Fascism: A Materialist Analysis of Capitalism’s Decay

This is a guest contribution Pokepreet, whose Instagram you can find here. You can find more of his work on his Substack or his Podcast. We thank him for this wonderfully written Piece.

I would like to dedicate this article to Michael Parenti who started me on my path of looking at the world more deeply than it was presented.

The actions of the American empire both home and abroad these past few months have seemed wholly illogical, almost as if the actions of a waning, old, tired man deep in the midst of dementia. Between a resurgence in imperial war and police actions at home, those observing America’s slow decline into fascism have been left wholly confused. Trump’s actions seem to have no logical through line; first he invades Venezuela and kidnaps Maduro, second, he threatens to take Greenland, and third he deploys ICE to Minneapolis. Liberal explanations for all of these events have largely fallen flat, with them having to do with a rise in the so-called stupidity of America. We are led to believe by liberal analysis that the reason America is trending the way it currently is stems in millions of Americans simply choosing to be ‘stupid, racist and hateful’. And this is by no accident. Capitalism, fascism, and class society have always relied on a mysticism transmuted to the masses in order to hide their true economic motivations – as Marx declared in German Ideology “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force […] generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it” ^[1].

Fascist ideology itself has always been hopelessly impossible to ideologically penetrate. For example, Hitler both believed that the free market and private property were vital towards the evolution of the ultimate human being (Übermensch) and also the state’s role in wholly mediating the economy to the will of the nation. His so-called ‘socialism’ was an ethical idealism with no specific economic policies or ideas contained within it.^[2] Given this apparent obscurity, the only thing that can truly help us understand and gain clarity into the imperial crises unfolding in front of us is to go deeper into our society than it is presented to us by our media, educators, culture and Hegemony at large.

This requires nothing other than a Marxist logic. Only Marxist logic can help us break down the world; see how it truly operates without the idealist explanations so often presented to help us find the primary source of America’s current crises and descent into fascism, not personal stupidity but the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

On Materialism

But what is logic, really? Logic is the philosophical study of how human beings relate to the world – how mind and body interact with each other, and how both engage with the external world, shaping and influencing one another.^[3] And fundamentally we all have questioned this at one time or another in our lives. I personally remember being on the elementary school playground wondering if I was really the only human being truly alive and conscious and if everyone else was some sort of automaton. European philosophers spent a long time debating how this mind-body connection worked, from Descartes to Hegel, debates that included questions such as, if thought was in a separate realm from our body or part of it (dualism vs. monism), if there was an objective, knowable truth outside the human mind or many truths existing at the same time, and how we should scientifically categorize the world, if at all. Marx built on those before him, namely Feuerbach and Hegel, radically reshaping this entire debate. ^[4]

Among the illusions that cast their shadow over the logical debates Marx was born into, none was more dangerous than idealism. Logic was understood as originating in the human mind, which was thought to project its will onto the world – so that ideas, willpower, and an abstract ‘human essence’ were believed to shape reality itself. In Hegel, for instance, the essence of humanity lay in estrangement within self-consciousness. His focus rested primarily on the unfolding of mental and spiritual processes; thus, forms of intellectual labor (philosophy, music, literature) occupied the center of his analysis, while material labor such as building, farming, or carpentry remained largely in the background. Religion and the state were not understood as forces outside of the mind but instead the highest expressions of this abstract objective spirit. As a result, Hegel not only took the world as it was presented to him but saw it (the state and religion namely) as the collective consciousness’s highest expression. And yet Trump doesn’t really seem to express my thoughts, nor yours, and if the American state and evangelical religions truly represented this, I doubt they would really be in such radical contradiction and states of suppression of all others right now. So clearly while Hegel gave us a good base his methodology was missing something.

Feuerbach took Hegel’s framework and turned it on it’s head: to him religion was not something ephemeral but instead man created religion by projecting his ideals onto it. Man’s species-being was projected to the heavens to create a religion rather than religious decrees coming from above (in form of the ever present ‘human essence’).^[5] Idealism has always been rooted in a sort of religious structure, Feuerbach by breaking with this and instead making the focal point not ideas in a vague sense but a concrete starting point of the creative activity of man and the working relations of people gave Marx the perfect base to break from Idealism and into materialism.^[6]

Marx made five important changes to logic. First, he shifted the focal point: Rather than centering thought on man’s relationship to God, Marx brought logic down from the heavens and focused on the relationship between human beings themselves.

Second, he introduced materialism. Marx argued that man’s social being arises from the material world around him, not the other way around as in idealism. Human consciousness does not create reality; rather, social existence shapes consciousness.

Third, Marx reconsidered the role of the senses and human activity. Earlier philosophers, he argued, treated man as a passive observer who merely contemplated the world through sight, touch, and reflection. But human beings do not only perceive the world—they actively change it. As Marx wrote, the sensuous world is “the total living sensuous activity of the individuals composing it.” Through transforming the world, humans also learn from it, though always within the limits of existing material conditions. A clear example of this dialectical interplay is given by Walter Rodney in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa: “The religious belief that a certain forest was sacred was the kind of element in the superstructure that affected economic activity, since that forest would not be cleared for cultivation.” Here, a community’s encounter with its material environment gave rise to a religious belief within consciousness, and that belief in turn shaped material practice by preventing the clearing of the sacred space, even as surrounding forest was cultivated. What we see is a social relation, rooted in material conditions, becoming reified – taking on a seemingly objective existence in the real world.

Fourth, Marx identified labor as the basis of humanity’s interaction with the world and therefore with logic itself. The central unifying activity through which humans relate to nature, to each other, and to society is labor – practical activity, the transformation of nature. Labor is what distinguishes humans from other animals, and for Marx it was so fundamental that he described it as man’s species-being. Labor existed long before capitalism; in pre-class societies human labor belonged to the laborer. Paleolithic humans could hunt, build tools, and create shelter freely for themselves and others. With the emergence of agricultural surpluses, however, societies developed divisions of labor and the accumulation of goods at one pole or another, giving rise to class society and the state as an instrument for preserving those relations. Under such conditions, one group could compel another to labor, producing alienation: people worked not for themselves but for others. One can see this in the familiar situation of working long hours to enrich an employer, producing goods one does not own yet being forced to do so in order to secure basic necessities. This alienation is both a mental and a material economic phenomenon, as it produces commodities and capital – a process Marx described as reification.

Finally, Marx extended this analysis through the concepts of productive forces and relations of production. Humans are shaped not only by nature but also by technology, scientific knowledge, raw materials, and technical skill—the productive forces, which determine the physical capacity for labor. Alongside these stand the relations of production: who owns what, how goods are distributed, and how people relate to one another within a given society. Whether in an egalitarian hunter-gatherer society, an agricultural order with heavy taxation, or a monarchy with concentrated wealth, these relations form the foundation upon which institutions such as government, education, and media arise. Revolution, therefore, occurs when productive forces come into conflict with relations of production. When the productive forces outgrow existing social relations, those relations become fetters upon the mode of production, leading to rupture and transformation – just as feudal monarchies were swept into an age of revolutions with the rise of industrial society.

Personifications of Capital

Let’s take a step back and see how this logic can help us understand the Trump phenomenon. Unlike many idealists that Marx often fought with, that simply believed that the world is changed or can be changed by simply changing people’s minds, or our liberal friends who believe that the Trump phenomenon is a result of people thinking mean thoughts and not voting for Kamala, Marxists go deep into the base and look at the economic contradictions of capitalist society that are driving all of these superstructural shifts. Us Marxists will not settle for simple explanations for why America and world capitalism are in a crisis and breaking point, we are going to use a Marxist logic to explain this, clearly there are objective conditions at play that are hidden away from plain view. But in order to do this, just like in biology textbooks, we will have to start from the cell and build to the ecosystem.

Marx built his economic analysis from his logic with labor at the center of it. To Marx the value of all commodities within capitalism was both a sociological and physical thing, a social relation materialized (reified). Value was a social relation amongst people, that assumed a material form through the production of something (commodity, capital), that is related to the process of production.

Think about it like this, a Pop mart executive hires an employee, this employee labors for the executive, and the product of this relationship would be the company’s flagship item, the Labubu. Where does the value of this Labubu come from? Let’s try to find the one universal contained within the Labubu and every other commodity in the entire capitalist system. So, let’s take away the costs of electricity, rent, raw materials, and what we are left with across all industries including those that provide the electricity and raw materials is human labor power. The value in a Labubu and Dubai chocolate then each represent a certain amount of human labor hours congealed within each commodity. If more human labor hours are contained within them, the more value they contain, if less vice versa. Of course, this only works if the product produced is desired and serves a need by society, and it is generally set by the average time across an entire industry. And this Labubu not only represents the human labor hours contained within it but also the relationship between the employee and executive manifested into the commodity (reified). Commodity production under capitalism is not a planned process and the system of production relations can often be misaligned, this can allow for production relations that don’t represent real movements within production, speculation and over production become huge catastrophic ills onto the entire system.

As importantly to understand Mr. Trump, Marx often described capitalists themselves as personifications of capital, while critics have described this as embellishment by Marx these are a…

“very real phenomenon: the dependence of production relations among people on the social form of things (factors of production) which belong to them, and which are personified by them […] it seems as if the social character of things determines the social character of their owners. Thus the “personification of things” is brought about. In this way the capitalist glows with the reflected light of his capital, but this is only possible because he, in turn, reflects a given type of production relation among people”.^[9]

Commodities, rent and capital all bridge the gap between social relations of people performing both a technical function in the process of production and social function of connecting each other. And Mr. Trump as a capitalist therefore is representing many of these relations within the US economy. But if human labor power creates value within commodities, then capitalists take their share and sell them, why is America and world capitalism in crises?

The Tendency of the rate of profit to fall

If human labor power congealed within a commodity is the major source of value under capitalism, then as the process becomes more automated and production becomes more productive there’s less human labor power congealed within each commodity. Think about it like this, if it takes 8 hours to make 2 tables each table represents 4 hours’ worth of value. However, if suddenly a new machine came along that in 8 hours produced 4 tables, then each table would represent only 2 hours of human labor power within each. Suddenly the value of each individual table has been dramatically lowered. Is the new table making machine itself producing any value? No, It is simply imparting value gotten somewhere else in the supply chain onto each commodity.

Now why would a capitalist want to do this? For a myriad of reasons. Capitalism is a competitive system and by driving value lower, even though a capitalist may be selling far below previous value, he may be able to get more buyers for a commodity (I’d rather have a 50-dollar table than a 1.000-dollar table personally). In addition, at first this new machine is only owned by one company and gives them that competitive edge over the competition. However, at the end of the day the overall value being produced is being lowered. At the core of all of this is human labor.

There are two main types of capital:

Variable Capital: the capital used to pay wages to human labor, this generates value.
Constant capital: Value gotten from living human labor and turned into ‘dead’ labor through investment into raw materials, machines, automatons, means of production, factories, etc. This cannot produce value only impart preexisting value onto the commodity.

Over time capitalists end up investing more into constant capital (machines, etc.) than variable capital (human labor power) which though in the short term able to generate immense profits leads to a generalized trend of a falling rate in value being produced and therefore a falling rate of profitability. This trend has produced itself worldwide:

“The statistics regarding Germany, France, and Italy are particularly revealing between the early 1960s and the first years of the new century, the rate of profit was halved. Japan began with higher rates of profit than Germany, France and Italy, and these rates fell even further than in these three countries between 1970 and the beginning of this century. The United States and the United Kingdom, which began at lower levels, seem instead to have enjoyed a relative recovery beginning in the 1980s .Whatever the case may be, regardless of a widely held opinion, there has not been a boom in profits in the past few decades, even in the United States. On the contrary, if we consider the average profits of American firms before taxes since 1940, we see constant reduction: the rate of profit from 1941 to 1956 was 28.2 percent; from 1958 to 1980 it was 20.3 percent; and from 1981 to 2004, it was 14.3 percent. And in the last of these periods, the industrial capacity utilization rate in the United States was always less than 82 percent, and it fell to 78 percent in 2005—that is, two years before the outbreak of the crisis.”^[10]

However, there are several actions that a country can take in order to temporarily diminish a falling rate of profit, and almost all of these align surprisingly well with both historical fascist governments and our current developments:

Raising the rate of exploitation of labor by making working hours longer, making workers work more intensely, and increasing labor productivity. Again, if you force workers to spend more labor time making more commodities and faster more value is overall produced; “An example […] is provided by the collective bargaining agreement reached in Germany in 2004 between Siemens and the metal workers union, IG-Metall, in which the workweek was lengthened from thirty-five to forty hours for the same pay”.^[11]
Wages are increasingly pushed far below the value of labor, shifting the balance of value in favor of capital and boosting profits. This process occurs worldwide, as workers are paid significantly less than the value they produce. Reductions in indirect wages (such as welfare, pensions, and other social supports) combined with the privatization of public goods, have exacerbated the situation. The result is that many workers struggle to afford basic necessities such as rent, food, and other essentials. This has even been acknowledged by liberal economists; “research by the Bank for International Settlements shows that in all countries of mature capitalism, there is a tendency to reduce the share of GDP that goes to wages and increase the amount that goes to profits”.^[12]
Decreasing Constant capital, destroying factories or letting them rot instead of using them.
Increasing Foreign Trade, this has the effect of lowering the cost of raw materials (constant capital) and consumer goods (variable capital). By making the necessities of life cheaper, the value of labor power drops which increases the rate of surplus value and slows the rise of constant capital relative to variable capital.
‘Overpopulation’: by increasing the reserve army of labor (unemployed people), these excess populations, depress wages as they’re desperate for any job and therefore the cost of labor power dramatically lowers.

Between 1930s Germany to America in the 2020s these sound amazingly familiar. Let’s take a look at historical Fascism first before we transition into our modern one.

Profit and Fascism

To approach Hitler from his own words and try to make sense of him is a damned fool’s errand. Hitler himself had a great disdain for the economy, seeing it as something in the way of achieving a goal, with a powerful ‘jewless’ state being able to handle anything. Likewise, his world view, unlike a materialist Marxist logic, was completely idealist as he stated, “the creation of a state is made possible not by material attributes but by ideal virtues”.^[13] But his ultimate economic policies were completely logical once we account for the falling rate of profit.

The Germany Hitler rose up in, was one in which the rate of profitability was absolutely abysmal. Forced to pay reparations after the Versailles treaty, the Weimar Republic pursued a strategy in which it would borrow immense amounts of capital from America and other lenders, so much so that it was soon attracting so much foreign capital that it could have paid off its reparations without having to produce value itself. This would lead to a cycle of money flowing between Germany, America, and France. However this would all come crashing down with the collapse of world trade and the great depression. Germany, whose economy was already squeezed, would soon see 2.1 million unemployed, factories shutting down en masse, poverty spreading like a plague, and rapid deflation of the Reichsmark as the entire DANAT bank system collapsed.^[14]

On February 20th 1933 Hitler met with top German industrialists and promised them two things, if they funded his party, he would get rid of parliamentary democracy and crush the left. As a result, he would get 400,000 Reichsmarks from IG Farben, 200,000 from Deutsche Bank, 400,000 from the mining industry, and 100,000 from automobile manufacturers – And his promises would come true: The labor movements would be systemically destroyed. The national labor law of 1934 would allow owners and managers to freeze wages and salaries.

As a result, nominal wages would fall far below those of previous years. And record profits would be made. Investment in foreign capital would be let free as though large parts of internal German economic affairs remained highly state-controlled: “large parts of German foreign commerce remained free of cartel regulation of any kind, most notably textiles, metalware and engineering, with the machine-builders association, the VDMA, being a particularly aggressive exponent of free trade”.^[15]

The overall economy would essentially be set up so that..

“the export subsidy […] was financed by a severe redistributive tax levied on all of German industry. Managing this burdensome system […] was the primary function of a new framework of compulsory business organizations imposed by [Minister of Economics] Schacht […] The existing multiplicity of voluntary associations was fused together into a hierarchy of Reich Groups […] Business Groups […] and Branch Groups. Every German firm was required to enrol […] Decrees that came down from the Ministry via the Business Group. Complaints, suggestions and information travelled upwards […] On the import side, the supervisory agencies all had staff drawn from the Business Groups. On the export side […] Business Groups were charged with assessing the turnover of their members and administering the levy that funded the export subsidy. Since this entire apparatus of control was designed to limit German imports, it had the effect of virtually eliminating foreign competition […] Combined with rising levels of domestic demand this enabled German producers to push through a marked increase in prices […] The result by the end of 1935 was the creation of a comprehensive system of state supervised price-setting. Fundamental to this system were the increased powers of oversight exercised by the Reich over Germany’s ramified system of cartels […] In July 1933 the [ministry of economics] equipped itself with the authority to impose compulsory cartels. Voluntary cartels were thus transformed into compulsory organizations under state oversight […] The combination of rising domestic demand, an end to foreign competition, rising prices and relatively static wages created a context in which it was hard not to make healthy profits. Indeed, by 1934 the bonuses being paid […] were so spectacular […] Communists and Social Democrats did indeed have a point. The Nazi regime was a ‘dictatorship of the bosses’.”^[16]

As a result the slump in the rates of profit which the Weimar republic had found itself in was amazingly reversed. And yet the German economy overall remained weak and hollow:

“In 1936, with the German economy at full employment, 14.5 million people, 62 per cent of all German taxpayers, reported annual incomes of less than 1,500 Reichsmarks […] The true significance of these modest figures becomes apparent when they are compared with the prices paid by German households for basic needs. A 1-kilogram loaf of brown bread in the 1930s cost 31 Pfennigs, the equivalent of half an hour’s work for many low-paid German workers. Potatoes were the staple diet of the German working class. Five kilos could be bought for only 50 Pfennigs. A kilogram of bacon cost half a day’s work at 2 Reichsmarks and 14 Pfennigs. Butter was extraordinarily expensive. In 1936 the price per kilo of butter stood at 3 Reichsmarks and 10 Pfennigs. A 250-gram lump of butter cost more than an hour’s wage. The phrase ‘crying over spilt milk’ takes on a new significance when we appreciate that a litre of the precious fluid cost 23 Pfennigs. Eggs at 1.44 Reichsmarks per dozen were hardly cheap. And even beer, retailing at 88 Pfennigs per litre, was a considerable drain on the working-class food budget. Not surprisingly, the majority of Germans lived on a modest and monotonous diet of bread and jam, potatoes, cabbage”.^[17]

Tantamount to saving Germany’s falling rate of profit were Hitler’s plans for Lebensraum, the conquest of Europe for more ‘living space’ for the so-called Aryan race which effectively meant more markets for the investment of capital within. However as the preparations for war against the USSR ramped up, the effects were disastrous. By 1937 maximum wage laws had to be implemented, more intensity within production would be encouraged through the elimination of paid holiday and in 1938 German workers would see a lengthening of the work week.^[18]

Here we can see how the falling rate of profit pulled on Nazi Germany in two ways and its attempts to offset it both led to a war of conquest which strained its society and further exacerbated the intensity of exploitation of its home population.

Just like Hitler, if we take today’s fascists at their word without critically examining the forces driving them (using a Marxist lens focused on labor) we would be equally confused. Modern right-wing movements often scapegoat Jews, invoke the so-called ‘great replacement,’ or blame migrants for ‘stealing jobs’ as explanations for the general decline in living standards. Engaging with these ideologies is difficult because they reduce complex social and economic phenomena to surface-level identity categories, disconnected from the underlying economy: Jews are accused of orchestrating the decline of the West, Mexican migrants are said to culturally ‘degenerate’ America, and so on. These explanations, and the solutions they propose, fail entirely. Deporting migrants, for instance, who constitute a massive part of the reserve army of labor, would do nothing to resolve the current economic crises. As Marx points out in Chapter 25 of Kapital, the reserve army of labor is relative to population size. After Ireland’s population was decimated by the British-imposed potato famine, the organic composition of capital, investment in constant versus variable capital, adjusted in such a way that the overall rate of unemployment remained roughly the same.

“The Irish famine of 1846 killed more than 1,000,000 people, but it killed poor devils only […] What were the consequences for the Irish laborers left behind and freed from the surplus population? That the relative surplus population is today as great as before 1846; that wages are just as low, that the oppression of the laborers has increased, that misery is forcing the country towards a new crisis. The facts are simple. The revolution in agriculture has kept pace with emigration. The production of relative surplus population has more than kept pace with the absolute depopulation.”^[19]

And to be honest, western culture is not so amazing that it can uphold an economy nor can its disappearance for seasoned food, taquerias, and reggaeton on the radio explain a decline in living standards or economy. Likewise, the so-called Aryans that the white supremacists would like to believe would be magically treated well in a post racially cleansed nation, were subject to absolutely horrible living conditions under the original experiment they keep trying to replicate – I highly doubt it’d be different a second time.

America’s rate of profit

American economic planners within the 1980s during its neoliberal turn were able to escape the serious effects of the falling rate of profit through two (plus one) main mechanisms. Firstly, of course privatization of social services was vital towards revitalizing the American rates of profit that had become abysmal after years of stagnation under a strong welfare state wherein workers were able to eat up a nice balanced share of profits.

The second ‘magic formula’ for countering falling rates of profit was the financialization of the economy, and the third was credit. Financialization allowed the American economy to grow 356% faster than global GDP, serving as a temporary salvation in the 1980s. By decoupling growth from real, tangible production, speculation could run amok, enabling the economy to navigate recession after recession. Credit further reinforced this system: through credit cards, mortgages, and loans, American families could maintain living standards independently of their actual income. For the first time in U.S. history, wages and material well-being were no longer directly linked.

“The result was to square the circle, to realize the dream of every capitalist: a wage-earner whose wage decreases but who consumes as before or even more than before”.^[20]

And in the short term this did work, as the neoliberal 1980s saw a huge boom within rates of profitability. However by 2008 “the ride was over”, as a Marxist economist would write at the time.

Reducing interest rates to secular minimums (0 to 0.25 percent in the United States; 0.10 percent in Japan; 0.5 percent in the United Kingdom; and 1.5 percent in the eurozone) leaves monetary policies no further room to maneuver.
The decades-long cycle of increasing debt has ended in every economy of mature capitalism.
The U.S. dollar’s centrality as international reserve currency has diminished, depriving the expansive U.S. monetary policy of its principal condition for success.
The expansion of capitalist markets now encounters objective limits (for example, environmental destruction). It therefore does not seem pessimistic at all to offer the prognosis “that the economy, even after the immediate devaluation crisis is stabilized, will at best be characterized for some time by minimal growth, and by high unemployment, underemployment, and excess capacity”.^[21]

And though there was a brief recovery through Obama-era policies, by 2021 the overall trend got worse.

As Michael Roberts says of the American rate of profit, it…

“has fallen 27% over the period 1945-2021. We can also discern the huge fall in profitability from 1965-82 from 23.2% to 13.5%. And we can identify a recovery during the so-called neo-liberal period from 1982 to 17.5% in 2006. After that, the rate of profit falls gradually, but in a series of booms and slumps, in what I call the period of the Long Depression, to 16.3%.” ^[22]

Given this we suddenly have a very logical explanation for Trump’s actions.

While liberals attempt to explain Trump’s actions as the folly of ‘stupid proletarians’ and fascists frame them as an effort to ‘restore the white race,’ Marxists understand that Trump’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill is primarily aimed at restoring America’s rate of profitability. It does so by slashing indirect wages, cutting $4.5 trillion in public spending. Likewise through threatening invasion of allies, redrawing alliances, and racketeering nations for resources and hegemony like Trump has been engaging in, which all diminish a falling rate of profit.

While the mass of public spending costs were previously allocated to sectors dominated by unproductive labor (those that do not generate surplus value, such as public services) the bill redirected significant resources toward productive labor, notably through military spending and private contracts for immigration enforcement, totaling $325 billion.^[23]

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) itself is an amalgam of private corporations being boosted to the tunes of billions with Palantir getting 139.3 million, AT&T 90.7 million, Deloitte 24 million, Dell 18.8 million, Motorola Solutions 15.6 million, General Dynamics 9.6 million, CoreCivic 538.2 million, and GEO Group 636.2 million.^[24] Core Civic Group CEO said on a call, that “given the intrinsic value of our assets and the unprecedented growth opportunities we anticipate will materialize over the balance of this year and next year, we believe that our current equity valuation offers an attractive opportunity for investors.”^[25]

The expansion of fictitious capital has now reached its physical limits and can no longer mask the stagnation of the real, value‑producing economy. When we look at the seemingly erratic actions of the modern American empire – such as public threats to ‘acquire’ Greenland, the U.S. military raid that captured Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro, and the willingness to deploy military force far beyond U.S. borders – the explanation is not some inexplicable national dementia that could be corrected by a Democratic victory. What we are witnessing are the logical end results of a system that has run out of room to breathe. Under the pressure of a falling rate of profit, liberal decency and democratic norms are discarded because the system can no longer ‘afford’ them. Capitalism begins to cannibalize everything, from its external relations with other states to its internal social fabric.

Surface‑level, mystifying explanations, blaming ‘globalist conspiracies,’ cultural decay, or ‘national stupidity’, serve a specific ideological function: they defend class society by obscuring its material roots. Through a Marxist logic that centers labor and material relations, we can see through these smoke and mirrors. The so‑called ‘illogical’ actions of the American state become comprehensible as expressions of capital’s own structural decay. What appears as erratic foreign and domestic policy, pressuring Denmark over Greenland’s sovereignty after a military intervention in Venezuela and deploying federal force, is, in fact, a material response to underlying economic imperatives.

Marx’s logic ultimately demonstrates that history is not a series of accidents but the result of objective material forces. Only by analyzing the world of labor and material change can we hope to rupture with the old world, rather than falling into the ideological traps laid by liberal explanations. The relations of production have long since become fetters on this mode of production, and crises in the ostensibly invincible neoliberal order are now undeniable.

Now is the time for movement, workers of the world unite!

^[1] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01b.htm

^[2] https://archive.org/details/germanbigbusines00turn

^[3] https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/essays/essay1.htm

^[4] https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/essays/index.htm

^[5] https://files.libcom.org/files/rubin_marx_theory_of_value.pdf

^[6] https://www.marxists.org/archive/cornforth/1953/materialism-and-dialectical-method.pdf

^[7] https://files.libcom.org/files/rubin_marx_theory_of_value.pdf

^[8] https://arxiujosepserradell.cat/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/How-Europe-Underdeveloped-Africa-by-Recorded-Books-Inc.Rodney-Walter-z-lib.org_.pdf

^[9] https://files.libcom.org/files/rubin_marx_theory_of_value.pdf

^[10] https://www.jstor.org/stable/23104259

^[11] https://www.jstor.org/stable/23104259