Inter-imperialist contradictions are objectives determined by the nature of the world imperialist system
Inter-imperialist contradictions develop in collusion and struggle, struggle is absolute and temporary and relative collusion.
The main contradiction is oppressed-imperialism nations.
Imperialism prepares the conditions for its own sinking and will be swept by the world revolution.
Yankee imperialism cannot resolve its contradiction between its fragile economic base and its unlimited ambitions which will inevitably take it to its final ruin and bars.
Yankee imperialism cannot resolve the unlimited world domain contradiction and its imperialist allies and rivals, because it seeks to dominate them and they oppose their domination.
The
rival powers and their "allies" seek to move Yankee
imperialism as a unique hegemonic superpower, but it still maintains
such a condition.
1. Facts and Data from 2017
- In 2017, the US, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), had a goods trade deficit of $807 billion and a services trade surplus of $255 billion. It also recorded a substantial surplus for primary goods (inputs or components) in the amount of $222 billion. Overall, the US current account shows a deficit of $449 billion.
- Another reason for the high goods trade deficit with China is that many US manufacturing companies, often including assembly companies, relocated to China due to low labor costs. These companies' exports to the US count as Chinese exports, although the value added incorporated in China is usually low.
We commented on the above: Regarding China's trade surplus, we must consider the country's backwardness in capitalist development despite its great technological achievements. This is reflected in the savings-investment ratio. Households have to invest up to 70% of their savings in the real estate market because they have no other option, and nearly 600 million workers have to live on an income of less than 150 euros, which shrinks the domestic market necessary for the development of capitalism and makes the social-imperialist country dependent on exports.
What is written in the previous paragraph indicates that the current regime of the bureaucratic faction is at a dead end in its opium-fueled dreams of making social-imperialist China an economic superpower. With each passing day, the contradiction with the opposing faction that has emerged from within its own midst, that of the particular monopolistic big bourgeoisie, will become more acute. What is most important for us is that this situation will increasingly sharpen the class struggle in China, a favorable situation for the proletariat to reconstitute its Communist Party and carry out the counter-restoration. (1)
- The competitiveness of the economy is also an important factor.
In 1990, manufacturing generated approximately a quarter of the US gross domestic product; in 2017, it was just under 12 percent. In comparison, the services sector accounts for approximately 69 percent of GDP, making it clearly more competitive.
- In the trade balance of goods and services with Germany,
Germany actually has a large trade surplus of approximately $64.1 billion. Also in the services balance and in terms of primary income, Germany has a surplus, but a small one, compared to the United States.
German Investments in the US
German investors invested $291 billion in the United States in 2016. German companies employ approximately 674,000 workers (2015) in the US. This makes them the fourth largest foreign employer in the United States – after the United Kingdom, Japan, and France.
Therefore, the trade balance depends primarily on macroeconomic conditions.
Many services Germany receives do not come directly from the United States, but rather through daughter companies of US companies located in other EU countries, especially Ireland. Therefore, the primary income (from the export of inputs and components) of the US from the trade of its daughter companies or subsidiaries is also counted in Ireland and not in Germany.
We comment: the previous data shows the parasitism of imperialism, as does the following.
Expression of Imperialist Parasitism
Undoubtedly, the European Union practices covert protectionism on a significant scale.
Furthermore, a large portion of the inputs or components of German exports come from Central and Eastern European countries (CEEE), so German exports to the US contain a high proportion of Eastern European value added, which is effectively charged to the German-US current account. Here, the German source forgets that this "high proportion of Eastern European value added" comes from daughter companies or subsidiaries of large German monopolies or belongs to their chain.
The US current account balance with the EU:
In trade in goods with the United States, the EU has a surplus of around $153 billion.
But, in comparison, there is a deficit in the services account of $51 billion.
Second, the EU shows a large deficit in primary income (inputs and components) of $108 billion.
European companies thus serve the US market with different business models than those offered by North American companies to European markets.
The facts, data, and commentary have been extracted from the article Donald Trump and World Trade, International Politics (Donald Trump und der Welthandel, IP • September/October 2018, from the original German); the subtitles are ours. (2) and (3)
The US is the most parasitic imperialist country
To illustrate this, we present the following quote from Henning Vöpel, "Trumps Welt – eine Bestandsaufnahme" ("Trump's World: A Balance Sheet"):
"Since the beginning of his term, the focus of discussion has been the trade conflict with China, but also with Germany. The central argument is that trading partners behaved unfairly toward the US.
The US current account deficit with China and Germany is robbing Americans.
On the economic front, the opposite is true: the role of the US dollar as the international reserve currency leads to chronic overvaluation and current account passivity.
The terms of trade are therefore Both are favorable for the US; so it's much more about a net export of welfare from these countries to the US.
It's completely unthinkable that Trump's argument is valid, because in reality, China has had its own export industries massively subsidized for many years, particularly by the undervaluation of the renminbi, and also the European currency.
Undoubtedly, the European Union practices covert protectionism on a significant scale. Trade conflicts, however, with mutual punitive tariffs, affect American consumers, who are significantly worse off.
The dispute between the US and China has another, even more important dimension: it concerns the next geopolitical order for the 21st century. The conflict already dragged on for a long time under Barack Obama. Trump, however, has greatly aggravated his rhetoric of confrontation, especially."
(United States before the election campaign: Donald Trump's footprints in economics and politics, ifo Schnelldienst 1/2020 (73rd year, January 22, 2020)
In the above quote, we clearly see the class nature of the economic measures of Trump and other previous governments of Yankee imperialism; that is, first, to benefit the largest monopolists of the Yankee financial oligarchy and to the detriment of the American proletariat and the peoples of the world; second, to maintain its global hegemony, a topic that will become more complete and clearer in subsequent installments.
NOTES:
(1) The backwardness of China's development:
“(...) In fact, the weakness of consumption is something of an Achilles' heel for the Chinese economy. In terms of gross domestic product, there is no other country where households save so much and spend so much. so little.
Less than 150 euros a month
This has less to do with cultural peculiarities than with economic constraints: Some 600 million people still live in the People's Republic and have to make do with the equivalent of less than 150 euros a month. And even large segments of the upper middle class have to set aside large portions of their savings to prepare for life's eventualities: Those who lose their jobs or fall seriously ill often end up financially ruined in China. Social media is only rudimentarily developed. (…)
Technological successes
Although China has recently achieved technological successes—from the market leader in electric cars BYD to the revolutionary artificial intelligence chatbot Deepseek—the Chinese population has had to accept significant losses of prosperity since the pandemic, in the form of wage cuts, layoffs, and, above all, the real estate crisis.
In the absence of alternatives, households have invested an average of 70% of their savings in a real estate market whose prices have fallen significantly in recent years.
At the same time, the weakness of domestic consumption has also become a foreign policy issue, and not only since Donald Trump's administration.
The more the Chinese economy relies on exports, which continue to boom, but at the same time it imports less and less, the more unbalanced the Middle Kingdom's trade balances become. As a result, China registers huge trade surpluses with both the European Union and the United States. This is causing tensions and has also caused more and more foreign companies to turn their backs on the Chinese market.
Therefore, experts have long called for the state to transfer more resources to the population, in the form of wages and better social benefits. Only then could they spend more again."
(TAZ, This Time Beijing Means Business: China Wants to Boost Consumption by Fabian Kretschman, April 24, 2025)
(2) Note on Trade in Goods and Services:
"2. Services Play a Growing and Undervalued Role in Global Value Chains"“2. Services play a growing and undervalued role in global value chains
In 2017, gross trade in services totaled $5.1 trillion, a figure dwarfed by the $17.3 trillion global goods trade. But trade in services has grown more than 60 percent faster than goods trade over the past decade. Some subsectors, including telecom and IT services, business services, and intellectual property charges, are growing two to three times faster.
Yet the full role of services is obscured in traditional trade statistics. First, services create roughly one-third of the value that goes into traded manufactured goods.6 R&D, engineering, sales and marketing, finance, and human resources all enable goods to go to market. In addition, we find that imported services are substituting for domestic services in nearly all value chains. In the future, the distinction between goods and services will continue to blur as manufacturers increasingly introduce new types of leasing, subscription, and other “as a service” business models.7econd, the intangible assets that multinational companies send to their affiliates around the
world—including software, branding, design, operational processes, and other intellectual property developed at headquarters—represent tremendous value, but they often go unpriced and untracked unless captured as intellectual property charges.8 Years of R&D go into developing pharmaceuticals and smartphones, for example, while design and branding enable companies such as Nike and Adidas to charge a premium for their products.9
However, trade statistics do not capture the use of intangible assets in production and sales around the world.
Finally, trade statistics do not track soaring cross-border flows of free digital services,
including email, real-time mapping, video conferencing, and social media. Wikipedia, for instance, encompasses 40 million free articles in roughly 300 languages. Every day, users worldwide watch more than a billion hours of YouTube’s video content for free, and billions of
people use Facebook and WeChat every month. These services undoubtedly create value for users, even without a monetary price.
We estimate that these three channels collectively produce up to $8.3 trillion in value
annually—a figure that would increase overall trade flows by $4.0 trillion (or 20 percent) and reallocate another $4.3 trillion currently counted as part of the flow of goods to services. If viewed this way, trade in services is already more valuable than trade in goods (Exhibit E3).
This perspective would also substantially shift the trade balance for some countries,
most notably the United States. This exercise is not meant to argue for redefining national trade statistics. It simply underscores the underappreciated role of services, which will be increasingly important for how companies and countries participate in global value chains and trade in the future. “
( McKinsey Global Institute Globalization in transition: The future of trade and value chains, January 2019)
(3) See also on the topic in square-roura, deindustrialization and third, the economic quarter 351, 2021, of which we consign the picture on the evolution of employment and some advanced economies of 2000-2019: Table goes under English translation:
“As is known, since the seventies manufacturing employment of Several developed countries began to decrease in absolute terms, and He also did, therefore, his participation in the total number of employed. This trend was particularly visible, as we have already anticipated, in the United States and some European countries, but also in Japan - to a lower rhythm - and, more recently, in the economies qualified as The Asian "four tigers" (Hong Kong, China and Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore). T
he data is clear. In the period between 1970 and 1995, with International Monetary Fund figures (IMF), Employment in Manufactac turas of the 24 economies qualified as more advanced fell almost 10 percentage points (from 28 to 18%, on average), and in the last two deco- give the average employment in the manufactures of said set of countries is only something above 13%, although with some differences, as sample trades on the weight of employment in the industry (with energy) and manufactures (Table 1).
The setback has also occurred in the contribution tion of manufacturing activities to GDP of some qualifying economies give as advanced (graph 1), where you can also appreciate differences Among the countries taken into consideration. As is known, the reduction of manufacturing employment did not start in All economies at the same time (Nickel, Redding and Swaffild, 2008)
