Emil McLeod
Outgoing President Joe Biden recently blocked the proposed acquisition of the monopoly U.S. Steel by Japanese monopoly Nippon Steel. Representatives from Nippon Steel and U.S. Steel have promised to contest the blocking of the deal through the federal appeals court, filing a lawsuit stating that Biden unduly prejudiced the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States (CFIUS) to reject the deal on the grounds of “national security concerns”. U.S. steel manufacturing monopoly, Cleveland-Cliffs, has also been named in the lawsuit, alleging that they co-ordinated with the Biden administration in order to block the sale of U.S. Steel to Nippon. Cleveland-Cliffs had previously proposed to buyout U.S. Steel in 2023 for $7 billion.
Both Democrats and Republicans, including Biden and Trump, have been united in their calls to block the sale of U.S. Steel to any foreign monopoly over “national security” concerns, rhetoric echoed by the union bureaucracy of the United Steel Workers (USW). A report issued by CFIUS in December warned that Nippon Steel acquiring U.S. Steel would significantly decrease domestic steel output, thus hampering the manufacture of military technology for U.S. imperialism despite Nippon’s promise to maintain steel production in the U.S. Domestic access to steel production is of prime concern for the U.S. imperialists as they seek to maintain their position as the world’s sole hegemonic power through both economic domination and force of arms.
Japanese capitalism has developed subserviently to U.S. imperialism since the end of WWII, yet the proposed acquisition, and subsequent blocking, of Nippon’s purchase of U.S. Steel, along with Nippon producing similar products to that of U.S. Steel in the United States and China, is an expression of contradictions among the imperialists. Nippon has recently been hit with 29% penalty tariffs for “dumping” hot-rolled steel flat products in the U.S., selling them at lower than average prices in an attempt to undercut U.S. domestic manufacturers.
While Nippon has promised to maintain production at some of the older unionized mills, including the two largest U.S. Steel mills in Gary, IN and Pittsburgh, PA, U.S. Steel has threatened to close these mills if the proposed deal doesn’t go through. The steel industry is in the process of destroying the old means of production in order to replace them with new labor-saving machinery, offloading the economic crisis onto the backs of their workers. U.S. Steel and other steel monopolies have begun moving to “greener steel” production. This so-called “greener steel” denotes the use of electric arc furnace technology to combine pig-iron with scrap steel. This process requires fewer workers, and inevitably will mean mass layoffs for thousands of workers, the shuttering of older blast furnaces, and domestic steel monopolies like U.S. Steel lapping up millions of dollars in green energy subsidies.
Photo credit: U.S. Steel
