Fernand Braudel argued in his book A History of Civilizations that economic progress proceeded from the innovations of industrial complexity and transportation. This produced, in some countries, the means to accumulate capital to extract, transfer and use the raw materials of other regions for manufacturing. The result was a relationship of specialisation with some nations benefiting from the raw materials and others from the cheap labour.
As this relationship developed, manufacturing also was concentrated outside the dominant countries where information and communication technologies concentrated and which perfected control of goods and services, especially by means of financial instruments and processes.
What Donald Trump and his cohorts are attempting is an interesting, yet risky, experiment to modify this relationship by reversing America’s deindustrialisation, restructuring America’s workforce as a pre-technology/communication form. By reducing institutions that have been involved in fostering social capital — for example Medicare, social security, unemployment insurance and welfare — Trump’s supporters in Project 2025 (see especially the Heritage Foundation recommendations) foresee a new industrial future for America, which, with its elimination of social supports, puts the emphasis on competition.
The means to accomplish this substantial reorganisation appears to be by presidential decree (“An ‘all-out assault’ on the rule of law”, The Big Read, March 22). No similar demolition of institutions and reconstruction of social process has been undertaken since the Bolshevik seizure of Russia. Trump, however, lacks the disciplined party ranks the Bolsheviks had created, and the dangers of social unrest, disorder and loss of authority loom large in the future.
Niccolo Caldararo
Department of Anthropology
San Francisco State University,
San Francisco, CA, US
