“The total value of the U.S. stock market has more than doubled over the past decade to over $75 trillion, roughly two and a half times the annual output [Gross Domestic Product] of the entire U.S. economy.” (July 23, 2026 New York Times.)
The GDP, at $31.87 trillion, is defined as the monetary value of all finished goods and services annually produced within the country. In contrast, the stock market valuation is a measure of the speculative super rich corporate “casino capitalism” tops’ manipulation of stock market prices where the “house always wins.”
This is not too dissimilar with the Trump administration’s imposition worldwide of massive tariffs on foreign imports. These are aimed at raising ever-declining U.S. corporate profit margins when U.S. factories find themselves increasing incapable of competing on world markets. Even when the U.S. Supreme Court rules that U.S. tariffs are illegal, Trump and his team openly declare that they will find ways to get around the “law.” And they always do, not to mention Trump’s ever-bloating family fortune, a product of his blatant use of power to advance his personal interests.
Trump’s first term denunciation of the cryptocurrency industry and its “fake money” today sees Trump becoming a cryptocurrency mogul. Yesterday’s China characterized by Trump as the U.S.’s main enemy is today’s China, where a fleet of U.S. multi-billionaires personally accompany Trump on a state visit to China to publicly and privately negotiate new deals to rip off the world’s people.
Seventeen U.S. multi-billionaires accompany Trump to China
President Trump’s current coterie of accompanying multi-billionaire U.S. corporate elite was 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.
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!”
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 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.
Trump’s Iran war “peace deals”
Each of the several recently announced U.S.-Iran War “peace deals” lasted barley a day as U.S. saturation bombing of Iran’s ever-beleaguered infrastructure resumed almost immediately after each announced temporary settlement.
The U.S.-Israel unprovoked and illegal war, now at its fifth month, has inflicted 30,000+ military strikes against every aspect of Iran’s basic infrastructure. But it has failed to bring Iran to its knees as Trump predicted at the outset.
But the U.S. onslaught comes at a terrible price. Iranian government officials have stated that the U.S./Zionist bombings have resulted in the loss of millions of jobs not to mention multiple 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.
In all these matters, and more, there are no U.S. or international institutions that even claim to have the authority to reign in the U.S. president’s slaughter. None have cited any “legal” authorities justifying the war. Waged in the name of protecting “U.S. national security interests” and preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons, no U.S. politician ever mentions that the U.S. nuclear arsenal comes close to matching or exceeding the rest of the world’s combined.
Verbal blasts at U.S. atrocities/war crimes by this or that nation are ignored with impunity. The U.S. government and its president operate in a world free from international restraints. Need we mention that zero opposition statements were issued by “Iran-allied” China, whose top leaders, headed by President Xi Jinping, hosted Trump in Beijing and his U.S. multi-billionaire investor friends a few weeks ago. The U.S. slaughter in Iran was in progress!
Similarly, silence was essentially the rule, with Trump’s recent sweeping proclamations granting full, unconditional pardons and some sentence commutations to approximately 1,500 rightwingers charged or convicted in connection with the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The same with the Trump’s kidnapping of the Venezuelan president and his sequestering of Venezuela’s fossil fuel resources and now his overt threats to invade Nicaragua, Cuba and more.
Beleaguered revolutionary Cuba
We note here that Socialist Action has always been in the forefront of the defense of the Cuban Revolution, today beleaguered by U.S. imperialism to an extent unmatched in modern history. Revolutionary Cuba, embargoed, blockaded, starved, denied fundamental fuels that operate basic infrastructure, and denied basic medical supplies, is threatened with imminent U.S. imperialist invasion. That no nation on earth has significantly provided even the minimum of fossil fuel aid to Cuba tragically informs us yet again that the Stalinist-led former deformed and degenerated workers states of decades past, China, Russia, etc., are no allies of the world’s oppressed and exploited.
Again, the spectacle of a near starving Cuba and an increasingly U.S. obliterated Iran at a time when Trump and his coterie of 17 multi-billionaires are celebrated in China informs us that the notion of a bi-polar world with one side championing humanity and the other fundamentally hostile to it has little or little or no credibility.
To the extent that there is any armed opposition to U.S. imperialism it is the Middle East where groups like the Yemeni Houthis, or the Palestinian Hamas, or the Lebanese Hezbollah exact a price from the U.S. beast by supporting Iran’s maintaining control of the Strait of Hormuth and helping Iran to block some 20 percent of the world’s oil and natural gas from passing. More recently, the Houthi rebels have threatened another critical fossil fuel passageway, the Bab el-Mandeb Straight that connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden. While the U.S. has incessantly bombed these rebels that have operated for years in the regions close to various U.S.–backed monarchies in the region, to date sending U.S. troops to the region has been at least for now ruled out by Trump and Co. The U.S. tops fear that yet another U.S. ground war could provoke a U.S. antiwar movement that exceeds the control of today’s Democratic Party “No Kings Day” forces.
Unprecedented U.S. military spending
The House of Representatives on July 22, 2026 voted 216-212 to approve a $1.15 trillion 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NFAA), the largest military expenditure in history. The Democrats, usually twin partners in all such expenditures, near unanimously opposed the bill – for show only – to gain some votes and pose as “progressives” as the midterms approach. Yesterday’s Democrats who backed Biden’s Palestine genocide are today’s instant progressives.
The House vote saw some Democrats citing some “objectionable” NDAA provisions for the usual massive U.S. aid to Zionist Israel or continued funding for the Iran War or the “constitutional” right of Congress to authorize war and not the president. While the bill, the largest military appropriation in history, will now go to the U.S. Senate, few believe that the end result will be significantly different. Indeed, history records that the Senate almost always increases the House-proposed NDAA military and related expenditures.
In point of fact, the real total of annual U.S. military expenditures, including for some dozen government agencies that receive separate military funds, exceeds $3.5 trillion, an amount that surpasses the world’s total!
Military spending is among U.S. capitalism’s prime methods to funnel $trillions of working class taxpayer dollars to the ruling rich.
Capitalism’s military-industrial complex has today been reduced from some scores, if not one hundred corporations to some half dozen largely monopolized mega companies that set prices for imperialism’s war machine far in excess of their real value. That’s what monopolies are all about. But military spending is but one of declining capitalism’s methods to maintain ever flagging corporate profit rates.
Indeed, the monopolization of the war industry is essentially matched in every major, in not lesser industries, in the entire country, whether they are engaged in auto manufacturing, fossil fuels, computers/technology, steel and plastics, basic foods, clothing, pharmaceuticals, construction, retail sales and all the rest. We have documented this process in several past Draft Political Resolution.
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 power 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, not to mention its deal with the labor bureaucracy.
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, cryptocurrency, 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 cryptocurrency 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.
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.
The world imperialist/capitalist system centers on making workers everywhere pay for capitalism’s central and inherent contradiction, again, “the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.” We have explained this fact in great detail in previous resolutions; it stands as a central tenet of Marx’s Capital.
Fighting this tendency is the central explanation for U.S. politics today and not any or all of the seeming idiocies of President Trump or his predecessor, Joseph Biden and/or any and all other capitalist politicians and parties.
Massive social cutbacks, anti-labor legislation, layoffs, part time casualization of work, forced overtime, computer surveillance-intensification of the labor process/speedup, cuts in fringe benefits, increased taxes on working people, crippling student debt, decreased taxes, if any, on the rich, obliteration of pensions, the imposition of multiple-tier wage systems, not to mention the reactionary decisions, local, state and national, attacking multiple aspects of women’s right, especially abortion, are the norm. They are all aimed at countering capitalism’s inherent contradictions. They are applied in the U.S. and worldwide. They, of course, include endless imperialist wars of intervention, exploitation, and conquest
Trump’s reactionary policies are increasingly matched by U.S. allies and “enemies” alike as a failing world capitalist-imperialist system sees no alternative.
When these heinous measures prove insufficient to stem profit declines, the ruling elite embark on massive efforts to transfer production – de-industrialization – 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.
Simultaneously, the ruling class literally gifts countless $trillions via near zero interest rate corporate loans that are instantly re-invested in the casino-like stock market, where the market manipulators always win. This “financialization” process operates independently of which capitalist party is in office. While the government claims that the “loans” to the corporate elite aim at encouraging them to invest in new plants that will supposedly create new jobs, this is rarely the case.
Maintaining at all costs the ever-threatened rate of profit, that inevitably drives the system forward, but inevitably sets it back into recession and depression, increasingly supersedes all considerations of human life.
The examples are multiple and need only the briefest of mention, notwithstanding the horrors they portend for humanity.
Today, the only force capable of challenging capitalism’s deepening degradation of every aspect of life – the working class the world over – remains largely unorganized and/or devoid of an independent leadership aimed at putting an end to the insane system itself. The daily construction of this leadership, however difficult or distant at any particular moment, in the form of mass revolutionary socialist parties worldwide, and especially in the imperialist U.S. heartland, built on the Leninist model, and complimented by qualitatively expanded, democratic, independent and revitalized trade unions allied with all the struggles of the oppressed and exploited remains central to Socialist Action’s reason for being. We fight for the reconstruction of a revolutionary Fourth International as we strive to build the nucleus of a mass Leninist party in the U.S. There can be no fundamental challenge to capitalist barbarism in all its manifestations that does not center on these two objectives.
Inter-imperialist rivalry
With the exception of revolutionary Cuba, a workers state with some inevitable bureaucratic distortions, there are no deformed or degenerated workers’ states in the world today. At great cost to the working class in these states, and with the collaboration of the Stalinist bureaucracies in tandem with U.S. and Western European imperialism, capitalism has been fully restored. The process began in China in 1979 under Deng Xiaoping and in the USSR a decade later under Gorbachev and Yeltsin. We have documented the process in extensive resolutions, articles and books over the past three-plus decades. The gains of the great Chinese and Russian Revolutions have been systematically obliterated.
With Stalinist collaboration with U.S. imperialism, the monopoly of foreign trade was abolished, allowing imperialist capital to freely enter the previously closed markets, exploit relatively skilled workers, and take control of major industries and resources. The planned economies were abandoned, including previous revolutionary gains in free social services of every type.
State property, the basis of the planned economy that prioritized human needs over capitalist profits, was largely abolished. What remained of this vital sector, that is, what did not go directly to the Stalinist bureaucracy cum capitalists, was “converted” from state property to “rental property” administrated by former Stalinist bureaucrats, who operated with “state support” to maximize personal private profit.
At the level of international politics a “détente” was established wherein support to national liberation struggles was largely ended in return for ever-deepening and profitable imperialist investments in the former workers’ states. This “peaceful coexistence” détente was also based on guarantees that the Communist Parties the world over would not challenge capitalist governments anywhere. Stalin’s infamous “socialism in one country” became the watchword for subordinating revolution everywhere to preserving the privileges of the USSR’s bureaucratic caste.
During the genocidal U.S. war against Vietnam that slaughtered four million people, mostly civilians, the world witnessed U.S. Richard President Nixon visiting China while Soviet bureaucrats similarly accommodated U.S. imperialism by restricting aid to the Vietnamese fighters to force a “negotiated settlement” far short of what the Vietnamese had won on the ground.
The Sino-Soviet dispute during that period saw the Stalinist bureaucracies engaged in border wars between each other while competing for U.S. favor. The Chinese Maoists declared the USSR, not U.S. imperialism, the “main enemy.”
To be continued….
