As I write these lines on August 22, it seems the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed in June 2026 has broken down completely. In Lebanon, the termination of Israeli bombing and the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the south as the MOU required did not occur. The Trump administration declared a designated route through the blockaded Strait of Hormuz, and Iran fired upon ships taking that path. Trump responded with a new 13-day bombing campaign.
Reports are circulating that the U.S. is running out of the anti-missile weapons designed to neutralize Iran’s missiles, which were used with great effect against U.S. and Israeli targets during the initial fighting in March and early April 2026. The supply has been drained by the war in this region as well as by the proxy war being fought by the U.S.-NATO empire over Ukraine. When the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran, Iran retaliated. It seems the Trump administration believed Iran would give up after about six weeks.
Iran did not surrender. Instead, it met each blow with an effective counterattack, putting Trump in a bind. Panicked by the failure to capitulate, in June the administration signed the MOU, seeming to agree to many of Iran’s demands. Trump soon reneged on the agreement, launching a new bombing campaign, and shooting incidents continue in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz. Trump declared an all-out economic war or an economic D-Day. Faced with such threats, Iran hints that if the war isn’t ended soon along the lines of the MOU, it may take the initiative in hitting U.S.-Israeli targets, depriving Trump of the ability to turn the war on and off according to his wishes and needs.
Will there be a new outbreak of major fighting, or a new attempt at a ceasefire and a renewal of the agreement? Could something far more sinister happen, such as the U.S. or its Israeli puppet using nuclear weapons? If the latter happens, the 80-year taboo on the use of nukes in war will be broken. The truth is that nobody knows what happens next; if you are not concerned about the possibility of the use of nuclear weapons by the U.S.-Israel, you should be.
About the only thing that we can be sure won’t happen soon is a full-scale military invasion of Iran. We know this because it would take months for the U.S. to marshal the forces that would be necessary. As we saw last month, to carry out something like that would rival the U.S. invasion of Nazi Germany-occupied Western Europe in June 1944. This is not to say it couldn’t happen, but there are obstacles. Let’s look at some of them.
One is the time it would take to marshal the necessary forces — months, bringing us into 2027. But this is only one factor working against an immediate full-scale invasion of Iran. If it were the only factor, an invasion could come as early as 2027. The Trump administration has yet to take the measures such an action would require: mobilizing military reserves, imposing some kind of emergency war tax (which would negate the recent tax cuts Trump is so proud of) and, most importantly, resuming the military draft. Such a program could be announced, perhaps as soon as after the midterm elections on November 3, 2026. But there are many other issues that would have to be overcome.
The problems are centered on the economic decline of the empire, especially the industrial decline of both the U.S. and its European satellites. As we enter the second quarter of the 21st century, the center of industrial production has shifted to East Asia, primarily to the People’s Republic of China.
This world-shaking shift, whose long-term implications we’re just beginning to absorb, has led to a reduction of relative U.S. military power. Here is an historical analogy: At the dawn of the 20th century, Japan was industrializing rapidly. The world was astonished when Czarist Russia, up to that point viewed as far more powerful, was beaten by Japan. This war played no small role in triggering the 1905 Russian Revolution that proved to be the forerunner of the more powerful 1917 revolutions that were triggered by Russia’s military defeats during World War I.
Recently, the terrible conditions U.S. sailors are experiencing aboard ship have been much discussed. The online socialist publication Liberation reports: “For more than 250 days, 5,000 sailors and marines aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier have been sailing without a port call. This is officially the longest unbroken at-sea status of a ship in the U.S. Navy’s history. Yet sailors aboard are not celebrating this record, but rather are in a state of crisis. So far there is one Navy-confirmed overboard incident tied to a mental health episode, and several military papers have reported multiple attempts by sailors to jump overboard.” And the Lincoln is but one vessel experiencing such conditions.
As the Russian Revolution of 1905 unfolded, sailors on the battleship Potemkin rose up and took command of the ship. This incident was the subject of the famous Soviet film directed by Sergei Eisenstein in 1925. Could the Lincoln or some other U.S. warship become a U.S. version of the Potemkin? If the U.S. government continues on its current course, it will be a matter of when rather than if.
In addition to the war on Iran and other wars now raging around the world, the month of August brings news of a developing financial crisis affecting both the currency and government bond markets. In the past, such crises have often heralded banking crises and deep depressions in industry, employment and world trade. Will this be the case this time as well? And if so, how rapidly will it develop? Let’s examine the signs of the financial crisis that appeared in August.
U.S. Treasury bails out the Japanese yen
The once mighty yen has been falling against the dollar for some time now. At the end of July, the U.S. Treasury decided to intervene. What is behind the weakening of the yen? Central banks often intervene in foreign exchange markets. The U.S., however, often carries out interventions in exchange rates through the Treasury, the equivalent of the finance ministry in other countries, rather than through the Federal Reserve. The Treasury’s foreign currency fund is called the Exchange Stabilization Fund. The Federal Reserve maintains its own fund, called the System Open Market Account.
The Federal Reserve System acts for all practical purposes like an independent branch of the state; in Marxist terms, it links state power directly with the banks. The Treasury, by contrast, is part of the government proper. Unlike the Federal Reserve, the Treasury is controlled by the White House. While the ultimate decision makers at the Federal Reserve are the Board of Governors and the Federal Open Market Committee, at the Treasury the primary decision maker is the president. This means that Donald Trump, not Kevin Warsh and the other six members of the seven-person Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve or the Federal Open Market Committee, controls the Treasury Department and, through it, the Exchange Stabilization Fund. (1)
The yen has been under exceptional pressure as a result of the war on Iran, which has raised the price of oil. Japan produces no oil of its own, and its balance of payments is vulnerable to any disruption of the world oil market or rise in the oil price. In 1941, the Roosevelt administration cut off sales of U.S. oil to Japan. This put Tokyo in a desperate situation because its economy could not function without the imports. Without a functioning economy, Japan could hardly support its imperialist colonial war of conquest against China. It decided to seize the oil-rich Dutch East Indies (today Indonesia) and, to secure a source of oil not under U.S. control, launched an attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
Tokyo was hoping against hope that Nazi Germany would win the war against Britain and the U.S. as well as the Soviet Union. Even before Pearl Harbor, the U.S. was fighting an undeclared naval war with Germany in the Atlantic. A German victory, Japan hoped, would let it force the U.S. to accept Japanese colonization of China. This clashed with the U.S.’s own plans to colonize China.
Things did not turn out that way, and in 1945 Japan ended up under U.S. occupation instead. Reduced to the status of a satellite imperialist country, Japan to this day has not recovered its full sovereignty. No longer concerned about having to deal with an independent imperialist Japan following its own interests, the U.S. was willing to allow Japan to resume its rapid capitalist development in order to stabilize capitalist rule there. The U.S. was not eager to deal with a potentially socialist Japan.
There was a price to be paid by U.S. imperialism for encouraging rapid capitalist growth in postwar occupied Japan. From the 1960s onward, both Japan and a similarly resurgent West Germany began to offer serious economic competition to the U.S., especially in industries such as steel and auto, the dominant industries of the 20th century.
These industries are important economically and militarily. For example, in the event of war, the automobile industry can quickly shift production from automobiles to tanks and other armored vehicles. This situation made the U.S. nervous because it was not comfortable being too dependent on factories located overseas that could be shifted to military production. In addition, there was the direct influence on the U.S. government of U.S. steel and automobile capitalists, who did not want their considerable investment in the fixed capital of steel mills and automobile factories wiped out by Japanese competition.
During these years, it was often said that both Germany and Japan were economic giants but political midgets. In reality, as their governments were under U.S. control, they played no independent political role and therefore had little political power.
By the late 1980s, the Japanese automobile industry seemed on the verge of wiping out its U.S. “Big Three” competitors. At this point, the U.S. laid down the law to Tokyo. Washington demanded that Japanese capitalists sign a cartel agreement preventing Japanese automakers from conquering ever larger shares of the U.S. home market. At most, they would be allowed to build factories within the U.S. The Japanese government, lacking real sovereignty, had to buckle under to Washington’s demand. The Japanese economic boom came to an end, and since then the Japanese industrial economy has at best stagnated and at times declined.
Here we see that if a given capitalist nation-state lacks real sovereignty, then as soon as its economic development comes into conflict with the interests of the most militarily powerful capitalist state, the latter will act to limit the challenger’s access to the market. This includes the export and import of the commodities needed to carry out industrial and agricultural production.
At the end of the 1960s, it was said in capitalist circles, referring to their accelerated economic development after 1945, that Japan and Germany seemed to be the real victors of World War II. What happened after that? Japan was forced to halt further growth in its share of the U.S. home market. If Japan had any real political or military sovereignty, it would not have agreed to these limits but would have continued its struggle to expand its share of all the world’s markets.
Today we see that it is economically rational for Germany to buy natural gas from Russia. Since the Russo-Ukrainian war began, the U.S. has demanded that Germany stop dealing with Russia and instead buy more expensive liquefied natural gas shipped from the U.S. This puts German industry at a big competitive disadvantage. If Germany had a truly sovereign government, it would not have agreed. This should be kept in mind when we seek the root cause of the war on Iran.
After 1989, the Japanese capitalist economy was no longer expanding as it had been before and after World War II. Japan was still a major manufacturing country and exporter of low-cost commodities. During its period of industrial development, Japan rapidly accumulated great quantities of real capital in the form of factories, machines, and raw and auxiliary materials (constant capital), as well as labor power (variable capital). Even after this period ended, Japan had a strongly positive balance of payments. The combined result of a stagnant but still powerful industrial economy and a strongly positive balance of payments has been an extraordinary accumulation of money capital within the Japanese banking system.
When a capitalist nation-state like Japan accumulates a huge quantity of money capital relative to its accumulation of real capital, it has a low interest rate relative to those prevailing in other countries. Domestically, this means the industrial and commercial capitalists get a larger share of the realized surplus value (profit), while the money capitalists end up with a smaller share. The money capitalists do not like this and react by lending money abroad, where interest rates are higher. A portion of the cache of money capital accumulated by Japan has been lent to the U.S. government. From the viewpoint of the U.S., Japan has become a cash cow and has played a key role in financing U.S. wars.
When the U.S. bailed out Japan by purchasing yen in August 2026, in effect lending it money, this was extraordinary. The large concentration of Japanese loan money capital is running out, so now the Treasury, instead of tapping Japan, has to bail it out. This indicates a decline of Japanese capitalism, and it also implies a growing shortage of loan money throughout the world money market.
The dollar system
Rebecca Patterson at the Council on Foreign Relations wrote on August 5: “For decades, U.S. economic and financial-market dominance has given the dollar outsized global influence. According to data from the Bank for International Settlements, the dollar was represented in more than 89 percent of all currency trades in 2025 — no other currency comes close.” This describes the dollar system, with the yen playing the role of an important satellite currency while the dollar plays the role of the central currency. To make an analogy with the solar system, gold (the money commodity) is the sun, Jupiter (the sun’s largest planet) is the dollar, and Jupiter’s moons, including the yen, represent non-dollar currencies.
Within the international system, the most important exchange rate is between the dollar and gold, popularly known as the price of gold. If this exchange rate were to crash, the entire dollar-centered international monetary system would end, and we would live in a different world. This has not yet happened. Whenever the exchange rate between the dollar and a major satellite currency is disrupted, as happened with the exchange rate between the dollar and the Japanese yen in August 2026, the international monetary system is shaken. Or as Patterson put it: “The latest financial-market volatility and intervention in the yen suggest that U.S. policymakers, this time the Treasury rather than the Fed, are increasingly concerned about contagion back to the United States.”
Patterson explains: “Rising U.S. interest rates have made the dollar more attractive, in part driven by expectations that a resilient economy [read U.S. overproduction — SW] and inflation stubbornly above the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target could lead to monetary policy tightening later this year.”
Or as I would put it: The break in the yen-dollar exchange rate reflects upward pressure on interest rates around the world, including within the U.S. This upward pressure on global interest rates ultimately reflects the continuing overproduction of commodities relative to the money commodity (gold) on a global basis. The ongoing boom in the construction of data centers for AI is an example of this overproduction.
On top of this, the U.S.-Israel-Iran war is also pushing interest rates up. So is the latest Republican tax cut, the “big beautiful bill,” which, by reducing federal revenues, forces the Treasury to borrow even more money. The Supreme Court decision forcing the return of some of the tariffs that the Trump administration illegally collected from importers is working in the same direction.
This rise in Treasury borrowing comes at the worst possible time, a period of tightening money markets caused by the natural evolution of the industrial cycle, which is driven by overproduction. If this war, started on February 28, 2026, by the U.S. attack on Iran, had broken out during the period following a recession, it would have been much less dangerous for the global capitalist financial system. Idle money capital would have accumulated in the commercial banks, and there would have been plenty of money available to finance the war. The Treasury is like a person who has come dangerously close to maxing out a credit card and then decides to go on a spending spree, though this particular spree involves war, with all its deadly consequences.
The bond market crisis
On August 18, the bond market plunged. On August 20, Patterson writes: “The U.S. 30-year Treasury bond yield scored a fresh 19-year high Tuesday. Elsewhere, Japan’s 10-year bond yield reached its highest level in three decades. Germany’s 30-year bond yield hit its highest since 2011, and the French 30-year government bond yield reached its highest point since 2008.” U.S. government bond yields have not been so high since 2007, just before the panic of 2008.
When yields rise on government bonds, interest rates on mortgage rates and auto loans rise as well since the rate on long-term consumer loans designed to finance the purchases of houses and cars is tied to the interest rates on government loans.
On August 19, the Treasury announced it would purchase its own bonds to pump some money back into the money market. Presumably the Treasury will finance these purchases by issuing more short-term Treasury bills. It might even draw down its savings accounts in private for-profit banks and its checking account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. This cannot go on forever.
As bonds rallied on August 19, the dollar price of gold rose sharply. That is, the dollar fell against gold. In the past, these kinds of frantic financial maneuvers have preceded high inflation, financial crashes and severe recessions. There is no reason to think that things will be any different this time.
Why is U.S. capitalism so reactionary?
Donald Trump is not so much a reactionary as a caricature of one. For Trump, even a mild social reform like Medicare for All is “communism.” According to him, to oppose the Gaza genocide is Islamic and communist, the two being for him almost the same thing. Trump is a racist, a misogynist, an Islamophobe and an extreme U.S. chauvinist. He pushes the most reactionary currents within religion, like fundamentalist Christianity and Zionist Judaism, though he does not seem to take religion seriously himself. Most liberals and progressives consider Trump the worst president ever. All other modern presidents have been reactionary as well, and so were the last few presidents just before the war of the slaveholders’ rebellion of 1861-1865, known as the Civil War. Trump is not without competition for the role of the worst president ever.
Actually, whether a certain figure in history, like a president, is good, bad, or the worst cannot be answered independently of class. Take, for example, the Democratic president Harry Truman, who served from April 1945 to January 1953. Today, among most pro-capitalist historians, Truman is considered to have been a good, even a near-great, president. He was not popular when he was actually in office, largely due to the Korean War. He gets high marks from pro-capitalist historians today because of his role in defeating Henry Wallace, who ran against him in 1948 as an opponent of the Cold War Truman had launched against the Soviet Union.
During the Korean War, millions of Koreans died, and tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers lost their lives. And it was Truman who was responsible for the decision to drop two atomic bombs on an already defeated Japan in August 1945 to intimidate the Soviet Union.
From the viewpoint of the imperialist U.S. ruling class, the argument that Harry Truman was a good, maybe even great, president is strong. His moves to stabilize a thoroughly discredited European capitalism through the Marshall Plan, organize NATO and put down the Greek Revolution of 1946–49 served the interests of the ruling class. Whatever blunders he made as president, his impressive list of achievements as a servant of capitalism-imperialism greatly outweighs them from the viewpoint of that class.
Likewise, the achievements of the Southern statesmen who prolonged and for a while strengthened the rule of their class, the slaveholders who ruled the South, made them, from the viewpoint of the interests of the class they served, good and even great leaders. From the viewpoint of the enslaved Africans and all opponents of slavery, the “achievements” of Southern leaders are awful.
Today, since it is hard to find people who would openly defend Southern slavery, few have the nerve to defend Southern politicians on the grounds that they extended the lifetime of slavery, though from the viewpoint of the class these leaders served, that is how they should be judged. To return to Truman, he was a good president from the ruling-class viewpoint; this cannot be denied. But from the viewpoint of the working class and its allies, as well as of oppressed nationalities (one example is the people of Palestine), Truman was an awful, even criminal president who will be reviled as long as the 20th century is remembered.
You cannot judge the Harry Truman presidency independently of class.
The same is true not only for a figure like Truman but also for Lenin. From the viewpoint of the working class and all those oppressed by capital, Lenin is of course one of the greatest people in the entire history of the world. From the viewpoint of the Russian landowners and capitalists, Lenin is the worst. Nor is Lenin fondly remembered by the U.S. capitalist class and its intellectual representatives. And from the viewpoint of the class interests they serve, they are quite correct.
So what about Donald Trump? There is no question, from the viewpoint of the interests of the working class of all nations, including the United States, as well as of oppressed nations such as Iran, the Palestinians and most others, that Trump has turned out to be a terrible leader. But what about from the viewpoint of the class interests of the U.S. capitalist class? Is he a good or a bad president? If you believe Trump, he is the greatest president ever.
The capitalist class is currently divided on this question. Some believe that Trump has been a good president for their class interests and in their commercial struggle against their fellow capitalist exploiters in other nations. Not all members of the capitalist class agree. A look at the capitalist press indicates that many think he has been very bad. They fear that his aggressive domestic policy and his policy against capitalist competitors in other countries are destabilizing capitalist rule in the United States and threaten to unravel the NATO alliance that serves the capitalists of the U.S. and Europe so well.
We cannot answer this question for certain now. If, for example, the U.S. succeeds in toppling the Cuban revolution, crushes Venezuela and the Gazans, manages to win the current war against Iran and halts the progress of China, then despite his clownish and generally disgusting personality and his personal corruption, he will go down, from the viewpoint of capitalist historians, as a good, maybe even great, president.
A good example is the current consensus among historians, even liberal ones, that Ronald Reagan was an exceptionally good president. When he was running against Jimmy Carter in 1980, the former B-movie actor and host of General Electric Theater on CBS television, a one-time Hollywood progressive turned reactionary, was viewed as a dangerous reactionary who would only make things worse for the ruling class if he actually became president. When the Republican Reagan was elected in November 1980, these liberal historians were horrified.
When the labor union leadership failed to put up any serious resistance to Reagan’s drive to strangle the unions, and the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev gave in to every Reagan demand that led to the Soviet Union’s collapse shortly after he left office, the pro-capitalist pro-imperialist intellectuals were awed. So they revised their view of Reagan, whom they now consider to be one of the greats, ranked right behind Franklin Roosevelt, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.
Ultimately, Trump, like Truman and Reagan and all other presidents before them, is only a temporary figure. But the economic laws that govern the capitalist system survived Truman and Reagan and will survive Trump, just as they survived Washington, Lincoln and all other presidents. This will remain true as long as capitalism lasts. As long as capitalism played an overall progressive role in history, men like Washington and Lincoln, who in their time also advanced the interests of capitalism, were great men. In the not-too-distant past, not only in the U.S. but throughout much of the world, Washington and Lincoln were considered among the greatest figures in human history. Today we take a more critical view of these historical figures.
George Washington, a former British colonial officer, was one of the richest men in the colonies. In that sense, Washington was the Elon Musk of his time. You do not become a rich man in the colonies without appropriating vast quantities of surplus value (by the standards of the late 18th century), whether it is produced by African slave labor, wage labor, or exploited small farmers and other small producers.
Washington was an owner and exploiter of African slaves and, according to historical accounts, was a cruel slave master who sometimes beat his slaves to make sure he squeezed as much surplus value as he could out of them. As the largest landowner, with much of his land in the Ohio Valley on territory taken from the Native peoples, including what is now Ohio and West Virginia, Washington had a personal interest not only in upholding slavery but also in the most rapid possible development of capitalism. If capitalism developed, these lands would increase in price and grow Washington’s personal fortune. If incipient capitalism developed more slowly, Washington’s fortune would also increase more slowly.
Since Washington had a foot in both the Southern slave system and Northern capitalism through his ownership of land, he was ideally placed to become the first president acceptable to both the Southern slaveholders and the Northern capitalists, though as president he actually leaned toward the interests of the Northern capitalists. The old general had an eye on the capitalist future.
Abraham Lincoln didn’t own any slaves. But he held racist views. Right after the end of the war of the slaveholders’ rebellion, just before his own assassination by a die-hard supporter of the slaveholder rebellion, Lincoln was eager to restore the right to vote for Southern whites but reluctant to extend the right to vote to freed slaves. As a young man, he also served in the militia during the genocidal “Indian” wars. (2)
How do we as Marxists view figures from the past such as Washington and Lincoln? Were Washington and Lincoln great men who pioneered freedom (the view that predominated not only among liberals and conservatives but on the left a generation or so ago), or were they the forgers of the horribly oppressive, exploitative and reactionary social, economic and political system that the U.S. represents today?
Some people see no progressive development in human history. It is claimed that we cannot differentiate between progressive and reactionary trends in world history. Today, with the wars in the Donbass and Iran raging and threatening to merge into World War III, and with global warming becoming more and more obvious, modern society is on the edge of disaster, and this view is strengthened. In past centuries, though, the world was overall much poorer than it is today. But at least human society was not on the edge of complete destruction, as is the case today.
Marxism, or more precisely its theory of history, historical materialism, does not take this view. What differentiates human society from the rest of the animal kingdom is that while animals collect food, humans produce their means of subsistence. Anything that advances the development of the productivity of labor gives human history its progressive direction. Let this sink in. The growth in the productivity of labor, not greater social justice, greater human freedom or democracy, but the growth in the productivity of labor.
A good example is the history of slave labor. The rise of slavery made it possible to achieve a higher productivity of labor than had ever been possible before. But slavery meant the most horrible oppression of some human beings, the slaves, by other human beings, an oppression that would have been inconceivable in the old clan-tribal society that had preceded slavery. At the same time, the era of slave labor in Greece and, a little later, in Rome saw an unprecedented flowering of culture in philosophy, literature and mathematics that laid the foundation of science. These achievements, which still impress and charm us even today, would have been unthinkable without widespread Greek and Roman slave labor.
Between 73 and 71 B.C.E., a rebellion of slaves broke out led by Spartacus, an enslaved Thracian (Thrace corresponds roughly to modern Bulgaria). It mushroomed into the greatest slave rebellion that the ancient world of Europe, North Africa and West Asia ever saw. Karl Marx, writing to Engels in 1861 after reading Appian, called Spartacus the most splendid figure in all of ancient history, a great general of noble character and a true representative of the ancient proletariat. He most certainly did not say that, since slavery was necessary to sustain the productive forces of the ancient world, a rebellion against slavery at that time should be condemned.
To turn to a later period, the brutal conquest of what the Europeans called the “new world”: neither Marx nor any Marxist worthy of the name ever hailed the crimes of the European conquest, which eventually exterminated about 90% of the native population of the Americas. As important as the ‘discovery’ of the Americas, as the Europeans called it, was in enabling dynamic capitalism to replace feudal stagnation in Europe, the price of ending that stagnation was the genocide of the Native peoples and African slavery.
Marx himself counted the conquest and plunder of the Americas among the chief moments of so-called original accumulation (Capital, Vol. I, Chapter 31). Marx sympathized with the victims, not the European conquerors.
Throughout the history of oppressive class society, there have been periodic rebellions against class oppression, national oppression, the oppression of women as a sex and many other oppressions. These struggles were objectively premature and doomed in their own time to defeat, but they form a chain and a tradition that will help make possible the overthrow of class rule and exploitation once the development of the productive forces makes it both possible and necessary.
What Marxism does is to show that struggles against the oppression of class rule, no matter how “historically premature” and doomed by the objective historical conditions of the epoch in which they occur, are never in vain.
What Marx showed was that the development of the forces of production will eventually create the conditions to overthrow class oppression once and for all, and furthermore that these conditions can only be created by the capitalist mode of production. As Marx put it in his 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, no social order perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed, and new, higher relations of production never appear before their material conditions have matured within the old society. This is the great historical justification of capitalism.
The history of successive modes of production is the history of the growth of the productivity of labor. In this sense, each of the successive modes of production is progressive in its own time. But at a certain point it comes into conflict with the need to increase the productivity of human labor still further. Or, in other words, it comes into conflict with the productive forces that it has developed. Eventually this can lead to a higher mode of production. Higher not in the sense that the new mode of production is more just, but in the sense that it can achieve a higher productivity of labor than its predecessor.
But this does not happen automatically. Each stage in the history of production beyond the clan-tribal level leads to the rise of social classes. Social classes are large groups of people with specific relations to the existing forces of production. Inevitably, this leads to a struggle between these large groups of people, summed up by the phrase “class struggle.” The most powerful class associated with a particular mode of production is called the ruling class because it not only dominates production but also controls the state. This is the class that not only rules politically and economically but also dominates the ideological superstructure.
At a certain point of development, the conditions for the domination of the ruling class are no longer compatible with the new productive forces that are coming into being. At this point, either a social and political revolution occurs that establishes the domination of a new mode of production, or the class struggle ends with the common ruin of the contending classes. In the latter case, human society is thrown backward for a prolonged period.
Let’s make this more concrete.
Around the time in the Christian religion assigned to Christ, the Mediterranean-based system of ancient slavery reached its peak. The ancient mode of production based on slavery was represented by Greek civilization, with its amazing achievements in literature, mathematics and art, and its laying of the foundations of science in the Western world. Rome extended some of these achievements further while uniting the entire Mediterranean in its empire. It did so by developing and extending the system of ancient slavery even further than the Greeks had. But beginning around the time of Christ, the achievements of Roman civilization began to taper off as Rome was repeatedly torn by civil wars.
The revolt led by Spartacus, just before the time of Christ, showed that the enslaved producing class of Rome, though capable of fighting back and carrying out a great armed rebellion, was ultimately incapable of overthrowing the slaveholding ruling class and creating a new, higher mode of production. (3) As a result, Roman society could not be transformed along revolutionary lines. The western Roman Empire, having proved incapable of revolutionary transformation, instead collapsed into a prolonged dark age starting in the fifth century of the common era.
How will capitalist society end? If in the coming years or decades the working class replaces the capitalist class as the ruling class and begins the building of a socialist society, the first step toward a communist society, then capitalism will end with a transformation to a higher mode of production that will achieve a far higher productivity of labor than is possible under capitalism. If, on the other hand, there is a world war that destroys modern society, or an ecological collapse that brings it down, or some combination of both, then future historians, if any, will say that the capitalist society of today ended with the common ruin of the two chief contending classes, the capitalist class on one side and the class of wage workers on the other.
Going back to the earlier history of capitalism, all capitalist societies have been cruel and exploitative economic systems. The historical justification of capitalism has never been that it is or ever was a humane system, but that it initiated an unprecedented development of the productive forces and of the productivity of human labor compared with the economic systems that preceded it.
Capitalism has a built-in limit on how far it can develop labor productivity. The reason is that at its core capitalism is about squeezing ever greater quantities of surplus value out of an ever larger class of wage workers. This puts a definite limit on how high labor productivity can rise under the capitalist system, because at a certain point the growth in the productivity of labor implies a decline in the total number of hours worked.
At this point, the mass of surplus value, measured in units of unpaid labor time, can only be increased by raising the rate of surplus value, the portion of the total hours worked that goes unpaid. But this process runs into a mathematical limit: the amount of paid labor cannot fall to zero. As we approach this limit, and here AI, artificial intelligence, is opening up some interesting possibilities, capitalism becomes more and more an obstacle to any further development of the productivity of human labor.
Communist, or socialist, production has no such limit, since here the aim is not to maximize profits for the capitalists, which means maximizing unpaid labor in the form of surplus value, but to reduce the number of hours that have to be worked and increase the free time available to the actual producers to the maximum extent possible.
Capitalism is based on the nation-state. It is no accident that the modern nation-state emerged in the aftermath of the geographical discoveries of the 16th century. This is especially true of the United States, which did not even exist in an incipient form until well after the 16th century. Each nation-state, like each individual capitalist, strives to dominate as much of the world market as possible. This means that the strongest and largest nation-states are forced by the economic laws that govern capitalism to strive for global domination. This is not a matter of the personal characteristics of this or that capitalist politician or capitalist party, or of the personality of individual rulers, but arises out of the capitalist mode of production itself.
The rise and decline of capitalist countries
Since capitalism develops on the basis of particular economic laws, the great stimulation that capitalism gives to the development of labor productivity peaks at different times in different capitalist nations. From the late 18th century, when the Industrial Revolution began in Britain, through the middle of the 19th century, it was British capitalism that gave the strongest stimulation to the development of the productive forces and labor productivity.
By the late 19th century, the most rapid development had shifted from Britain to Germany and, above all, the United States. The first half of the 20th century saw financial, military and political power shift from Britain to the United States. Broadly speaking, successful capitalist countries go through a cycle of development followed by decay and decline. Let us take a hypothetical capitalist country of our own and follow it through that cycle. The early phase is when our capitalist country undergoes rapid industrialization, financed largely through importing large quantities of foreign money capital. During this phase, the industry of our capitalist country has to rapidly increase its share of the world market. This begins with the conquest of the home market, where protective tariffs and other restraints on imports play an important role. But it cannot stop with the conquest of the home market.
Our country must increasingly penetrate foreign markets. As Frederick Engels put it in Anti-Dühring, the section of which was also published as “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,” the greatest resistance that capitalist production meets is the limited availability of markets. For reasons we have been exploring throughout this blog, while markets expand with the development of capitalism, they expand at a far slower rate than industrial capitalists can increase industrial production. This creates an expand-or-die situation not only for each individual industrial capitalist but also for each capitalist country. At the beginning of the period of rapid industrialization, and this is especially true of every country that industrialized after Britain, our country’s capitalist industry commands only a small part of the total world market. Remember that the world market includes the home market.
This means that while some industrial capitalists can grow at a rate considerably faster than the market, they can only do so by taking market share from their competitors. The same principle applies to capitalist countries. This is the basic reason why relations between capitalist countries are and must remain deeply antagonistic. While it is not a pure zero-sum game, since the world market as a whole does indeed grow, the rise of some capitalist countries still implies the decline of others. This uneven development is not accidental but is governed by definite economic laws.
An emerging capitalist country that commands only a small percentage of the global capitalist market can maintain a higher than average rate of growth precisely because its starting share is so small. For example, let’s assume that our capitalist country commands 1% of the total world market. If it doubles that share in a given amount of time, it will still command only 2%. But suppose the trend continues. In the same amount of time, we go from 2% to 4%, then from 4% to 8%. From 8% we go to 16%, then to 32%. After that we go to 64%, and after that to 128%. But wait, this is mathematically impossible. By definition, you cannot command more than 100%. Something has to give. The more a given country increases its share of the world market, the stronger the resistance it will run into. In the end, every successful capitalist country will experience a fall in its rate of growth once its command of the world market reaches a certain point.
As the rate of growth of its share of industrial production slows down, the capitalists of our country will tend to transform themselves from industrial capitalists into money capitalists. This transformation is what marks our capitalist country’s entry into its imperialist phase. Thus the countries that are exceptionally successful as capitalist countries will inevitably experience not only a slowdown of industrial development but eventually “de-industrialization.” De-industrialization implies an eventual relative and even absolute decline in industrial power, which at first means an increase in financial power. But eventually even that financial power will wane. Declining relative financial power at some point means a decline in military and political power.
The United States
With this in mind, let’s look at the history of one particular highly successful capitalist country, the United States of America. At the time of the “discovery” of the Americas by bourgeois Europeans, there was no United States of America in any form. What was to become the United States began with the colonization by English settlers of portions of what the Europeans called the North American continent. These colonizers considered themselves English people loyal to the British Crown, spreading the power of the British Empire. There was not a single English colony but a group of English colonies. In 1776, thirteen of them decided that they were a separate nation and rebelled against the mother country. They were no longer English subjects loyal to the British Crown but Americans loyal to the new American republic. Britain at first refused to recognize the independence of the rebel colonies and attempted to put down the rebellion by force.
But the 13 colonies themselves had different social and economic structures. Were they 13 new nations or only one new nation? Back when they were still English colonies, the white settlers came into fatal conflict with the people who were already living in the territories that the Europeans called North America. These people were dubbed “Indians” by the colonizers, though they had no ties to the people of the Indian subcontinent who are the actual Indians. The society and mode of production of the white settlers of both the North and the South were incompatible with the societies of the Native Peoples. The result was a centuries-long genocidal war, begun when the settlers still considered themselves English and continued once they began to consider themselves Americans. Many of the Native Peoples were killed, first by the English settlers and then by those same settlers as Americans, while others were driven onto reservations. Even today, the Native Peoples are among the most oppressed people in the United States. No freedom or justice here.
The English settlers, even before they turned into Americans, had a growing problem. Back in the days of English colonization in North America, labor was in short supply. The settlers turned to African slaves as a source of labor, and the system of modern slavery began to take shape. It is here that the development of the thirteen colonies diverged. In what became the southern United States, particularly in territories where climatic conditions favored the growing of tobacco and rice, and later above all cotton, African slavery put down deep roots and became central to the mode of production that was taking shape. This was because the English textile industry, the first highly mechanized industry using steam power as its motive force, developed a tremendous need for cotton as a raw material. And the territories that were to become the southern U.S. had favorable conditions for growing cotton with slave rather than wage labor.
In the North, though African slavery existed, it was not central to production. Northern slaves were largely used as personal servants. Over time, enslaved personal servants were replaced by “free servants” working for wages. Eventually this led to the rise of two different and incompatible types of society. In the North, while the availability of cheap land hindered the process at first, widespread simple commodity production gave way to free wage labor. As industrial capitalists began to appear, even if at first on a modest scale, other Americans were forced by economic conditions to sell their labor power to them. Capitalist production based on free wage labor was emerging as the dominant mode of production in the North, replacing simple commodity production as it expanded from east to west across the North American continent.
Britain, still in the early stages of its own industrial revolution, was alarmed at the prospect of an independent development of industrial capitalism in the northern colonies, which could grow only by taking market share away from the English capitalists. London therefore acted to hold that development back, and this angered the wealthy merchants of the North, who wanted to go beyond being mere merchant capitalists and become full-scale industrial capitalists in their own right. That became the driving factor behind the war of independence that raged between 1775 and 1783, out of which the United States of America emerged.
The South was dominated not by emerging industrial capitalists using wage labor but by a commercial planter class using enslaved Africans. These Africans did not sell their labor power to capitalists; they were themselves bought and sold. They grew tobacco, rice and indigo for the British market and, after the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, above all cotton, the chief raw material of the British textile industry, the leading industry of Britain in that period and the most technically sophisticated in the world. In exchange, the slaveholders were more than happy to purchase manufactured goods from Britain.
As the appetites of the large planters outran the revenue they received from their crops, they increasingly found themselves owing large sums to British capitalists. While the North’s incipient industrial capitalists used money borrowed from British capitalists to expand their enterprises, the planters spent their borrowed money on high living. The big advantage of independence for the planters was that it offered them a graceful way out of their British debts. But the escape was not what it seemed. Having slipped the grip of their British creditors, the planters found themselves increasingly dependent on the merchant and banking capitalists of the North, who financed their crops, marketed their cotton and held their paper.
After the victory of the colonists over the British in the War of Independence, the North, led by its merchant capitalists turning themselves into industrial capitalists, pushed for protective tariffs to shield young U.S. industrial capitalism from British competition, while the South, led by the slaveholding planters, opposed these tariffs because they raised the price of the means of personal consumption the planters craved. Unlike the North, whose industrial capitalist economy represented competition for British capitalism, the southern economy was highly complementary to the British economy, because in providing cheap cotton produced by slave labor the South was extremely profitable to the British industrial capitalists. The British capitalists used slave-produced raw material to fuel the growth of British industrial capitalism.
In the years between the victory of the war for independence and the war of the slaveholders’ rebellion, the U.S. Civil War, the North generally supported protective tariffs and what were called internal improvements. Internal improvements were public works, including canals and later railroads, that greatly stimulated the development of industrial capitalism in the North by accelerating the turnover of capital. The pro-industrial capitalist northern politicians also favored a central banking system, in the form of the First and Second Banks of the United States, which provided a national banknote currency.
In contrast, the politicians representing the southern planters who used slave labor opposed tariffs in the name of safeguarding states’ rights, that is, African slavery. They also opposed internal improvements and the development of a central banking system, since they distrusted the central government. They feared, rightly, that the central government would sooner or later fall into the hands of the industrial capitalists. In this way the southern slaveholders of that earlier era, producing raw materials for the dominant British industrial capitalists and financed by British merchant and banking capital, served as allies of British capitalism, much as comprador capitalists serve as agents of the imperialist countries today.
These class differences were reflected in the contrasting programs of the two most important members of George Washington’s cabinet. Alexander Hamilton favored a strong central government, a central banking system in the form of the First Bank of the United States, whose notes would circulate nationally alongside those of the state banks, protective tariffs and internal improvements.
Thomas Jefferson believed in a much more limited central government. He held that the United States should remain an agricultural country, supplying industrial Europe with the agricultural products it needed to maintain its industrial society. This had the advantage, as Jefferson pointed out, of keeping as small as possible that troublesome class of industrial workers who sold their labor power to the industrial capitalists and who were already causing problems for the men of property in Britain. In contrast to Hamilton, his slogan was that the government that governs least governs best.
When the crisis broke out with the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, the British ruling class did everything it could to support and encourage the slaveholding rebels. During the first phase of the war, the stand of the Lincoln government was that, however much it disliked African slavery, private property in human beings was a form of private property recognized by the Constitution and had to be respected where it already existed. What Lincoln and his supporters strongly opposed was any further extension of slavery. And here Lincoln made no concessions.
Lincoln and his supporters pointed out that the Constitution made no provision for any state to leave the federation. No state had any right to leave the Union. Lincoln said that in using force to override the southern states’ illegal declarations of independence, he was only enforcing that principle.
How British defenders of the slaveholders justified their support for the rebellion
British supporters of the slaveholding rebels claimed that, whatever the legal arguments, the right of nations to self-determination overrode them. Since the southerners had come to consider themselves a separate nation, the Lincoln government had no right to interfere with that right.
But what about slavery? By the 1860s, with wage labor thoroughly entrenched in Britain and any kind of legal serf or chattel slave labor, except for prison labor, long gone, public opinion in Britain completely condemned all forms of chattel slavery, including the African slavery that dominated the southern economy. This put the defenders of the slaveholders’ rebellion, the overwhelming majority of the British capitalist class, on the defensive. The British supporters of the slaveholders argued that if Lincoln were actually following a policy of abolishing slavery and freeing the slaves in the South, this might override the South’s right of self-determination.
They pointed out that Lincoln himself had made clear that abolition was not the policy of his government, ignoring the fact that Lincoln was opposed to the expansion of slavery. Since the mode of production associated with modern slavery was extremely wasteful toward the land, the fertility of the soil was quickly exhausted. Modern slavery therefore meant that new territories had to be captured to the south of the United States, where conditions were highly favorable to growing cotton, as well as sugar, which could also be grown profitably with slave labor.
The island of Cuba was especially seen as the next logical addition to the slaveholding states. But it could not stop with Cuba. Lincoln’s policy of halting the establishment of any more slave states would doom the entire system of modern slavery as the land already under cultivation with slave labor was gradually exhausted.
Overlooking this difference, the British supporters of the slaveholders’ rebellion claimed that there was nothing to choose between Jefferson Davis, the pro-slavery president of the rebel government, and the northern government of Abraham Lincoln. Pro-Confederate spokesmen of the British capitalist ruling class said the two were the same on the slavery issue, since both were for the continuation of the system. They claimed that the issue was not slavery versus free wage labor, but the difference between Lincoln and Davis on the right of states to self-determination, which Lincoln opposed, and Davis upheld.
This argument was false to the core. First, it ignored the opinion of the slaves themselves. How many slaves supported the slaveholders’ rebellion? And it ignored the opposition to the rebellion among many non-slaveholding Southern whites.
It ignored the fact that the Lincoln government and its Republican Party were thoroughly based on capitalist wage labor relations, while the government of Jefferson Davis based itself on the relations of production represented by modern slavery. The victory of Lincoln and the North, whatever Lincoln said and even personally believed, would inevitably pull the rug out from under the system of modern slavery. Lincoln and the Republicans opposed its expansion, while a victory for Davis would just as inevitably have prolonged the life of modern slavery and extended it into new territory. The Republican policy of opposing the expansion of slavery would doom the system in a relatively short historical period, though it would not abolish it immediately.
Lincoln’s legalistic position, that the war was about upholding a Constitution that gives no state the right to secede and not about abolishing slavery, greatly weakened those in Britain who opposed the pro-rebel stand of the ruling British capitalist class. In the early period of the war, there was a real danger that the British ruling class would lead Britain into war with the United States in defense of slavery. That danger was destroyed when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863.
True, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freed only the slaves in the areas that were in rebellion against the United States. At the time it was issued, it did not actually free a single slave. But as the Union army expanded the territory under its control, more and more slaves were freed. Despite Lincoln’s initial stand, it became obvious that legally sanctioned chattel slavery, aside from prison labor, would not long survive a northern victory. This gave the slaves themselves every incentive to join the war against the slaveholders, accelerating the rebellion’s defeat. This was truly the turning point of the war.
Marx and Engels, living in Britain at the time of the slaveholders’ rebellion, solidly and enthusiastically supported the North from the beginning. They did not like Lincoln’s purely legalistic argument, made before the Emancipation Proclamation, that the war was about the fact that the Constitution did not recognize a right of states to self-determination. They held that this played right into the hands of the British supporters of U.S. slavery, since after all the right to self-determination, all other things being equal, is a good thing.
Marx and Engels were delighted when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. They were not merely observers. They were actively involved in mobilizing the British working class behind the war effort of the United States government and the enslaved themselves, to put down the rebellion as quickly and decisively as possible.
The war waged by the North included a northern blockade of the South that led to a severe shortage of cotton in the British factory districts. This caused mass unemployment among the workers of the textile industry, the leading British industry. Despite that unemployment, British workers strongly supported the North. Besides the general democratic sentiment that made slavery a dirty word, this also reflected the fact that during the 19th century emigration to the U.S. acted as a social safety valve for British and European capitalism. If things got too bad in Europe, European workers could emigrate to the U.S., where wages were considerably higher, and land was cheap. This doubtless influenced the views of British workers on the war raging in the United States.
Why did the British capitalists strongly support the Southern slaveholders’ rebellion? There were basically two reasons. Neither was any attachment to self-determination, as their policies in their Indian colony made clear. The most immediate reason was that the war threatened the supply of slave-produced southern cotton, one of the most important raw materials for the British textile industry. Britain’s reaction was to develop cotton production in India and Egypt, which in the coming years reduced Britain’s dependence on cotton grown in the southern U.S. But this could only take effect over a number of years.
The second reason operated in the long run. The rise of the Republican Party and the northern victory in the war of the slaveholders’ rebellion did not only end legal chattel slavery in the U.S., though the defeat of radical Reconstruction in the bargain of 1877 wiped out many of the democratic gains as slavery was replaced by Jim Crow. Other gains, in the interests of the ruling capitalist class, were secured and maintained. First, the victory of the North guaranteed a large home market free of tariffs and other trade barriers. The U.S. finally established a common banknote currency, ending the notorious system of “free banking,” under which individual commercial banks issued their own banknotes. And federal money was poured into the construction of railroads, greatly accelerating the turnover period of capital and thus increasing the annual rate of profit.
The first phase of independence
From the viewpoint of human progress, the U.S. represented a mixed picture during its first phase of development, which stretched from the war of independence of 1775-1783 to the war of the slaveholders’ rebellion of 1861-1865. The U.S. established a republican form of government at a time when monarchies existed in almost all other countries. Suffrage, the right to vote, was narrow at the start of the period, limited to fairly large property owners, but was extended to most adult white men in the course of it. A much larger percentage of the population could vote than in any other country in the world.
Women remained excluded, and it was not until the Russian Revolution that the right to vote was won for them. Men of color, especially African Americans in the North, not to speak of women of color, were excluded as well. Large numbers of white families received land to farm, land stolen from the Native Peoples in the course of the genocide. And there was African slavery, which, though it died out in the North, was deeply entrenched in the South. African slavery could only last as long as it did because of the development of a racist ideology to justify it. Racism has haunted the U.S. throughout its history, and U.S. racist ideology was exported to Europe and eventually helped inspire the horrors of Nazi Germany and today the horrors of Zionist Israel.
The progress that they did represent, especially the growth in the productivity of human labor, was purchased at the price of genocide and modern African chattel slavery. A mixed picture, but this was the general rule in even in the most progressive societies, judged from the viewpoint of the development of the productivity of labor, throughout the history of class society. You cannot understand historical materialism without understanding this fact.
NOTES
(1) In the U.S., the concepts of the state and the government are thoroughly confused. The reason for this is historical. As the English government evolved from feudalism to capitalism, the king, or “the crown,” functioned as the head of state. The actual running of public affairs on a day-to-day basis was carried out by a special committee, called the cabinet, chaired by a prime minister. The division of these functions was useful because, since the position of the king was hereditary, there was no guarantee the king would be even minimally qualified to rule. Any person can simply represent the state power.
The prime minister and the members of the cabinet had to rise through the political jungle and, as a rule, would be expected to be minimally competent people capable of actually ruling. While the king was head of state, the prime minister was the head of government who actually ran the government. The government was the committee, headed by its prime minister, that actually presided over the state. To use the British example, which influenced the evolution of the U.S. more than any other country, the state consisted not only of the monarchy but also of the cabinet headed by the prime minister (the government) and, most importantly, the military, the police and “intelligence agencies,” parliament, the courts, prisons and judges, the civil service, local governments and their departments, and increasingly the state bank, in Britain called the Bank of England. The concept of the state extends beyond the government. This is what Marxists mean in reference to the state.
When the U.S. began as a rebellion against Britain by 13 British colonies, the question arose: in the event of the success of the rebellion, what would replace British colonial rule? This was especially acute because the dominant mode of production was not the same in all of the original 13 colonies. In the North, incipient industrial capitalism based on wage labor was emerging as the dominant mode of production, while in the South it was plantation agriculture based on modern African slavery.
The Southern ruling class feared its slave system would be destroyed if a strong centralized state was established. It wanted to keep the state power as much as possible located in the state capitals, with a central government that would command as little of the actual state power as possible. This doctrine, even today, is called “states’ rights.” The early statesmen of the North, whose outstanding representative was Alexander Hamilton, wanted a strong central government that would command a strong centralized state power, while the outstanding statesman of the South, Thomas Jefferson, wanted the central government to be as weak as possible.
The actual constitution that went into effect in 1789 was a compromise between these two ruling classes, one based on wage labor (capitalism) and the other on chattel African slavery (modern slavery). This original compromise constitution exploded in 1861, though the formal continuation of the 1789 constitution was important to the victorious capitalist class because it creates the illusion that the U.S. is still living under the same constitution that existed in 1789, and that it will last for the rest of time, making the U.S. forever immune to a new revolution. Or so the modern capitalist ruling class hopes. The U.S. has states, now 50, not mere provinces, and a central government that is not called a state, when in reality the real state power has long been centered in Washington, D.C.
In the legal sense, this reflects the long-gone world of 1789, where the states were supposed to be in some sense sovereign. Whether or not this is true was settled on the bloody battlefields of the war of the slaveholders’ rebellion, the U.S. Civil War. But who actually commands the state power, the organization in society that in the final analysis guarantees by force the rights of capitalist private property, through which in our present world the capitalist class, led by a handful of billionaires and multi-billionaires, rules over hundreds of millions of people who can only exist by selling their labor power to the ruling capitalist class? There is no doubt these people rule from Washington, D.C. and not from Sacramento, Albany or any other state capital.
To apply the proper scientific terminology to the U.S., the state consists of the president, now Donald Trump, and his (we are still awaiting the first female president) cabinet secretaries. It includes the military; the prisons, federal, state and local, plus private for-profit prisons; the entire bloated police force, from the FBI, ICE, U.S. marshals and Secret Service down to the local beat cop wielding a nightstick while patrolling your neighborhood to “keep you safe”; the courts; and the organs of local government. It also includes the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, which controls the 12 Federal Reserve Banks, including the powerful Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Though Kevin Warsh is not by this definition a member of the government, he is one of the powerful people within the state, representing in his person the direct fusion of the power of money, the banks, and the state power. (back)
(2) Lincoln was shot by the actor John Wilkes Booth, a supporter of the slaveholders’ rebellion, on April 14, 1865, early in his second term and shortly after the rebels surrendered. Lincoln died from his wounds early the next day. (back)
(3) Is there a hidden connection between the Spartacus rebellion and the origins of the Christian religion, which came shortly thereafter? The symbol of Catholic Christianity is the crucifix, showing a dying man nailed to a cross and wearing a crown of thorns. Today the crucifix is more often than not a symbol of reaction. After the Spartacus slave rebellion, the highways of Rome were lined with real crucifixes bearing the bodies of Spartacus’s rebel slaves. It must have been a horrible sight, one that shook to the core those who witnessed it.
Critical scholars, many of whom can be found on the internet, have thoroughly debunked Christianity’s accounts of its own origins in the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, and rightly so in my opinion. But they do not explore the possible connections between mass rebellions against the Roman Empire and the real origins of Christianity. (back)