On June 13, 2025, Israel attacked Iran. It is clear that the Trump regime knew it was coming and approved of it. Then, on June 22, the U.S. directly attacked the peaceful Iranian nuclear energy program with bunker-busting bombs. On June 25, the U.S. and the Zionist entity announced they were halting the bombing attacks for the time being, and Iran then halted its counterattacks against the Zionist entity, ending what is being called “the twelve-day war” for now. Next month, we will examine the consequences of the twelve-day war.
Last month, I noted that the tariff war shows we are entering a period similar to that between August 1914 and August 1945. The U.S.-Israeli twelve-day war against Iran confirms it. Significantly, Israel has threatened to launch such a war many times over the last 30 years, claiming it was concerned Iran was developing nuclear bombs. This is even though there is no indication Iran was interested in developing a nuclear bomb — Iran’s clergy-run regime has declared many times that nuclear weapons are sinful and forbidden by the Muslim religion and God. (1)
In the past, every time an Israeli attack on Iran seemed imminent, the U.S. blocked it. This occurred under Clinton, the war-mongering Bush, Obama, and yes, the first Trump administration. This doesn’t mean anything like peace has prevailed between U.S.-Israel and Iran since the Iranian revolution of 1979, when the pro-imperialist dictatorial Shah was overthrown by a popular revolution and the present-day Islamic Republic was created. Since then, the Zionist regime has repeatedly sent assassination squads to kill Iranian scientists — acts of war.
Then, during the Democratic Biden administration, things took a turn for the worse. In April 2024, Israel attacked the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria. Under international law, a nation’s embassy in another country is considered part of the territory of the first nation — for example, the French embassy in Washington, D.C., is considered part of France. By attacking the Iranian embassy, the Zionist entity directly attacked the territory of Iran. Among those killed in the bombing were Brigadier General Mohammad Rena Zahedi and Brigadier General Mohammad Hadi Haji-Rahimi, major Iranian military leaders. In the face of this open act of war, Iran launched a limited retaliatory missile strike on military targets within the Zionist entity.
Iran had to be careful not to give the war makers in Washington and Tel Aviv a pretext to start a full-scale war. So Iran confined itself to a limited counterattack against Israel, and Israel responded with a hit on Iran’s civilian nuclear energy program. Significantly, the Biden administration did nothing to stop the Israeli genocide of the people of Gaza (well within Biden’s ability). The incident showed that, contrary to claims by many liberals, progressives, as well as far-right reactionaries, the U.S. government serves Israel first. In reality, Israel is controlled by the United States.
In light of the attack’s limited scale, it seemed that the hour of danger had passed. That was not to be. On July 31, 2024, the leader of the Hamas resistance organization, Ismail Haniyeh, was visiting Tehran, Iran’s capital city, to attend the inauguration of the new Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, when he was assassinated by Israeli agents.
Iran was expected to again launch missiles in retaliation, but did not. Instead, it used diplomacy to prevent war with the U.S. and its Israeli proxy. The new president, who belongs to a “reformist” political trend in Iranian politics, was eager to normalize diplomatic and trade relations with the United States. Since the 1979 revolution, the U.S. has maintained a trade ban on Iran.
By 2024, the sun was setting on Genocide Joe’s long career in the service of U.S. imperialism as a senator, as vice president, and finally as president. The two leading candidates to succeed him were his vice president, Kamala Harris, and his predecessor, Donald J. Trump.
In January 2020, during his first term in the White House, Trump ordered the murder of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, who was on a peace mission in Iraq when he was assassinated. The Iranian government responded with a measured and limited attack on a U.S. military base in Iraq, again doing all it could to avoid a full-scale war with the U.S. in the face of this unbearable provocation. For a moment, it looked as though war had begun, but Trump backed down at the last moment, recalling his bombers on the way to attack Iran.
This did not prevent Trump from running as a peace candidate in November 2024 against Kamala Harris, who failed to put any daylight between herself and Genocide Joe on Gaza. Trump promised to end the Russo-Ukraine war (really a Russo-U.S. war with Euromaidan Ukraine serving as a proxy). Even before he formally assumed office, Trump achieved a ceasefire in Israel’s “war” — genocide — in Gaza. Once in office, he opened negotiations with Russia over Ukraine and with Iran. This, even though it was the Trump administration that had torn up an agreement the Obama administration had with Iran on their civilian nuclear program. This agreement allowed Iran to proceed with its program on the condition that it agree to intrusive inspections to ensure Iran limited uranium enrichment for strictly civilian use.
In January 2025, a cease-fire was signed between Israel and Hamas, bringing a momentary pause in the Gaza genocide. Trump did what Biden refused to do and opened up negotiations with the Russians and even publicly berated Ukrainian dictator Zelensky when he visited the White House live on the internet. (2)
Biden had all but broken diplomatic relations with Russia, and during his lame-duck period following Trump’s election, Biden allowed the Ukrainian dictatorship to attack Russia with long-distance missiles (that can only be fired with the direct involvement of U.S. military personnel). Compared to the Biden administration, it seemed for a moment that, as bad as Trump would be on domestic policy, his foreign policy would be less bellicose than that of Genocide Joe.
The “peaceful” phase of the second Trump administration didn’t last long. First, he announced he would take back the Panama Canal, claiming China controlled it. He then announced he would annex Greenland, by force if necessary, against the will of U.S.-NATO ally Denmark that holds Greenland as a colony, and Greenland’s people. As of the time of this writing, Trump has taken no action to do so. He also invited Canada to become the fifty-first state of the United States. It’s clear that the majority of Canadians, including those of European descent and the Native peoples, do not support the idea.
In March 2025, with Trump’s full support, the Gaza genocide resumed full force, including massive bombing and refusal to allow water and food into Gaza. Trump then made a new “peace” proposal, involving the removal of all Palestinians from Gaza and their resettlement in another country or countries (so far not found), with the U.S. taking over Gaza. Even Genocide Joe paid lip service to Gaza becoming part of an “independent” Palestinian state once the elected Hamas government is removed.
On April 2, Trump announced his “liberation day” tariff war against almost every nation on earth. Of course, this involved only tariffs, but as I explained last month, tariff wars often lead to shooting wars. War clouds gathered on the horizon.
Still, Trump played the peacemaker with Iran. On June 15, negotiations were scheduled to begin between the U.S. and Iran on the question of how much uranium Iran was allowed to enrich for its civilian nuclear energy program and medical uses. Trump proposed allowing no enrichment, instead saying Iran should burn more fossil fuel, which, in addition to limiting Iran’s future economic development, would further accelerate global warming. Hopes for any sort of economic and diplomatic relations between Iran and the U.S. were dashed.
This was against the background of resuming the Gaza genocide. Trump declared that all Palestinians would have to leave Gaza as the U.S. took control, and the fruitlessness of the U.S.-sponsored peace talks between Russia and the Euromaidan dictatorship became clear. In an ominous development, in June, the Trump administration allowed the Zelensky dictatorship to carry out an attack deep inside Russia against Russian warplanes capable of carrying nuclear weapons, as well as carry out terrorist attacks against Russian civilians.
Then, on June 13, came the launching of the U.S.-supported Israeli bombing of Iran. It targeted individual military and civilian leaders in Tehran. Among the dead was the man the Iranian government designated as its chief negotiator for the June 15 talks! Even Adolf Hitler, not known for a kind and gentle diplomatic style, never did anything like this. The Iranian government had no alternative but to order its own missile attacks on Israeli cities.
On the domestic front
As part of Project 25, a presidential policy guide drawn up by the far-right Heritage Foundation in anticipation of Trump’s takeover, Trump launched an attack on immigrants and people visiting, working, or studying in the United States, zeroing in on Arab people and everyone from Muslim countries. It also attacked the Latine population, with a focus on the working-class component. Today, the majority of the “blue collar” workforce is Latine. In the largest and richest states, such as California and Texas, Latine people are increasingly the largest part, even the majority, of the population. Considering its class composition and sheer size, the attack by the Trump administration is nothing but an attack on the U.S. working class.
A reader this week asked an important question:
“Is there an economic motive to Trump’s (and that of the section of the bourgeoisie he represents) hostility towards immigrants to the U.S. and their labor within the U.S. economy? All the administrations before him aspired to keep immigrants in a precarious position so as to be exploited as thoroughly as possible by American corporations, and indeed, this has been a highly profitable arrangement for them. Now Trump ostensibly wants to deport many of them, despite their obvious benefits to U.S. capitalism. Moreover, because immigrants could not organize as easily as other sections of the working class, this profitable relationship seemed secure in the long term. So, why would Trump want to throw all this away, especially when, as you noted, their role would become even more essential if Trump were to pursue his re-industrialization dream in earnest? It’s hard to imagine that even Trump and his far right think tanks could be so short sighted and irrational with respect to their own interests. The only idea I’ve had so far is that Trump intends for American capitalism to exploit these same workers even more brutally from afar in their homelands across national boundaries i.e. to revitalize U.S. imperialism in the Latin American region”.
It’s true that workers who are so-called “illegal aliens,” overwhelmingly immigrants from Mexico and the Central American countries, are super-exploited, i.e., paid less than the value of their labor power. However, it’s also true that attacking individuals by ICE’s plain clothes thugs is not the same thing as throwing out all undocumented immigrants.
The general rule is that the U.S. government looks the other way regarding undocumented workers when the demand for labor power is rising, as it does during the upward phase of the industrial cycle. When the demand for labor power falls, as during a recession, many of the “illegal” workers return to their native countries or are removed by force. This holds down the official unemployment figures, a policy of both Democratic and Republican administrations. For example, under Obama, there were massive deportations in the aftermath of the Great Recession when demand for labor power was low. Deportations are about keeping the super-exploited layers of the working class in the U.S. down, as they are about keeping anyone out. We must look at the broader political as well as the purely economic aspects of the problem.
The capitalist ruling class, above all, fears the working class unifying around their own class interests. Once it becomes class against class, the capitalist class is finished. It has to divide the people, particularly the working class, on a non-class basis. The U.S. capitalist class is the world master of doing this. Historically, it has had more money to do this than any other national ruling class. Central to this tactic has been “white against Black.”
Let’s go back to the early days of U.S. capitalism, before the war of the slave owners’ rebellion known as the Civil War. Then, the pro-slavery Democratic Party of the Northern states, where most wage workers lived, pitted whites against Black workers. An example: Democratic machine “bosses” told immigrant workers fleeing the potato famine in Ireland that their main enemy was enslaved Africans in the South and Northern opponents of slavery (forerunners of the Republican Party).
The Irish immigrants who were willing to work in jobs that no “native” (descendants of English settlers, not the Indigenous peoples) would take feared they would face competition from formerly enslaved people who would work for even less. Most workers in the U.S. also feared competition from Chinese immigrants who, due to the low standard of living among working people in old China, threatened to undersell others in the U.S. labor market. There was once a “labor” party in California whose program was to kick out immigrant Chinese workers from the U.S.
At the same time, some capitalist politicians (who were among the forerunners of the Republican Party) launched the American party generally known as the Know Nothings — a good name for them. The Know Nothings appealed to English-American workers against Irish immigrants, claiming they would establish the “rule of the Vatican” over the “real Americans” and would take their jobs! One of the Know Nothings’ leaders was Millard Fillmore, who served as the 13th president of the United States between March 4, 1849, and March 4, 1853.
Today, Trump and his MAGA movement appeal to the U.S. white working class against workers who are not “white” (meaning of European descent). These include African Americans as well as workers from Mexico and Central America. The ruling class also pits these two oppressed groups against each other.
Trump’s “big beautiful bill,” he’s trying to ram through Congress, includes deep cuts to Medicaid (medical insurance for the poor). This hits much of Trump’s “working-class base” — super-exploited white workers who fear Latine immigrants will undersell them in the labor market and take away their jobs.
In addition to a trillion-dollar “defense” budget, this bill revives the “repeal and replacement of Obamacare” under a different guise. The aim of these cuts is not so much to finance tax cuts — that is part of it, of course — but to force poor people of all nationalities, ethnic groups, and “races” into the labor market to increase competition among all the sellers of labor power. The aim is to increase the rate of surplus value, thereby increasing the rate of profit. This threatens many people of color as well as many white workers who, out of ignorance, support MAGA.
What happens when white workers wake up and reject this age-old game of America’s ruling capitalist class? When workers are not paid enough in wages to purchase medical insurance, according to Marx’s theory of surplus value, they are being paid below the value of their labor and are thereby super-exploited.
The latest Trump-GOP tactics have the potential of making MAGA’s working-class supporters open up to other political ideas. The attacks against the Latine community whipped up racism of the working-class portion of his MAGA base against “Brown” people. For MAGA leaders like Trump, not their misled working-class followers, this is the only way to hold their movement together.
Whatever inroads Trump may have made among Latine voters in the 2024 elections, they are not worth the risk of losing large portions of white working-class MAGA supporters. In addition, there is the prospect that soon many of his working-class supporters will find themselves joining other young workers fighting in Iran and other West Asian and North African countries as well. To MAGA leaders, racism is more necessary than ever.
No Kings Day
Before the Zionist entity’s unprovoked attack on Iran on 13 June 2025, and going against long-standing U.S. traditions, Trump announced a military parade to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps. And oh yes, June 14 just happened to be Trump’s 79th birthday!
This occurred during the attacks on the people of Los Angeles, the biggest city in California, with a large Latine population. Trump, arguably illegally, federalized the state’s National Guard for use against the people of California. He did this against the protests of its Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, who is considered a leading candidate for the 2028 presidential nomination.
The last time the National Guard was federalized against the will of a state governor was during the Civil Rights Movement when die-hard Jim Crow Southern Democrats refused to desegregate the schools in direct defiance of the Supreme Court and federal government.
Trump didn’t stop there. He then announced the deployment of two thousand marines to the city, despite the demonstrations having been peaceful. It is an understatement to say that the context in which the California National Guard was federalized is different from what it was during the days of the Civil Rights Movement.
During a news conference held by the Director of Homeland Security, Kirsti Noem, the Democratic Senator Alex Padilla was physically assaulted, handcuffed, and arrested by federal cops. Since I have been able to do so, I have never voted for a single Democratic (or Republican) candidate and never will. I am not among Senator Padilla’s political supporters. Still, I will say that this attack is on all people of Latine heritage but also all Californians who are represented by the senator (however badly).
A few days later, Brad Lander, New York City’s comptroller and mayoral candidate this year, received similar treatment at the hands of ICE agents. Again, whatever you think of him as a politician (I had never heard of him), the same principle applies to him as it does to Senator Padilla. The action against Lander is an attack on the people of New York City. The same is true of Congressional Representatives (I assume all Democrats) who have been arrested when attempting to exercise a degree of control over ICE that they are entitled to do as members of Congress under the division of powers doctrine.
Because of his far-right policies, the attacks against medical care, the racism, misogyny, and constant gay baiting, the majority of the people already hate Trump. He failed to secure even 50% of the votes in the November election, winning only by a plurality. In most other countries, failing to win 50% would have led to a run-off between him and his nearest rival, Harris. U.S. presidential elections do not work this way. Here, it’s even possible for someone who comes in second in the popular vote to win the office. This is how Trump gained his first term in the 2016 election. (3)
This time, he was only able to win a plurality because Biden supported the Gaza genocide. This caused the most progressive Democratic voters to stay home or not vote for the top of the ticket in light of Democratic candidate Harris’s refusal to put any distance between herself and Genocide Joe’s policies on genocide. In addition, there was the high inflation that lowered real wages during Biden’s term, as well as the attempt to hide the evidence of Biden’s mental and physical decline. Trump saw only a slight rise in his total votes (reflecting population growth), while Democrats saw steep declines due to the above factors.
Under the Trump administration, feeling the overall buildup of anger among the population, liberal-progressive Democrats recently called for the “No Kings” protest on June 14, which attracted more than six million participants in about 2,100 cities or towns across the U.S., including some in deeply Republican areas. The issues raised were by no means limited to Trump’s wasteful and expensive military parade, as obscene as it was. I attended one No Kings demonstration that attracted more older white people who would not normally be expected to attend a more “radical” militant demonstration.
This in itself was not a bad thing. It is a problem if only older white people attend. We can’t forget that older people are particularly threatened by Trump’s renewed attacks on government-supported medical insurance (Medicare/Medicaid) that older people rely on. It is a biological law that, generally speaking, older people require more medical care than younger people. However, in my California city, the No Kings protest attracted a huge number of young Latines, especially women, a small number of African Americans, as well as many young white people. My impression is that this was typical of the protests around the country.
All of Trump’s reactionary policies were attacked by the demonstrators, especially those on immigrants and sending the military against the people of California. Left Democrats and California politicians, including Governor Newsom, who is not left-wing [ChatGPT says “he’s viewed as a centrist within the Democratic mainstream”], after all, are under attack by Trump as well. I wouldn’t hold my breath on how far Democratic politicians like Newsom are willing to go in their struggle against the Trump administration with all its dictatorial (Bonapartist) tendencies.
This, by the way, is not based on my assessment of the personalities of individual Democratic officeholders, but on the laws of class struggle that have been verified over the centuries. As usual, the point is that the working class must not rely on individual capitalist politicians, but on our independent power as a class.
This requires that our class organize its own political party to protect and advance its own class interests, as well as those of our lower-middle-class potential allies. This is a task that hasn’t yet been accomplished in the United States, whether during the populist era of the late 19th century, the progressive era of the early 20th century, the Depression era, the Civil Rights struggle against Jim Crow era followed by the struggle against the Vietnam War, the struggles for Black liberation followed by struggles against women’s oppression, then LGBTQ+ oppression of the 1960s and 1970s, and the more recent struggles against the Iraq and other West Asian wars. Various reasons for this include the availability of cheap land stolen from the Indigenous Peoples in the 19th century, the profound division between African Americans and white workers, as well as divisions between different groups of European immigrants and the colonial settlers’ origins of the country.
All these have played their part. However, the fundamental reason has been the success of U.S. capitalism in developing the country’s productive forces. Since the end of the 19th century, the U.S. has been the world’s center of industrial production, replacing Great Britain as the workshop of the world.
Now, for the first time in about 130 years, the U.S. is no longer the leading industrial power, as the People’s Republic of China now holds that position. Today, it is China that is preaching “free trade.” China is hot on the heels, if not ahead, in science, technology, including computer science and artificial intelligence, and space exploration, with the U.S. in full retreat.
Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” includes not only attacks on the working class in the form of Medicaid cuts but also cuts for scientific research, from medical to space exploration. As Trump and his gang attack the workers, particularly the most oppressed, they are also attacking scientists. In contrast, China is rapidly advancing on all these fronts, and unless trends reverse soon, it will leave the United States far behind. Why is this happening?
The main reason is not due to the stupidity of leaders like Trump and company, though that is accelerating the trend. No, the current unimpressive leadership of U.S. capitalism is a symptom, not the cause. The real reasons lie deep within the contradictions of the capitalist system and the laws that govern world trade under it. Under this system, as the Marxist economist Anwar Shaikh stresses, it is not comparative advantage that economists insist governs world trade, but absolute advantage. At the bottom, the productive forces of the U.S., including its workers and scientists, are coming into conflict with the capitalist nation-state and the capitalist class. The ruling class is strangling all the creative and productive forces of the nation.
Make America Great Again
Trump calls his program Make America Great Again — MAGA. When we examine his concrete policies, the cuts in medical care and science research (including the weather service!) are clear. This program will have the opposite effect. It’s a program for a nation in decline. The only thing MAGA really does is to make the ruling capitalist class even richer by expanding their share of the wealth created by both labor and nature to the maximum extent possible. Its vision hardly goes beyond next quarter’s bottom line.
As U.S. capitalism as a system has moved into its declining phase, a growing percentage of firms are non-industrial and non-agricultural. These include trade firms, insurance companies, banks, accounting firms, brokerage firms, and law firms, among others. Trump himself represents the typical spoiled rich kid grown old who has the wealth he enjoys in the form of capital and capitalist landed property — through inheritance. He did not get it through any of his own work. His father made his fortune not by developing any industrial, agricultural, or even commercial enterprise, but by buying urban real estate and watching as rents on the property soared. The Trump family itself is a symbol of the decline of U.S. capitalism.
The decline of the United States is the inevitable working out of the economic laws that rule the system. These laws are built into the foundation of the capitalist mode of production and commodity money relations that are the highest stage of the capitalist system. No national capitalist class has been able to go beyond a global empire and transform its rule into a global national state. Such a state would centralize production, distribution, and other aspects across the planet, and national differences would disappear. There will be neither nation-states nor nationalities — here would be one universal capitalist state. We would then no longer have a nation state.
As capitalism developed, nation-states became powerful organizations that attempted, by any means, to expand the power of their own national capitalist class in opposition to all others. The bourgeois state is a bureaucratic military and police machine designed to hold down the working class, who alone produce surplus value. This is indeed the primary function of the capitalist state if it took its purest form as a single universal capitalist state (an assumption Marx sometimes made in “Capital”). But we are still far from that, and capitalism will be torn to pieces before we get anywhere near it. This will occur through a world socialist revolution — or a war that destroys civilization, helped along by the current global warming crisis.
As we remain in a world dominated by nation-states, it is essential to analyze global trade.
The laws that rule world trade
Under the capitalist mode of production, nation-states must trade with one another. This achieves a global division of labor. There are two theories on the laws that govern world trade. One can be called the law of absolute advantage. It holds that laws governing world trade are an extension of laws governing trade within a nation-state. The other holds that the laws governing trade, among nations or more strictly between capitalists located in different nation-states, are ruled by a different law: that of comparative advantage. If you take any college-level economics course, you will be taught the law of comparative advantage. Now, let us examine the roots of these two theories.
Closely connected to the claim that comparative advantage rules world trade is Say’s Law, which claims there cannot be a general glut of commodities, and the quantity theory of money, which claims commodity prices are controlled by the quantity of money relative to the quantity of non-money commodities. Despite claims by neoclassical economists to the contrary, the capitalist economy does not tend toward full employment of capital or labor — a reserve industrial army is necessary.
Without an industrial reserve army, competition between capitalists within the nation-state and a lack of competition among workers for jobs would make it impossible for capitalists to hold wages down to levels that make possible the production of surplus value. If no surplus value is produced, profits cannot be made, as profit is surplus value realized in terms of the use value of the money commodity.
The reserve army of labor has other functions under capitalism. A large pool of unemployed potential workers makes it possible to increase production in a short time. This often happens during the phase of the industrial cycle when demand for commodities and demand for the commodity labor power rise rapidly. The neoclassical version of the theory of comparative advantage, “improving” on the original Ricardian version, claims that perfect competition leads to an outcome where everyone who needs a job, regardless of the individual productivity of their labor, will be able to get a job.
The theory of comparative advantage is older than neoclassical economists. It was first developed by classical economist David Ricardo (1772-1823). What is this theory? Suppose the entire global economy were run as a single factory. The factory manager is instructed to employ every worker and is not allowed to fire anybody.
This is a math problem. It is solved by assigning every individual worker to the task they are personally best — or least bad — at. A worker with below-average productivity of individual labor might be most productive in operating a lathe, even though they are still below average. So that’s the job assigned to that worker. While other workers are better at operating a lathe, they are better at at least one other task. Perhaps there is an individual worker who can outperform all the rest at any task, but exceeds that average the most when it comes to fitting. So that worker is assigned to fitting. By assigning workers this way, our manager is following the principle of comparative advantage.
Imagine our factory is the entire global economy, and our workers are nations engaged in world trade. There is no universal manager but only free competition. How is comparative advantage internationally supposed to emerge out of free competition? If you want to have the highest productivity of labor in individual countries and the world possible at any given stage in the history of production, the comparative advantage supporters claim all countries have to allow free trade — meaning no tariffs or other trade barriers; no bans of commodity exports; no currency controls. All mercantilist trade restrictions must be scrapped. If this is done, comparative advantage advocates claim that a nation that is far behind the average global degree of productivity in all branches of industry will benefit just as much from free trade as a nation that is far ahead. A pretty picture indeed.
David Ricardo, the person who “discovered” comparative advantage as an economic theory, argued that the law of comparative advantage operates in international trade while absolute advantage works on the national market..
According to the law of labor value, the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labor necessary to produce it. Ricardo’s law means that a capitalist who produces a commodity of the same use value and quality with less labor will win the battle of competition because our capitalist will be able to undersell the competition — the law of absolute advantage. According to Ricardo, on the national market, the law of absolute advantage prevails. But on the world market, Ricardo claimed comparative advantage rules.
Why would this be true? Why would one law operate on the national market while a different law work on the international market? Ricardo was not a fuzzy thinker. He always aimed for mathematical consistency.
The quantity theory of money
In his attempt to show that comparative advantage prevails, Ricardo used the quantity theory of money. According to this, everything remaining equal, it’s the quantity of money defined in terms of currency units, such as the dollar, that determines the general price level.
If the quantity of money doubles, the price level should double. If the amount of money drops by 50%, the general price level should also drop by 50%. Assuming a gold standard prevails, the quantity of money in circulation at a given time will be determined by the balance of trade. If a given nation enjoys a positive balance of trade, gold (international money) will flow into it — and this, according to the quantity theory of money, should cause prices to increase. If the country suffers a negative balance of trade, gold should flow out, causing prices to fall.
Closely connected to the quantity theory of money is the claim — associated with Say’s Law and accepted by Ricardo — that all capital is fully utilized. Ricardo reasoned that since every individual capitalist attempts to maximize profits, they will use all the capital they have in production. Leaving some of the capital idle would reduce profit (which no rational capitalist would ever do). As money is received through sales, a rational capitalist will throw the money right back into circulation to avoid reducing profit. Money is always in a state of full circulation.
Keeping these rules in mind, suppose a country is ahead in all branches of production, more ahead in some branches than others. Assuming no world trade, prices will be determined by Ricardo’s law of labor value, meaning there is no international division of labor. According to this theory, price levels in every country will be determined by the value of commodities in their home market. As there are no global markets, there’s no international division of labor, and each individual country is isolated from every other.
Assuming the value of gold is the same in all countries, in a country with below-average productivity of labor, prices will be relatively high, while in one with higher-than-average productivity, prices will be lower. Prices in a country with higher-than-average labor productivity will be lower than the world average, and those with below-average labor productivity will have prices higher than average.
Then, assume that global trade begins. Let’s first look at a country with a higher-than-average productivity in all branches of industry. In trade, our country wins the battle of competition in all branches of production, resulting in massive trade surpluses. This causes the world’s gold to move toward our country, increasing its quantity of money.
Since we assume all capital is being fully utilized, the sudden increase in demand will cause prices to rise, rising above their values. As this inflationary process unfolds, it finds its advantage in world trade eroding. At some point, the country begins to lose the battle of competition in those branches of production where it is least ahead in labor productivity. This results in the reduction of the rate of growth in the country’s quantity of gold (money), and it begins to lose the battle of competition in more and more branches of industry until the initial trade surplus vanishes.
Now let’s take a country in the opposite position. In this country, labor productivity lags in all industries, including agriculture. It is less behind in some branches of industry than in others. At the beginning, the country runs a balance of trade and payments deficit. Money (gold) flows out, causing the money supply to contract.
According to the quantity theory of money, prices fall because the national money supply contracts. Eventually, the prices of commodities where the country is least behind in labor productivity compared to the world average fall below the prices of commodities where, although requiring more labor than others to produce commodities of a given use value and quality, it is least behind in terms of the quantity of labor that is nationally necessary to produce these commodities. At this point, the outflow of gold will slow down as the country begins to win the battle of competition in more branches of industry. This continues until the original trade and balance of payments deficit disappears.
According to Ricardo, eventually, world trade reaches an equilibrium where international trade is in balance. No country runs a surplus or deficit in its balance of trade, and gold stops moving from country to country. The world gold supply distributes itself in such a way that world trade balances. Each country produces the commodities it happens to be best at comparatively, but not necessarily absolutely. All countries benefit equally from universal free trade.
This is the conclusion. Free trade is equally in the interest of every country, the capitalistically most advanced and the least advanced, as measured by their relative productivity of labor, alike. The world as a whole benefits from the optimum division of labor.
Ricardo preached free trade. At the time he came up with the comparative advantage theory, thanks to the widespread use of steam-powered machinery, Britain became the world leader in producing more commodities of a given use value and quality with less labor. The economy of the British colony of India, known for its textile industry, was decimated. In the coming decades, China’s economy, once the world’s greatest manufacturing nation, was devastated as it sank into its century of humiliation.
When it came to agricultural commodities, Britain often lagged behind or couldn’t produce them at all. For example, cotton, the essential input for the 19th-century textile industry, cannot be grown in the British climate, despite the availability of steam power. Ricardo’s followers concluded that Britain should concentrate on manufactured commodities while others should provide the world’s workshop (as Britain was called) with raw materials and foodstuffs. Cotton was produced with the labor of enslaved Africans in the southern U.S. — the British textile industry was dependent on the U.S. slavery system. This consolidated the role of “King Cotton” within the early 19th-century U.S. economy..
British landowners who lived off rents — agricultural super-profits — opposed Ricardian support of free trade. Most British (capitalist) farmers did not enjoy the kind of productivity advantage of British manufacturers since it was hard to employ steam power in agriculture. Ricardian free trade policies threatened to wipe out the super-profits of capitalist farmers, that was then skimmed off in the form of rent by British landlords. Free trade promised to ruin the landlords and many British capitalist farmers as well.
Ricardians were willing to sacrifice the landlords and capitalist farmers if it meant that British and world capitalism would develop more quickly. This was part of the revolutionary impact of Ricardian economics.
Ricardo held, correctly, that the landlords and farmers were holding back the development of the world’s production in the name of what would today be called “special interests.”
A fierce political battle erupted in Britain between two opposing factions: pro-industry, free-trade radicals on one side, and conservative-reactionary landlords and capitalist farmers on the other, who supported agricultural tariffs known as the Corn Laws.
In 1846, the free traders were victorious, and the Corn Laws were repealed. In sacrificing its agriculture, the country needed a strong navy to protect itself from being cut off from supplies of raw materials and foodstuffs. Britannia had to rule the seas to protect this arrangement.
Ricardo’s version of the theory of comparative advantage reflected a world where, after 1821, the British pound was convertible into gold, and more countries joined the gold standard over the coming decades.
Ricardo himself was opposed to the Bank of England’s power to issue paper money that was inconvertible into gold at a fixed rate of exchange (a power that central banks have today) during the Bank Restriction Act of 1817-1821. The theory of comparative advantage came into its own in the form of the Currency School. The final victory of Ricardian economics was the Bank Recharter Act of 1844, followed by the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846.
How neoclassical economics ‘improved’ Ricardo
Eventually, Ricardo’s comparative advantage theory made its way into neoclassical economics. Today, it’s been adopted into the world of inconvertible paper currencies. Neoclassical economists claimed it was continuing the tradition of Ricardian economics — hence the term “neoclassical” — while dropping the Ricardian theory of labor value.
Neoclassical economics “improved” on Ricardian economics in one sense. Ricardo believed, as we mentioned above, that what Marx would later call constant capital — machinery, raw materials, and auxiliary inputs — was always fully employed. Ricardo didn’t believe the workers — what Marx would later call variable capital — would be fully employed.
Instead, Ricardo employed the Malthusian theory of population. According to this theory, wages fluctuate above mere subsistence — what Ricardo called the value of labor and Marx called the value of labor power.
When labor was scarce, workers would form more families, which then accelerated the growth rate of the working-class population. Eventually, the supply of workers exceeds the demand for the commodity “labor,” Marx’s labor power. The size of the working class population would surge, and as labor (power) became abundant, wages would again fall below the value of labor (power).
The resulting unemployment will then drive the price of labor — wages — back below the value of labor (power). Then, the formation of working-class families declines, the population growth rate falls, and the cycle repeats.
Ricardo argued that just as market prices fluctuate around the value of commodities, market prices of labor (power) — wages — fluctuate around the value of labor (power). Using Marx’s later terminology, it is only constant capital that is always fully employed. Neoclassical economists would later claim that labor (power) is also fully employed as long as the government doesn’t interfere with the freedom of the labor market or foreign trade.
Comparative advantage after the end of the international gold standard
Ricardo assumed a full-scale gold standard, while today we have a universal non-convertible into gold at a fixed rate of exchange international monetary system. How is comparative advantage expected to work under such a system?
Modern neoclassical economists claim that comparative advantage works through currency exchange rates. Assuming governments don’t interfere with foreign trade and allow exchange rates to fluctuate, if a country is running a trade deficit, the rate of exchange of its currency will drop. Since neoclassical economists, just as Ricardo did, believe in the quantity theory of money, it follows that exchange rates have a minimal effect on the general price level.
Neoclassical economists believe that a fall in the exchange rate of a currency against another will raise the price of imports in terms of the local currency while lowering the price of a country’s exports in terms of foreign currency. They reason this will cause imports to decline as consumers shift to cheaper goods produced within the country, while exports rise as more foreign consumers buy them in preference to other commodities because they are cheaper in terms of the currencies they use.
Similarly, when the exchange rate of a currency rises above that of foreign currencies, the price of foreign imports in terms of the local currency increases, and the price of exports rises in terms of foreign currencies. As a result, more consumers within the country will buy more foreign-produced commodities because they are now cheaper, while foreign consumers will buy fewer commodities produced in our country because they will now be more expensive.
This, according to neoclassical economists, will continue until foreign trade is balanced and comparative — not absolute — advantage is enforced. As long as currencies exchange rates are free to fluctuate against one another without government or central bank intervention — no tariffs, no exchange controls, no export restrictions — then world trade will balance and the law of comparative advantage will kick in. (4)
You often hear economists and non-economists argue that a country’s balance of payments difficulties are the result of currencies being overvalued or undervalued. Whether they know it or not, they’re repeating the neoclassical version of the theory of comparative advantage.
The most consistent supporters of neoclassical economics (now commonly referred to as neoliberals) — such as the late Milton Friedman — advocated that neither the Federal Reserve nor the Treasury should maintain reserves of foreign currency or gold, allowing currency exchange rates to fluctuate freely.
This will result in a favorable foreign trade balance, and there will be no dangerous buildup of international debts. All countries, whether capitalistically underdeveloped from the Global South or the most developed from the Global North, will benefit equally from free international trade.
The opposition to Ricardian free trade
Economists in underdeveloped capitalist countries (in Ricardo’s time, all countries except Britain were underdeveloped), who believed their countries should develop industry, opposed free trade and favored protection. If we surround a country with protective tariffs [see last month’s post on how tariffs work], they argued, we can become an industrial country in a few decades, fully able to compete with Britain in industrial production, not just agriculture and raw materials. If we don’t, we will forever be subordinated to Britain’s dominant steam-powered industry (later electrical power), which is so important to the military and political strength of a country.
U.S. opinion was divided. Thomas Jefferson’s followers favored free trade. The cotton lords grew cheap cotton for the British textile industry using the labor of enslaved Africans, not wage labor. Jefferson always distrusted industrial workers but was more favorable to small farmers, who, unlike industrial workers, were reliable supporters of private property. (5)
Jefferson believed it better to keep the U.S. an agricultural country using enslaved Africans producing raw materials and foodstuffs than to have to deal with a free proletariat with all the dangers associated with that. Let the British capitalists worry about those uppity industrial wage workers.
U.S. capitalists located in the North wanted to develop industrial production to challenge the British monopoly. They wanted tariffs to safeguard their position within the home market from British cheap commodities. They weren’t moved by Ricardian claims that free trade was equally in the interests of both countries.
Say’s Law and comparative advantage
False is the claim of neoclassical economics that, given perfect competition, demand will equal the supply of commodities because commodities are purchased by means of other commodities. Say’s Law ignores the fact that even before capitalism, commodities became polarized between a special money commodity and all other commodities.
Capitalism has two special commodities that it can not do without. One is labor power, the only one that reproduces its own value and produces an additional one — surplus value — without which there would be no profit. The other is the money commodity, which, in its use value, all other commodities are measured. In addition – and this is crucial – all surplus value must be measured in terms of the use value of the money commodity. Surplus value, measured in terms of the use value of money, is profit.
In a capitalist economy, the highest form of commodity production requires the accumulation of the money commodity over the entire lifetime of the capitalist system. Indeed, a considerable quantity of money must be accumulated even before capitalism. With the rise of the capitalist, this accumulated money becomes money capital. The money commodity as a use value must be durable. At the dawn of commodity production, cattle were the chief form of wealth. They served in their use value as a measure of the value of all other commodities.
This is evident in the Homeric poems. When it came to measuring the value of other, less important commodities, it was natural for the human mind to reckon their value in terms of the most important commodity during that phase in the history of production, in terms of cattle.
As commodity production develops, though still not capitalism, cattle have drawbacks as money. One, it isn’t easy to lug cattle around; you can hardly carry them around in a pocket, a purse, or a money bag. Another drawback is that they are not durable, as they have a limited biologically determined lifetime.
By the time we get to capitalism, the money commodity must be durable. Let’s examine why.
Capitalists are interested in accumulating wealth in the form of general social wealth. Unlike earlier ruling classes, they are not primarily interested in accumulating use values for personal enjoyment. To the extent they consume items of personal wealth necessary to reproduce their persons, they don’t act as capitalists who play a necessary role in capitalist reproduction, but rather as simple consumers of revenue.
This was enough for members of earlier exploiting classes, but not for capitalists. Of course, the majority of capitalists, like members of earlier exploiting classes, love consuming luxuries. But consuming without having to work does not distinguish them from previous exploiters.
What distinguishes them is the need to accumulate ever greater wealth, under pain of losing their position as capitalists. The ancestor of the capitalist is the miser who accumulates great quantities of money. Cattle will not do. The money commodity must be durable. Gold is forever, and therefore can represent social wealth as opposed to individual items of private wealth.
As for other forms of wealth, the desire to accumulate additional assets diminishes — or, in Keynesian terms, the marginal propensity to consume wealth declines.
Not so with the miser. Since the miser accumulates wealth only in the abstract form of money, there’s no limit on the amount of wealth, gold, that can ever satisfy the desire for more. The miser must meet personal needs, such as water, food, and shelter, which constitute the specific forms of private wealth. But the desire to consume more of these items declines beyond a certain point. But the desire to accumulate social wealth, wealth in the abstract — gold — knows no limits.
From miser to capitalist
The miser seeks to accumulate wealth without limits in the physical form of money material. The capitalists seek to expand wealth in the physical form of all types of commodity use values, but this is crucial; the capitalist, like the miser, measures his wealth in the physical substance of the money commodity.
Instead of money material having to be physically present as it is for the miser, for the capitalists the money material can be imaginary — money of account. Capital really takes off only when it becomes industrial capital. The industrial capitalist, instead of holding onto money material like the miser, throws money back into circulation to purchase labor power, which produces surplus value. On the other hand, this means acquiring means of production, raw materials, and auxiliary materials so that he can produce commodities that have absorbed surplus value.
Commodities have to be realized in terms of money material so that the money material — or what symbolizes it in circulation — can be thrown back into circulation. Quite unlike the miser here, they desire to purchase additional labor power, means of production, raw and auxiliary materials to produce on an ever expanding scale more commodities that have absorbed yet more surplus value. This is what Ricardo saw and so strongly approved of. Here we have production for the sake of production.
Money itself appears here only momentarily in this circuit. First, when money is thrown into circulation to purchase labor power and other elements of production and again when the commodities that have absorbed surplus value are themselves sold.
This gives rise to the illusion that money itself is an illusion and not something real. Here, we have Say’s Law, the myth that capital is always fully employed — and this is particularly important today due to the tariff war — which leads to the theory of comparative advantage. Here we are in the world of neoclassical — often called today neoliberal — economics, which was built upon Ricardo’s comparative advantage but without Ricardo’s foundation of labor value, the scientific heart of Ricardian economics, which was abandoned by neoclassical marginalism.
Two hundred years of the industrial cycle have kept the production of non-money commodities on one side and the money commodity on the other in their proper proportions over time. These proportions are constantly getting out of balance first by producing too many non-money commodities relative to the money commodity (overproduction) and then producing too few non-money commodities relative to the money commodity (underproduction).
This has consequences aside from the inevitable recession every ten years or so. One is that it prevents the law of comparative advantage from operating in the world economy. If comparative advantage can operate in a capitalist economy, it means that the interests of all trading countries are aligned, leading to a global division of labor that maximizes the overall productivity of labor worldwide.
If we combine comparative advantage with Say’s Law, we arrive at the claim that worldwide, all workers who want employment can find it. All nations, developed, developing, or underdeveloped, have an equal interest in free trade. Say’s Law depends on the quantity theory of money. If we adopt this view, Trump’s trade war makes no sense. All countries worldwide would have an equal interest in free trade. Protectionism makes no sense.
The above is what you learn in college-level economics courses. About two hundred and ten years — this is being written in June 2025 — after Ricardo explained how the law of comparative advantage operates, even a Trump should understand it. After all, he was a business major at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, so he must have taken (and presumably passed) a few university economics classes. Even if he never understood comparative advantage, most of his advisors would certainly have, being highly educated individuals with degrees from Ivy League universities, like the University of Pennsylvania.
In reality, as we have said before, the quantity theory of money, Say’s law, and the claim that the law of comparative advantage can operate in a capitalist economy are false. The real law is that in an advanced capitalist economy, individual industrial capitalists are able to increase commodity production at a greater rate than the ability of the markets for these commodities to expand. Claims of the modern neoclassical school that trading countries in an international global economy have an equal interest in free trade are wrong. We have trade wars, which all too often lead to shooting wars.
The right wing of capitalist politics, represented by Trump, believes that the nation state is an eternal institution, just like they believe the capitalist system is eternal. That’s why they call themselves MAGA. What passes for the left wing of U.S. politics doesn’t really challenge this. On the far left, beyond bourgeois politics, you can find the view that all nationalism is reactionary. The only countries that have an interest in free trade are those that have an absolute advantage. However, the nation-state is a progressive institution only during a certain stage in the history of production. It is not eternal..
The current tariff and war crises, and historical materialism
The concept of the modern nation-state represents a distinct stage in the history of production. Production separates our species from the rest of the animal kingdom.
Our species is called homo sapiens, Latin for “man the wise.” Today, this term seems archaic because it excludes more than half of our species — women.
With nuclear war and environmental destruction threatening the mass extinction of many animal and plant species, and eventually our own, the name “sapiens,” or wise, seems ironic.
In the coming decades, if humans succeed in organizing a global communist society that ends the danger of nuclear war for good and if we overcome the current environmental crisis, we will have earned the name “sapiens.” Otherwise, civilization is toast.
Until then, I for one will keep the question of whether we deserve the name “sapiens” open. What is true is that it is our use of tools and, more recently, machinery that, as opposed to merely collecting food (without the food being modified by tools) from the environment alone, distinguishes us from all other animal species.
Traces of tool-making can be found among other members of the animal kingdom. Here, I leave aside social insects and other similar creatures who are guided by instinct. The process of natural selection shaped these instincts and has produced impressive social organizations that superficially resemble human societies. However, the difference between an ant colony and any human society observed in historical times is a difference of kind, not degree.
Other animals engage in activities and use tools that seem remarkably similar to human labor. However, the matter of degree becomes a qualitative, not just a quantitative, difference. Our ancestors gradually became dependent on tool-making. At a certain point, they could not live without it. This is what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom.
The oldest stone tools identified in the archaeological record date back about 3.3 million years. Other types of tools made by still earlier human ancestors, such as those made of non-durable wood or leaves, are undoubtedly far older. What was to become human tool-making emerged from the occasional tool-making that can be observed among our closest relatives, such as chimpanzees and bonobos, as well as other intelligent animals far less closely related to us, like crows or dolphins.
From the laws of Darwinian evolution to the laws of historical evolution
Human ancestors diverged from the animal kingdom when the most skilled pre-human toolmakers became the most likely to reproduce and pass on their genes to subsequent generations. Before our ancestors reached a degree of dependence on tool making, this would not have been the case.
Brain tissue is very expensive metabolically, so individuals with bigger brains, though they might have been more intelligent, would not have necessarily been more likely to reproduce. They would have needed more food, which would have been a disadvantage from a natural selection perspective. Natural selection is interested in passing on genes, not creating intelligent creatures.
As tool-making became increasingly important and human ancestors became dependent on tool use — labor — the social organization of our ancestors began to change. Put another way, the laws of historical materialism began to operate alongside the laws of Darwinian natural selection. The social organization of chimpanzees and bonobos is significantly different from the clan-tribe organization found in even the most basic human societies. The transition from a chimpanzee or bonobo-type social organization to the most basic human society, as observed and described in written history, is significant.
While we have fossils to help us trace the physical changes in our ancestors, such as the size of the brain as they transitioned toward human conditions over the last few million years, the changes in social organization that accompanied this process leave no fossils. Although we can make some educated guesses, the actual transition between a chimpanzee/bonobo type of social organization and a clan/tribal type of social organization is concealed behind the curtain of prehistory.
What is better documented is the transition from the clan/tribal organizations that were universal around ten thousand years ago, with local variations due to various natural conditions, to the class-divided bourgeois nation-states based on capitalist private property that now dominate human society. Today, we are witnessing the increasing division of all humans presently living and producing into capitalist owners and proletarians, who have only one commodity to sell: their labor power.
Of course, there are numerous people, even today, engaged in peasant agriculture and craft production, but their numbers continue to decline. There is also still a landowning class separate from the capitalist class, but its numbers are dwindling as the two become increasingly intertwined.
The lesson is that as the instruments of production change, social organization must change. The current tariff and political crises now unfolding in the United States, combined with the war crisis, mean that the system of nation-states and private property, as well as the division of the human population between the capitalist class that buys labor power and working class that sells of labor power, cannot last much longer.
We have now reached a point in the 3.3 million year history of production that we must in the nearest future (in the historical sense) transform from the system where humans are divided between an increasingly rich capitalist class and an increasingly exploited working class and a global society that is divided into nation states with conflicting economic interests give way to a communist society under the pain of the general collapse of human civilization.
Well, I have now run out of both space and time for this month.
To be continued
(1) Far from advocating the destruction of all Israeli Jews as U.S. propaganda claims, the position of the Islamic Republic of Iran is that the apartheid Zionist regime be replaced by a Palestinian government that would grant equal rights to Jews, Christians, and Muslims. It’s hard to see how the liberation of the Palestinian people can be achieved by nuking Palestine (defining Palestine as present-day so-called Israel plus the territories of Gaza and the West Bank). These territories taken together form a tiny country. So if “Israel” were devastated by a nuclear attack from Iran, this would mean not only wiping out the Jewish Israelis but also the Palestinians living there. It’s hard to see how the Palestinian people can be liberated in this way. This certainly would not be the position of the Iranian leadership that, on principle, rejects all nuclear weapons. (back)
(2) I think we can call Zelensky a dictator because his constitutional term expired more than a year ago, as Ukrainian authorities have refused constitutionally mandated elections. In contrast, during the War of the Slave-Owners’ Rebellion, also known as the U.S. Civil War, when the U.S. was fighting for its existence, it held the regular constitutionally mandated presidential election in November 1864. In addition, the Zelensky government has banned almost every opposition party that has not given 100% support to the war aimed at holding the Russian people of the Donbass within Ukraine against their will. Zelensky has put the press and the electronic media under strict government control. I think this meets the definition of dictatorship. (back)
(3) Under the U.S. Constitution, written in the late 18th century, the president is elected by an electoral college, with electors chosen by each state. The Constitution does not specify how the electors are selected; initially, electors were chosen by state legislators. African slaves had no vote and generally no rights whatsoever. At the insistence of the slaveholders, enslaved Africans were counted as three-quarters of a person to increase the number of electors that states were allowed. Indigenous peoples were excluded entirely as non-citizens with no rights, no vote.. Women were counted as “free persons” when determining electors for the Electoral College, but had no right to vote, a state of affairs that remained in effect until the time of the Russian Revolution. The Soviet Republic was the first nation to give women the right to vote. In the wake of the Bolshevik revolution, as the U.S. claimed to be the world’s leading democracy, it finally had to give women the vote.
Nor were white men without property allowed to vote. If you were white but proletarian, no vote for you. Only white owners of landed property and/or capital could vote because only people with property had large enough incomes to pay taxes. If you didn’t pay taxes because you had no property, the government was none of your business.
Native Peoples had to wait until the 20th century to gain voting rights. African American men, with rare exceptions, did not gain the right to vote until Reconstruction and lost it again for all practical purposes by the turn of the 20th century. African American men (and women) didn’t regain — or, in the case of African-American women, regain — the right to vote until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
In presidential elections, despite the large Democratic victories in populous states like California and New York, the Democratic candidate does not receive any additional electoral votes. With a couple of exceptions, if the Republican candidate edges out the Democrat in a state, the Republican gets all the electoral votes, even if the Republican victory is the result of voter suppression or other forms of electoral fraud. For example, Albert Gore won the popular vote in the 2000 election, but Republican George W. Bush became president. Donald Trump became president in 2017, despite losing the popular vote to Democrat Hillary Clinton by approximately two million votes.
By modern (not late 18th-century) standards, U.S. presidential elections are undemocratic, even when there is no electoral fraud. The Constitution does not guarantee its citizens (let alone its residents) the right to vote to this day. (back)
(4) This analysis owes much to the work of Anwar Shaikh. (back)
(5) If the Russian Revolution had not occurred in his lifetime, Lenin would have gone down as the Marxist who did more than any other to examine the relationship of the peasantry to private property and the relationship of the peasantry to the working class. Anyone interested in the subject of the relationship between peasantry and private property, as well as the working class, should consult the works of Lenin. (back)
A Critique of Crisis Theory 