In January 2026, the Trump administration launched additional attacks on the Federal Reserve System’s independence. This caused the gold market to go into a frenzy, with the dollar gold price spiking to over $5,500 an ounce. The price then plunged back below $5,000 after Trump announced the nomination of veteran central banker and Wall Street favorite Kevin Warsh to head the Fed after chair Jay Powell’s term ends in May. As of early February, the price has fluctuated around $5,000. While this may seem obscure to laypeople, it points to the economic roots of crises that have erupted on many fronts.
We’ll begin with Iran, then turn to the general strike in Minnesota on January 23.
A Critique of Crisis Theory 
I hope you are still alive; we have the opportunity now to put your theory to the test. We are, or at least seem to be, on the brink of a great recession. There hasn’t been one of this scale since 2008, and we have just witnessed the largest yield curve inversion in history. Is a crash inevitable, or can the capitalist state avoid recession by printing money? We shall see. The only problem, however, is that there is no real communist movement. We have only liberals, social democrats, MMTers, and ‘democratic socialists’ all capitalist Trojan horses who want taxation and money printing to save the system. Therefore, I don’t think the system will end yet. Even with the rise of fascism, climate change, wars and genocide, there is no serious communist movement like the one that existed in the early 20th century.
What is going on? There seems to be a flaw in Marxist theory: workers do not possess proletarian consciousness. Instead, they strive to be petty bourgeois; they want reform and welfare, not a planned economy. Are they afraid of the ‘Stalinist’ bogeyman?
I think AI replacing most jobs might lead to a communist renaissance. Capitalists want AI to evolve to the point of replacing all labor and providing UBI. They believe they can solve the system forever this way: infinite wealth, innovation and productivity growth with no class conflict, since people could live well without working. But according to your theory and Marx’s, capitalists cannot save the system through UBI or reformism. The Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall (TRPF) makes it impossible to sustain, and crisis are inevitable. Thus, the enshittification of everything under capitalism cannot be stopped. We shall see which theory is correct: the liberal vision of an automated capitalist utopia or the Marxist one. But it may take a long time, capitalism might survive another 50 or 100 years. It sucks, but it’s the realist view.