The start of President Donald Trump’s second term marked a turning point in the trade and industrial policy of the world’s largest power.
According to some observers, behind the tariffs and the alliance with the leaders of multinational tech companies, there is a global strategy aimed at profoundly changing the logic of globalization, refounding U.S. leadership on new principles.
Reshoring, or relocation, which is supposed to foster the rebuilding of an industrial capacity on U.S. soil, does not actually bring labor back to the center, but aims to enhance the new technological sovereignty based on intelligent automation. American action can be read in light of this transformation as: a post-labor capitalism.
Artificial Intelligence becomes the key asset: the algorithm replaces the factory as the central measure of value. With autonomous robotics, efficiency no longer depends on worker mass, but on software architecture.
Capital, which for decades called for more open markets, is now closing in on itself. Not because it is in crisis, but because it no longer needs to minimize the cost of labor through productive mobility, which had led it to relocate production to emerging countries with low labor costs.
This also includes the series of announcements about AI-integrated Multifunctional Robots, such as Optimus, a multipurpose robotic humanoid being developed by Tesla.
This logic that justified the unlimited opening of markets and the import of cheap products from abroad is no longer necessary in the age of Artificial Intelligence and autonomous robotics.
Capital can henceforth produce value in a way that is selective (choosing which technologies and industries to manage with the new production logic), territorial, and supreme (in a less externally dependent, in some cases autarkic, logic).
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