By Jeff Mackler
A front-page May 13, 2026 New York Times 1972 photo featured warmongering U.S. President Richard Nixon in China shaking hands with Chinese President Mao Tse-Tung during the Vietnam War.
The photo brought on the deepest feelings of revulsion on the part of U.S. activists, who spent their youth organizing and mobilizing nationally-coordinated massive antiwar protests demanding “Bring the Troops Home Now!” These actions, coupled with the courageous resistance of the Vietnamese people, who lost four million people in the course of the ten-year U.S. genocidal war against their country, forced the U.S. to withdraw in defeat.
Today’s Times photos of China’s President Xi Jinping’s royal welcome of U.S. genocidal mass murderer, President Donald Trump, undoubtedly brought on similar sentiments of contempt for today’s U.S. and Chinese capitalist-imperialist warmakers.
Nixon’s visit took place at the height of the Vietnam War when U.S. bombing exceeded any in history. Mao’s Stalinists declared at that time that the Soviet Union, then Vietnam’s closest ally and weapons supplier, was the “main danger,” not U.S. imperialism!
Indeed, shortly after the U.S. was forced to fully withdraw from Vietnam in the late 1970s, the U.S.-allied Chinese Stalinists orchestrated their own ill-fated 1979 Vietnam invasion only to be quickly defeated by the Vietnamese national liberation fighters. [The Vietnamese had invaded Cambodia in 1978 to end the monstrous slaughter of three million Cambodians by the “communist” Pol Pot-led Khmer Rouge regime.]
Today, replete with an entourage of U.S. multi-billionaires – the U.S. has some 800 of these mega rich exploiters while the Chinese account for one million – Trump was assured that the two-day discussion would not include ending the present U.S. mass slaughter of “China-allied” Iran.
Indeed, the day before Trump headed for China a New York Times front-page articleblared, “Trump Fumes at Iran Offer, Stoking Global Economic Fears.” The “fears” no doubt include the U.S. ruling class’s inability to control Iranian-dominated sea routes that transport 20 percent of the world’s oil resources and other vital commodities.
Iran “wins” but at terrible costs
Trump denounced Iran’s just demand for war reparations and an end to the unprovoked U.S. war as “garbage” adding that Iran was led by “lunatics” and “stupid people.”
Today’s so-called cease fire, near daily interrupted by US bombing of Iran’s ports, sea coasts, vital infrastructure and manufacturing facilities, continues as Iran refuses to accede to U.S. demands that it open the vital Strait of Hormuz.
That the US-Israel unprovoked war against Iran, after months of horror inflicted on the Iranian masses, including 30,000 confirmed U.S. and Israeli military strikes, has failed to bring Iran to its knees. Yet the U.S. defeat comes at a terrible price. Iranian government officials have stated that the U.S. bombings have resulted in the loss of millions of jobs not to mention thousands of lives. Trump’s prediction of an almost immediate U.S. victory, not to mention a massive uprising by the Iranian masses to overthrow the Iranian government, has proven to be nothing but warmongering bluster, endlessly blared on corporate media headlines by Trump and his allies.
Iran and Venezuela: Two more U.S. Oil wars
The twisted panoply of U.S. lies justifying the U.S. war against Iran, as well as the capture of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, barely disguise the central objective of the U.S. imperialist beast: regaining the oil wealth of the world’s two largest fossil fuel nations. The 1979 Iranian Revolution that overthrew the 1953 U.S.-imposed dictatorship of Shah Reza Pahlavi ended U.S. control of Iranian oil. The same with the 2007 partial nationalizations of foreign oil assets under Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.
Today, and ever since the generalized U.S-imposed imperialist era more than a century ago, any nation that dares to claim or assert control of its own resources and sovereignty, is subject to U.S. war in whatever form the U.S. ruling rich determine is most effective at any given time: embargos, blockades, sanctions, assassinations, “secret CIA wars” and/or overt interventions.
Trump declares “war is good for profits
As Trump crudely explained early on, referring openly to the U.S. oil monopoly behemoths’ imposition of ever-rising gas prices, “war is good for profits.” These and related monopolies literally oversee and control key aspects of the U.S. economy, from tax codes written to largely exclude corporate taxation, to prices, to the courts and government, regardless of which capitalist party holds the presidency or controls one or another state or national legislative body. “War is good for profits,” applies with few, if any restraints on the massively monopolized military-industrial complex, where the super rich endlessly manipulate the tax codes and weapon’s prices to extract ever-mounting $trillions in profits at the expense of working people.
Supreme Court orders Trump’s corporate tariffs returned but no rebates for working people
When the U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled against Trump’s tariffs imposed on U.S. corporate imports, its decision mandated only that corporations whose profits were impinged upon be reimbursed but not the general working class who were and continue to be daily robbed by endless price increases, not to mention hikes in taxes, rents, transportation and education.
Seventeen U.S. multi-billionaires accompany Trump to China
President Trump’s current coterie of accompanying multi-billionaire U.S. corporate elite were purported to be focused on negotiating “deals” with their Chinese counterparts. Aboard Trump’s Air Force One jet to China were Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
These two executives – whose combined net worth approaches $1 trillion – lead companies with major business interests in China, despite years of trade disputes between the world’s two largest economies.
Musk, whose fortune stands at some $688 billion, is the world’s wealthiest person. Huang, whose net worth totals roughly $183 billion, was also part of the U.S. delegation, according to the list of attendees provided to CBS News by the White House.
Other U.S. billionaires in China at Trump’s invitation, were Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, with a net worth of $47.5 billion, and Apple CEO Tim Cook, whose fortune stands at a paltry $2.9 billion.
Also present representing top U.S. ruling class corporate magnates were Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, and Meta President and Vice Chair Dina Powell McCormick.
Trump listed a total of 17 top billionaires “journeying to the Great Country of China” with the objective of asking President Xi Jingping “to open up China so that these brilliant people can work their magic, and help bring the People’s Republic to an even higher level!”
After two days of hoopla accompanied by zero facts regarding the achievements of the 17 U.S. multi-billionaires, The Times was forced to conclude in a front-page May 17 article, “…President Trump departed Beijing on Friday with almost nothing concrete to show for his two-day summit with President Xi Jinping of China. After months of buildup and a delay necessitated by Mr. Trump’s difficulty in extricating the U.S. from the war in Iran, the summit ended with no major public progress on the Middle East, trade, Taiwan, nuclear proliferation, artificial intelligence or any of the other myriad issues that are sources of friction between the world’s two superpowers.”
The corporate media neglected to mention that over the past 26 years since China was admitted to the World Trade Organization the two economies have been significantly integrated. U.S. corporations have offshored millions of union jobs to China. Why pay top union wages to U.S. workers when Chinese workers are made available to work at U.S.-owned and now increasingly Chinese- billionaire owned tax free factories at some $3.70 per hour, the highest minimum wage in the country. With China’s initial 2001 entry into the WTO, teenage girls working 80-hour weeks in dormitory factories earned 6 cents per hour! Over the over the course of the past 26 years the Chinese superrich have increasingly matched and exceeded previous U.S. technological domination. Last week’s Trump-engineered high level exchanges no doubt aimed at initial explorations as to how these ever-competing super powers might find solutions to mitigate the undeniable fact that the very nature of increasingly competitive capitalism makes this impossible.
Origin of the crises: A Marxist analysis
Capitalism’s broad-ranging and mounting crises today, including and especially its endless wars, are essentially driven by the inherent contradictions in the capitalist system itself. Long ago, Karl Marx explained this in great detail in his classic work Capital. “The law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall,” he explained, was at the center of capitalism’s ever-recurring boom and bust economic recession/depression/recovery cycles. In the face of ongoing competition among capitalists, today and especially China, to maintain and conquer new markets, each is forced to constantly update, modernize and automate its productive facilities, in each instance generally substituting increasingly high-tech machines and AI (Artificial Intelligence) for workers. The value of every commodity, Marx explained, is a measure of the quantity of human labor embodied it in the normal course of its production. Over time, the proportion of human labor power embodied in all commodities, relative to machines, diminishes. Whatever advantage one capitalist momentarily gains over their competitors by introducing updated technology, is in time negated as the weaker capitalists are forced to leave the marketplace while those remaining are compelled to merge or borrow to introduce yet another round of technological innovation. But with each successive round, the amount of embodied labor time decreases and with it the amount of profit the boss class can extract from workers. That is, the average rate of profit declines, despite whatever “deals” the boss classes attempt to negotiate, as is the case today with Trump’s multi-billionaire delegation in China.
Why U.S. capitalists don’t build new plants
Capitalists are well aware of this dilemma and are compelled to fight it tooth and nail. In the financial arena, promises to invest the government’s bailout trillions in new plants that create new jobs but lower profits are disappeared, and the trillions are instead invested in the various speculative financial markets that promise instant and higher profits. This “financialization” process, the creation of “fictitious” capital, paper money, bonds, securities, etc., based not on investment in the real economy, but only on future speculative gains, increasingly dominates capitalist investment policies today. In decades past, a tiny proportion of capitalist profits was invested in bank and related financial institutions, perhaps five percent. That percentage has qualitatively expanded today.
The Concentration and Centralization of Capital and Fictitious Capital
In recent decades, the concentration and centralization of wealth has increased with a vengeance. Over half of all public corporations have disappeared over the last twenty years, either filing for bankruptcy or bought and dismembered by rivals. Between 1996 and 2016, the number of publicly listed stocks in the U.S. fell by roughly 50 percent—from more than 7,300 to fewer than 3,600. Mergers and acquisitions are the major cause for this delisting.
The result of this increased concentration, centralization and financialization is evident. From 2007 through 2016, stock repurchases (the buying back of their own shares) by 461 companies listed on the S&P 500 index totaled $4 trillion, an amount equal to 54 percent of their profits. These companies also declared $2.9 trillion in dividends, 39 percent of their profits. To finance takeovers, they increased corporate debt and used their takeover victims’ cash reserves as collateral to borrow in order to facilitate the stock purchase and finance payouts to investors while firing many of the employees of the dismembered corporations.
Thus, profits in U.S. capitalism today are rarely directed to building new plants, employing new workers and expanding output in the US, but rather, in large measure, to purchasing or repurchasing company shares, which inflates the wealth of the group at the top that overwhelmingly own corporate stock. In a real sense, the “insiders” have founded a system that, for them, guarantees their disgusting wealth, while lesser players, including FTX’s San Bank Friend (SBM) and associated cryptrocurrency speculators, often go from great heights to great depths. Again, the emergence of the highly speculative cryptocurrency market is but another reflection of Marx’s inescapable “Law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.” British Marxist economist Michael Roberts explained it well, “Speculation is inherent in capitalism, but it increases, as other financial activities, in times of economic malaise and crises, i.e. when profitability falls in the productive sectors and capital migrates to unproductive and financial sectors where the rate of profit is higher.”
If we are correct in defining SBF’s blockchain technology as the vehicle for “pure speculation,” that is, the solicitation of millions to bet on whether the value of a non-existent “coin” will rise or fall, what can we say about the U.S. stock market and its trillionaire investors? Today’s wide swings in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, not infrequently 500 to 1,000 points in a day, inform us that there, too, speculation reigns. But not always. The big players at the top of the leading corporations, the “insiders,” buy and sell in a manner that guarantees they are winners. In every casino, the House always wins! SBF half-jokingly stated that his crypto business is really akin to a classic Ponzi scheme.
We will only add here a revealing note that Donald Trump’s first term as president saw him denouncing SBF (Sam Bankman Fried) and cryptocurrency markets as fundamentally corrupt. Today, Trump and his family are among the leading cryptocurrency afficionado profiteers!
Capitalist “solutions” in the real economy
Life in capitalist America and worldwide repeatedly informs us that there can be no “good capitalists” or good capitalist parties or capitalist politicians. All are compelled by the very system they uphold to live and function at the expense of all humanity. In the real economy, as well as in the highly speculative financial sectors, the same holds true. Capitalists are compelled to counter declining average profit rates with ever-intensifying attacks on working people. Massive social cutbacks, anti-labor legislation, layoffs, part time casualization of work, forced overtime, computer surveillance-intensification of the labor process/speedup, mortgage foreclosures, cuts in fringe benefits, increased taxes on working people, decreased taxes, if any, on the rich, obliteration or cutbacks of pensions, Social Security benefits, health care coverage, public education, the imposition of multi-tier wage systems, the employment of near slave labor prisoners at an hourly average wage of 50 cents, and racist, sexist, anti-LBGTQI+, and anti-immigrant discrimination aimed at pitting worker against worker, are no accidents. If they are not seriously pursued, the errant capitalist can only fall prey to those competitors who do understand how the game must be played.
Every one of the above measures center on making workers pay for capitalism’s central and inherent contradiction. And when these heinous measures prove insufficient to stem profit declines in the U.S., the ruling elite embark on massive efforts to transfer production—through de-industrialization and off-shoring—outside their own borders to free themselves from the gains workers have won following decades of struggle. The result is the ever-increasing exploitation, super-exploitation and degradation of life across the globe, not to mention endless wars of plunder and conquest, and the catastrophic increase, not decrease, of fossil fuel production that threatens, in the short term, life on earth itself. Capitalism’s degradation of human beings knows no limits!
The system itself cannot be significantly reformed. Ousting Trump resolves nothing: the “genocide Joe” Biden example was proof positive. There are no “good Democrat” alternatives! Capitalism must be abolished. And the only force on earth capable of doing so is an independent, fighting, militant working class, democratically organized at the point of production and in the political arena in the tens of millions, and whose ranks have been infused with the ranks of a mass revolutionary socialist party aimed at building a new world free from all forms of capitalist degradation, exploitation and oppression.
Join us! socialistaction.org socialistaction@lmi.net