Tariffs and Pension Turmoil: A Marxist View

The recent announcement by Donald Trump of sweeping tariffs on imports to the United States has sent tremors through global financial markets. In the days following, billions were wiped from the value of UK pensions. While mainstream commentary focuses on reassuring individuals not to panic, to "ride out the volatility," a Marxist analysis must go further—identifying how the structural logic of capitalism itself renders working-class security precarious, while shielding the wealth of the bourgeoisie.

Stock markets fell because tariffs cast doubt on future profitability—specifically, the expansion of capital through international trade. Corporations face increased costs, reduced market access, and therefore diminished surplus value extraction. This bleeds into pensions—particularly defined contribution (DC) schemes—because these are bound to financial markets. When capital sneezes, workers’ retirement prospects catch pneumonia.

Unlike defined benefit (DB) schemes, which at least partially de-commodify retirement by guaranteeing a set income, DC pensions shift all risk onto the worker. Here the class nature of the pension system is laid bare. Retirement becomes a speculative wager, subject to the chaos of international capital, and detached from the actual social labour the worker contributed. This isn't merely a flaw—it is a feature of the neoliberal settlement that commodifies not just labour, but its deferred reproduction.

The rhetoric of "not panicking" is a technocratic plea for patience within the confines of a system designed to profit from uncertainty. Yet, from a working-class perspective, this volatility is intolerable. For cultural workers—museum staff, curators, educators—whose labour is undervalued in the market but deeply socially necessary, the contradictions are especially acute. Their pensions decline not because of any failure on their part, but because of shifts in imperial trade policy driven by the needs of rival capitalist blocs.

From a Marxist standpoint, this moment can and must be politicised. It is not enough to treat pension instability as an unfortunate consequence of global interdependence. Instead, it is evidence that the reproduction of labour-power—both in active employment and retirement—cannot be left to the anarchy of markets. Cultural institutions like museums are sites of public education, collective memory, and ideological contestation. But they are also employers, deeply entangled with the state via funding mechanisms like Grant-in-Aid from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS).

As such, unions and museum staff are uniquely positioned to expose the class contradictions of market-based pension systems and to demand a different kind of public investment. The call must be made to:

Increase public funding for museums, not as a handout, but as a reallocation of value towards socially useful labour.

Restore and expand DB-like pensions, removing retirement from the grip of finance capital and recognising it as a right, not a gamble.

Challenge Labour to break with fiscal conservatism and embrace public ownership and planning in culture and beyond.

At stake is not only the security of individual pension pots, but the broader struggle over whose interests the economy serves. The cultural sector, long treated as marginal by capital, can become a front in the class struggle—not only by defending jobs and pensions, but by asserting the necessity of culture as a public good beyond the logic of profit.

We are told not to panic. But panic, correctly directed, is not unwarranted—it is a symptom of a system in crisis. The task of the working class is to channel that fear into organisation, that instability into struggle, and to seize from the jaws of pension volatility a broader mandate for socialist transformation.