Can Workers Push Back Against Capital’s Devaluation? Dangers Revealed in South Africa

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While the labour movement often seems at its lowest ebb, what Marx identified as capitalism’s main internal contradiction – the overaccumulation of capital at the world scale – has never been worse in absolute terms. Capital is especially frenetic within financial circuitries, amplifying extreme uneven development across the world system, but especially in the periphery and even middle-income Asia, as a result of the accompanying geopolitical stresses, at a time of extraordinary Artificial Intelligence bubbling in the New York Stock Exchange.

Although the excess capacity of productive capital, is – in this cycle of accumulation – mainly emanating from the east coast of China, as documented by Mercator (a Berlin imperial think tank justifiably worried about competition), it’s a more general tendency of capitalism. David Harvey has described the most visible and volatile aspect of overaccumulation as a “surplus of liquidity sloshing around in the world’s money markets. The rising mass of money seeking opportunities for ‘productive’ investment is harder and harder to accommodate.”

The logic of displacing overaccumulated capital includes not only moving it across space and time, i.e. the imperialist expansion of the system (‘shifting’) or the use of credit to pay later for today’s consumption (‘stalling’). Also the system turns more to accumulation by dispossession through – as Rosa Luxemburg described it, capitalism ‘eating up’ the non-capitalist spheres of life – as a way to make up for declining profits in the productive sector (‘stealing’).

Now, in addition, more than ever in recent memory given that shifting-stalling-stealing techniques are facing exhaustion, a battle emerges who bears the cost of devaluation of the most exposed components. According to Harvey’s seminal (1982) account in The Limits to Capital:

When government intervenes to stabilize accumulation in the face of multiple contradictions, it succeeds only at the price of internalizing these contradictions. It acquires the dubious task of administering the necessary doses of devaluation. But it has some choice as to how and where it does so. It can locate the costs within its territory through tough labour legislation and fiscal and monetary restraints. Or it can seek external relief through trade wars, combative fiscal and monetary policies on the world stage, backed in the end by appeal to military force. The ultimate form of devaluation is military confrontation and global war.

To avoid massive economic devaluations, states are now forced to collaborate, e.g. in global financial bailouts. Yet what was once an effective approach by G20 rulers against devalued banks and investment markets – mainly in the forms of temporary but potent monetary loosening (‘Quantitative Easing’ and lowered interest rates) and fiscal expansion in 2008-09, or against Covid-19’s economic damage during 2020-22 lockdowns – now appears impossible. Witness Trump’s coming (mid-December) hosting of the G20 gathering, yet his exceptionally narrow, neoliberal, climate-destructive self-mandate for the event at his Miami golf club.

Meanwhile, waves of U.S.-Israeli military destruction across West Asia are weakening the durability of Trump’s version of imperialism. These include not just genocide in Palestine and mass murder in Iran and Lebanon, but devastating energy, petrochemical and fertilizer (hence food) disruptions due to the Strait of Hormuz closure.

Moreover, add to that Washington’s rapidly-collapsing soft power, which even before Trump went to war against Caracas, Tehran and (soon) Havana, and alienated Europe by threatening a Greenland invasion, was also savagely self-harmed: in early 2025, USAID’s massive medical, climate and emergency-relief funding was fed into Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency woodchipper (along with millions of lives – although the woke-neoconservative National Endowment for Democracy was ultimately saved from the initial cuts).

Add to this turmoil the likelihood Trump will lose his tight grip over Congress in November, in part because of a lasting scandal over his former best friend Jeffrey Epstein’s pedophilia potentially implicating him, and also in part because, internal to his regime, the war-mongering neocon-oriented politicians and adventurists at the Pentagon and State Department have defeated paleo-conservative geopolitical isolationists. Short-term financial winners are to be found in the U.S. Military Industrial Complex, Big Oil and Technofeudal corporates, at the expense of everyone else.

This all appears untenable, but Trump’s project – behind which lies not just a neo-fascist ideology but the danger of a longer-lasting ‘Muskism’ regime of accumulation – could well continue, given how little geopolitical resistance he’s finding in the broader community of nation-states. Widespread hype and – at minimum – hope have turned now to helplessness, after BRICS failed to lead a de-dollarization drive last year, when hosted by Lula da Silva at the Rio de Janeiro summit (or in 2024 by Vladimir Putin at Kazan). The BRICS could not even provide a unified response to Trump’s tariff wars, or respond to attacks on fellow member Iran.

The bloc’s fabled spirit of resistance had simply evaporated. Several BRICS governments joined Trump’s Board of Peace in February: Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Indonesia (though the latter has had second thoughts), with Saudi Arabia also considered a BRICS member, and with India an official observer to that Gaza construction mafia, one that no European leaders dared endorse.

Or recall Narendra Modi’s mid-February visit to the U.S. for trade negotiations (which entailed rejecting Moscow-supplied, highly-subsidized oil and gas as part of the deal), and then to Benjamin Netanyahu on February 25-26 to promote massive arms sales. The Tel Aviv appearance was just two days before Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and dozens of top military leaders (and 168 school girls) were suddenly murdered in Israel-U.S. attacks, in the midst of supposed peace negotiations.

This split left even once-virulently pro-BRICS commentators like Pepe Escobar resigned that the bloc had fallen into a ‘very deep coma.’ (I prefer to think of the Board of Peace membership and many other BRICS’ geoeconomic, multilateral-institutional, Trump-appeasing and environmental-policy practices as all too often deserving a different slur, subimperial, a term popularized by Brazilian dependency theorist Ruy Mauro Marini after the 1964 coup.)

Uneven resistance to deindustrialization

With the anti-Trump backlash so weak, aside from Iran’s military resistance, on May Day it is timely to at least glance at working-class forces operating under some of the most extreme pressures. Two metalworking trade unions in the United States and South Africa reveal fight-back potential but leadership confusion.

In both economies, manufacturing has shrunk to historically low levels over the past thirty years, from 16% to 11% of GDP in the U.S. and from 20% to below 11% in South Africa, with the latter suffering much more rapid deindustrialization in 2025. Appealing to a layer of once-powerful unionized workers, Trump imposed widespread protective tariffs against imports in 2025. He can claim a slight uptick in industrial productionsince he took office, although correlations with his trade policy are not yet certain.

Tariffs were first imposed in February 2025 on steel, aluminum and auto imports, and then in early April on countries against which U.S. producers experienced trade deficits. This was followed a week later by a pause – and imposition of a 10% base tariff on all imports – once U.S. financial markets rebelled against Trump (even dumping U.S. Treasury bills). There followed a set of new tariffs in August 2025, carrying much more of a political than economic rationale.

These also entailed ‘transactional’ deal-making for Trump, when he settled scores or achieved greater familial wealth through real estate deals (e.g. in Vietnam). His powers were, however, questioned by those arguing Congress has the constitutional mandate to regulate trade, and the presidency can impose........

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