Economy and War

Update April 13

After five weeks of the United States and Israel bombing Iran, as its neighboring oil monarchies collaborated in the attacks, it became clear from the viewpoint of the Trump administration that the war wasn’t going anywhere. There was talk that the U.S. might seize one or more Iranian islands, though even if successful, this would have achieved little. A full-scale invasion of Iran, meaning a march on Tehran, is out of the question at the current time.

Iran is a country of around 93 million people. This is larger than the German population of 80 million at the time of the U.S. invasion of Western Europe and Germany in 1944-1945. In geographical size, Iran is about the size of Western Europe. And of course, there is no equivalent to the armed forces of the Soviet Union attacking from the other side. This means that a “march on Tehran” like the march on Baghdad in 2003 is ruled out. If attempted, this would be the largest foreign military operation by the U.S. since 1945 and possibly larger. This would require, at the least, a full-scale mobilization with a renewed military draft.

In 1944-45, the U.S. enjoyed the support of most of the non-German Western European population, who did not want to be ruled by Nazi Germany. This certainly would not be the case in any attempted “march on Tehran” today. There are other differences as well, that are not in the U.S.’s favor. In 1944-45, U.S. industry was, relative to that of other countries, at its historic peak. Today, the U.S. lags far behind China. The effects of the long-term decline are being felt as the U.S. and its extension, the Zionist entity, are running low on munitions. Unlike before, when the U.S. dollar was rock solid, the dollar has been plunging against gold. The dollar price of gold was above $5,000 per ounce when the war began on February 28, and the Trump administration was forced to accept a two-week ceasefire on April 8. Talks to find a permanent end to the war began in Pakistan on April 11 and collapsed the next day when the U.S. insisted that Iran give up its entire nuclear power industry.

The U.S. then announced it was blockading all trade through the Strait of Hormuz, effective April 13. This is an Act of War by the United States against the Islamic Republic of Iran. Whether this will lead to a resumption of large-scale military action and what form it may take is unknown as of the time of this writing on April 13, 8:36 a.m., Pacific time. It appears that the Trump administration is hoping that by preventing Iran from selling oil on the world market, it will be forced to surrender to U.S. demands.

Gold, Oil, and the Road to War

On Friday, Feb. 28, 2026, the government of Donald Trump, along with the Zionist entity, launched a full-scale military assault on Iran. Trump indicated that, as he did during the so-called 12-day war in June 2025, the attack aimed at killing top Iranian leaders.

This time, the targets included Iran’s “supreme leader” — as the expression is translated in the West — Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The 86-year-old was the religious leader of Shia Islam based in Iran, and other Muslims respected him as well. Millions of Iranians were outraged, as millions of Catholics and other Christians would be if a powerful nation bombed the Vatican to kill the pope. A U.S. airstrike on a girls’ elementary school killed, according to one estimate, almost 170 people, mostly schoolgirls. A brilliant example of U.S. military technology and power!?!

In addition to joining the assault, the Zionist entity has gone even further. It launched a massive attack on Lebanon, intending to drive out all Arab people from the southern part of the country. If that isn’t enough, it tightened its food blockade against Gaza, escalating the genocide, while the assault on Iran diverts the attention of the world. The war on Iran raises many questions, including the relationship between the Zionist entity, the so-called State of Israel, and the U.S.-NATO world empire.

The Reichsbank in 1939 and the Federal Reserve in 2026

In January 2026, the Trump administration launched additional attacks on the Federal Reserve System’s independence. This caused the gold market to go into a frenzy, with the dollar gold price spiking to over $5,500 an ounce. The price then plunged back below $5,000 after Trump announced the nomination of veteran central banker and Wall Street favorite Kevin Warsh to head the Fed after chair Jay Powell’s term ends in May. As of early February, the price has fluctuated around $5,000. While this may seem obscure to laypeople, it points to the economic roots of crises that have erupted on many fronts.

We’ll begin with Iran, then turn to the general strike in Minnesota on January 23.

From Surplus Value Producers to Associated Producers of the World

Many books on Marxist economic theory end with the author describing what a future socialist – or communist – society will look like. Inevitably, these portraits of the future society reflect the author’s personal views and often contain bourgeois prejudices. We are all, Marxists included, products of the society we were born in and live in. This means that our ability to transcend the bourgeois society we were born and raised in, and our imagination, is not unlimited. The present author does not claim to be an exception.

From Caracas to Minneapolis

The Donald Trump administration celebrated the birthday of what those in the Christian faith call the Prince of Peace, Jesus Christ, on December 25 by bombing two African countries, Nigeria and Somalia. That Christmas day horror was only the beginning of its crimes as 2025 ended. As 2026 began, on January 3, the U.S. bombed Caracas, the first time in history a South American country was subjected to air bombardment, and kidnapped Venezuelan president, Nicholas Maduro, and his wife Cilia Adela Flores. In a world of nation-states, the government of one country has no right to seize the citizens (let alone the head of state) of any other nation-state.

On January 7 in Minneapolis, an ICE agent shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, a native-born U.S. citizen who was a poet, a Christian, white, and a mother of three now-orphaned children. While the administration attempted to frame Ms. Good as a “domestic terrorist” who was attempting to run over the agent, Jonathan Ross, bystander videos show she was actually trying to avoid him while he circled her car with a cell phone in one hand and his service weapon in the other.

This horror followed weeks of a coordinated racist drive against the Somali community, which serves as a textbook example of economic scapegoating. Reactionary demagogues first claimed Somali immigrants had been capturing and eating domestic pets; more recently, they have weaponized allegations of “daycare fraud” to charge that Somali businesspeople are funneling federal dollars to international terrorist groups. By criminalizing the Somali community’s economic activity, the federal government has created the pretext for a permanent federal occupation of the city.

More than 2,000 ICE agents have flooded Minneapolis, and Trump wants to send more. This massive deployment represents a domestic application of the “Department of War” philosophy, turning a major U.S. city into a garrisoned territory.

Can the World Market Ever Become Exhausted?

Around the turn of the 20th century, the belief that the world market was headed for eventual exhaustion was widely accepted among the left wing of the Social Democracy, especially in the German-speaking world. But the refutations of Rosa Luxemburg’s “Accumulation of Capital” and her “Anti-Critique,” based on Marx’s Volume II models of capitalist reproduction, pretty much discredited the idea that the world market could ever face a situation of permanent exhaustion.

The Historical Limits of Capital: From Stagflation to Artificial Intelligence

Recent media speculation has focused on whether 79-year-old President Donald Trump is experiencing cognitive decline, echoing similar coverage of his predecessor, Joseph Biden.

They’re the oldest men to have held the office. As people age, they become more vulnerable to the group of brain changes we call dementia. I’m not qualified to assess anyone’s health; what matters here is what these stories signal politically — confusion, factionalism, and instability at the top of the state.

At times, it seems that Trump has no coherent foreign policy. There are stories he’s pressuring Euromaidan Ukraine to settle the war with Russia on Russian terms. Then it seems that settlement talks go nowhere.

Otto Bauer’s Critique of Rosa Luxemburg’s ‘Accumulation of Capital’

Of all the Social Democrats who criticized Rosa Luxemburg’s “Accumulation of Capital,” the most important contribution was Otto Bauer’s. Bauer was a leader of the Austrian Social Democratic Party and became the party’s top leader in 1918.

The Struggle Against Revisionism in the German Social Democracy

At the time of the death of Engels in August 1895, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) represented the highest expression of the class-conscious working class organized as a political party achieved up to that time. Not only did the SPD enjoy the support of a large and growing sector of the German working class, it was a party avowedly based on Marxist ideas. As a result, it was the leading party of the Socialist International, also known as the Second International.

Breakdown Theories

In the preface to his “Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy,” the only major economic work of his mature period other than Volume I of “Capital” that Marx published during his lifetime, Marx explained that the underlying cause of the replacement of one mode of production by another is to be found in the changes in the forces of production.