On Tariffs, Marx, Sugarcane, and the Myth of Economic Liberation

Karl Marx, in *The Communist Manifesto*, penned what may be the most potent pamphlet in the history of economics—a poetic molotov that still burns. In it, he described capitalism as a revolutionary force, one that tears through all feudal bonds, customs, and ancestral pieties “in the icy waters of egotistical calculation.” It globalizes, it metastasizes. Its genius—if we dare call it that—is also its curse: like cancer, it knows no limits. Local traditions, kinship systems, ecosystems, epistemes—nothing is sacred. It must grow, or it dies. And so it grows.

What we now see in rural Busoga is not development—it is absorption. The Madhvani sugar empire, like a colonial revenant, has replaced subsistence with monoculture, dignity with debt, and nutritional sufficiency with malnutrition. The children of Soga no longer chase butterflies in cassava gardens. They ride trucks to Kakira, their labor sweetening the profits of an industrial dynasty whose generosity masks an unrelenting extraction. The economy has grown, they say. Yes, like a tumor.

And in America, the original genocidal land grab is so complete that one can pass a whole life without seeing a single Native American. The nation is draped in erasure, paved over with suburbia and myth. Now, in a bitter twist of irony, Trump—who inherited the wreckage and rage of that very system—is invoking tariffs as a “declaration of economic independence.” This isn’t protectionism; it’s projection. The same empire that once bulldozed global trade routes is now howling in pain when new rivals play by their rules.

Trump’s tariffs are not a bug; they are a feature of late-stage capitalism’s self-cannibalism. They are the erratic hand of a declining hegemon trying to control its own narrative. Like a factory foreman setting fire to the warehouse to renegotiate insurance, he induces a supply shock to reassert control. And the spectacle is almost Shakespearean: MAGA crowds cheer, unaware that Marx, if he could witness this theatre, would nod with bitter amusement. He’d recognize in Trump’s tariffs the ultimate irony: the capitalist class fracturing under its own contradictions.

Yet the absurdity reaches fever pitch when those same MAGA factions chant “commie” at Kamala Harris. As if they’ve read a single line of Marx. As if tariffs weren’t the favorite tool of the 19th-century state. As if their ancestors didn’t benefit from the largest state-planned land redistributions and infrastructural boondoggles ever devised. They don’t hate communism; they hate displacement. They fear being the next forgotten tribe, the next Busoga.

This is the world Hyperbolus Muzaaleth was born into—a world where epistemic pirates must steal metaphors from the Empire to survive. Where sugar, steel, and semiconductors are not just commodities, but chapters in a planetary exodus. We are no longer witnessing the clash of ideologies. We are witnessing metastatic desperation. Capital has no homeland. It conquers, then panics when the conquered knock on its doors. The tariffs are not walls—they are screams.

So call it what it is: a scorched-earth maneuver masquerading as “liberation.” A trade war dressed as nostalgia. The rhetoric of independence hiding a terminal dependence on spectacle. Marx was right. The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. But they forgot the last part: the revolution devours its children. And in this inferno, even the steelworker must pay higher for his boots.

As for Busoga, as for the Midwest, as for the world—the Ukubona Doctrine reminds us: 🌊 the abyss is real, 🚢 the ship is broken, 🏴‍☠️ the pirates are improvising, ✂️ the scissors are dull, and 🏝️ the island is a mirage built on sugarcane and steel.