IN the chancelleries of the world, all the talk is of a return to the 1930s, when tariffs and war preparations walked hand-in-hand.

US monopoly capitalism is more ambitious. In terms of the exploitation of labour, it is going back all the way to the 19th century.

Lift the lid on the high drama of the moment, and the dull rhythms of capital accumulation are still grinding away — grinding ever finer in fact.

Specifically, the bosses are after the children of the working class. They want them out of school and bent over a lathe once more.

One US state after another under Republican control is rolling back regulations on children working, sometimes even in violation of remaining federal law.

A Bill before the state assembly in Florida — often a proving ground for reactionary initiatives today — would permit school-age children to work after 11pm and before 6.30am, even when they have classes to attend the next day, Sarah O’Connor of the Financial Times reports.

This in a state where around 20 per cent of children are already chronically absent from school.

The same legislation would also remove the present limit of 30 hours a week on the employment of 14- and 15-year-olds who have completed high school or are being home-schooled.

Thirty-one other states have diluted child labour protection laws or are planning to do so. As with much else barrelling ahead in Donald Trump’s US, the process began on Joe Biden’s watch.

The think tank, the Economic Policy Institute, found at the end of 2023 that “violations of child labor laws and proposals to roll back child labor protections are on the rise across the country.”

“The number of minors employed in violation of child labor laws increased 37 per cent in the last year,” it said, pointing out that “attempts to weaken state-level child labor standards are part of a co-ordinated campaign backed by industry groups intent on eventually diluting federal standards that cover the whole country.”

These children have — or had — faces and names. Sixteenyear-old Duvan Tomas Perez was killed working industrial machinery at a poultry plant in Mississippi in 2023, while Michael Schuls, the same age, died trapped in a conveyor belt at a Wisconsin sawmill.

In all, 57 children 15 years old or younger died from injuries sustained at work between 2018 and 2022 in the US, according to official statistics. This in the leading capitalist state on the planet.

Under Trump, front-of-house barker for an oligarchy heading fast towards neofascism, things will only get worse. The ultra-reactionary Project 2025 drafted by the US corporate ultra-right to inform the policies of his administration prioritises turbo-charging this cannibalistic trend to sweating profit out of kids.

The Centre for American Progress (CAP) warned in July 2024 that “the far-right authoritarian playbook known as Project 2025 proposes eliminating protections against hazardous work for children.

“Specifically, Project 2025 calls on the US Department of Labor to ‘amend its hazard-order regulations to permit teenage workers access to work in regulated jobs with proper training and parental consent.’

“In plain English, revising these ‘hazard-order regulation’ means letting teens work in hazardous jobs. Exploiting child labor sounds extreme because it is extreme — and politicians mostly in far-right states have recently worked to institute these changes.”

Of course, some businesses have not waited for Project 2025’s plans to be turned into Washington policy. McDonald’s, a blue-chip corporation, violated child labour law 83 times in Texas and Louisiana alone in 2023.

And in Republican-controlled Iowa, legislators directly confronted federal labour regulations, passing a law permitting 14-year-olds to perform assembly-line work in factories and meatpacking enterprises.

As the CAP points out, “these proposals are a direct result of lobbying by special interest groups, which see children as an opportunity for inexpensive labour that would benefit corporations. Project 2025 would amplify such opportunities.”

It is now estimated that in the US alone, four million children are employed legally — that is to say, within the ambit of these very loose regulations — while a further two million work illegally.

As when the first steps were taken to regulate children’s employment in Victorian Britain, the opponents of any restriction invoke parental rights over their children, and some of the new laws mandate parental consent.

These, of course, will be the poorer parents already scrambling to make any sort of a living under neoliberal capitalism, those desperate for any extra income and unconvinced that there is any other route to survival for their families.

There are many countries around the world where the situation is still worse than it is in the US. There are some, including Britain, where it is not yet as bad.

However, where the US goes, Britain tends to follow, and never more so than under Keir Starmer.

Moreover, the drive to exploit younger and younger — and hence cheaper — labour, to squeeze more and more surplus value out of the working class, speaks to the deepening competitive crisis facing US imperialism and its rivals. The latter category embraces almost every country in the Trumpian perspective.

In the third volume of Capital, Marx identified the greater use of child labour as a factor counteracting the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, a tendency driven in the first place by competitive pressure.

What Marx achieved by analysis, the bourgeois finds his/her way to instinctively, and higher rates of profit beats childhood and education in any game of capitalist top trumps (pun appropriate).

Ultimately, shredding protections and intensifying exploitation in the US will create incremental competitive pressure on British firms to follow suit. This will, of course be incremental, and doubtless accompanied by a culture war manufactured panic around parents’ rights.

Setting more children to work harder and faster underlines the willingness of the capitalist class and its political servitors to discard not only any and every advance workers have ever made but also any residual moral values in the pursuit of profit.

Britain is already playing its part in this crisis. The huge cuts to overseas aid announced by Starmer to fund his militarisation programme will push tens of thousands more children around the world into exploitation.

The demonisation of migrants and asylum-seekers will drive more families into an underworld of illegal work, while clamping down on new labour entering Britain will surely mean pressure towards the hyper-exploitation of working families already here.

So the capitalist future starts to look a lot like the past. Time to send the masters of the universe up the chimneys instead.

Vic Heath: the colours of working-class resistance

“IN COMMUNIST society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.”

I thought of the description of the communist person of the future in Marx and Engels’ The German Ideology when I heard of the death of my old comrade Vic Heath, at the weekend.

The short version of Vic Heath is that he was a communist construction worker, a militant trade unionist who looked somewhat like Lenin.

But he was also a poet who loved gardening — a man with a sensitivity which belied his confrontational class attitude. He could not be boiled down to just a couple of attributes and accomplishments.

What Vic wanted for himself he wanted for all workers. When convener of the then-mighty Direct Labour Organisation in Camden he pioneered the employment of women craftsmen and supported them through a challenging environment.

And still earlier, in the 1960s, he led boycotts of Camden pubs which refused to serve black people.

His autobiography Just One of the Working Class is a great read, and it tells the story of a life both tough and well-lived.

I last spoke to him a few weeks ago as he wanted to hand his collection of Soviet posters on to me — “because I know you always supported the USSR, and I did too.”

In Parliament one can see so many former leaders of the labour movement shuffling around the House of Lords, fading into monochrome. Vic Heath will be remembered in vivid colours, a class fighter who carried a bit of the future in him always.