was not the executor but the gravedigger of the October Revolution: it murdered an entire generation of revolutionaries and progressively restored capitalism—a process that culminated in the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Marxism was defended and developed further by Leon Trotsky and the Fourth International, who led an implacable struggle against Stalinism.

The fact that Kurbjuweit, one of the most zealous journalistic advocates of German rearmament, feels compelled to draw this line at all is revealing. A Marx who merely “sensed” something remains harmless, but a Marx whose analysis becomes the basis of a political program poses a mortal danger to capitalism.

For what Marx analyzed more than 150 years ago is today becoming concretely tangible for every worker, above all through the development of AI. The productive forces have outgrown the social order within which they are confined.

...

What the article finally presents as “the counter-movement” amounts to nothing more than neo-Luddite machine-breaking and abstention from technology. It ends with a call for passive waiting: “Who consumes? Who rebels? Who rules? The questions are quickly asked. The answers will take time.”

This false alternative—adaptation to AI controlled by the oligarchy, or rejection of the technology—leaves the decisive question untouched: who controls the technology, and in whose interest is it deployed?

The answer lies in the working-class taking control of the technology and deploying it to improve living and working conditions, instead of for war and profit.

What is needed is the expropriation of the corporations that own this technology—the AI companies, the cloud providers, the chipmakers and the major online platforms. They must be transferred into social ownership and placed under the democratic control of the working class. Not nationalization (Verstaatlichung), which would hand the apparatus over to a capitalist state that is rearming and carrying out mass deportations. Decisions on the use of these systems must be made by those who create them and whose lives they are transforming.

This would clear the way for what this technology is actually good for: research and medicine, an education system that benefits every child, the elimination of the most mind-numbing and dangerous jobs, and tackling the climate crisis. The precondition for this is the conquest of political power by the working class on the basis of a socialist program.

The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) has drawn practical conclusions from this insight. With Socialism AI, it is deploying the most advanced technology of the present day not against the working class, but for it: workers and young people gain direct access to the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg and Plekhanov, as well as to more than 125,000 articles from the World Socialist Web Site, and can engage with them in dialogue at any time, from anywhere, and in any language.

Socialism AI replaces neither the political struggle nor the party that must lead it. But it is a step in the political arming of the working class for the tasks posed by Der Spiegel’s cover story: the expropriation of the oligarchy and the establishment of a socialist society.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/08/27/xfej-a27.html

Last Thursday, Ukrainian workers intervened to interrupt a document check being carried out by two service members of the Territorial Recruitment Center (TRC) responsible for the forced mobilization or “busification” of tens of thousands of Ukrainian men off the streets of Ukraine.

According to Suspilne news, TRC officers stopped a vehicle at a checkpoint in the western Ukrainian city of Lutsk and demanded to view the male driver’s documents. The man refused to provide any personal information and instead abandoned his vehicle and fled the scene to avoid ending up in the Ukrainian Armed Forces unwillingly. 

The TRC officers followed the man towards a residential building in their official vehicle at which point they were confronted by 30 Ukrainian workers opposed to another apparent case of government-sanctioned kidnapping. 

Daria Stelmaschuk, spokesperson for the Volyn Regional Territorial Recruitment and Social Support Center, stated, “After that, 30 civilians approached the scene and began physically resisting the police officers and service members of the Territorial Recruitment and Social Support Center, striking them with their hands and unidentified objects.” Both officers were injured in the protest, and their TRC vehicle was essentially destroyed by the crowd. According to the report:

- All the windows and headlights were smashed.

- All the tires were damaged.

- A radio was stolen.

- A body camera was taken.

- The vehicle keys were stolen.

Just a day later, a 25-year-old man stabbed a TRC officer to death after being stopped and refusing to show his military registration documents. Both photos and summary of the case can be found on the website of Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office and video of TRC officers beating the suspect appeared on social media.

Notably, the incident took place on Stepan Bandera Street in Lviv, named after the infamous leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and war criminal. While the Zelensky regime has expanded its campaign to rehabilitate and honor Nazi collaborators such as Bandera as part of its war efforts, the stabbing of a TRC officer on Bandera Street demonstrates the lengths Ukrainian men will go to avoid fighting in the NATO-backed war against Russia.

On Tuesday, a riot erupted in Ternopil when neighbors came to the rescue of a man who was being abducted inside his own apartment. Special forces and police were deployed to quell the subsequent protest.

...

Such incidents go entirely unreported in the Western media. They are likewise underreported within official Ukrainian media but appear regularly on social media as videos. 

Marta Havryshko, Ukrainian historian and professor at Clark University, has shared and popularized many of the most recent incidents on her X account. For her opposition to both the war and Zelensky’s campaign to honor Nazi collaborators, Havryshko has been relentlessly attacked online and threatened by far-right nationalist thugs who are essential to continuing the disastrous war against Russia and propping up the Zelensky regime.

Earlier this week, Havryshko shared a similar incident to the destruction of a TRC vehicle in Lutsk that occurred in Ternopil when a crowd again intervened against a forced mobilization and smashed the TRC vehicle and assaulted the officers, leaving one hospitalized. 

As Havryshko noted, “Similar scenes have recently unfolded in Lviv. What might once have been dismissed as an isolated incident is beginning to look like a pattern—and an increasingly troubling one.”

It bears emphasis that Lviv, Lutsk, and Ternopil are all located in Western Ukraine, predominately Ukrainian-speaking and located in the supposed heartland of Ukrainian nationalism. While still marked by individual acts of despair and spontaneous outbursts of anger, such incidents testify to a growing and significant opposition across the Ukrainian working class to the war despite constant propaganda and the Zelensky police state. A recent Gallup poll found on June 30 that 66 percent of Ukrainians want a negotiated end to the war as soon as possible, against 24 percent who favor fighting on until victory.

...

But even amidst this ever-wider opposition to the further mobilization, the Zelensky government is now discussing its further expansion. In recent weeks, proposals by Ukrainian politicians and NATO military figures to include women who are single and have no children in the draft, have been floated by the media. The secretary of the parliamentary defense committee Roman Kostenko recently stated that “radical changes” to the draft would soon be announced but denied that women would be included in the draft.

With the recent appointment of the former leader of the Ukrainian Secret Service, the SBU, which is overseeing the domestic campaign of terror against opponents of the war, Yevhen Khmara as Defense Minister, it is clear that the Zelensky government is doubling down on its already existing police state. Just prior to his firing, former Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, aware of the immense hatred for the TRC among Ukrainian workers, had announced a “reform” effort that included the banning of TRC officers wearing balaclavas (ski masks) and the introduction of body cameras. While himself a war hawk against Russia, Fedorov has been criticizing Zelensky for the obvious corruption of his government and advocated cosmetic reforms in order to stem the tide of growing working-class opposition to the war.

As important as the growing spontaneous protests against “busification” are, the critical question is to root the struggle to end the war in the working class. The economic and political power of workers in Ukraine, Russia and Europe must be mobilized for a joint struggle against imperialist war and its origins in the capitalist system. This is the stance Ukrainian socialist Bogdan Syrotiuk fought for and for which he now faces 15 years in prison.

Do we consider a country like Canada to be a bourgeois republic since its monarchy is relatively weak?

It's good to see this case getting attention. It so clearly demonstrates the right-wing character of the NATO war in Ukraine.

我本人比较偏毛主义，不过这并不影响我对托派这个群体的兴趣。说实话，我之前接触过建制派、马列毛派、自由派等不同立场的人，但一直没有真正接触过托派。
我对托派的理论、历史和不同派别的观点其实了解得比较有限，所以很希望能认识一些中国的托派朋友，和大家交流一下，也想比较系统地了解一下托派对于革命、无产阶级专政、社会主义建设以及中国历史等问题的看法。
当然，我不是来找人吵架或者互相扣帽子的。如果你是托派，欢迎来聊聊你的观点；如果你了解托派但不是托派，也非常欢迎交流。
如果方便的话，也可以推荐一些比较适合入门的托派书籍、文章或资料。

我觉得这样交流下很有意思

我想去学习交流 但是不知道在哪里能找到托洛茨基派的交流群

Canadian prime minister Mark Carney has declared that Canada is “at war” with the United States on trade following the collapse of several weeks of talks with the Trump administration over its move to impose a 50 percent tariff on $20 billion worth of Canadian goods, representing 5 percent of $380 billion of Canadian exports to the US.

The attack on the US’s closest trading partner is significant in that it invoked for the first time a provision of the 1930 Tariff Act, otherwise known as the Smoot-Hawley Act, which played such a destructive role in the trade wars of the 1930s.

Up until the end of last week, the talks between the US and Canada appeared to be headed for an agreement. The tariffs had been initially set to go into effect on August 19, but US president Trump announced a three-day delay saying the two countries had a deal “subject to the finalisation of the documents.”

But it appears that there was considerable devil in the detail because on Saturday the negotiations collapsed as both sides flung accusations against each other and sought to boost their respective nationalist agendas.

Carney announced he had suspended the discussions because the US side had introduced last-minute changes which were “unfair, uneconomic and called into question the reliability of any deal.” This was followed by a speech in which he said Canada was “at war” with the US over trade.

“You’re at war when you’re attacked, and we got attacked,” he told reporters.

Carney indicated that the last-minute changes demanded by the US included efforts to push back on efforts to have more Canadian content in online streaming services, including in French, an official language in Canada.

...

There are also political calculations at work here. Carney has built his support, since taking over from former prime minister Justin Trudeau, by presenting himself as the most determined defender of Canadian national interests against the Trump administration.

Significantly, he received strong support from Doug Ford, the hard-right Tory premier of Ontario, the centre of Canadian industry, who gave full support to Carney’s “strong response.”

“As we fight to protect Canadian sovereignty and economic security, everything needs to be on the table. Ontario is ready to do its part,” he posted on X.

In his response posted on social media, Trump indirectly revived his earlier insistence that if Canada wanted to avoid US tariffs, then it should become the 51st state.

He said that Canada wanted the “benefits of being a state, without being one!!! They have also charged our great farmers, for many years, massive amounts of Tariffs. No more!!!”

This is an indication that the conflict goes beyond the 500 or so products on which the 50 percent tariffs are to be charged. The list already covers a wide range of products including building materials, dairy products, clothing and alcohol.

The US tariffs came into effect from midnight on Saturday. The Canadian tariffs, which have yet to be announced, will be imposed from September 8. Carney indicated they would cover “steel, dairy, appliances, agricultural equipment, pulp and paper, electronics.”

...

The eruption of this conflict goes beyond the issue of Canadian trade. It has global implications.

The tariffs were invoked under Section 338 of the Smoot-Hawley Act. This provision, which has never before been invoked by any US president, provides that he can impose tariffs on countries that discriminate against the “commerce of the United States directly or indirectly.”

In April 2025, Trump initiated a trade war against the rest of the world with his so-called “reciprocal tariffs.” But after being collected, these tariffs were struck down by the Supreme Court earlier this year, resulting in the Treasury having to repay around $160 billion to US corporations—exposing the lie of the administration that they were paid for by foreign governments and corporations.

Since then, the administration has been casting about for other means of imposing tariffs, notably under the 1974 Trade Act. But this is a cumbersome and somewhat lengthy procedure, and the administration would like to be able to rapidly impose tariffs at will as Trump sought to do.

The use of Section 338, as was noted when it was invoked, may well be a trial run for its wider application as the administration deepens its economic warfare against the rest of the world.