As explained last month, Donald Trump kept his promise to end the genocidal military assault by the Zionist entity against Gaza. I will not call this a war. He then unveiled his own plan for “post-war” Gaza. Trump plans the permanent removal of 100% of the Palestinians from Gaza.
Who will replace them? Trump indicates that the U.S. itself would own Gaza, not Israel. Trump did not explain what this ownership means. Does it mean that U.S. businesses (including Trump’s family businesses) would build hotels and casinos to take advantage of Gaza’s beautiful Mediterranean climate? Or would Gaza become some sort of U.S. territory? He also implied that U.S. forces would replace Israeli forces, though he later walked that back claiming U.S. forces wouldn’t be needed in a Palestinian-free Gaza. (1)
Trump claimed Gaza Palestinians would be resettled at some beautiful place nearby, such as in Jordan or Egypt, though there were some stories it might be distant Indonesia. The governments of Jordan and Egypt expressed strong opposition to any forcible resettlement in their countries. His plan also raises questions about the future of West Bank Palestinians. Many of them, as in Gaza, are refugees from other parts of Palestine. Even before Israel began its genocide in October 2023, the Zionist entity was putting pressure on the West Bank — will the next step be to drive Palestinians out of there as well? Will the U.S. own the West Bank as well as Gaza?
Anyone who has studied the Holocaust of European Jews of the 20th century, which immediately preceded the 1948 Nakba, will recognize words such as resettlement and promises the victims will be sent to wonderful places somewhere else. For European Jews, resettlement was a euphemism for being executed. Does it mean the same thing for the Palestinians? (It cannot mean anything good.) Of course, before he can bring his monstrous plans into effect, the Palestinian people will have to be completely defeated. The Zionist entity was not able to accomplish this during 15 months of genocidal bombing. But to end the Palestinian genocide for good, the wave of reaction now engulfing so much of the world must be defeated.
In the just-concluded German election, the right-wing nationalist Alternative for Germany party gained more than 20% of the vote, just behind the “reactionary union,” as it is called in Germany. The “union” is a parliamentary alliance of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) and the Christian Social Union of Bavaria (CSU). Friedrich Merz, whose title is “Leader of the CDU,” is considered to be to the right of the previous CDU leader, Angela Merkel, and is expected to be the new chancellor.
The new government will be a coalition between the fast-declining Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the reactionary CDU/CSU union. The only question is whether the warmongering, pro-NATO Green Party will be included. If the Greens are not part of it, the new government will have a slim majority in parliament. This situation deserves a closer look, but I have neither the space nor time to do so now.
Meanwhile across the Atlantic, the reactionary triumvirate of billionaire President Donald J. Trump and Vice President JD Vance alongside CEO Elon Musk — the richest man in world history with wealth estimated at almost a trillion dollars — are sinking their fangs. Musk and his thugs in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are rampaging through federal departments firing workers by the thousands and slashing services. Like the typical capitalist boss he is (on steroids), Musk demands an explanation from workers about their last week’s activities, or they may face getting fired.
Trump and Musk are attempting to treat federal workers like employees of their private enterprises. For Trump, this would be the Trump Organization, the real estate conglomerate. For the much wealthier Musk, this would include SpaceX, which builds rockets that act as shuttles to the International Space Station and the StarLink satellite network, as well as the Tesla electric automobile company and the X social media company formerly known as Twitter.
Who is the lesser evil?
Liberals and progressives argue that we should throw out Trump, Musk, and Vance by electing a Democratic House and Senate in 2026 and a Democratic president in 2028. But there’s a problem. Throwing out Trump by electing Democrats is the policy liberals and progressives followed after the election of Trump in 2016. It was successful insofar as it led to the election of a Democratic House majority in 2018, and in 2020 a Democratic House, a Senate majority, and a Democrat President. Trump was gone despite his illegal attempts to cling to power – or so it seemed.
The result? The Gaza Genocide of 2023-25 as well as the ongoing proxy war in Ukraine. The Biden-Harris administration failed to halt the Israeli genocide for 15 months, instead supporting it with more than a hundred billion dollars. This ensured Trump’s return to the White House in 2025, something deemed unthinkable in the wake of the events of January 6, 2021.
The Gaza genocide paused only after the defeat of the Democratic Harris-Walz ticket and the election of Trump. Even the Biden administration never said openly they wanted to exile all Palestinians from Gaza. They claimed only to want the removal of the elected Hamas government, to uphold the two-state solution with a Palestinian state made up of the West Bank and Gaza. It remains to be seen whether Trump’s promise to achieve complete deportation of Gazans will happen in practice. That will be determined by the struggle in the months and years ahead not only in Palestine but throughout the world.
What cannot be denied is that Biden and Harris are responsible for killing tens of thousands directly, as well as tens of thousands more when we count the effects of thirst, cold, and hunger over fifteen months. Whatever he may do in the future, Trump has at least paused the genocidal bombing and some supplies are now reaching Gaza, somewhat slowing the continuing genocide, though the Israelis are trying to shut them off again. For Gazans, what then is the lesser evil, Trump or the Democrats?
For years, especially in the United States, the truth about Palestine and “Israel,” as the Zionist entity is dubbed, was largely unknown in the West. People were told that survivors of the Holocaust, European Jews, made their way to their ancient homeland from which they had been forcibly exiled thousands of years ago. They then moved to rebuild their long-lost country, despite the opposition of “anti-Semitic Arabs.”
It took decades before people in the U.S. began to learn that this was a fairytale designed to cover the crimes of modern imperialism against both Jews and the Palestinians. But today more people in the West, young and old, see through the Zionist myth. Because of this, Democrats today won’t openly say that if they return to power they’ll give the Zionist entity the go-ahead to restart the bombing of Gaza, though not saying it doesn’t mean they won’t.
Then there is the question of Ukraine. Most in the U.S. and Europe don’t know the facts about the real cause of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Like the conflict between Israeli Jews and Palestinians, the real culprit is imperialism. The tale told by imperialist propaganda is that “democratic” Ukraine, finally won its independence from Russia in 1991, after centuries of oppression by first czarism and then by the Soviet Union. Then in 2022 the Russian “dictator” Vladimir Putin, without provocation, invaded this “democracy” to reestablish Russian rule.
The left-wing liberal trope is that Putin wants to restore the czarist empire. For conservative audiences, it’s that he wants to restore the Soviet Union. These are two very different things. Putin definitely does not want to restore the Soviet Union if only because, betraying his membership as a member of the Soviet Communist Party as well as that of a KGB officer (unfortunately he was hardly alone in this) Putin was a supporter of Boris Yeltsin as he overthrew what was left of the Soviet Union, to restore capitalism. As for restoring the czarist empire, this is beyond the power of today’s capitalist Russia, so it doesn’t matter. The old czarist Russian empire belongs to a different time in the history of production and unless we can return to the era that produced it, the czarist empire cannot return.
People are taught little about Russian and even less about Ukrainian history. They are taught a distorted version of the Russian Revolution and the political counterrevolution that swept out the Soviet Union under Gorbachev between 1985 and 1991. As for the real history of the Soviet Union, U.S. schools rarely teach more than simplified exaggerations about Stalin’s excesses and the harsh conditions in the gulags. (To avoid any misunderstanding, I do not deny there were genuine problems.) (2)
Trump has now done what Biden refused to do: He entered into negotiations with Russia to restore normal diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Russia. On February 28, Trump and Ukrainian President Zelensky held a joint press conference. Usually, such events between world leaders are highly scripted affairs that are as dull as dishwater.
Not this one. Zelenksy and Trump had agreed to a plan whereby Ukraine would pay for the aid it received during the more than three-year-long war, with Ukrainian rare earth minerals (REMs) and other mineral wealth in a way that would weaken the Ukrainian economy for decades. In exchange, the U.S. would give security guarantees. Zelensky hoped to pull the U.S. entirely into war, including U.S. boots on the ground, the only way the Nazi-ridden Euromaidan regime had any chance of surviving.
At a February 28 press conference streaming live online, Trump and Vance blasted Zelensky publicly. It began when what I assume was a pro-Trump journalist asked Zelensky why he was disrespecting Trump by wearing a black-shirted outfit instead of a proper suit and tie. Then Vance attacked him for not thanking the U.S. for the aid. Trump joined the fray, bluntly pointing out that the Zelensky government was losing the war, explaining that he had no cards to play, and accused him of playing with World War III and the lives of millions (in reality Trump could have said billions) of people.
The press conference ended with Zelensky being kicked out of the White House without signing an agreement. He was told he could return only when he showed proper gratitude to the U.S. I know of no precedent for anything like this when the U.S. president publicly blasts a foreign client leader.
The liberal Party of Order media that supports the Democratic Party attacked Trump for betraying democratic Ukraine. Virtually every Democratic politician of any note, including Bernie Sanders, as well as progressive podcasters who claim to represent the left, joined in. What the liberal and progressive left are trying to do is make Trump’s betrayal of democratic Ukraine to Russia a key part of a growing anti-Trump movement. If the Democrats get away with linking this movement with Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine and public humiliation of Zelensky, the new anti-Trump movement will crash and burn even faster than the first. Reaction will return in a worse form than the current troika of Trump, Musk, and Vance. The working class vanguard must understand what is really behind the Russo-Ukrainian war.
What’s the truth being repressed in the West? To explain would require a whole book that I am hardly qualified to write. I will say this. In the wake of the political counterrevolution of 1985-1991 that overthrew the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union formally broke up in December 1991. Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus announced they withdrew from the Soviet Union. The USSR was formally abolished, and Mikhail Gorbachev was out of a job.
The capitalist system was fully restored in Russia, Ukraine, and the other member nations of what had been the Soviet Union. Russia and Ukraine adopted U.S.-inspired constitutions. Both nations had formal bourgeois democratic regimes, though both fell short as their economies were thoroughly ravaged by U.S.-led imperialism. In Russia, the decade of the 1990s is remembered with horror. Both Gorbachev and Yeltsin are the most hated figures in Russian history.
In Ukraine, the new capitalist leaders were divided between pro-Russian leaders who dominated in Donbass, located in what was eastern Ukraine, and so-called Ukrainian nationalists who were strongest in western Ukraine. These nationalists are the opposite of a genuine national liberation movement. They whipped up hatred of Russia, especially anything associated with the Russian Revolution that had freed Ukraine from centuries of czarist oppression and economic exploitation.
Outright war developed in Donbass where Ukrainian nationalists, actually fascists, attacked the Russian-speaking population. During World War II, the nationalists, whose most (in)famous leader was Stephan Bandera, fought on the side of Nazi Germany. The Ukrainian fascists occasionally clashed with their masters, the German imperialist Nazis. This was because the Hitler regime was planning to convert Ukraine into a German colonial settler colony. The Nazi idea was that a portion of Germany’s surplus population would be transformed into capitalist farmers who would exploit a helpless Ukrainian working class and whatever was left of the peasantry.
Bandera would have preferred that Ukrainian capitalist farmers and other Ukrainian capitalists do the exploiting. But both the Nazis and Bandera and his fascist followers agreed on the main question, the restoration of capitalism in Ukraine. When the tide of war began to turn in favor of the Soviet Union, Bandera and the Nazis buried their differences and united against their main enemy, the Ukrainian working class, its allies among the collective farmers, and its state, the Soviet Union. Much more than fascist movements elsewhere, the Ukrainian fascists adopted Nazi symbols and considered them their own. They worked side-by-side with Nazis in exterminating not only Jews in Ukraine but for historical reasons that I don’t have the space or time to examine here, the Polish population as well.
As the Soviet army, including Ukrainian workers and collective farmers, swept the Nazis out of Ukraine, the Ukrainian fascists switched their sponsors to their new imperialist master, the United States. Many fascist refugees made their way to the U.S. Some found employment in auto plants and other large industrial enterprises where they could be used to fight Communists and other left-wingers during the postwar anti-Communist purges that swept the labor unions.
The fascist nationalists were able to use the U.S. as well as Canada as a base where they could give encouragement and support to the anti-communist fascists underground within Ukraine itself. (3) After the counterrevolution of 1985-91 some of their descendants, linking up with the descendants of members of the old fascist underground, organized new fascist organizations using Nazi symbols.
In 1999, as Russia’s economy bottomed out, the hated Yeltsin resigned as Russian president and was succeeded by the prime minister of Russia, Vladimir Putin. (4) Putin moved away from Yeltsin’s policy of complete subordination to the West as he adopted policies to develop the Russian economy along capitalist lines. In Ukraine, Putin encouraged the Russian-speaking people of Donbass who wanted to rejoin Russia to instead stay in Ukraine where they provided a pro-Russian counterweight to pro-U.S. (pro-German during World War II) nationalists who were strongest in the West in Ukrainian elections. But the situation was unstable with pro-Russian and pro-U.S.-NATO imperialist forces pretty evenly divided.
What is important to us in the U.S. today is that in 2014 the Obama administration encouraged pro-Western, pro-NATO liberals to unite with Ukrainian fascists to overthrow the elected government of Victor Yanukovych. They aimed to integrate Ukraine into the European Union and NATO. While pro-Western liberals took over the government it was the fascists of the Right Sector and the Azov Brigade, sporting Nazi symbols, who were the leaders of the coup in the trenches that overthrew the Yanukovych government.
Between 1991 and 2014, it would be hard to say whether Russia or Ukraine was the most bourgeois-democratic. After 2014 Ukraine became less democratic than Russia. Tough de-communization laws were passed that made it illegal to celebrate the Soviet past and the Ukrainian Communist party was banned. Attempts were made to ban the Russian language and members of the Russian nationality faced persecution. In Donbass, the Russian population, proud of the Soviet past (and making Putin nervous) formed the People’s Republic of Donbass and the People’s Republic of Lugansk, taking up arms to defend these republics against the fascists. As the Euromaidan coup government and Ukrainian fascist groups increased their pressure on the Russian population, Russia changed its policy of keeping the Donbass in Ukraine. It recognized the two People’s Republics as independent states.
In February 2022, a special military operation was launched. The Russian army marched to the gates of Kiev but did not attempt to take the city. Instead, the Russian army withdrew, and negotiations were opened with Ukrainian President Zelensky’s government in Istanbul, Turkey. A general agreement to end the then-four-week-old war was drawn up, in which Ukraine agreed to accept the autonomy of the two people’s republics, recognize Crimea as Russian, and not seek NATO membership.
Then, the British government of Boris Johnson, backed by Democratic President Joseph Biden’s administration, told Zelensky to tear up the agreement. Three years of bloody war followed. In response, Russia moved to formally annex the two republics and the two Russian-speaking provinces, which provide a secure land bridge to defend Russian Crimea and the Russian naval base in Sevastopol, which gives Russia access to the Black Sea. Most of the fighting has occurred in the Donbass.
Russia insists that Ukraine cede the four disputed provinces, agree to stay out of NATO, accept limitations on the size of its armed forces, guarantee the rights of Russian speakers, ban nuclear weapons on its territory, and de-nazify Ukraine. Since the Euromaidan coup of 2014, all statues of Lenin have been removed from territory controlled by the Kiev regime while statues of Ukrainian fascist leader Stephan Bandera have gone up. Putin is unlikely to insist on restoring the Lenin statues, but Russians will surely want to see the Bandera statues removed.
Is Trump really ready to walk away from the Ukrainian war at this point and accept the demise of the pro-U.S. imperialist Nazi ridden Euromaidan regime? That remains to be seen. He insists that Ukraine use its mineral wealth to repay Washington for aid delivered to Kiev during the three years and counting of bloody warfare. This would weaken Ukraine’s economy for decades, but it would be highly profitable for U.S. corporations.
Trump has rightfully called Zelensky a dictator. The U.S. president points out that Zelensky’s constitutional term has expired and demands Kiev hold long-overdue elections as specified by the Ukrainian constitution. In addition to staying in office beyond his constitutional term, Zelensky banned all political parties except his own and established government control of the media to ensure no anti-war voices were heard. This seems to meet the general definition of a dictatorship.
There are reasons why Trump might be willing to write off the Ukraine puppet regime for now. The move to seize control by U.S. imperialism through the Euromaidan coup has been mostly a Democratic Party project. It occurred under the Democratic Obama administration, supported on the ground by Victoria Nuland and her husband, Robert Kagan, an anti-Trump Republican and founder of the neoconservative think tank Project for the New American Century. Unlike the Democrats, neither Trump, Musk nor Vance are personally committed to the Ukrainian adventure. In the final weeks of the Biden administration, the administration pushed things to the brink of a shooting war with Russia.
Like the Gaza genocide, the Democratic Biden administration is also responsible for the three-plus years of war in Ukraine and the fighting in Donbass that has occurred since 2014. Biden was Obama’s vice president and his son Hunter served on the board of the major Ukrainian fossil fuel company Burisma. The Trump, Musk, and Vance regime has less personal responsibility for the bloodbath of the last three years. Though Trump could have ended support for the Euromaidan regime during his first term, from 2017 to 2021, he instead increased support.
Democrats accused Republicans of undermining support, of being friendly to Russia, and impeached Trump over it. This makes it easier for Trump to wash his hands of the bloodbath and blame Democrats if he decides to move in that direction. There is a reason why the Trump, Musk, Vance regime might want to end the war for now. The reason is financial.
There are indications that the global capitalist economy is approaching the first generalized crisis of relative commodity overproduction since 2007-2009. The economic crisis associated with the 2020 COVID shutdowns was not one of overproduction, instead it postponed the crisis. The main indication of impending crisis is that when interest rates begin declining, the dollar price of gold soars. A soaring dollar price of gold leads to accelerating inflation independent of the rise in the quantity of Federal Reserve-created dollars. When the dollar gold price soared, long-term interest rates rose, blunting a further rise in the dollar price of gold but generating inflation.
When the Federal Reserve attempts to drive interest rates back down, the rise in the dollar gold price resumes. This is the pattern we saw in the 1970s and early 1980s as well as at the start of 2007-2009. The exchange rate of the dollar against gold, the money commodity (aka the dollar price of gold) has been weak against gold but strong against other currencies. Currently, there are no strong capitalist currencies, meaning that no country is in a position to bail out the United States, and it is becoming increasingly difficult for the U.S. to bail out other countries. It is hard to see how a deep global recession can be avoided much longer.
The tense financial situation can be eased if the government reduces its expenditures. The Trump administration and the Republican party are committed to yet another Republican tax cut, the last thing the world capitalist economy needs right now, as this will only increase competition between the private sector, the capitalists, and the government for loan money.
The Trump, Musk, and Vance regime has launched a vicious purge of the federal government, firing federal employees in the thousands throughout the country. Trump has created the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which Elon Musk runs. Federal employees are treated as though they were employees of one of Musk’s for-profit companies while the Trump, Musk, and Vance government attempts to strip them of their civil service protections. The Republican House passed an instruction to House committees to institute deep cuts in federal social spending while it draws up yet another tax cut for the rich.
The theory is that cutting taxes for those who live off profits will increase spending on capital accumulation, lift production, and increase job creation. This is known as trickle-down economics. Even if this happens — it usually doesn’t — any stimulative effects from the tax cuts will be felt years into the future while the mass firings of government employees will be felt now, resulting in a recessionary effect on the economy.
As the federal, state, and local governments suddenly reduce spending, commodity sales will drop. Businesses notice that inventories — commodity capital — are piling up. Slow sales increase money demand in dollar form to pay debts, causing a fall in money demand in gold form. Faced with falling sales, capitalists are forced to sell gold. This lowers the dollar gold price, allowing the Federal Reserve to create more dollars without raising the dollar price of gold. In most recessions, the fall in private spending triggers a downturn, though a drop in public spending can also lead to a recession.
Central government spending drops associated with DOGE layoffs may soon trigger a recession, but the Trump team may consider this a lesser evil than a collapse of the dollar followed by a contraction of credit throughout the economy, which would trigger a greater recession, as in 2008-09. Other countries carrying out large-scale capitalist production on a capitalist basis are feeling similar financing difficulties.
This pressures the U.S. and Russia to pause or end the war. If the fighting escalates instead, as it did under Biden-Harris, even if it doesn’t lead to World War III, it will increase competition between governments and capitalists for loan money and create a global financial crisis.
The DOGE purges of government employees aim to ease competition between the government and capitalists for loan money. They also gut the social safety net, which will allow capitalists to increase the rate of surplus value. Even if the DOGE cuts trigger a recession, it will eventually pass (as recessions do) as overproduction is liquidated. Musk and Bezos will then no longer be dollar billionaires; they will become the world’s first dollar trillionaires.
As the world capitalist economy approaches the critical point of the economic cycle, the last thing that the Trump, Musk, and Vance administration need is a major war. It would only increase competition between the government and the rest of the economy, which the DOGE purges are designed to reduce, among other things. However, war might come in handy later to pull the economy out of a depression. This will only be true after a good deal of money has fallen out of circulation and gold production is in a strong upswing. For now, the Trump team is bullying countries that cannot fight back militarily such as Panama, Denmark, and Canada while avoiding confrontation with more powerful countries, like Russia, China, and Iran who can fight back if they are attacked.
In the last week of February and early March, as the full extent of the DOGE purge became apparent, along with negotiations between the U.S. and Russia and now Trump’s public dressing down of Zelenskyy, the interest rate on government bonds and the dollar price of gold fell.
On Friday, February 28, these developments were celebrated on Wall Street with a rise in stock market prices. According to well-informed Alexander Mercouris, the current talks between Russia and the U.S. are not about the Russo-Ukrainian war but the dollar and international monetary system. Could a deal be brewing where in return for the U.S. removing sanctions on Russia, Russia could use its gold reserves to prop up the dollar and the international monetary system? Though gold prices rose moderately the following week, long-term interest rates rose slightly, while stock market prices fell. Markets remain highly unsettled as of early March.
In any case, the movement of the dollar gold prices and interest rates is in contrast to January’s soaring dollar gold price and government bond interest prices. What Wall Street is saying to Trump, Musk, and Vance is that you are on the right track and if possible push even harder. If they don’t or Wall Street believes that they are backing down or bluffing, the markets could easily reverse.
The DOGE cuts are not only aimed at short-term attempts to manipulate the industrial cycle. They express long-term capitalist aims of driving up the profit rate by increasing the rate of surplus value. From the viewpoint of the capitalist class’s needs, the current economic and political situation is making things more urgent for the Trump, Musk, and Vance administration’s attempt to blunt the effects of the looming economic crisis. Once the economic cycle does turn, as it inevitably will, the financial pressure on the U.S. government will ease and the danger of war will increase. This is the lesson of the history of the 1930s.
Bourgeois society as the kingdom of freedom and democracy
Capitalism is a system of generalized commodity production where labor power is a commodity. The early ideologues of the system saw capitalism as a system of freedom. Everyone can freely buy and sell commodities. For example, a person might sell their labor and spend their wages on satisfying their immediate needs. Or they might save some of it and put it on the money market directly or through the banking system. If done to a sufficient extent, they will earn interest income and become a capitalist. Or they might take a risk and create their own business. If successful, they will become a merchant or industrial capitalist. Then they will become even richer since, in addition to earning interest, they will also earn the profit of enterprise.
Economists developed the concept of human capital. A person can work an unskilled job and live off the wages — perfectly proper. Or a person can decide to acquire a skill. To do this, the thrifty worker will forgo consumption in the present to enjoy more consumption in the future and earn interest. Following this logic, interest is the difference between the wages of skilled and unskilled workers. The skilled worker becomes a capitalist who owns human capital.
The story goes that at the beginning bourgeois society consisted of equal commodity owners. Some of these owners were thrifty and saved part of their wages to collect interest, obtain a skill and accumulate human capital, launch a business, and accumulate merchant or productive capital. Others, the majority, were spendthrifts who chose immediate personal consumption over the accumulation of capital. Society became divided into those who owned capital in some form and others who had only their labor to sell. If a person has only their labor to sell, they can still put off immediate consumption, save, and begin the process of becoming capitalists as owners of industrial or merchant businesses, live off the interest of money capital, or become skilled workers and enjoy the interest on their human capital in the form of high wages.
According to this story, the world lived in repression and terror before capitalism. When slavery reigned supreme, the enslaved people had no freedom whatsoever but were the private property of their owners. They were forced to work for nothing. Things were a little better under feudalism. The serfs were bound to the land, and could only leave it with the lord’s permission. They worked their strips of land for themselves only part of the day. In contrast, the free-wage workers work the entire day for themselves as the market ensures that they earn the full value of the labor they sell to the capitalists. (5)
Assuming the state keeps its hands off the economy, as it should, confining itself to the role of protecting private property and enforcing the sanctity of contracts, sometimes called the “night watchman view of the state,” marginalists of the Austrian and neoclassical schools decided the economy would be at or near full employment. Anybody can find a job, as long as they are willing to accept a wage equal to the value their labor produces. If a person is unwilling to do this, then unlike under slavery or feudalism, the worker can choose leisure instead. If the worker is unsatisfied with the wages offered, they can improve their skills, their labor will produce additional value, and they will earn more.
Capitalists who own the means of production have the freedom to put them to work as they see fit. To maximize their earnings, the mix of products produced will be such that it would be impossible to achieve a greater or equal degree of total satisfaction for the population at large. Democracy, where the people are free to vote for anybody they want to run the government and make policy, is viewed as the political counterpart of economic freedom, aka capitalism.
These classical bourgeois ideas were those of the traditional — pre-Trump — Republican Party, and though they are less dogmatic about it, they are also the views of the modern Democratic Party — that is since the Democratic Party gave up defending African slavery. How did this wonderful society of freedom and democracy — capitalism — come about? This is the story told by bourgeois ideology. After thousands of years of slavery, serfdom, and political despotism, came the enlightenment, freedom, and democracy. People began to realize that slavery and serfdom were just plain wrong. Instead, free wage labor came, where people could sell any commodity they chose, including their labor. They are free to enter into voluntary contracts with one another, and the state guarantees the contracts they freely enter into. Slavery, where a person owns another and forces them to work for them without pay, was abolished. Serfdom, where people must work for part of the day to meet their own needs and then work the rest of the workday for the lord, was abolished.
Today, under freedom — capitalism — people are free to do work or not as they see fit, and only for themselves.
This story of how freedom (capitalism) replaced feudalism is far from the truth. As Marx explained, the essence of capitalism is the separation of workers from the means of production. Under slavery, the enslaved people, like the tools they worked with, were the private property of the master. Since someone owns enslaved people, they are attached to the means of production that are owned by the same person. Under feudalism, while the serf could not leave the manor without permission, the lord could not simply dispose of the serf. The serf had the right to some land, and the lord could not deny the land, the main means of production. Here, the worker, the serf, was attached to the means of production.
The transition to capitalism was and is marked by the separation of the worker from the means of production. This is far from a democratic operation. As the feudal lord was transformed into the modern capitalist landowner, they acquired the right to kick the tenant off the land. This was a brutal process, but not the end of it. The worker lost all ownership rights over the land and all other means of production. The transition to capitalism is only complete when the worker owns no other means of production except the ability to work. This is all the worker has to sell.
Under slavery, the worker is the private property of the master and has no freedom not to work. Likewise, under feudalism, the worker is forced to work for part of the day without compensation. In both cases, there is no freedom. But under capitalism (what bourgeois ideologues call freedom), the worker has the freedom to sell or not sell their labor power, the freedom to starve, the freedom to choose leisure — plenty of freedom to go around.
Silicon Valley turns against bourgeois freedom and democracy
The concentration and centralization of capital leads to the decline of bourgeois freedom. The concentration of capital refers to the ever larger scale of both merchant and industrial firms. As industrial firms grow in size and exploit greater numbers of workers, the ability of industrial capital to produce commodities expands faster than the market also grows. The situation is reached where a handful of industrial firms can meet the market’s ability to absorb commodities at their prices of production. A handful of industrial firms will come to dominate the market.
Even without formal cartel agreements, firms will reduce production as soon as demand weakens to avoid a fall in market prices much below production prices. Reducing production means that markets will clear relatively quickly. The decline in the number of independent firms marks the beginning of the end of capitalist production and the beginning of the transition to communist production. This type of monopoly (or oligopoly — meaning few sellers) grows out of the spontaneous evolution of the capitalist mode of production. Here we see that capitalist freedom with many independent capitals, fades away through the operation of the system itself. There is another type of monopoly created and imposed that depends on the direct intervention of the repressive power of the state that represents the direct negation of bourgeois freedom.
The rise of modern computing
The late 1940s witnessed a pivotal breakthrough: the realization that computer instructions and the data they manipulate could be represented as sequences of binary digits (zeros and ones). This fundamental concept, which signifies true and false states, ushered in the era of the stored-program computer.
Instead of computing machines being laboriously programmed by hand to run specific programs, now it became possible to simply load instructions typed in by a programmer into a computer along with the data that the program processes. Soon, the first modern computer languages were developed, which enabled programmers to type in English-like instructions that were translated into strings of zeroes and ones along with the data to be processed. Computers solve particular problems by exercising a finite number of steps called algorithms by mathematicians.
During the 1950s some early programmers believed that it wouldn’t be long before they could simulate the human mind on a digital computer. This project was dubbed artificial intelligence (AI). For all practical purposes, computers would acquire human or super-human intelligence. A person could type questions onto a keyboard and not know whether they were speaking with a human being or a computer. Some AI programs achieved impressive results in certain fields. Programs that could play board games such as chess were developed that could beat all but the best human players by the late 1980s. The belief that it is possible to develop a program that runs on a digital computer that could fully simulate the human mind is called Strong AI.
Wikipedia writes:
“Chess computers were first able to beat strong chess players in the late 1980s.
Their most famous success was the victory of Deep Blue over the then World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, but there was some controversy over whether the match conditions favored the computer.
In 2002–03, three human–computer matches were drawn, but, whereas Deep Blue was a specialized machine, these were chess programs running on commercially available computers.
Chess programs running on commercially available desktop computers won decisive victories against human players in matches in 2005 and 2006. The second of these, against then world champion Vladimir Kramnik, is the last major human–computer match.
Since that time, chess programs running on commercial hardware — more recently including mobile phones — have been able to defeat even the strongest human players.”
Computer chess-playing programs do not work in the same way human brains do. They beat human players because of the speed of their electronic calculations. These programs cannot do more than the specific tasks they were programmed for. However good the programs, or impressive the results — though they inspired many science-fiction stories about intelligent machines developing super-human intelligence that eventually turned on their creators — no real-world computer program could achieve anything like this.
Despite this, some computer scientists believe it is only a matter of time before computers will have human-like cognitive abilities called Strong AI. Others believe that the difference between the AI of a cleverly programmed computer and human beings is not how much but what kind of intelligence is present. These scientists believe that the animal intelligence that evolved into human intelligence involves something more than algorithms and that human intelligence can’t be simulated by a machine that operates on algorithms alone.
By the 1960s, another approach to AI developed. The animal brain learns by varying the strength of the electronic and chemical connections between neurons. Neurons are the cells that make up the brain. When you learn a new task, or a new field of knowledge, such as the Marxist critique of political economy, computer science, or the game of chess, the brain’s neurons create a network of connections. The more work done in the new field, the stronger the connections become. If you do not continue working in this field after you have mastered it, the neuron networks weaken. If you later return to it, you will have less knowledge or skill than before and will have to work to regain and reestablish the neural connections. Is it possible to build a machine that can do the same thing? It’s possible to use electronic components representing artificial neurons and vary the strength of the electrical connections between them until the machines learn a task or skill. This was tried in the 1960s but the results were somewhat disappointing.
You do not have to build a physical machine to do this. Neural networks can be simulated on a general-purpose digital computer, and taking advantage of its ability to process large amounts of data in a short period of time, it simulates far more intricate networks than was done in the 1960s. Recently such simulated neural networks have become popular and have drawn the attention of the business world. A team of programmers writes instructions that simulate neurons that can communicate with each other. Then, a series of numbers are stored in data structures inside a computer’s memory, representing the strength of the connections between the simulated neurons. The numbers, and the strength, of the neurons the program creates can be changed to vary the strength of the connections, enabling the program to learn. This is called machine learning (ML).
The way this works is that you run the program on a task, various sets of numbers representing the connections between the neurons the program is simulating are chosen randomly. No matter what set of numbers is used, the program performs very poorly at first, but some are a little less bad than others. The numbers doing the least bad job are chosen, (pseudo) random changes are made, and the program is rerun. This process, called training, is repeated through many learning cycles until the results sought are achieved.
To achieve this goal, large amounts of data are required. Where does this data come from? The program collects data on the Internet and uses it during its training. This training uses tremendous amounts of computer power and electrical energy. As long as we use the current carbon-based power system, the problem of global warming will worsen. Current ML technology simply would not be possible without the modern Internet.
What programs run the Internet? Today, the Internet depends on servers that run an operating system called GNU/Linux, or more often just Linux. GNU/Linux is the successor to an earlier operating system called Unix. Below, we discuss Unix and its relationship to GNU/Linux. (6)
In a simulated neural network, the computer instructions build the simulated neurons and the data it uses. Another component represents neither data nor instructions in the traditional sense. Rather, there is a set of numbers that represent the strength of the connections between the neurons that the program simulates. As with traditional instructions and data, the numbers that represent the strength of the connections are made up of a string of ones and zeros. Once the program has been fully trained on the task it is meant to perform, the strings of ones and zeros can be copied onto any computer connected to the Internet through a few mouse clicks.
There are potential problems with this approach. Unlike a traditional computer program, nobody knows how the neural net produced by the training works. There is an element of uncertainty as to how the system will react to an unanticipated input it may encounter. In such a scenario, the system can be further trained to deal with it so the chances of accidents become less likely but never go away entirely. More science fictionally, some say there’s a possibility that such a system could acquire a will of its own in addition to super-human intelligence and decide to turn against its human creators. While this danger is widely hyped in the media because of its sensational nature, so far these programs learn only what we choose to train it on. There is no general artificial intelligence or good evidence to believe these strings of zero and ones have any will of their own. They act as data collectors; they group the data, assuming they work correctly in a way that is assessable to humans.
Under capitalism, machine learning makes the automation of jobs possible like never before. However, as long as we retain capitalism, ML, like other technologies, threatens jobs and gives capitalists new weapons to exploit workers more effectively. In this sense, ML is simply the latest stage of the capitalists’ ability to pit workers against machines, which has unfolded since the 18th century.
But this is not the end of the story. A future communist economy will be characterized by the management of things, not people. Instead of the division of society into workers and non-workers, which has been the case since the rise of class society beginning around seven thousand years ago, we will have humans ruling over not other human beings but machines. One thing no ML program can do is produce an ounce of surplus value. Once we abolish capitalism, it will be possible to unleash machine learning to eliminate unpleasant labor in areas that have resisted this process up to now. The rise of machine learning makes the transition to a communist society more urgent as well as more possible than ever before.
One angry programmer
In the late 1970s at the artificial intelligence lab at MIT, there was a group of young programmers (all men) who called themselves “the hackers.” (7) They spent their days and nights writing artificial intelligence programs in the Lisp programming language widely used in those days in artificial intelligence programs. They freely shared the Lisp software code in which the programs were written. By the early 1980s, capitalists decided it was time to commercialize the code — to enrich themselves. With one exception, the hackers were not averse to the prospect of getting rich even if the days of free sharing source code would end.
A brilliant hacker named Richard Stallman refused to be bought by the capitalists. He was obsessed with hacking and code, not with money. More importantly, Stallman became obsessed with keeping computer code free in the sense that everybody who wanted to should be able to inspect and change the source code of a program if they so desired. As capitalists moved to commercialize Lisp, they declared the source code was their intellectual property, and a commercial secret. The government, which after all serves the capitalists, backed them up issuing software copyrights and patents. Stallman hated this. He spent many hours cloning Lisp programs so the capitalists who were trying to “lock up the source code to enrich themselves” would fail. For a while, he was successful, but of course, this didn’t last.
The attempt to commercialize Lisp, however, did fail. However, other proprietary programs that kept the source code secret succeeded. Perhaps the most well-known example of this type of software, which Stallman calls freedom-killing proprietary software, is Microsoft Windows. When you purchase a copy of Windows, or what is far more common, when you purchase a new computer with Windows installed, you may think you own your copy of the software. But you don’t. Rather, Microsoft Corporation, that is, the company’s stockholders, own Windows. If you want to own a share of Windows, you don’t go to a computer store or download a copy online. You call a stockbroker and purchase shares in Microsoft.
You must purchase a license to use Windows as an operating system. You are not allowed to inspect the source code, which contains the instructions for the computer hardware, or change the software. If you illegally obtained a copy of the source code for Windows and published it on the Internet, you would go to jail in care of the capitalist state.
Unix and the rise of the Internet
In the early 1980s, the Unix operating system was attracting the business world’s attention. The first version of Unix emerged from Bell Labs at the end of the 1960s. Then Bell Labs was part of the AT&T telephone monopoly. As a federally regulated monopoly facing no competition, AT&T gave scientists and engineers the freedom to pursue their personal interests with the hope that useful things would emerge from it. The Unix operating system was one of them, but AT&T was not allowed to commercialize it. As a result, during the 1970s, computer science students had access to the source code and worked on improving Unix.
The various versions of Unix that emerged from this process had powerful network facilities laying the foundation of the Internet as we know it today. At this point, capitalists became interested. If they could monopolize Unix, they could sell licenses granting user rights to use it, turning it into a golden gravy train. The same process that killed the 1980s Lisp-based software eventually killed Unix. Versions of Unix were sold to for-profit companies that commercialized it. Its source code was made a commercial secret. The federal government now enforced a ban on examining, changing, and/or improving the source code.
From Unix to GNU/Linux
Around this time, Richard Stallman realized he could not single-handedly keep cloning the LISP-based programs to foil attempts to commercialize it. While the attempt to commercialize the Lisp-based operating system by locking up its source code failed, this didn’t happen with all proprietary software. In 1983, Stallman decided to clone the Unix operating system to defeat the proprietary software model. Unlike other Unix-like operating systems, its source code would be available to anybody interested in obtaining it and modifying and improving it. He had no access to Unix’s source code and would not be permitted by the government to use it if he did. So he wrote the code from scratch to replicate and improve the functionality of the Unix operating system.
Though the operating systems of the early 1980s were simple compared to today’s, cloning and the Unix operating system were already beyond the power of any single programmer, even one as brilliant as Stallman. To succeed, he had to recruit like-minded programmers to tackle the task, which took about eight years to complete. The cloned operating system was GNU called (“GNU is Not Unix”). Though GNU is a clone of Unix, it is not legally a version and does not share any source code with any version of commercial Unix.
By 1991, Stallman and his volunteer programmers had completed their cloning, with one crucial exception, called the “kernel.” The kernel of an operating system is the instructions to the processor that connect the applications running on the operating system with the underlying hardware. The kernel allocates the memory — the hardware that holds the strings of zeroes and ones — available for the applications, called processes — running on the hardware as well as data the processes are processing. Stallman attempted to write a kernel based on the latest theoretical ideas of what an operating system kernel should be in the early 1990s. However, practice and theory are not always the same, and his kernel never worked properly, although computer scientists still love to play around with it.
Fortunately, Linus Torvalds, then a Finnish computer science student, spent August and September 1991 writing his own version of a Unix kernel based on established principles. He called his program Linux, which presumably means Linus’s Unix. Torvalds donated his kernel to the GNU project. Today, the current version of Linux, the kernel, has vastly expanded from the 1991 version and is one of the most widely used operating system kernels in the world. It dominates servers and essentially runs the Internet. This makes, among other things, today’s ML possible. It also runs the world’s super-computers, many smart phones, routers, and a growing though still a minority number of personal computers (these words are being written on a desktop computer running the Ubuntu version of GNU/Linux). Thanks to the GNU project, it has become one of the most important pieces of software ever written. Most of us interact daily with the Linux kernel directly or indirectly, whether we know it or not. If you use Google, you’re using GNU/Linux.
In the 1990s, UNIX ran the Internet. GNU/Linux, as a Unix look-alike, began to be used as a Unix clone that could be run on a home computer as an alternative to Microsoft’s MS-DOS, Windows, and the offerings from Apple Computer. These were all second-rate operating systems relative to Unix and over time GNU/Linux as it was perfected.. Today, Apple runs a version of commercial Unix, while office computers run Microsoft Windows, which has completely replaced MS-DOS. However, in other domains, GNU/Linux has replaced Unix and formed the foundation of the modern Internet.
Capitalism and GNU/Linux
In addition to being the author of many computer programs, Stallman also conceived the GNU Public License, GPL. The idea behind it is based on a principle called “copyleft,” a play on copyright. When a program is copylefted, the program user has the right to receive a copy of the source code and the full right to alter the source code and redistribute their modified version. They cannot do so and then declare it a commercial secret. Copylefted source code stands in contrast with what is called permissive licenses that allow users to take a program’s source code and modify it, then copyright and sell it without access to the source code or the right to modify it. GPL allows a person to sell the software at any price the buyer is willing to pay as long as they are willing to provide a copy of the source code and allow it to be modified by the buyer. In turn, the buyer has the same rights.
What price is a buyer willing to pay? With Internet access now almost universal, even complex programs can be downloaded and run on a computer because, ultimately, all they are is a string of ones and zeros. You do not have to pay anything beyond the wear and tear on your computer and the electricity you consume. The downloaded program is simply instructions to the computer hardware, source code programmers write to produce the program, plus additional strings of ones and zeros that instruct the computer to install it.
It is difficult to sell a copylefted program for any price above zero. Today’s copylefted programs, including those that form the GNU/Linux operating system, are free in a double sense. Free in the sense that you can run the program, use it any way you want (as long as it is legal), and modify or have it modified. It’s also free because you don’t have to pay a penny. If you distribute your modified version, you must give the buyer of the program the same rights.
Capitalist enterprises like the element of being able to modify the programs they purchase to run their businesses. Let’s say a company uses Microsoft Office for its office and commercial operations. Perhaps they would like to add a new function. For Office, the company cannot access the source code nor modify any programs. They can only go to Microsoft and suggest that it add the feature they desire. Perhaps Microsoft will add the feature. In this example, only one company wants this feature and Microsoft is in business to make a profit. It isn’t profitable to hire additional programmers to write the code for a new function for only one or maybe a few companies. Perhaps Microsoft will add the feature to a future version — or perhaps they never will.
If the company uses a free program such as LibreOffice, it can hire a few programmers to download the source code, write the needed function, and compile the modified version. The company then has a custom version that meets its particular needs. The company must pay for the skilled labor power of the programmers which consists of many simple labor powers, but the expense might be worth it since the extra revenue our company will gain as a result of the new feature will be more than the costs of hiring a few programmers, the wear and tear on their computers plus the electricity expenses.
Suppose the modified LibreOffice meets the needs of other companies. Since our company is obliged by competition to maximize its own profits, it can sell its modified version of LibreOffice to other companies which might find them useful. They get back the money spent on purchasing the skilled labor power of the programmers, plus some. They can do this as long as LibreOffice is sold under a permissive license, but not if it is a copylefted license. A permissive license allows them to copyright their modified version of the program, and keep its source code a commercial secret. For this reason, for-profit businesses tend to love free software but hate copyleft. Capitalists are pretty much united on getting rid of copyleft.
Split between the free and the open-source movement
In 1998, there was a split in the free software movement around Richard Stallman and the GNU project. Stallman, the GNU project, and his supporters refused to make any principle concessions on the copyleft principle to win business support. Other free software supporters were willing to work with big business and were not adverse to getting rich in the process. They were willing to give up on copyleft and use a mixture of proprietary and what they called open-source software, undermining Stallman’s dream of completely replacing proprietary software.
Most open-source software is also free software, often called FOSS, “free and open source software.” However, the philosophy behind the two movements is different. As we saw above, many businesses like the open source approach because it produces great and often profitable software. This approach is supported by many others, including the author of the Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds. Stallman despises the open-source software philosophy. To him, the point of free software is advancing the cause of human freedom first, not producing great software if it reduces what Stallman views as freedom. Naturally, this attitude makes no sense to the capitalists who rule the business world. Contrary to what is sometimes believed, much of what is called Free and Open Source Software is not written by rebel programmers like the young Stallman but by engineers employed and paid by large corporations for their skilled labor power.
Silicon Valley turns against bourgeois-imperialist democracy
As we saw, with capitalism’s classic bourgeois ideology, unlike under slavery and feudalism, you are free to do what you want regarding economic activity. Free to sell your labor or hold on to it, or to learn a trade and accumulate human capital. You can spend your wages on items of personal consumption or save a part of it, postpone consumption, and earn interest income. Or you can save up wages and start a merchant, industrial or financial business — or choose not to work at all to enjoy the pleasures of leisure instead.
The bourgeois narrative says that when free and democratic societies arose, most people chose to consume all their income. They didn’t get rich; instead, they sold their labor to capitalists, a valid choice in a free society. But a few people were thrifty. They postponed their immediate enjoyment and got rich. Inevitably, this led to inequality in the distribution of wealth. Capitalists and their ideologists explain that there is equality when it comes to opportunities but not in results, as any Republican leader never tires of explaining.
This is a pretty tale, but not true. It is necessary to separate the worker from the means of production to establish the capitalist mode of production. Under slavery, the worker owns nothing but is the private property of the master, like any other means of production. Under feudalism, the worker cannot leave the manor without permission, but in return, the worker is entitled to a strip of land that they can use as they see fit — after performing compulsory labor for the lord.
To transform the feudal system into capitalism, the landowner-lord required the freedom to kick the tenants and serfs off his land, which was “enclosed.” In this free society, landowners were free to not rent land to the former serfs. Now impoverished, the former serfs had to find somebody to buy their labor power — or starve. They might or might not succeed; their situation was desperate.
Entire continents were ravaged by capitalists eager to find gold and silver first, and then as markets expanded, other profitable commodities as well. With a large number of workers separated from the means of production not available, enslaved Africans were used instead. The majority of the native peoples of what bourgeois Europeans called the Americas perished. Marx described it ironically, as the “rosy dawn of capitalist production.” Today the separation of the remaining workers from the means of production continues.
As free, not perfect, competition leads inevitably to monopoly, it becomes increasingly difficult to talk about freedom in economic activity. Instead of freedom, people are subordinated to the centralized commands of the owners of giant, highly centralized corporations. To safeguard their investments around the world, these corporations need large armed forces, naval power, marines, ground armies, air forces, nuclear weapons, and in the future perhaps even space forces, to safeguard their sources of raw materials and markets from upstart competitors, not to speak of rebellious wage workers. The armed forces are subjected to a highly centralized command — hardly models of freedom.
A new layer of restrictions on freedom are connected to what Silicon Valley capitalists call “intellectual property” and others call “technological feudalism.” Whatever the term, you are forced to pay high prices for software, though if the software market were truly free, the price would be zero. Not only that, but the force of the state is deployed by the capitalist owners of this intellectual property to make sure you cannot study or copy the program source code. Whether you have commercial motives or just curiosity about how things work, it is illegal to modify or improve the software for your commercial or personal use. Attempt to do it anyway or even install the software on more computers than the license permits and you could find yourself up against the forcible repression exercised by the state power. This is similar to the feudal Middle Ages, when your serf ancestors could not leave the manor without permission, without risking state repression. To add insult to injury, modern computing and the Internet have made possible a system of spying and surveillance undreamed of by the despotism of early times.
This digital “feudalism” isn’t a separate mode of production from capitalism, and it belongs to a completely different epoch in the history of production than the real feudalism of the past. Instead, digital “feudalism” is a parasitic growth on the body of declining monopoly capitalism.
Recently the blogger, programmer, and entrepreneur Curtis Yarvin (1973 -) has emerged as a major ideological influence among Silicon Valley capitalists and within the Trump administration. He calls himself a neo-reactionary. Some would say just a plain reactionary. Openly racist, though his brand of racism is not Trump’s opportunist, seat-of-your-pants racism, but rather the “scientific” variety that considers human races unequal in physical and intellectual abilities.
Yarvin wants to get rid of decaying bourgeois democracy with its division of powers and the checks and balances between the executive, legislative, and judicial that is characteristic of the U.S. Constitution. He believes there should be an all-powerful chief executive, who rules as an autocrat or, as Yarvin sometimes puts it, a king.. There should be a board of directors that will choose the next chief executive when the post is empty. The board of directors would be chosen by only rich, white, and perhaps East Asian men. There would no longer be even the pretext of democracy. The chief executive would rule like a king — indeed, Yarvin considers himself a monarchist. Yarvin would be considered a reactionary even from the point of view of the late 18th-century U.S. founding fathers.
Yarvin could be dismissed as an intellectual nut case except he has influence among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and financiers. Trump’s current vice president, JD Vance, is an admirer. Before being elected a Republican Senator from Ohio, Vance was a Silicon Valley financier. Though Yarvin doesn’t believe Trump will be able to realize his vision, Trump is certainly trying. We see it in his moves to increase the power of the executive at the expense of the legislative and judicial branches. Yarvin’s current influence is one of many that shows that imperialist democracy is in decline and in the long run, or maybe much sooner, is on the way out. Next month we will examine Yarvin’s ideas and how they fit into the current phase of U.S. monopoly capitalism.
(1) On February 26, Trump posted on his True Social account a disgusting video about Gaza. The video begins with what appears to be an AI-generated video of a ruined Gaza inhabited by Palestinians. It passes to the glorious Palestinian-free Gaza that is to come. There appears a huge hotel-casino with the name Trump emblazoned on it. Some highly sexualized female figures are shown symbolizing the subjection of women. Elon Musk is pictured enjoying the warm Mediterranean as he eats a sandwich. The future Gaza is pictured as palm tree-lined streets and kilometer-tall skyscrapers inhabited by happy people, none of whom are Palestinians.
It ends with a picture of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu in bathing suits sipping drinks and enjoying the warm sunny weather. What this video illustrates is the complete moral decay of U.S. imperialism in the age of Trump, Musk, and Vance. Bourgeois society began with Puritan morality and passed through the genocide of many peoples represented in the video by the vanquished Palestinians of Gaza, ending in complete moral depravity of the exploiters symbolized by Trump and Netanyahu enjoying themselves on the bones of their countless victims. (back)
(2) In the West, people are taught that Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin were courageous reformers who brought freedom and democracy to the Russian and other formerly Soviet peoples.
Only rarely is it admitted in the Western media that Gorbachev and Yeltsin are today thoroughly hated by the vast majority of the Russian people. When it is admitted, the Russian people are blamed for not appreciating the freedom and democracy that Gorbachev and Yeltsin brought them.
As for Ukraine, the leading role played by Ukrainian Nazis who openly sported Nazi symbols in the Euromaidan coup are rarely admitted. I remember, in 2014, I saw a picture of a Euromaidan rally and there among other symbols was the stars and bars, the flag of U.S. slaveowners. No genuinely democratic movement would ever use Nazi and Confederate symbols. I have heard Ukrainian liberals explain that the Ukrainian Nazis were the best fighters in the “revolution”. We should never support a “revolution” anywhere in the world where the “best fighters” are admirers of Nazis and the U.S. slaveowners’ rebellion. (back)
(3) The Ukrainian nationalist insurgency against Soviet power lasted into the early 1950s. (back)
(4) As the socialist economy was dismantled starting with Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms and reaching its peak under Boris Yeltsin after 1990, enterprises that were not profitable, that is, could not make a profit in terms of the use value of gold, were ruthlessly liquidated. Profitable ones were sold for a song to emerging Russian and foreign capitalists. Soviet workers who under Soviet power had collectively owned the enterprises through their state were again brutally separated from their means of production as they were thrown out into the street. Though rarely mentioned in the West, this was one of the greatest social catastrophes in history, only dwarfed perhaps by the destruction of the Indigenous societies in the Americas after bourgeois Europeans discovered them.
Though Gorbachev was initially popular with promises of radical reforms and a higher standard of living, he became hated by the 1990s. After Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin was also initially popular because he promised even more radical reforms and an even higher standard of living. But these reforms were nothing less than the full-scale restoration of capitalism that destroyed many of the productive forces of what had been the Soviet Union while pushing ahead with the separation of the workers from the means of production as unemployment increased.
As the decade continued, this process of capitalist restoration approached completion. With economic conditions about to improve from a very low base, Yeltsin was pressured to resign in favor of his prime minister, Vladimir Putin. Unlike his two predecessors, Putin was able to improve economic conditions relative to the 1990s nightmare. He has gained popularity as he continues the transformation of Russia into a bourgeois nation state. To do that, he has defended capitalist Russia against the U.S.-NATO world imperialist empire that does not want competition from Russian capitalists. (back)
(5) In reality, enslaved people have to be paid something or they are dead and the slaveowner loses all their investment. It appears enslaved people work all the workday for the master. In reality, as with a feudal lord or a capitalist, enslaved people work part of the working day or themselves and part for the master, feudal lord, or capitalist. Only in the feudal system does this appear openly. (back)
(6) Free Software supporters call this operating system GNU/Linux. Richard Stallman started the project that cloned the UNIX operating system. Linus Torvalds wrote a Unix-like operating system kernel in 1991 as a summer programming project. It was pretty crude compared to the professional operating system UNIX kernels of the time and had no practical use. Torvalds donated his kernel to the GNU project. After it was integrated into the GNU system, it began to develop into the powerful operating system that largely runs the modern Internet as well as super-computers, many smartphones, routers, and a rising number of home computers.
Anybody who knows the actual history of GNU/Linux and that of computers knows it was Stallman’s GNU project that made today’s GNU/Linux systems possible. I prefer to call it GNU/Linux as in my opinion, just calling it Linux implies the project to create the free clone of UNIX was started by Torvalds, when in reality without Stallman’s GNU project, the Linux kernel would have remained a curiosity and not the powerful and critical piece of software that it is today. So, I will refer to the operating system as GNU/Linux. (back)
(7) The term “hacker” is usually used to refer to programmers who write computer programs to cause harm to other people, such as extracting money from them, for example. However, the hackers of the MIT artificial intelligence department, where Stallman spent his days and nights, were used to describe any person who wrote cleverly programmed pieces of software. (back)
A Critique of Crisis Theory 