Summary
Trump warned automakers not to raise prices after announcing a 25% tariff on imported vehicles starting April 3, claiming the tariffs would be “great” and benefit U.S. manufacturing.
Industry leaders, including GM, Ford, and Stellantis CEOs, expressed concerns about inevitable price increases, with experts warning tariffs could add thousands to car costs.
Auto suppliers stated that absorbing tariffs is impossible, and dealers fear affordability challenges for consumers.
While the United Auto Workers union support the move as a job creator, trade groups predict higher prices and fewer manufacturing jobs.
More precisely, to use Marx’s definition: socialism is when workers own and fully control the means of production.
Government services: not socialism, no worker ownership or control.
State capitalism (like China and the former USSR): not socialism, no worker ownership or control.
Historically, the closest things we’ve seen to socialism so far are worker-owned co-operatives and city- or provincial-level anarcho-syndicalist systems such as the Spanish Anarchists before the fascists murdered them. Some grassroots movements like Podemos and Occupy have also attempted to implement such systems, with brief and limited success.
Again going back to Marx, he expected socialism to be an emergent phenomenon as late capitalism in the most advanced economies becomes unsustainable (he didn’t anticipate the transition from feudalism to state capitalism in Russia and China, or its leaders fraudulently calling it socialism). You’ll see more attempts to implement worker ownership and control, and you’ll see those who get fat off the existing system do everything they can to smack those attempts down. That’s where we are now. Then there will be a sort of phase transition that might take the form of a revolution or might be a less brutal change.
Now, whether Marx and his successors are correct in his prediction, only time will tell.