On August 15, 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska. Alaska was once a Russian colony that was purchased by the U.S. in 1867 and became a state in 1959.
The anti-imperialist YouTuber Brian Berletic expressed concern that the Trump administration might attempt to kidnap Putin. This did not seem so far-fetched in light of the Israeli-U.S. attack on Iran aimed at decapitating Iran’s political and military leadership. This occurred as they were supposed to engage in negotiations to normalize relations. Unlike Iran, Russia has nuclear weapons and the ability to deliver them to the U.S. mainland, making any kidnap attempt unlikely, and Putin returned home safely.
Trump has refused to walk away from the Russo-Ukrainian war, and there were no breakthroughs in ending it. The war started with the 2014 U.S.-organized right-wing coup to overthrow the popularly elected Ukrainian government of Viktor Yanukovych. Coup leaders, called the Euromaidan movement, were supported by a coalition of pro-U.S. imperialist liberals and Ukrainian fascists who provided the muscle power.
Democratic rights, previously in line with those in post-1991 Russia, were attacked by the new Ukrainian government. These included a campaign banning any communist symbols, restricting the use of the Russian language, and arresting opponents of the new regime. These operations were carried out by the SBU security service (closely tied to the CIA) and fascist gangs, such as the Azov Brigade and the Right Sector.
The fascist gangs openly used Nazi symbols, and hatred was whipped up against all things Russian. In the largely ethnically Russian Donbass region, armed resistance broke out against the occupying Euromaidan army, a coalition of communists and Russian nationalists. It organized the People’s Republic of Donetsk and the People’s Republic of Lugansk and fought the Ukrainian military.
The Russian government initially declined to recognize the peoples’ republics. The Putin government saw the pro-Russian Donetsk as an electoral counterweight to the Euromaidan stronghold, including its fascist wing. (1)
On February 21, 2022, Russia officially recognized the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic as independent and sovereign states. Then, on February 24, Russia launched a special military operation, in part defending the people’s republics that were under heavy attack by the fascist regiments of the Ukrainian military.
Many of the Western left (though not that in the Global South) see the war as one of national liberation against Russian “imperialism” to restore Russian rule over Ukraine. (See “Is Russia Imperialist?”)
The current Kiev regime is anything but anti-imperialist. It is, in fact, a loyal servant of the U.S. imperialist world empire. This is an important question, and I will likely write about this situation in detail next month.
Another development is Trump’s “temporary” takeover of the local government in Washington, D.C. To legally justify it, he claimed street crime in the nation’s capital was out of control, so he declared a state of emergency. In reality, figures show that crime in the area declined over the last several years.
Calling fake emergencies is a feature of this administration. Trump called one to justify his tariffs (taxes on selected imports). Rooted in English history (it forms the pre-history of the United States) is a basic principle that it is not the executive (the English king or the U.S. president) but the right of the legislative branch (parliament or congress) that holds the “power of the purse,” the right to levy taxes. Trump’s declaration of a “state of emergency” violates this English-U.S. law.
U.S.-sponsored genocide in Gaza
This month, the deteriorating situation in Palestine demands our prime attention.
The genocide in Gaza has reached a new, worse stage. Photos show children resembling those from countries that have suffered a mass natural disaster, such as a prolonged drought resulting in a massive crop failure. Or of the victims of the 1940s Nazi death camps. This is no natural famine but one deliberately planned by the Zionist entity and backed by the Trump administration. Then there are the deaths caused by air bombardment and getting shot as they scramble for scarce food deliveries.
After the horror caused by Genocide Joe Biden, why is Trump following an even worse policy? Liberals and progressives who seem to take everything but class into account are at a loss to explain it. One thing that is not driving Trump’s policy is pressure from the people of the U.S., who have never before expressed so much opposition. Polls show support for Israel in the U.S., including among Jewish-Americans, is at an all-time low and falling. The same is true among the people of every nation on earth. Yet the Trump administration, like its Democratic predecessor, continues to support genocide.
Progressives put forward two theories. One is that AIPAC and other Zionist lobby organizations bought U.S. politicians of both political parties to such an extent that Tel Aviv controls the government. The other idea involves the Jeffrey Epstein (1953 – 2019) case. Epstein, as many know, was a shady financier and long-time Trump friend who ran a massive sex trafficking operation providing young women, many under 18, to meet the sexual urges of wealthy and powerful men. To do this, he tricked young women into what amounted to sexual slavery. Epstein is rumored to have been either a Mossad agent or to have other ties to Israeli intelligence. He was in a position to blackmail some of the richest and most powerful people on earth (including Trump, who, to say the least, is not known for his chaste lifestyle).
Epstein supposedly committed suicide and died in prison in 2019. Donald J. Trump was a prominent friend and companion of Epstein’s. There were many other powerful and rich friends or clients (if creatures like him can be said to have friends), including former Democratic U.S. President Bill Clinton (also known for his rapacious sexual appetites). Many rich, powerful people would have had an interest in maintaining Epstein’s silence. And the best silencer of all is death. It is widely doubted that Epstein’s death was by his own hand.
Trump has refused to release the so-called “Epstein files” that may contain information on Epstein’s “client” list. Further fueling suspicions, Trump allowed Epstein’s imprisoned long-term personal associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who was heavily involved in her late associate’s sex trafficking crimes and has been sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for trafficking underage girls for sexual abuse, to be transferred to a minimum security prison. Is she blackmailing Trump? Does she have dirt on him? There are rumors that Trump will pardon her completely. If Epstein was indeed an Israeli agent, maybe Maxwell is now blackmailing Trump as well as other Western imperialist leaders into supporting the Israeli genocide.
There is a lot these theories do not explain: Why did the British government, at least since the Balfour declaration of 1917, support the Zionist colonization of Palestine well before Epstein and Maxwell, both of whom are Jewish, were even born? And after 1945, why did the U.S. insist on the creation of the so-called State of Israel at the expense of the Palestinian people? This is not to deny that AIPAC has made many congresspeople and senators financially dependent on it. But this cannot be the real reason for imperialism’s support of Zionism and its many crimes since 1917. Zionism in the final analysis is just one of many agencies of imperialism, originally British, now U.S. (2)
Imperialism in general is determined to prevent the rise of countries that compete with its own capitalists. Even before the imperialist era, established capitalist countries resisted the rise of other countries. The one thing capitalists hate is competition. One reason for the U.S. War of Independence was Britain’s fear that colonial capitalists of North America had the potential to compete with their own. The crown tried to prevent the colonial capitalists from manufacturing. The policy of mercantilism was designed to advance the interests of the capitalists of a particular country at the expense of another. This is what lay behind the 17th-century and 18th-century commercial wars. Later, during the U.S. Civil War, the British capitalist class aided the slaveholder rebels, wanting to safeguard its cotton supply produced by slave labor for its textile industry. More generally, it hoped to derail further development of U.S. capitalism that could undermine British industrial capitalists.
We see how concerned the U.S. is about the development of large capitalist enterprises in China, such as Huawei (but not only Huawei), that threaten the U.S. monopoly in high tech. During the final stages of the “Cold War,” the U.S. hailed the development of capitalist enterprise in China after Chairman Mao died in 1976. Today, U.S. imperialism has turned against Chinese capitalist development when it became clear that these enterprises were becoming a threat to U.S. capitalists. This wasn’t supposed to happen. If the U.S. cannot live with Chinese capitalist enterprises like the phone, computer, and software company Huawei, what happens if “a new China” emerges in the Arab world?
The Arabic-speaking countries stretch from Morocco in the west to Iraq in the east, spanning North Africa and West Asia, with a population of over 450 million. The region is home to some of the world’s richest oil-producing countries. It includes the Suez Canal, which shortens shipping routes by linking Europe, Africa, and Asia together. This reduces the turnover period of capital and raises its profit rate worldwide.
Arabic has many dialects, but all literate Arabic-speaking people can understand its written form. The Arabic-speaking people have a common religion in the form of Islam, with a shrinking Christian minority, and before the creation of the State of Israel, a Jewish minority, and some other smaller religions. Taken as a whole, the Arab world exhibits the characteristics of a nation, including a common language, territory, and religion.
During the 20th century, the rise of pan-Arabism —a movement that aimed to unite the region into a single nation-state — was a natural development. First British, then U.S. imperialism have been hostile to this movement and done all they could to destroy it. On the other hand, since the Balfour Declaration of 1917, British and U.S. imperialism have championed Zionism, a movement aimed at creating a Jewish state in modern Palestine, formerly a thoroughly Arab country.
In contrast to the modern Arabs, modern Jews have none of the features that would make them a nation, except for a common religion. There was no common Jewish language until Zionists revived the long-dead language of Hebrew in the 20th century. Except for a few phrases, Hebrew was spoken by no modern Jewish community anywhere in the world. It was used mostly for religious purposes. In the synagogue, prayers were recited in Hebrew. Outside of rabbis and their students, the members of congregations did not understand these prayers any more than the Catholic congregations understood the prayers recited in Latin.
Yiddish, a language primarily based on medieval German, was widely spoken and understood by Eastern European Jews. Other Jewish communities spoke various Jewish languages or the local language in the countries where they lived, depending on the circumstances. Nowhere in the world in modern times were Jews a majority in a territory large enough to constitute a nation or anywhere close to it. Nowhere did modern Jews, in contrast to Arabs, form a potential nation.
This doesn’t mean the national question has no meaning to modern Jews. Many reactionaries (with the German Nazis being the most extreme example) claimed that Jews were biologically incapable of forming a nation. This is, of course, pure nonsense. During the struggle for bourgeois democracy, reactionaries claimed Jews did not belong to the country because they were either biologically incapable of forming a nation or belonged to the biblical nation of Israel. Progressives, on the other hand, demanded that Jews be given full citizenship rights and be accepted as full members of the countries where they were living without first having to convert to Christianity. This was, and remains, the only truly progressive solution to the so-called Jewish question, handed down to modern society from the Middle Ages, but never resolved by capitalist society.
British and U.S. imperialism have bitterly opposed the ideology and program of pan-Arabism because they fear a United Arab state could become a powerful economic competitor to existing imperialist nations. Consequently, they oppose every attempt to create even smaller Arab states like modern Iraq and Syria. When all other attempts failed, the U.S., under Republican President George W. Bush in 2003, simply invaded and wrecked Iraq, pitting Sunni against Shia Muslims.
In Syria, imperialism has supported movements with periodic bombing by the Zionist entity after years of trying, and finally succeeded in late 2024 in overthrowing the Syrian government in direct collaboration with the Zionist entity. Syria is being divided up between Turkey and the Zionist entity, with U.S. imperialism in overall control. (3)
In 2011, under Democrat Barack Obama, Libya was attacked, leading to the murder of its long-time leader, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, which led to open markets selling enslaved people from sub-Saharan Africa. In contrast, Colonel Gaddafi was a supporter of pan-Arabism and pan-Africanism. This is why Gaddafi was on U.S. imperialism’s hit list. Under the British, then after 1945, the United States, imperialism supported Arab oil monarchies that offer little prospect for development as they pump out non-renewable oil and natural gas to be burned away while adding to CO2 in the atmosphere that is driving global heating.
These same imperialists insist the Jewish people (who are not a nation) must have their own state in modern Palestine, while the Arab inhabitants are denied the right to live where their ancestors lived for thousands of years and are now in Gaza, facing outright physical extermination. (4)
Finding themselves at a historic dead end, Jewish colonists (called Israelis since 1948) have become increasingly reactionary. This is similar to what happened with Afrikaner colonists in South Africa, though this process has gone further in Palestine. In South Africa, Afrikaners depended on the exploitation of native African labor, while the Israelis want to get rid of the Palestinians completely.
Global reaction, headed by the U.S., has other uses for Zionism. With centuries of oppression at the hands of Christian Europeans, after World War II, the European Jews had the honor of being the greatest victims of German imperialism. By the early 1940s, the German Nazi government was not eager to continue the historic oppression but instead was determined to kill every individual Jew they could get their hands on.
Because the Nazis had taken it to such extremes, by 1945, anti-Semitism as an ideology was discredited as never before. Jews in general leaned to the left, and many supported communist parties. During the New Deal years and especially during World War II, U.S. imperialism was compelled by circumstance to form an alliance with the Soviet Union, and to some extent with the Third International and its successor, the more loosely organized international communist movement. But U.S. imperialists never forgot that the Soviet Union and the international communist movement represented their working-class enemy.
In 1945, there were no serious challengers to U.S. hegemony anymore. Its only enemies were the working class and the oppressed nations. The strongest workers’ organization was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and various communist parties, which, depending on the country, had great influence in the labor unions.
Though the U.S. Communist Party wasn’t the strongest nor the most militant, capitalists had a special fear of it. If capitalists lost the U.S., the game would be over. The government was also concerned about the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party and other socialist movements for the same reason.
In the second half of the 1940s, the U.S. ruling class was determined to crush all left-wing organizations. With good reason, it was believed that if a large number of survivors of the holocaust ended up in the U.S., they would strengthen the left and join the fight against the “Cold War” against the Soviet Union that had saved many European Jews. If the Jewish holocaust survivors could be sent to Palestine, they could fight the Arab nation on imperialism’s behalf, “curing” them of their left-wing views.
As years went by and the crimes against the Arab people by the Zionist entity piled up, U.S. imperialism could whisper into the ears of the world’s people, “It’s the Israelis carrying out these crimes, not us.” Indeed, Israelis have been fighting wars for the United States since its inception. Today, not only an increasing number of reactionaries, but also many liberals and progressives, complain that the Zionist lobby has become so powerful that it controls U.S. foreign policy, maybe even the government itself! If the holocaust aftermath was the negation of anti-Semitism, Zionism and the Zionist entity with its current U.S. imperialist-sponsored genocide in Palestine, is the negation of that negation.
Extraordinary revision
On August 1, 2025, the Labor Department announced the U.S. economy had created 258,000 (the size of a medium-sized city) fewer jobs than originally estimated. For the Department to overestimate employment, especially when the economy is slowing, is not unusual. This is true because the Labor Department assumes that the creation of new businesses that create additional jobs minus the failure of existing businesses that reduce them, is unfolding at the previous rate.
When the economy slows, especially as it transitions from a boom to a recession, the creation of new businesses slows, while the collapse of existing businesses accelerates. This helps cover up recessions in their early stages. As we will see below, there are reasons for governments to cover up recessions in their early stages. Even taking this into account, the revisions announced on August 1 are extraordinary.
Trump boasted for months that the U.S. economy has been performing like never before. The capitalist media, though not as extreme as Trump, who is known for his inflated, bombastic rhetoric, published article after article reporting that the labor market is holding up in the face of the tariff war. These articles were based on what is now acknowledged to be inflated estimates of job creation. One technique the media employ is to fail to mention that the Labor Department’s reports on employment and unemployment are only estimates, not facts, and subject to revision. Remember, media owners and advertisers that control it are themselves capitalists.
Like other capitalists, those who control the media want high unemployment as long as the economy is not so depressed that profits are endangered. To understand this, we have to keep Marx’s theory of surplus value in mind. Anything close to real full employment (as opposed to what capitalist economists and journalists call full employment) would shift the balance of power in the market for labor power in favor of the sellers of labor power and against the buyers. If this happens, the rate of surplus value would fall, leading to a drop in the profit rate.
This is why capitalist economists developed definitions of full employment. Workers who are not “pounding pavement” daily are not considered unemployed. People who have dropped out of the labor market are not counted as employed. Anything less than five, six, or even seven million of narrowly defined unemployed workers is considered to represent “over-employment”.
A second reason is more subtle. As the overproduction of non-money commodities develops relative to the money commodities, interest rates rise as capital in money form grows scarce relative to that in the form of non-money commodities, called real capital. The Federal Reserve System central banks have to accommodate this rise in interest rates. This gives the illusion that the central banks have the power to determine rates that they do not have. If the bank tries to fight the rise by creating additional paper money, the demand for the money commodity, gold, is whipped into a fury. Depreciation of the currency against gold then causes inflation to accelerate when measured in terms of paper currency. The 1970s are the classic example of this.
Capitalist economists claim (supported by many well-meaning progressives) that periodic recessions caused by capitalism can be solved by correct government policies within the framework of capitalism. In reality, crises are necessary to maintain the correct proportions between the production of non-money commodities and that of the money material.
If the bank floods the money market with newly created paper money not backed by gold (as it did in the 1970s), the recession is postponed, but at the cost of causing a spike in gold demand and paper money to depreciate, accelerating inflation. Worse, it leads to higher interest rates, which, if not checked, swallow the whole profit of enterprise (the difference between total profit minus the interest rate), destroying the incentive to produce surplus value.
If capitalism is to survive (no production of surplus value = no capitalism), the central banks must resist a premature reduction of interest rates. This is politically unpopular. This is why Trump nicknamed Federal Reserve head Jay Powell “too late Powell” and demands he immediately drop interest rates. If Powell gives in to these demands, gold’s dollar price would rise far above the current level of over $3,000 and a 1970s-style, or worse, inflation would result.
Interest rates would rise above current levels as capitalists would lose all remaining trust in the dollar. This would end in an unparalleled world depression and mass unemployment — and the U.S. world empire would be history. When full-scale recession arrives, Trump’s claims that the U.S. is experiencing unparalleled prosperity will turn to dust. He will blame Powell, the central banker whom Trump himself appointed. Acting as a scapegoat for the consequences of the capitalist system they serve is part of the job description of a central banker.
It is easier for central bankers to resist premature interest cuts if unemployment data is designed so that it misses an initial rise. Later on, they can be blamed for waiting too long to cut interest rates. By then, the recession has liquidated overproduction, and the banks can safely cut their target rates. If the data is designed so that rising unemployment is initially concealed, it’s easier for the bank to resist political pressure to lower its rate before it is safe to do so.
Donald Trump takes action
To give him credit, Trump wasted no time taking action in the face of the news that employment was rising more slowly than predicted. He didn’t take any action against rising unemployment; he fired Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for releasing “fake data.” Trump defends the firing, claiming she falsified data in hopes of electing Kamala Harris by inflating the employment data, and when that failed, issued “fake data” to make Trump look bad.
In her place, Trump announced the nomination of Project 2025 co-author E.J. Antoni, a far-right economist who works for the arch-capitalist Heritage Foundation. As a servant of the capitalist class, this outfit believes that the labor department’s job should be to issue employment-unemployment data in a way to show less unemployment than current methods, precisely because the people they serve (the capitalist class) benefit directly from unemployment — to say the least, a major conflict of interest.
On August 12, “The Hill” reported Antoni said the agency should “suspend issuing the monthly jobs reports, but keep publishing more accurate, though less timely, quarterly data.” Antoni’s job will be to change the way unemployment is estimated to show less of it.
In the same spirit, Trump even attacked the weather service, fearing that honest reporting would highlight the problem of global heating. Not only has the weather service, but many other federal statistical services and governmental bodies, were gutted by Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, under Trump’s appointment to the newly created Department of Government Efficiency.
Musk and Trump have since fallen out over the Big Beautiful Bill’s cancellation of tax incentives passed by the previous Democratic administration to encourage the purchase of electric vehicles. Musk just happens to own the electric car manufacturer Tesla. This shows Musk is more than willing to break with conservative policies if they happen to contradict his own personal material interests.
Artificial Intelligence and the struggle for a communist world
The current AI boom is looking more like the dot-com boom of the late 1990s. Capitalists are rushing into the AI field, and many of those enterprises have yet to show a profit. This is a sure indicator that, in the not-too-distant future, the prices of stocks in AI companies will crash, and most of these companies will go bankrupt, as happened with the dot-com crash in 2000.
This sort of thing has happened often in the history of capitalism. For example, in the 1840s, there was a wave of speculation in railroad stocks. The 1847 crash did not mean the end of the railroad industry any more than the 2000 crash in dot-com stocks and the failure of countless dot-com enterprises meant the end of the internet.
The coming crash in AI stocks and bankruptcy of AI companies won’t mean the end of the industry. It’s the longer-range consequences that I am interested in exploring here.
Artificial Intelligence has become a buzzword in the media. You can’t open up a web page these days without meeting an AI. You can ask any question and they will type out a coherent, though not necessarily correct, answer. The programs or chat boxes are called by computer scientists large language models, LLMs for short.
In the original 1960s Star Trek TV series, before the advent of personal computers and the modern internet, Captain Kirk (played by actor William Shatner) would ask the computer a question. The computer, in a proper computer voice, would then correctly answer the question. While most aspects of Star Trek, where the “Enterprise” and other Hollywood starships move around the galaxy with the ease of 1960s-style airplanes flying around the Earth, remain in the realm of fantasy, LLMs have made it possible to communicate with computers in natural language. They are not quite as reliable as Captain Kirk’s was, but these, after all, are still early days.
What is called machine learning can be applied to LLMs as well as other skills like driving a car or an airplane. This opens up the possibility of pushing mechanization and automation further than was previously possible. How far it will be possible to automate jobs that have resisted until now remains to be seen.
Not long ago, people were expected to learn “coding” and write programs in computer languages like Python, C++, etc. All those industrial workers who were losing jobs in the “Rust Belt” would get jobs as coders, as well as all the miners in coal country.
Now, AI programs are taking over coding jobs at such a rate that “junior programming jobs” are going the way of loom operators in early 19th-century Britain. Predictions are commonplace that, within a few decades, most jobs still done today with human labor, whether manual or intellectual, such as coding, will disappear. This isn’t new. Predictions that what was called “automation” from the 1940s on, or earlier “mechanization,” was about to eliminate practically every job.
Although Marx lived in the 19th century, when nobody had ever heard of LLM or machine learning, Marx did not rule out that in the future, virtually every job could be eliminated by the progress of science and technology.
What does all this have to do with achieving a future communist society? It turns out almost everything.
Marx’s historical materialism, a theory with a broader sweep than his critique of bourgeois political economy, explains that the class and political structure of human societies is not accidental but lawfully determined. The social structure of hunter-gathering societies, primary communism, was inevitable given the tools available to them. Given the technology available, as well as the natural environments that enabled irrigation, the agriculture of ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Hindu society, or ancient China reveals the class and political structure of those societies. The same applies to the feudal societies of the European Middle Ages and the various native civilizations of what is now called the Americas.
The same rule applies to our modern capitalist society. At a time when the power of capital has never been stronger, it’s good to take the long view. Unlike earlier modes of production, capitalism cannot maintain long-term equilibrium between its productive forces on one side and its class, political, scientific, and cultural structures on the other.
Driven by competition between individual capitalists, the capitalist class is forced to constantly revolutionize the means of production. This implies that in a relatively short historical period of time (though not short relative to a human lifetime), capitalism must give way to a higher mode of production.
Let’s look at this more concretely. Each capitalist must expand their capital as much as possible, or risk losing it entirely. To win the competition, each must produce as cheaply (at the lowest cost price) as possible.
Cost price is the capitalist’s cost, measured in money terms, that it takes to produce a commodity, not the price in money terms that the capitalist sells the commodity.
Profit is the difference between the commodity’s sell price and the cost price. Behind price, whether cost, direct, production, or market, measured by a physical quantity of the monetary commodity, lies human labor.
A capitalist’s capital, as well as the total social capital, is a pile of commodities whose immanent measure is the quantity of human labor measured in some quantity of time that is necessary to reproduce that capital.
While in earlier modes of production, its conditions were relatively stable for prolonged periods, this is not the case under capitalism. The amount of labor needed to reproduce our capitalists’ capital consequently falls as the productivity of human labor increases. If the capitalist merely maintains or reproduces the capital in a physical sense, its value will remain physically the same, but its value measured in terms of abstract human labor (measured time) will fall. The capital will evaporate, and our capitalists will cease to be capitalists at all.
To maintain capital, the capitalist must expand it while constantly renewing (reproducing) it physically. To expand it, the capitalist must extract surplus value (unpaid labor) in ever greater amounts from the working class. This alone makes it possible for a capitalist to expand capital and remain a capitalist. The more surplus value extracted from the workers, the better. The Trump-Republican “Big Beautiful Bill” didn’t fall from the sky.
Because the productivity of labor performed by an individual varies, not every concrete hour of labor creates the same amount of value. The value of human labor of average productivity embodied in a commodity does not change. An hour of average labor produces an hour of value regardless of how much use value is produced. If the average labor can produce x amounts of widgets in an hour, and an hour of a specific human labor produces only ½ x of widgets an hour, it will count for only half an hour of value-producing labor. Or if a particular hour of labor produces 2x widgets, then this individual hour of labor will count for two hours of value-producing labor.
The productivity of a given quantity of labor performed depends in part on the skill and diligence of that worker, and even more so on the means of production, such as the machinery the worker gets to use. For example, if a capitalist replaces old machines with better ones, the new equipment will make it possible to produce twice the number of widgets in an hour. If there is no change in the average quantity of labor necessary to produce the widget, then an hour of labor performed by our worker will now produce twice the number of widgets and twice the quantity of value. Each widget of equal quality will have the same social value, no matter how much or little labor was used in producing it.
Questions arise here. Are those who work with the most advanced machinery more exploited than those who work with average or worse? This can be translated into whether workers in what is today called the Global North are more exploited than those in the Global South.
First, an hour of actual or concrete labor can count for more than an hour of average value-creating labor only to the degree that other hours of concrete labor count for less than an hour of value-creating labor, and other concrete human labor counts for more.
The concept of the average rules here. Growth in the power of machinery over time, while it leads to the creation of more use values, does not increase the value-creating power of labor. As the productivity of labor grows, meaning that labor becomes more productive in creating use values, it doesn’t increase its ability to produce value at all.
An hour of average value-creating labor creates greater quantities of use values than it did when Marx was writing “Capital”.
If a capitalist has a monopoly on the best machinery but pays the same wages as other capitalists, the one with the best machinery makes a super-profit. While workers with the best machinery are paid the same wage as those working with average machines, during their eight-hour workday, they produce twice as many widgets and twice as much value. Every widget produced has the same social value. If it takes an average worker an hour to produce a widget, the average worker produces eight widgets during the workday. Those working with the more powerful machinery produce 16 widgets on an average workday. In terms of social value, our workers work not for 8 hours a day, but 16 — but are paid the equivalent of only 4 hours of labor like other workers.
In social value terms, workers perform four hours of paid labor and twelve hours of unpaid labor. A ratio of twelve hours unpaid to four hours paid labor, for a rate of surplus value of 12 divided by four, or 300%.
This means the capitalist with the superior machinery makes a super-profit. This creates a possibility that the capitalist with the monopoly on the advanced machines could (in theory) share some of the super-profit with the workers. They, of course, prefer to pocket the entire super-profit, but there may be circumstances that discourage that, for example, the need to “buy off” the workers so they’ll side with the boss who pays them so well. Instead of paying the workers the wages of four hours of average labor, our boss will pay them wages equal to six hours. When we calculate the rate of surplus value in social labor terms, our workers are paid for six hours of the sixteen hours of social labor performed during an eight-hour workday.
The rate of surplus value calculated in social value terms (not individual values) is 16 divided by 6, or 267%, the rate of surplus value. So it’s possible for workers working with the most powerful machinery to be exploited more than the average worker in social value terms, but still share in the super-profits of the capitalist.
A debate has raged among Marxists about whether workers in the Global North or those in the Global South are more exploited. What we see in the above analysis is that workers in the North can be more exploited in social value terms than those in the South, even though they are no more skilled, and can receive higher real wages and share in the super-profits of the capitalists of the Global North.
The above analysis is highly abstract. In the concrete world, the imperialist countries of the West, and more recently Japan, enjoy a monopoly of powerful machinery relative to the countries of the Global South. With the rise of modern China and, to a lesser extent, other Asian nations and countries in the Global South, this monopoly has been breaking down. Combined with overproduction, this is what lies behind Trump’s current tariff war.
How capitalists maintain monopolies of powerful productive forces
Powerful productive forces (for example, steam power, railroads, assembly lines, and today’s “high tech” — technology centered on digital computers) may for a while remain the monopolistic property of groups of capitalists we call nations.
But monopolies break down over time. Rising capitalists in newly industrializing nations do not have to pass through the intermediate steps that their predecessors did. Individual capitalists and their states do not stand by as their monopolies decay. They do everything to maintain them as long as possible.
Capitalists with monopolies on productive techniques usually also have a lot of capital, making it difficult for new capitalists to challenge them. This is particularly true if the entrenched monopolists can influence the banking system to refuse loans to those that threaten their technical monopolies.
The banks themselves might not want to grant loans to upstarts, fearing it could undermine the existing loans granted to the monopolists (or the banks may control the industrial monopolies). Economists call these factors “barriers to entry.”
Another method used is to pass laws putting the power of the state directly behind the monopolies. The state grants a legal monopoly to produce certain products with patents, which can be rented or sold as commodities. The theory behind them is that if they did not exist, no capitalist would incur the expense of doing the research and development needed to create new products and productive forces that raise the productivity of human labor; they’d just copy them.
To prevent this, the state issues a patent granting exclusive use to the capitalist or inventor. When a non-capitalist inventor is granted a patent, they have to sell or loan the patent to capitalists to put the invention into production. More often, capitalists hire engineers as salaried workers who make the inventions, and the resulting patent goes to the enterprise, the corporation. The legal patent owner is not the actual inventor but the corporation’s stockholders.
In theory, a patent runs for a limited period of time. When it expires, anyone is eligible to copy the process. The thinking is that once a patent expires, it creates a positive incentive for capitalists to experiment with new production methods and products without preventing the adoption of these methods to produce commodities if they prove profitable after some time has passed. The monopolies created by state-issued patents are supposed to be temporary.
Under capitalism, the rich, the capitalists, can easily corrupt the process. They have their bought-and-paid-for representatives in parliament (or Congress) pass laws to increase the patent’s lifetime. Instead of acting as tools to encourage the development of the productive power inherent in human labor, patents become tools that hold back development to maintain super-profits indefinitely.
In the 19th century, the U.S. just ignored British patents. That enraged British capitalists because they saw the U.S. as a growing threat to their industrial monopoly.
The current U.S. world empire, far more powerful than the British empire ever was, has imposed international “rules” policed by the World Trade Organization, designed to force all countries to recognize U.S. patents. If a nation refuses — that is, behaves the way the U.S. did in the 19th century — it is excluded from world trade.
Monopoly capitalists in the imperialist countries, especially the United States, owning patents, use military and political power to extend the life of patents. This is the essence of what U.S. imperialists call “rules based order.” U.S. capitalism, though never humane, was once a powerful developer of the productive forces of humanity; however, it is now the biggest brake on their further development.
Finally, nation-states dominated by monopoly capitalists, today mostly the U.S., use brute military force to maintain their technology monopolies. If an upstart nation dares to try to compete, they are accused of violating “intellectual property,” and the “rules-based international order,” of violating “human rights,” being “authoritarian” states that don’t play by the rules, supporting international terrorism, etc., and become targets for U.S.-NATO military aggression. The foreign policy of the U.S. world empire is, in no small measure, about maintaining the monopolies of the West, of U.S. capitalists.
The working class and technology monopolies
The class interests of the working class are to begin and complete the transition from a capitalist to a communist society as quickly as possible. The class interests of the capitalists are to maintain capitalist relations as long as possible, forever if they can. This, and not the exact rate of surplus value that measures the extent of working-class exploitation under capitalism, is the root of the antagonism between the two classes.
To achieve a communist society where classes no longer exist, the productive forces must develop to the point that the working day is reduced, allowing all members of society to develop their capacities while meeting all their material needs. This goes beyond the development of the productive forces, impressive as it was, that the Soviet-led socialist camp accomplished in the 20th century.
AI is just the latest indication that the productive forces, despite the victory of political reaction and counterrevolution at the end of the 20th century, are developing toward a situation where a communist society will be possible, indeed the only form that human society can take.
Before there can be a modern communist society, capitalism must develop the productive forces to a very high level. Capitalism will never be able to develop to the point that a direct transition to a communist society, where people work according to their ability and receive according to their need, will be possible. If the productive forces reach that level, capitalism will no longer be viable, a transition period will be necessary. Let’s examine the reasons why this is true.
Capitalism must maximize the production of surplus value — unpaid labor relative to paid labor, while minimizing paid labor as much as possible. It will never be able to achieve the full potential that modern technologies such as AI now make possible. As long as capitalism persists, AI, like the earlier technologies such as steam engines in the 18th and 19th century, and electric motors in the 20th century, will be subordinated to capitalists’ need to minimize paid labor while maximizing unpaid labor. Under capitalism, AI remains just another weapon in the hands of the capitalist class to extract surplus value from the working class.
Absolute versus relative surplus value
This takes us back to Marx’s most important discovery in his critique of classical political economy. He showed that beginning in the late 1850s, surplus value is produced under capitalism even if we assume that equal quantities of labor always exchange with equal quantities of labor, sometimes called equal exchange. There is no need to assume unequal exchange to explain surplus value.
Let’s begin with absolute surplus value.
We’ll assume a working day of twelve hours. During this day, the average worker produces twelve hours’ worth of value (not the same as saying that the value of wages is twelve hours per day). The workers are paid considerably less than this. If this were not true, the labor power that capitalists purchase from the workers would have no use value for them because the use value of labor power for capitalists is to produce surplus value.
Marx assumes that commodities that contain equal amounts of embodied labor exchange equally with one another. Since this applies to gold, the money commodity, it means that the prices of commodities, given weights of gold, will have the same value as the commodities they can purchase on the open market. Or as Marx assumes, all commodities, including labor power, sell at their value.
The value of the wage — whether calculated in terms of money or of the commodities the wage buys, makes no difference. The wage represents a given quantity of value-producing abstract human labor.
Suppose it represents six hours of human labor. The worker works twelve hours a day but is paid for only six hours of labor. Under Marx’s assumptions, there is no wage theft (that doesn’t mean there isn’t any wage theft in the real world). The worker is paid for the value of their labor power that equals six hours of average labor per day. The other six hours are unpaid, but there is no violation of equal exchange because, as long as the worker is paid for the full value of their labor, that is only six hours of labor per day under our assumptions.
Suppose, as happened in early capitalism, the workday is increased from twelve hours to sixteen hours per day, but the worker is paid for only six hours of labor (because the value of labor power remains unchanged). The worker is still working six hours a day for themself but now also working ten hours a day for the capitalist. If before, the average worker produced six hours of surplus value per day, they now still work six hours a day for themself but ten hours for the capitalists. To the extent the bosses can lengthen the working day without any increase in daily wages, the bosses are increasing what Marx called absolute surplus value.
The ability of the capitalists to increase surplus value runs into limits. First is the mathematical limit: The workday cannot be extended beyond 24 hours. Next is the biological limit. While 24-hour shifts are not unknown, in the long run, the human organism needs about eight hours of sleep per day, so the workday cannot be extended much beyond sixteen hours. Then there is the limit set by the inevitable struggle of the working class against the constant lengthening of the workday.
During the 19th century, the struggles of the British working class established the 12-hour, then the 10-hour day. In the 20th century, the 8-hour workday was achieved. The establishment of a legal maximum workday is the first great victory the working class won against the ruling capitalist class. Naturally, capitalists fought every legal shortening of the workday. The Trump-Republican Big Beautiful Bill contains an attempt to lengthen the workday disguised as a tax cut to help working people.
The Big Beautiful Bill ends taxes on overtime pay, an attempt to encourage workers to put in more hours. The bill’s authors hope this will encourage workers to become more dependent on overtime to meet their expenses — effectively lengthening the workday. Instead of working 8 hours a day to meet daily expenses, they’ll have to work 10, 12, or even 16 hours to survive. The capitalists are still attempting to increase relative surplus value.
Relative surplus value
Let’s assume the workday is 8 hours and the rate of surplus value is 100%. This means the worker works half the day, 4 hours, for themself and four hours for the boss.
As the productivity of labor rises, this might change, so it takes only 2 hours to reproduce the value of the labor power expended during an 8-hour shift, 2 hours for themself and 6 for the boss. The rate of surplus value rises to 300%. As the productivity of labor continues to rise, the worker may work just one hour for themself and seven for the boss, and the rate of surplus value rises to 700%.
If the workday remains unchanged while the productivity of labor increases, the part of the day that the worker works for free for the capitalist increases. If workers resist, the capitalists say, “If you insist on higher wages or reducing the work day with no cut in pay we’ll replace you with machinery that can learn.”
Even with strong trade unions, in the long run, the working class cannot resist the rise in relative surplus value, even if they succeed in defending or increasing their standard of living, real wages. It’s also true that the shorter the workday gets, the more the capitalist class will resist any further reductions, even trying to increase them, a la the Big Beautiful Bill.
Also tied in with the growth in productivity of labor is Marx’s theory of the tendency of the profit rate to decline. The increasing use of production machinery implies that the ratio of constant to variable capital rises. Under capitalism, the productive forces cannot develop for long before the number of workers producing surplus value declines. They can decline in certain industries, even countries, but not on a global scale.
In theory, a decline in the total number of productive of surplus value-producing workers could be accompanied by a rise in the total mass of surplus value if there is a rise in the absolute or relative rate of surplus value. This could occur up to a mathematically defined point. As we have mentioned, the workday cannot mathematically extend beyond 24 hours, nor beyond the biological limits of 16 to 18 hours.
Once the number of productive workers stops growing, it’s only a matter of time before the total mass of surplus value stops as well. Capitalism is a system that requires growth in surplus value; otherwise, it collapses.
If the productivity of labor grows at such a rate that the workforce shrinks (outside of overproduction crises), the struggle over surplus value shifts in favor of the capitalists. This increases surplus value rates so that demand for labor power again rises, causing an increase in the number of employed workers.
The basic law of motion of the capitalist system is that as the number of people exploited by capital rises, the rate of surplus value, also called the rate of exploitation, rises, driven by the rise in surplus value, while the rise in organic capital tends to make the profit rate fall. This is a tendency rather than a law of the falling rate of profit because the fall in the profit rate is checked by the rising rate of surplus value. This dismal picture of an ever-rising rate of exploitation pushes society toward a different economic organization: a communist one.
What will a communist society look like
Capitalism is all about maximizing the quantity of unpaid labor, surplus value, while holding the amount of paid labor to the absolute minimum. This is a major contradiction.
Under the capitalist mode of production, we see a growth in the productivity of labor that dwarfs anything seen in pre-capitalist times. This creates the possibility of a society with a minimum of labor time and maximization of free time for the entire population. Under capitalism, we get a growing amount of free time only for the ruling capitalist class and some hangers-on, while the working class gets longer hours to produce more surplus value.
When I examine a future communist society, I’m not referring to those that are transitional between capitalism and communism, or the first or lower stage of socialist society, where workers receive items of personal consumption according to the quantity of labor they perform, rather than according to their needs. In a fully developed communist society, people work according to their ability and receive according to their needs.
In a fully developed communist society, all means of production will be the common property of that society. They were not privately owned by individuals or corporations, unlike today. There will be no social classes, and thus, no class struggle. Without class struggle, there will be no need for any type of state, nor any political parties engaged in a struggle for control of the state. Productivity of labor will be so high that people will no longer be coerced to work through force (as with slavery or serfdom) or hunger (as with capitalism). The notion of one person working for another will be an alien concept in such a society.
Such a society will have labor productivity beyond what is achievable under any form of capitalism. This is why a transitional period is necessary between capitalism and communism. The transitional society will become universal when labor productivity is too high for capitalism to exist, but not yet high enough to make full communism possible. Broadly speaking, the transitional society can be divided into two phases. One is the transition between capitalist and communist society, and the second is the first phase of communist society proper.
The first phase begins with the seizure of political power by the working class and the time when private ownership of the means of production disappears, ending the division of society into social classes. Elements of a communist (socialist) economy and a commodity-producing economy both exist and struggle with one another.
State power of the working class, what Marx called the dictatorship of the proletariat, is necessary to prevent a return to capitalism. If the dictatorship of the proletariat is overthrown before the lower stage of communism is reached, the transition to communism is aborted and capitalism returns. This is what happened in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe at the end of the 20th century. The class struggle is intense as the capitalist class and its allies do all they can to restore their system.
If this doesn’t happen, eventually all commodity money relations will disappear, not because they are repressed by state power, but because all economic needs will be met without commodity-money relations. Then the transitional society evolves into the first or lower stage of communism.
Under the first stage of communism, labor productivity is not yet sufficient to allow people to receive use values according to their needs, rather than the quantity of labor they perform. In the sphere of distribution, bourgeois right, payment according to the quantity of labor performed, still exists even though all commodity and money relations have been left behind. During this stage, the principle that “he who does not work does not eat” still applies in a modified form, because, unlike under capitalism, everyone who can work will be given the opportunity to do so.
With a further rise in labor productivity, the need for even this modified force will become unnecessary. People will work because they want to, not because they “have” to. Access to the means of personal consumption will no longer be tied to the amount of labor an individual performs.
Whether such a society can be achieved depends, of course, on whether we can achieve high enough labor productivity to make it possible. We haven’t done this yet because we are still living under capitalism. The development of machine learning (what is generally meant today by the term “artificial intelligence”), where machines through computer-simulated “neural nets” learn “on the job” like human beings do, shows that humanity’s productive forces are steadily moving toward a stage of development that will make full communism not only possible but necessary.
The rise and fall of class society
Most anthropologists believe that humans have changed very little in their biological or mental capacities over the last 200,000 to 300,000 years. For most of this time, humans did not enslave other humans through chattel slavery, serfdom, or wage labor. Humans sometimes ate each other, cannibalism, but no human individuals or communities forced other humans to work for them.
Every member of the community, clan, or tribe had to work for the community and had the right to draw the means of subsistence from it, which provided the bare necessities of use values needed to maintain life. However, there was a problem: because the productivity of human labor was very low, people had to work for the community, and the possibility of a fully rounded development of individual capacity was limited — life was tough and short for everyone.
With the rise of human labor productivity about 10,000 years ago, classes arose. A portion of the community, the ruling class, acquired the ability to live off the labor of others. This led to the development of a new organization that held down the classes forced to labor for the ruling class, by force if needed. The development of human culture, art and the beginnings of science, beyond anything possible before the rise of classes, occurred because the members of the ruling class were freed from the need to labor and could thus participate in the development of human culture.
But, it also means that for the majority, participation in the development of human culture was less than before classes arose. The fact that the great majority of the population was deprived of developing or participating in human culture slowed down its progress. It was the price that had to be paid for the degree of development of human culture made possible by the progress of productive forces of the time. As long as capitalism survives, we remain mired in this trap.
Now, in a world where machines can learn, we can glimpse the way out that Marx and Engels foresaw during the 19th century. We can enslave machines instead of other human beings. Once the burdens of enslaved labor can be shifted to machines, the further existence of capitalism is impossible because no machine or machine “intelligence” can produce surplus value. Communism will be economically possible — and necessary.
The working class has no interest in maintaining the current system of capitalism — no other form of class society is viable any longer, given the current development of the productive forces. The capitalist class does have such a need. The Trumps, the Epsteins, the Musks, etc., cannot expect to continue to enjoy their dissipated and often depraved lifestyles under the rule of the working class.
The monstrous excesses of the Trump administration in terms of their personal lives and policies, such as their sponsorship of the current genocide in Gaza, are ultimately the expression of the gap between what’s made possible by today’s development of the productive forces and the narrow limits of capitalism imposed on their further development. The situation is becoming intolerable. The grim days we are living through contain the seeds of a new revolutionary dawn.
(1) Eastern Ukraine, largely ruled by the Austro-Hungarian empire before World War I, has a different character than the rest of the country. After World War I and the Russian Revolution, eastern Ukraine was ruled by Poland, not the Soviet Union. It became a stronghold of a nationalist, anti-Soviet and anti-Polish movement. This movement (Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists – OUN), like other right-wing nationalist movements in Eastern Europe, was also anti-Semitic. Under Stephan Bandera’s leadership, it assumed a fascist character.
When Nazi Germany invaded Ukraine, the OUN fascists collaborated with the invaders. However, there was also conflict because the fascists wanted to build a country without Jews, Poles, or Russians. At the same time, the Nazi imperialists wanted to transform Ukraine into a German colonial settler state.
Native Ukrainians would provide cheap labor for German farmers at best, similar to South Africa under apartheid, or would be treated as the Israelis today treat the native Palestinian Arab population at worst. What united the German and Ukrainian fascists was their common hatred for the Bolsheviks and the Great October Socialist Revolution and all it stood for.
After World War II, most Ukrainian fascists fled to the United States or Canada, where they were welcomed. Some created an underground resistance movement that engaged in armed struggle against Soviet authorities until the early 1950s. After the counterrevolution of 1985-1991, some emigres or their descendants returned to Ukraine to help organize today’s fascist movement. (back)
(2) In the 1950s, Britain resisted the nationalization of the Suez Canal (which runs through Egypt) while France was engaged in a last-ditch attempt to hold onto its North African colony, Algeria. In 1956, Britain and France joined Israel to launch an invasion of Egypt that was then led by the celebrated pan-Arab nationalist President Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-1970). Israel seized control of the Suez Peninsula. The attack was launched because the Nasser government had nationalized the Suez Canal. France joined because Nasser gave support to the national liberation movement in Algeria. The administration of Republican President Dwight Eisenhower (1890-1969) did not support the Israeli, French, and British attack against Egypt and ordered them to withdraw.
During the French war against Algeria that lasted from 1954 to 1962, Israel looked to France and occasionally to Britain. This culminated in the Israeli seizure of the Sinai Peninsula in 1956. This gave Israel some room to maneuver between Washington, its main patron on one side, and London and Paris on the other. When Paris and London were forced to withdraw from Egypt in 1956 and Algeria won its independence from France in 1962, the ability of Tel Aviv to maneuver with Paris and London shrank, making the Zionist entity almost entirely dependent on Washington. (back)
(3) Syria and Iraq were ruled by different branches of the pan-Arab Ba’ath Party that were bitterly hostile to one another. The Syrian Ba’athist government supported imperialist attacks on Iraq during the Gulf War of 1991. At times, the Arab Ba’athists have struggled against imperialism, but at other times have sought to come to terms with it and betrayed the struggle for national liberation. In this, they somewhat resembled the Kuomintang, the Nationalist party of China. (back)
(4) Ironically, the same land where, among other things, the Jewish religion was created, and later the first steps toward what became Christianity were taken. Jesus, if he existed, was a Palestinian, though the concept of Palestinian nationality did not exist at the time. Back then, “Palestine” referred not to a nationality but to a geographic region roughly corresponding to the area known as Palestine today. (back)
A Critique of Crisis Theory 