It’s always interesting to try to figure out what the central bank is going to do next. Previously, under Joe Biden, they raised rates as inflation was rising. They thought it would lower demand, which was supposedly why the prices of commodities were above their value.
Well here we go with Jerome Powell again, who is under pressure from Donald Trump to lower interest rates. Trump has raised tariffs to most of the rest of the world, and the prices of products at the store are already starting to rise.
When the price of commodities rises, it is referred to as inflation. Yet Powell is under great pressure to lower rates, which is the exact opposite of what he did last time inflation was an issue.
Given the weak jobs report that came out last week, and the lowering of gross domestic product under Trump, signs point to efforts to bail out the companies again with low interest rates.
Trump wants the state to subsidize capitalist industry, by having a low or no interest rate at all. During the pandemic the rates were a percent or so. We remember when they were dumping the milk, yet it was record after record for the stock market numbers.
Why not, it worked for Don then? This time when Don got jobs numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showing poor job growth, he fired the leader of the group, and installed a loyalist who helped write the Heritage Foundation’s project 2025. Now it is no longer providing monthly job statistics. Soon it may be like trying to get real numbers out of the press about profit, surplus value, the expenditures on labor as compared to the whole investment including the constant capital. It may become even more of a free masonry regarding the average rate of profit.
Which leaves one wondering just what these big investors go on when they invest in a company?
Perhaps they are privy to more than the Washington Post or Reuters. But without government data, how can they predict what the market is doing, especially the bond market? All we know is the BLS data Don banned is showing the economy is slowing down. That makes a rate cut likely.
But that is the exact opposite of what Don was trying to prove. He wanted the jobs numbers to reflect strength, which they did not. The clever bail out of free credit to bourgeois owned industry seems to be in order, the rates may fall.
Again we have to question Powell, whose raising of the interest rate under Biden occurred. We were told to keep inflation at 2% of GDP the interest rate, the cost of money, had to rise. Now we see inflation rising again, but this time in conjunction with the economy shedding jobs. What will he do?
He could keep the rates where they are, and let the next Central Bank chairman who will be appointed by Trump lower rates. He has to wait until May when Trump gets to appoint whoever he likes the post of Chairman.
Use of the state to prop up failing industry is common in capitalist Germany. In their case, the state buys stocks in the distressed companies, with no votes in decision making. They sell the shares after the company can again make a profit without the state assistance. It is an example of why nationalized companies do not always represent something radical, like socialism. The key here is the government pays for the shares, they do not simply appropriate them.
Trump’s bailout is coming; it will be here by May. Farm subsidies are already here, at 12 billion dollars for large farms. Among Trump’s ideas about the state one might find unusual is his tariffs. When you tack on a money amount to a sale, it just gets passed on to the next seller or buyer; it changes nothing to the buyer as he simply passes on the additional sum to the next seller. It is the consumer who pays ultimately for the tacked on cost, the tariff. That is why prices are rising at the store, the consumer is paying for the tariffs.
But here comes Trump with the tariff money he gained, which he considers surplus value. It’s the value of the product, which he obtained through taxing imports. He touts this as progress, a sign of his strength he can raise taxes at his discretion.
But in the end the taxes are paid for by the consumer, even if the buyer or seller simply passes on the cost to the next guy, with no real effect on the merchant.
Another clever use of the state, this time to bring in additional taxes by taxing imports. Trump has his billions from tariffs. But inflation is the result. Which puts Powell in an uncomfortable position; will he bend to a bailout, even though inflation is rising? Again, it is the exact opposite to what he put Biden through when he raised the interest rate due to inflation.
These bourgeois slight of hand games change nothing about the fact the taxes, profit , etc. all represent surplus value. The tariffs and taxes now have in common with profit; it is not a transparent process; with the statistics people compromised, no one will have any way of knowing the real numbers, perhaps until it’s too late.
Prepare for Trump’s big bailout, anything to keep those stock market numbers rising.
Nicholas Jay Boyes
Milwaukee Wisconsin
American Democratic Republic
8 15 2025
I edited this 9:23 2025. Powell’s rates fell a quarter percentage.point yesterday.
Anti-Dühring by Frederick Engels 1877 Part III: Socialism
II. Theoretical
“The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or estates is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men’s brains, not in man’s better insight into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. They are to be sought, not in the philosophy, but in the economics of each particular epoch. The growing perception that existing social institutions are unreasonable and unjust, that reason has become unreason, and right wrong, is only proof that in the modes of production and exchange changes have silently taken place with which the social order, adapted to earlier economic conditions, is no longer in keeping. From this it also follows that the means of getting rid of the incongruities that have been brought to light must also be present, in a more or less developed condition, within the changed modes of production themselves. These means are not to be invented, spun out of the head, but discovered with the aid of the head in the existing material facts of production.
“What is, then, the position of modern socialism in this connection?
“The present structure of society — this is now pretty generally conceded — is the creation of the ruling class of today, of the bourgeoisie. The mode of production peculiar to the bourgeoisie, known, since Marx, as the capitalist mode of production, was incompatible with the local privileges and the privileges of estate as well as with the reciprocal personal ties of the feudal system. The bourgeoisie broke up the feudal system and built upon its ruins the capitalist order of society, the kingdom of free. competition, of personal liberty, of the equality, before the law, of all commodity owners, of all the rest of the capitalist blessings. Thenceforward the capitalist mode of production could develop in freedom. Since steam, machinery, and the making of machines by machinery transformed the older manufacture into modern industry, the productive forces evolved under the guidance of the bourgeoisie developed with a rapidity and in a degree unheard of before. But just as the older manufacture, in its time, and handicraft, becoming more developed under its influence, had come into- collision with the feudal trammels of the guilds, so now modern industry, in its more complete development, comes into collision with the bounds within which the capitalistic mode of production holds it confined. The new productive forces have already outgrown the capitalistic mode of using them. And this conflict between productive forces and modes of production is not a conflict engendered in the mind of man, like that between original sin and divine justice. It exists, in fact, objectively, outside us, independently of the will and actions even of the men that have brought it on. Modern socialism is nothing but the reflex, in thought, of this conflict in fact; its ideal reflection in the minds, first, of the class directly suffering under it, the working class.
“Now, in what does this conflict consist?
“Before capitalistic production, i.e., in the Middle Ages, the system of petty industry obtained generally, based upon the private property of the labourers in their means of production; {in the country,} the agriculture of the small peasant, freeman or serf; in the towns, the handicrafts. The instruments of labour — land, agricultural implements, the workshop, the tool — were the instruments of labour of single individuals, adapted for the use of one worker, and, therefore, of necessity, small, dwarfish, circumscribed. But, for this very reason they belonged, as a rule, to the producer himself. To concentrate these scattered, limited means of production, to enlarge them, to turn them into the powerful levers of production of the present day — this was precisely the historic role of capitalist production and of its upholder, the bourgeoisie. In Part IV of Capital, Marx has explained in detail, how since the fifteenth century this has been historically worked out through the three phases of simple co-operation, manufacture and modern industry. But the bourgeoisie, as is also shown there, could not transform these puny means of production into mighty productive forces without transforming them, at the same time, from means of production of the individual into social means of production only workable by a collectivity of men. The spinning-wheel, the hand-loom, the blacksmith’s hammer, were replaced by the spinning-machine, the power-loom, the steam-hammer; the individual workshop by the factory implying the co-operation of hundreds and thousands of workmen. In like manner, production itself changed from a series of individual into a series of social acts, and the products from individual to social products. The yarn, the cloth, the metal articles that now came out of the factory were the joint product of many workers, through whose hands they had successively to pass before they were ready. No one person could say of them: “I made that; this is my product.”
“But where, in a given society, the fundamental form of production is that spontaneous division of labour, there the products take on the form of commodities whose mutual exchange, buying and selling, enable the individual producers to satisfy their manifold wants. And this was the case in the Middle Ages. The peasant, e.g., sold to the artisan agricultural products and bought from him the products of handicraft. Into this society of individual producers, of commodity producers, the new mode of production thrust itself. In the midst of the old division of labour, grown up spontaneously and upon no definite plan, which had governed the whole of society, now arose division of labour upon a definite plan, as organised in the factory; side by side with individual production appeared social production. The products of both were sold in the same market, and, therefore, at prices at least approximately equal. But organisation upon a definite plan was stronger than spontaneous division of labour. The factories working with the combined social forces of a collectivity of individuals produced their commodities far more cheaply than the individual small producers. Individual production succumbed in one department after another. Socialised production revolutionised all the old methods of production. But its revolutionary character was, at the same time, so little recognised that it was, on the contrary, introduced as a means of increasing and developing the production of commodities. When it arose, it found readymade, and made liberal use of, certain machinery for the production and exchange of commodities: merchants’ capital, handicraft, wage-labour. Socialised production thus introducing itself as a new form of the production of commodities, it was a matter of course that under it the old forms of appropriation remained in full swing, and were applied to its products as well.
Engels and Karl Marx saw the historical condition of capitalism, much of which is still with us, of the late 19th century. England. Engels work here in Anti Duhring is some of the most advanced work in historical materialism that was ever written. The depth of the thought, which traces capitalism from its beginnings in the 16th century in England, to recent conditions, places it as a piece of work that should be enjoyed by anyone who has interest in the genesis of modern capitalism.
Here is more:
“In the mediaeval stage of evolution of the production of commodities, the question as to the owner of the product of labour could not arise. The individual producer, as a rule, had, from raw material belonging to himself, and generally his own handiwork, produced it with his own tools, by the labour of his own hands or of his family. There was no need for him to appropriate the new product. It belonged wholly to him, as a matter of course. His property in the product was, therefore, based upon his own labour. Even where external help was used, this was, as a rule, of little importance, and very generally was compensated by something other than wages. The apprentices and journeymen of the guilds worked less for board and wages than for education, in order that they might become master craftsmen themselves. Then came the concentration of the means of production in large workshops and manufactories, their transformation into actual socialised means of production. But the socialised means of production and their products were still treated, after this change, just as they had been before, i.e., as the means of production and the products of individuals. Hitherto, the owner of the instruments of labour had himself appropriated the product, because, as a rule, it was his own product and the assistance of others was the exception. Now the owner of the instruments of labour always appropriated to himself the product, although it was no longer his product but exclusively the product of the labour of others. Thus, the products now produced socially were not appropriated by those who had actually set in motion the means of production and actually produced the commodities, but by the capitalists. The means of production, and production itself had become in essence socialised. But they were subjected to a form of appropriation which presupposes the private production of individuals, under which, therefore, everyone owns his own product and brings it to market. The mode of production is subjected to this form of appropriation, although it abolishes the conditions upon which the latter rests.*8 This contradiction, which gives to the new mode of production its capitalistic character, contains the germ of the whole of the social antagonisms of today. The greater the mastery obtained by the new mode of production over all decisive fields of production and in all economically decisive countries, the more it reduced individual production to an insignificant residium, the more clearly was brought out the incompatibility of socialised production with capitalistic appropriation.
“The first capitalists found, as we have said, wage-labour ready-made for them. But it was exceptional, complementary, accessory, transitory wage-labour. The agricultural labourer, though, upon occasion, he hired himself out by the day, had a few acres of his own land on which he could at all events live at a pinch. The guilds were so organised that the journeyman of today became the master of tomorrow. But all this changed, as soon as the means of production became socialised and concentrated in the hands of capitalists. The means of production, as well as the product, of the individual producer became more and more worthless; there was nothing left for him but to turn wage-worker under the capitalist. Wage-labour, aforetime the exception and accessory, now became the rule and basis of all production; aforetime complementary, it now became the sole remaining function of the worker. The wage-worker for a time became a wage-worker for life. The number of these permanent wageworkers was further enormously increased by the breaking-up of the feudal system that occurred at the same time, by the disbanding of the retainers of the feudal lords, the eviction of the peasants from their homesteads, etc. The separation was made complete between the means of production concentrated in the hands of the capitalists, on the one side, and the producers, possessing nothing but their labour-power, on the other. The contradiction between socialised production and capitalistic appropriation manifested itself as the antagonism of proletariat and bourgeoisie.
“We have seen that the capitalistic mode of production thrust its way into a society of commodity producers, of individual producers, whose social bond was the exchange of their products. But every society based upon the production of commodities has this peculiarity: that the producers have lost control over their own social interrelations. Each man produces for himself with such means of production as he may happen to have, and for such exchange as he may require to satisfy his remaining wants. No one knows how much of his particular article is coming on the market, nor how much of it will be wanted. No one knows whether his individual product will meet an actual demand, whether he will be able to make good his costs of production or even to sell his commodity at all. Anarchy reigns in socialised production. But the production of commodities, like every other form of production, has its peculiar, inherent laws inseparable from it; and these laws work, despite anarchy, in and through anarchy. They reveal themselves in the only persistent form of social interrelations, i.e., in exchange, and here they affect the individual producers as compulsory laws of competition. They are, at first, unknown to these producers themselves, and have to be discovered by them gradually and as the result of experience. They work themselves out, therefore, independently of the producers, and in antagonism to them, as inexorable natural laws of their particular form of production. The product governs the producers.
“In mediaeval society, especially in the earlier centuries, production was essentially directed towards satisfying the wants of the individual. It satisfied, in the main, only the wants of the producer and his family. Where relations of personal dependence existed, as in the country, it also helped to satisfy the wants of the feudal lord. In all this there was, therefore, no exchange; the products, consequently, did not assume the character of commodities. The family of the peasant produced almost everything they wanted: clothes and furniture, as well as means of subsistence. Only when it began to produce more than was sufficient to supply its own wants and the payments in kind to the feudal lord, only then did it also produce commodities. This surplus, thrown into socialised exchange and offered for sale, became commodities. The artisans of the towns, it is true, had from the first to produce for exchange. But they, also, themselves supplied the greatest part of their own individual wants. They had gardens and plots of land. They turned their cattle out into the communal forest, which also, yielded them timber and firing. The women spun flax, wool, and so forth. Production for the purpose of exchange, production of commodities, was only in its infancy. Hence, exchange was restricted, the market narrow, the methods of production stable; there was local exclusiveness without, local unity within, the mark[114] in the country; in the town, the guild.
“But with the extension of the production of commodities, and especially with the introduction of the capitalist mode of production, the laws of commodity production, hitherto latent, came into action more openly and with greater force. The old bonds were loosened, the old exclusive limits broken through, the producers were more and more turned into independent, isolated producers of commodities. The anarchy of social production became apparent and grew to greater and greater height. But the chief means by aid of which the capitalist mode of production intensified this anarchy of socialised production was the exact opposite of anarchy. It was the increasing organisation of production, upon a social basis, in every individual productive establishment. By this, the old, peaceful, stable condition of things was ended. Wherever this organisation of production was introduced into a branch of industry, it brooked no other method of production by its side. Where it laid hold of a handicraft, that old handicraft was wiped out. The field of labour became a battle-ground. The great geographical discoveries, and the colonisation following upon them, multiplied markets and quickened the transformation of handicraft into manufacture. The war did not simply break out between the individual producers of particular localities. The local struggles begot in their turn national conflicts, the commercial wars of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries.[115] Finally, modern industry and the opening of the world market made the struggle universal, and at the same time gave it an unheard-of virulence. Advantages in natural or artificial conditions of production now decide the existence or non-existence of individual capitalists, as well as of whole industries and countries. He that falls is remorselessly cast aside. It is the Darwinian struggle of the individual for existence transferred from nature to society with intensified violence. The conditions of existence natural to the animal appear as the final term of human development. The contradiction between socialised production and capitalistic appropriation now presents itself as an antagonism between the organisation of production in the individual workshop, and the anarchy of production in society generally.
Engels ibid.
For anyone who claims to have feelings about Marxism they should read a book like Capital. Anti Duhring is also one to examine, before one spurs out foolish statements like those put forward by cable television, and its adherents.
“But with the extension of the production of commodities, and especially with the introduction of the capitalist mode of production, the laws of commodity production, hitherto latent, came into action more openly and with greater force. The old bonds were loosened, the old exclusive limits broken through, the producers were more and more turned into independent, isolated producers of commodities. The anarchy of social production became apparent and grew to greater and greater height. But the chief means by aid of which the capitalist mode of production intensified this anarchy of socialised production was the exact opposite of anarchy. It was the increasing organisation of production, upon a social basis, in every individual productive establishment. By this, the old, peaceful, stable condition of things was ended. Wherever this organisation of production was introduced into a branch of industry, it brooked no other method of production by its side. Where it laid hold of a handicraft, that old handicraft was wiped out. The field of labour became a battle-ground. The great geographical discoveries, and the colonisation following upon them, multiplied markets and quickened the transformation of handicraft into manufacture. The war did not simply break out between the individual producers of particular localities. The local struggles begot in their turn national conflicts, the commercial wars of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries.[115] Finally, modern industry and the opening of the world market made the struggle universal, and at the same time gave it an unheard-of virulence. Advantages in natural or artificial conditions of production now decide the existence or non-existence of individual capitalists, as well as of whole industries and countries. He that falls is remorselessly cast aside. It is the Darwinian struggle of the individual for existence transferred from nature to society with intensified violence. The conditions of existence natural to the animal appear as the final term of human development. The contradiction between socialised production and capitalistic appropriation now presents itself as an antagonism between the organisation of production in the individual workshop, and the anarchy of production in society generally.
“The capitalistic mode of production moves in these two forms of the antagonism immanent to it from its very origin. It is never able to get out of that “vicious circle” which Fourier had already discovered. What Fourier could not, indeed, see in his time is that this circle is gradually narrowing; that the movement becomes more and more a spiral, and must come to an end, like the movement of the planets, by collision with the centre. It is the compelling force of anarchy in the production of society at large that more and more completely turns the great majority of men into proletarians; and it is the masses of the proletariat again who will finally put an end to anarchy in production. It is the compelling force of anarchy in social production that turns the limitless perfectibility of machinery under modern industry into a compulsory law by which every individual industrial capitalist must perfect his machinery more and more, under penalty of ruin. But the perfecting of machinery is making human labour superfluous. If the introduction and increase of machinery means the displacement of millions of manual by a few machine-workers, improvement in machinery means the displacement of more and more of the machine-workers themselves. It means, in the last instance, the production of a number of available wage-workers in excess of the average needs of capital, the formation of a complete industrial reserve army, as I called it in 1845,*9 available at the times when industry is working at high pressure, to be cast out upon the street when the inevitable crash comes, a constant dead-weight upon the limbs of the working class in its struggle for existence with capital, a regulator for the keeping of wages down to the low level that suits the interests of capital. Thus it comes about, to quote Marx, that machinery becomes the most powerful weapon in the war of capital against the working class; that the instruments of labour constantly tear the means of subsistence out of the hands of the labourer; that the very product of the worker is turned into an instrument for his subjugation. Thus it comes about that the economising of the instruments of labour becomes at the same time, from the outset, the most reckless waste of labour-power, and robbery based upon the normal conditions under which labour functions; that machinery, the most powerful instrument for shortening labour-time, becomes the most unfailing means for placing every moment of the labourer’s time and that of his family at the disposal of the capitalist for the purpose of expanding the value of his capital. Thus it comes about that the overwork of some becomes the preliminary condition for the idleness of others, and that modern industry, which hunts after new consumers over the whole world, forces the consumption of the masses at home down to a starvation minimum, and in doing this destroys its own home market. “The law that always equilibrates the relative surplus-population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the labourer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of misery corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital” (Marx’s Capital, p. 671.) And to expect any other division of the products from the capitalistic mode of production is the same as expecting the electrodes of a battery not to decompose acidulated water, not to liberate oxygen at the positive, hydrogen at the negative pole, so long as they are connected with the battery.
Anti Duhring by Friedrich Engels
“We have seen that the ever increasing perfectibility of modern machinery is, by the anarchy of social production, turned into a compulsory law that forces the individual industrial capitalist always to improve his machinery, always to increase its productive force. The bare possibility of extending the field of production is transformed for him into a similar compulsory law. The enormous expansive force of modern industry, compared with which that of gases is mere child’s play, appears to us now as a necessity for expansion, both qualitative and quantitative, that laughs at all resistance. Such resistance is offered by consumption, by sales, by the markets for the products of modern industry. But the capacity for extension, extensive and intensive, of the markets is primarily governed by quite different laws that work much less energetically. The extension of the markets cannot keep pace with the extension of production. The collision becomes inevitable, and as this cannot produce any real solution so long as it does not break in pieces the capitalist mode of production, the collisions become periodic. Capitalist production has begotten another “vicious circle”.
“As a matter of fact, since 1825, when the first general crisis broke out, the whole industrial and commercial world, production and exchange among all civilised peoples and their more or less barbaric hangers-on, are thrown out of joint about once every ten years. Commerce is at a standstill, the markets are glutted, products accumulate, as multitudinous as they are unsaleable, hard cash disappears, credit vanishes, factories are closed, the mass of the workers are in want of the means of subsistence, because they have produced too much of the means of subsistence; bankruptcy follows upon bankruptcy, execution upon execution. The stagnation lasts for years; productive forces and products are wasted and destroyed wholesale, until the accumulated mass of commodities finally filters off, more or less depreciated in value, until production and exchange gradually begin to move again. Little by little the pace quickens. It becomes a trot. The industrial trot breaks into a canter, the canter in turn grows into the headlong gallop of a perfect steeplechase of industry, commercial credit, and speculation, which finally, after break-neck leaps, ends where it began — in the ditch of a crisis. And so over and over again. We have now, since the year 1825, gone through this five times, and at the present moment (1877) we are going through it for the sixth time. And the character of these crises is so clearly defined that Fourier hit all of them off when he described the first as crise plethorique, a crisis from plethora.
“In these crises, the contradiction between socialised production and capitalist appropriation ends in a violent explosion. The circulation of commodities is, for the time being, stopped. Money, the means of circulation, becomes a hindrance to circulation. All the laws of production and circulation of commodities are turned upside down. The economic collision has reached its apogee. The mode of production is in rebellion against the mode of exchange, the productive forces are in rebellion against the mode of production which they have outgrown.
Engles ibid.
I really like the revolutionary energy this work by Engels has. He clearly has a great understanding of his topic, political economy, which shows here. HIs wisdom is formidable, and all the bourgeoisie can do is kill it with silence. Much like my own works. It will not be taught in schools, or promoted by the capitalist press. It is too revolutionary.
“The fact that the socialised organisation of production within the factory has developed so far that it has become incompatible with the anarchy of production in society, which exists side by side with and dominates it, is brought home to the capitalists themselves by the violent concentration of capital that occurs during crises, through the ruin of many large, and a still greater number of small, capitalists. The whole mechanism of the capitalist mode of production breaks down under the pressure of the productive forces, its own creations. It is no longer able to turn all this mass of means of production into capital. They lie fallow, and for that very reason the industrial reserve army must also lie fallow. Means of production, means of subsistence, available labourers, all the elements of production and of general wealth, are present in abundance. But “abundance becomes the source of distress and want” (Fourier), because it is the very thing that prevents the transformation of the means of production and subsistence into capital. For in capitalistic society the means of production can only function when they have undergone a preliminary transformation into capital, into the means of exploiting human labour-power. The necessity of this transformation into capital of the means of production and subsistence stands like a ghost between these and the workers. It alone prevents the coming together of the material and personal levers of production; it alone forbids the means of production to function, the workers to work and live. On the one hand, therefore, the capitalistic mode of production stands convicted of its own incapacity to further direct these productive forces. On the other, these productive forces themselves, with increasing energy, press forward to the removal of the existing contradiction, to the abolition of their quality as capital, to the practical recognition of their character as social productive forces.
“This rebellion of the productive forces, as they grow more and more powerful, against their quality as capital, this stronger and stronger command that their social character shall be recognised, forces the capitalist class itself to treat them more and more as social productive forces, so far as this is possible under capitalist conditions. The period of industrial high pressure, with its unbounded inflation of credit, not less than the crash itself, by the collapse of great capitalist establishments, tends to bring about that form of the socialisation of great masses of means of production which we meet with in the different kinds of joint-stock companies. Many of these means of production and of communication are, from the outset, so colossal that, like the railways, they exclude all other forms of capitalistic exploitation. At a further stage of evolution this form also becomes insufficient: the official representative of capitalist society — the state — will ultimately have to*10 undertake the direction of production. This necessity for conversion into state property is felt first in the great institutions for intercourse and communication — the post office, the telegraphs, the railways.
Friedrich Engels 1877 Anti Duhring
In this part he calls attention to the state having to take control of industry, and it is not socialism. His examples of the the post office, the telegraphs, the railways, has practical importance as the United States Postal Service, and Amtrak, the only passenger railroad. Telegraphs have become the internet, so this prediction of state control has yet to pass. But the fact he knocked off two in 1877 is remarkable.
“If the crises demonstrate the incapacity of the bourgeoisie for managing any longer modern productive forces, the transformation of the great establishments for production and distribution into joint-stock companies and state property shows how unnecessary the bourgeoisie are for that purpose. All the social functions of the capitalist are now performed by salaried employees. The capitalist has no further social function than that of pocketing dividends, tearing off coupons, and gambling on the Stock Exchange, where the different capitalists despoil one another of their capital. At first the capitalist mode of production forces out the workers. Now it forces out the capitalists, and reduces them, just as it reduced the workers, to the ranks of the surplus population, although not immediately into those of the industrial reserve army.
“But the transformation, either into joint-stock companies, or into state ownership, does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies this is obvious. And the modern state, again, is only the organisation that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the general external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists. The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers — proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution.
“This solution can only consist in the practical recognition of the social nature of the modern forces of production, and therefore in the harmonising of the modes of production, appropriation, and exchange with the socialised character of the means of production And this can only come about by society openly and directly taking possession of the productive forces which have outgrown all control except that of society as a whole. The social character of the means of production and of the products today reacts against the producers, periodically disrupts all production and exchange, acts only like a law of nature working blindly, forcibly, destructively. But with the taking over by society of the productive forces, the social character of the means of production and of the products will be utilised by the producers with a perfect understanding of its nature, and instead of being a source of disturbance and periodical collapse, will become the most powerful lever of production itself.
“Active social forces work exactly like natural forces: blindly, forcibly, destructively, so long as we do not understand, and reckon with them. But when once we understand them, when once we grasp their action, their direction, their effects, it depends only upon ourselves to subject them more and more to our own will, and by means of them to reach our own ends. And this holds quite especially of the mighty productive forces of today. As long as we obstinately refuse to understand the nature and the character of these social means of action — and this understanding goes against the grain of the capitalist mode of production and its defenders — so long these forces are at work in spite of us, in opposition to us, so long they master us, as we have shown above in detail. But when once their nature is understood, they can, in the hands of the producers working together, be transformed from master demons into willing servants. The difference is as that between the destructive force of electricity in the lightning of the storm, and electricity under command in the telegraph and the voltaic arc; the difference between a conflagration, and fire working in the service of man. With this recognition, at last, of the real nature of the productive forces of today, the social anarchy of production gives place to a social regulation of production upon a definite plan, according to the needs of the community and of each individual. Then the capitalist mode of appropriation, in which the product enslaves first the producer and then the appropriator, is replaced by the mode of appropriation of the products that is based upon the nature of the modern means of production: upon the one hand, direct social appropriation, as means to the maintenance and extension of production — on the other, direct individual appropriation, as means of subsistence and of enjoyment.
Engels ibid.
Anyone who said there was no direction given as to what to replace capitalism with should read this. Marx and Engels had a very clear picture in their minds about what constituted socialism, and how a society beyond capitalism would look.
“Whilst the capitalist mode of production more and more completely transforms the great majority of the population into proletarians, it creates the power which, under penalty of its own destruction, is forced to accomplish this revolution. Whilst it forces on more and more the transformation of the vast means of production, already socialised, into state property, it shows itself the way to accomplishing this revolution. The proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production in the first instance into state property. But, in doing this, it abolishes itself as proletariat, abolishes all class distinctions and class antagonisms, abolishes also the state as state. Society thus far, based upon class antagonisms, had need of the state, that is, of an organisation of the particular class, which was pro tempore the exploiting class, for the maintenance of its external conditions of production, and, therefore, especially, for the purpose of forcibly keeping the exploited classes in the condition of oppression corresponding with the given mode of production (slavery, serfdom, wage-labour). The state was the official representative of society as a whole; the gathering of it together into a visible embodiment. But it was this only in so far as it was the state of that class which itself represented, for the time being, society as a whole: in ancient times, the state of slave-owning citizens; in the Middle Ages, the feudal lords; in our own time, the bourgeoisie. When at last it becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary. As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection; as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a state, is no longer necessary. The first act by virtue of which the state really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society — this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a state. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not “abolished”. It dies out. This gives the measure of the value of the phrase “a free people’s state”, both as to its justifiable use at times by agitators, and as to its ultimate scientific insufficiency[117]; and also of the demands of the so-called anarchists for the abolition of the state out of hand.
“Since the historical appearance of the capitalist mode of production, the appropriation by society of all the means of production has often been dreamed of, more or less vaguely, by individuals, as well as by sects, as the ideal of the future. But it could become possible, could become a historical necessity, only when the actual conditions for its realisation were there. Like every other social advance, it becomes practicable, not by men understanding that the existence of classes is in contradiction to justice, equality, etc., not by the mere willingness to abolish these classes, but by virtue of certain new economic conditions. The separation of society into an exploiting and an exploited class, a ruling and an oppressed class, was the necessary consequence of the deficient and restricted development of production in former times. So long as the total social labour only yields a produce which but slightly exceeds that barely necessary for the existence of all; so long, therefore, as labour engages all or almost all the time of the great majority of the members of society — so long, of necessity, this society is divided into classes. Side by side with the great majority, exclusively bond slaves to labour, arises a class freed from directly productive labour, which looks after the general affairs of society: the direction of labour, state business, law, science, art, etc. It is, therefore, the law of division of labour that lies at the basis of the division into classes. But this does not prevent this division into classes from being carried out by means of violence and robbery, trickery and fraud. It does not prevent the ruling class, once having the upper hand, from consolidating its power at the expense of the working class, from turning its social leadership into an exploitation of the masses.
“But if, upon this showing, division into classes has a certain historical justification, it has this only for a given period, only under given social conditions. It was based upon the insufficiency of production. It will be swept away by the complete development of modern productive forces. And, in fact, the abolition of classes in society presupposes a degree of historical evolution at which the existence, not simply of this or that particular ruling class, but of any ruling class at all, and, therefore, the existence of class distinction itself has become an obsolete anachronism. It presupposes, therefore, the development of production carried out to a degree at which appropriation of the means of production and of the products, and, with this, of political domination, of the monopoly of culture, and of intellectual leadership by a particular class of society, has become not only superfluous but economically, politically, intellectually a hindrance to development. This point is now reached. Their political and intellectual bankruptcy is scarcely any longer a secret to the bourgeoisie themselves. Their economic bankruptcy recurs regularly every ten years. In every crisis, society is suffocated beneath the weight of its own productive forces and products, which it cannot use, and stands helpless face to face with the absurd contradiction that the producers have nothing to consume, because consumers are wanting. The expansive force of the means of production bursts the bonds that the capitalist mode of production had imposed upon them. Their deliverance from these bonds is the one precondition for an unbroken, constantly accelerated development of the productive forces, and therewith for a practically unlimited increase of production itself. Nor is this all. The socialised appropriation of the means of production does away, not only with the present artificial restrictions upon production, but also with the positive waste and devastation of productive forces and products that are at the present time the inevitable concomitants of production, and that reach their height in the crises. Further, it sets free for the community at large a mass of means of production and of products, by doing away with the senseless extravagance of the ruling classes of today and their political representatives. The possibility of securing for every member of society, by means of socialised production, an existence not only fully sufficient materially, and becoming day by day more full, but an existence guaranteeing to all the free development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties — this possibility is now for the first time here, but it is here.*11
“With the seizing of the means of production by society production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organisation. The struggle for individual existence disappears. Then for the first time man, in a certain sense, is finally marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal conditions of existence into really human ones. The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes under the dominion and control of man who for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of nature because he has now become master of his own social organisation. The laws of his own social action, hitherto standing face to face with man as laws of nature foreign to, and dominating him, will then be used with full understanding, and so mastered by him. Man’s own social organisation, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces that have hitherto governed history pass under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself, with full consciousness, make his own history — only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is the humanity’s leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.
To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the historical mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and thus the very nature of this act, to impart to the now oppressed class a full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish, this is the task of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific socialism.
Engels Anti Duhring
The part at the end, of man mastering nature, should be ecological symbiosis. Mastery of ecology was a second millennium concept; an ideal of mans control over nature, and its right to treat other organisms in the ecology as unwanted, often because they found their appearance unfavorable to humans.
Otherwise though for its time, it is a good piece of work. There are parts in this book that Engels talks about fixing ecology, like creating Milorganite from human sewage. Another prediction come true.
It is coming to light that the starlink satellite internet service run by Elon Musk is a poor example for providing internet service, unless there are few users at a time. Basically the conclusion is the more users on the service at a time, the slower it goes, or starts to malfunction.
“There’s an irony with Elon Musk’s Starlink internet service beamed from space: The more popular it becomes, the worse its speeds and reliability tend to get.”
“Those limitations are known, but a new analysis estimates the tipping point at which Starlink connections could bog down: With as few as 419 Starlink customers in an area the size of Tacoma, Washington, service for all users in the area could become unusable.”
“They (internet expert Sascha Meinrath’s group) believe that within the geographic coverage area of a single Starlink satellite – an estimated 62.9 square miles or roughly the area of Tacoma – hitting 419 Starlink customers could become a problem. That’s an average 6.7 Starlink customers per square mile.
“At that level of usage, they estimated that internet speeds for Starlink customers in the area would fall below the government’s definition of modern, reliable internet service for sending data out from your device. Service could be unusable under some conditions, they said.”
Elon Musk knew this, but kept it secret, and just kept launching more and more rockets with the starlink satellites on board, regardless of pollution in near orbit, or later on how offensive the militarization of space is becoming.
“All internet services experience those constraints, but internet experts say they’re more acute with Starlink, particularly for uses like sending images or video calls for which you send data out to the internet.”
Washington Post ibid.
“Ookla reports, based on user-initiated speed tests, were cited by the Federal Communications Commission last month when it rejected Starlink’s application to receive $885.51 million in broadband funding that had been tentatively awarded during then-Chairman Ajit Pai’s tenure. The FCC said it doubts whether Starlink can provide the grant’s required speeds of 100Mbps downloads and 20Mbps uploads.”
“”We observe that Ookla data reported as of July 31, 2022 indicate that Starlink’s speeds have been declining from the last quarter of 2021 to the second quarter of 2022, including upload speeds that are falling well below 20Mbps,” the FCC said at the time. Ookla, a private company, operates a widely used speed testing service and boasts that its data is often used by government and regulatory bodies.”
Article continues
“Starlink has more than 3,000 satellites in orbit so far. The Internet provider has FCC permission to deploy nearly 12,000 satellites, including those already being operated, and is seeking authorization to launch tens of thousands eventually.”
From link: internet speeds start to significantly slow. see above in Washington Post
Which one has to wonder, what is the real purpose of this exercise? Who benefits from using starlink?
“Wireline broadband is still the best. Overall, fixed broadband services in the US posted median download speeds of 150.1Mbps, uploads of 21.5Mbps, and 14 ms latency, the Q2 Ookla report said.”
“From the beginning, it was clear that Starlink is most appropriate for people who don’t have a solid cable or fiber connection in their homes. The recent data doesn’t change that overall conclusion, but Starlink users who are getting slower-than-expected speeds have good reason to be frustrated.”
Ibid, arstechnica
So clearly not the average person using starlink, at least not in a city, It costs 7 times more than cable internet, and it functions poorly compared to wire internet.
From here we go to Reuters, an article written yesterday about Elon Musk and the war in Ukraine, which his starlink internet service is providing access to for military purposes.
“KYIV – During a pivotal push by Ukraine to retake territory from Russia in late September 2022, Elon Musk gave an order that disrupted the counteroffensive and dented Kyiv’s trust in Starlink, the satellite internet service the billionaire provided early in the war to help Ukraine’s military maintain battlefield connectivity.”
“According to three people familiar with the command, Musk told a senior engineer at the California offices of SpaceX, the Musk venture that controls Starlink, to cut coverage in areas including Kherson, a strategic region north of the Black Sea that Ukraine was trying to reclaim.”
““We have to do this,” Michael Nicolls, the Starlink engineer, told colleagues upon receiving the order, one of these people said. Staffers complied, the three people told Reuters, deactivating at least a hundred Starlink terminals, their hexagon-shaped cells going dark on an internal map of the company’s coverage. The move also affected other areas seized by Russia, including some of Donetsk province further east.”
“Upon Musk’s order, Ukrainian troops suddenly faced a communications blackout, according to a Ukrainian military official, an advisor to the armed forces, and two others who experienced Starlink failure near the front lines. Soldiers panicked, drones surveilling Russian forces went dark, and long-range artillery units, reliant on Starlink to aim their fire, struggled to hit targets.”
“As a result, the Ukrainian military official and the military advisor said, troops failed to surround a Russian position in the town of Beryslav, east of Kherson, the administrative center of the region of the same name. “The encirclement stalled entirely,” said the military official in an interview. “It failed.””
This is an example of how connected Musk is to Ukraine, and its war with its now capitalist neighbor, Russia. As soon as starlink stopped functioning, everything started to fail.
article continues
“Whatever the reason for Musk’s decision, the shutoff over Kherson and other regions surprised some involved with the Ukraine war – from troops on the ground to U.S. military and foreign policy officials, who after Russia’s full-scale invasion that February had worked to secure Starlink service for Ukrainian forces. Panicked calls by Ukrainian officials during the outage to seek information from Pentagon counterparts, five people familiar with the incident said, were met with few explanations for what could have caused it. “
“As of April 2025, according to Ukrainian government social media posts, Kyiv has received more than 50,000 Starlink terminals. Easily transported and deployed, the pizza-box-sized devices communicate with thousands of SpaceX satellites now circling the globe. An initial batch of terminals was provided to Ukraine by SpaceX itself. Further terminals have arrived from donors including Poland, the United States and Germany.”
“SpaceX is the first company to establish an extensive network of communication satellites in low-Earth orbit, a region of space that is closer to the planet than areas where such satellites historically reside. The proximity of satellites that now make up the company’s constellation allows Starlink to offer space-based wireless connectivity that is faster than any previously available. “
“With more than 7,900 satellites now in orbit, SpaceX has become the world’s largest satellite operator. Its devices, which relay signals among each other to create a network that communicates with the ground, account for about two-thirds of all active satellites in space, according to Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian. “
“Compared to the geostationary satellites historically used for communications, the sheer number of SpaceX satellites helps make Starlink less vulnerable to jamming and attacks. Its far reach makes it valuable in remote and hostile terrain – from battlefields to airspace to high seas. In Ukraine, it has facilitated activities including communications, intelligence and drone piloting. “
Reuters ibid.
“Even before the conflict began, documents reviewed by Reuters show, SpaceX had already been in discussions with the U.S. government about providing Starlink in Ukraine. Rollout began after Russian troops crossed the border on February 24, 2022.”
“Two days later, Mykhailo Fedorov, a deputy prime minister in Ukraine, requested Musk’s help. “We ask you to provide Ukraine with Starlink stations,” he wrote on Twitter.”
“Musk responded in 10 hours. “Starlink service is now active in Ukraine,” he tweeted. “More terminals en route.””
“Poland was also instrumental in the early days of the war, shipping thousands of terminals to Ukraine shortly after the invasion. Warsaw this year said it has purchased about 25,000 Starlink terminals for the effort – roughly half the total now in Ukraine – and that it is paying the subscription costs to keep them connected. So far, it has spent about $89 million on Starlink for Ukraine.”
“The equipment has made a critical difference for Ukraine.”
“Day-to-day bureaucracy has also benefited. Early in the conflict, Ukraine stored state data in the cloud and relied on Starlink to access it, helping keep some government operations running. “We wouldn’t be anywhere without Starlink,” said Vadym Prystaiko, Ukraine’s ambassador to Britain until 2023. “The whole state was preserved.””
“On the battlefield, Ukraine quickly deployed Starlink to enable front-line troops to communicate with commanders. The service also allowed drone operators to transmit surveillance video streams and locate and attack Russian targets. Reuters couldn’t establish just when such attacks may have become a concern for Musk or SpaceX.”
“That month (September 2022), in a statement to the United Nations, Russia noted the use of “elements of civilian, including commercial, infrastructure in outer space for military purposes.” It warned that “quasi-civilian infrastructure may become a legitimate target for retaliation.””
“It isn’t clear whether Russia has tried to attack any Starlink facilities. Musk has said, however, that Moscow has repeatedly sought to block its connectivity. “SpaceX is spending significant resources combating Russian jamming efforts,” Musk wrote on X last year. “This is a tough problem.””
“Ukrainian drone specialists and Prystaiko, the former ambassador to Britain, said some attack devices, including maritime and bomber drones, now have Starlink antennas fitted to them. The antennas, in the case of sea drones, help operators guide the devices and view video feeds to classify targets, said Sidharth Kaushal, a senior research fellow at Royal United Services Institute, a London-based defense think tank.”
“Musk himself has boasted of Starlink’s importance to Kyiv. “My Starlink system is the backbone of the Ukrainian army,” he wrote on X in March. “Their entire front line would collapse if I turned it off.””
Reuters ibid.
So here we see what starlink was really designed for; internet service communications in war zones where many users, civilians, etc. along side military users would overload the system. It may hardly provide for civilian internet service, but it seems to work when NATO and their proxies are attacking a de populationed region. Clearly this militarization of outer space is exactly what Musk knew he was doing, when he launched all those satellites into near earth orbit.
There is still no way to return satellites to earth; they just break apart and make near earth orbit space stations vulnerable to space garbage, which damage for example fuel cells for returning to Earth. It also precludes any carbon based life being able to get near the planet without shielding of some sort. Fortunately we have been lucky enough not to have been visited by anything recently, up to this point this sounds like science fiction.
Musk’s system is being used to guide drones and missiles into Russia, some of which are targeting Moscow. It has allowed capitalists there to attempt to join NATO, to leave behind the past attempt to rectify the contradiction between wage labour and bourgeois. Ukraine preferred the material results of capitalism more than the quality of labor emancipated from production for surplus value. In exchange for weapons, luxury items, and modest gains in wages, capitalism returned full force to Ukraine.
Part of this was due to the failure of eastern communism to make the shift to ecological socialism.
Nuclear energy remains an export from capitalist Russia. The reactors built by GE and Hitachi in Japan, at Fukushima. melted down too. Japan has had to release hundreds of millions of liters of tritium polluted water into the ocean. Neighboring countries refuse to buy Japanese fish, or serve it in restaurants.
In Ukraine the largest nuclear reactors in Europe, the Zaporizhyzhia generation facilities, were never shut down, even after Chernobyl melted down. They are now in a war zone, shut down, for how long it is unknown. Clearly the return to capitalism by Ukraine did not have ecological goals.
Musk’s starlink service is the main weapon in the war in Ukraine. It is for communications and targeting of drones and missiles, designed to conquer Russia. What Musk told us about starlink being practical as a service for areas with little internet service seems to only work if you keep your connection a secret to your neighbors. The minute people start to use the starlink in numbers, it fails. But in Ukraine, in a depopulated area where the army uses starlink, it works fine. It is just that it is not really for civilian usage, like it was promised by Musk when he began launching massive amounts of satellites into orbit.
The satellites are essentially military satellites, it should be of no surprise Trump started a military wing called the “Space Force” when he was in office. Although he may not be getting along so well with Elon now, the fact remains he contributed about 275 million dollars to Trump’s campaign to get reelected. Space Force is really militarising space, and passing off starlink as a civilian organization.
Without Musk, no war in Ukraine. Unless you want to pay top dollar for crappy internet service somewhere in America without cable or telephone lines, starlink is not for you. But give it to capitalists in a war zone, it is essential. Musk even said before the war broke out he would deploy starlink for the military in Ukraine. Well there it is, in full glory bombing Moscow from Ukraine.
The answer to why Donald Trump is ramping up tariffs is protectionism, in particular to protect ExxonMobil and Chevron, who control much of the US market for petroleum. Other countries like Britain own Shell and BP,; Total is owned by France. By discouraging competition with tariffs, ExxonMobil and Chevron will control the US market for oil.
Chevron has a history. This work is from Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia.
Chevron is one of two massive companies that control much of the US market. There are 5 large oil companies in the world who control most or all of the market for petroleum production, refining, and selling the gas at gas stations. They are ExxonMobil, the largest, Chevron, BP , Total, and Shell. The Saudi Aramco company is in production of crude and are also a force to be reckoned with.
There was a time not so long ago, in memory, when the gas station was a family business. That began to change in the 80’s and 90’s and now it is rare to find a family or small business owned gas pump. Concentration of ownership by large capitalists removed the small gas stations,
“Since the acquisition of the Pacific Coast Oil Company by Standard Oil, the Standard descendant had traditionally worked closely with Texaco for 100 years, before acquiring Texaco outright in 2001. “
Wikipedia Chevron
There went another large company to Chevron. Texaco used to own gas stations, it is now all Chevron.
“The term “Seven Sisters” refers to seven major, vertically integrated oil companies that dominated the global petroleum industry from the 1940s to the 1970s. They controlled a significant portion of the world’s oil reserves and production. The “Seven Sisters” were: Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later BP), Royal Dutch Shell, Standard Oil Company of California (later Chevron), Gulf Oil (later merged with Chevron), Texaco (later merged with Chevron), Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (later Exxon, then ExxonMobil), and Standard Oil Company of New York (later Mobil, then ExxonMobil). “
Google search 7 sisters oil and gas
Basically Chevron and ExxonMobil are the main American petroleum producers, BP, Shell, and Total also dominate the market for oil. These 5 companies also own gas stations, which as mentioned have become owned by a few large companies, rather than small businesses.
“Hess Corporation (formerly Amerada Hess Corporation) is an American global independent energy company involved in the exploration and production of crude oil and natural gas.[3] It was formed by the merger of Hess Oil and Chemical and Amerada Petroleum in 1968. Leon Hess was CEO from the early 1960s through 1995, after which his son John B Hess succeeded him as chairman and CEO.[4] The company agreed to be acquired by rival oil company Chevron in October 2023.[5]
Wikipedia Hess company
This one has ties to the new fields in South America, in French Guyana. It is now owned by Chevron.
Exxon Mobil is the other American company that competes with Chevron, at least, if you believe that this small group of companies does not exert monopoly control of oil.
“ExxonMobil traces its roots to Vacuum Oil Company, founded in 1866. Vacuum Oil later was acquired by Standard Oil in 1879, divested from Standard in 1911 with its breakup, and merged by the Standard Oil Company of New York (Socony), later known as Mobil, in 1931. After the 1911 breakup, Standard Oil continued to exist through its New Jersey subsidiary, sometimes shortened to Jersey Standard, and retained the Standard Oil name in much of the eastern United States. Jersey Standard grew by acquiring Humble Oil in the 1930s and became the dominant oil company on the world stage. The company’s lack of ownership over the Standard Oil name across the United States, however, prompted a name change to unify all of its brands under one name, choosing to name itself Exxon in 1972 over continuing to use the three distinct brands of Esso, Enco, and Humble Oil.[16][17]
“In 1998, the two companies agreed to merge and form ExxonMobil, with the deal closing on November 30, 1999.
Wikipedia ibid
From here we pivot back to protectionism. Oil from Canada is now under a 25% tariff from Trump. This number fluctuates as Trump has repeatedly threatened larger tariffs, and exempted Canadian oil from some tariffs. Trump’s tariffs change from day to day and seem to be more reliant on stock exchange numbers than anything else.
“The predecessor company of Marathon Petroleum Corporation, Marathon Petroleum Company LLC, formerly known as Marathon Ashland Petroleum LLC, was formed by the merger of the refining operations of Marathon Oil and Ashland Inc. in 1998.[11] The merger brought together several descendants of the Standard Oil trust, as Ashland had acquired several smaller Standard spinoffs while Marathon itself was directly owned by Standard Oil. It also brought Marathon’s Speedway and Ashland’s SuperAmerica convenience store chains together and were subsequently merged as “Speedway SuperAmerica”.
“As longtime Marathon rivals Standard Oil of Ohio and Amoco were acquired by British company BP, Marathon Ashland adopted the marketing slogan “An American Company Serving America”, with the slogan being adjourned to Marathon fuel pumps. In 2006, it adopted its current slogan, “Fueling the American Spirit” as the company shifts emphasis on work ethic and the contributions of its employees.[12]
Wikipedia marathon petroleum
Mentioned above is a further ending of small businesses in petroleum, BP (British Petroleum) purchased Amaco. Marathon is still a big gas station owner in companies with American ownership. BP is massive, so is Total and Shell, and can leverage power in the market. Marathon does refining, but it is not nearly as large as ExxonMobil or Chevron. Watch for concentration of ownership to consolidate monopoly control of this company by the bigger competitors…
Place tariffs on the oil from outside the country, and these three companies are in position to have monopoly control of petroleum in America. It is probably not a coincidence that ExxonMobil are climate change skeptics, and Trump is too.
These dinosaurs pump and sell as much oil as possible, with little or no concern about climate change. The goal is to make a profit, not to promote proletarian ecological visions.
Consolidation of ownership occurs after every periodic crisis that comes in the business cycle of what we know of as modern capitalism. The economy starts off after the last crisis. Workers return to their jobs, business starts moving again. The unemployed army of workers who work in the precarious position of unskilled labor are slowly reemployed. Business picks up further, the economy starts to pick up a trot. Employment increases, and profit is created.
Then, there comes overproduction. The speculation on the ability of the market to exchange commodities begins to falter. The crisis comes, and the workers are out on the streets again, unemployed. The machines are no longer working, capital is being destroyed. The crisis is social; there are workers hungry and jaundiced, the machines to provide for them unable to be used due to capitalism.
At this point the large companies buy at ridiculously low prices their former competitors. This process gives rise to massive capitalist companies in control of things like petroleum.
American goals of returning to small businesses in control of, for example, gas stations, is a futile endeavor. The Standard Oil monopoly that preceded ExxonMobil and Chevron’s trust was hit with antitrust in the 20th century. As we can see, monopoly control of petroleum came raging back. There we have Trump, climate change skeptic, supporter of large petroleum industries, also throttling forward gasoline powered engines for cars. Built by Detroit, the large engine petroleum motors propel people where they need to go.
Attempts at building electric cars are now dominated by China, where EV’s cost as little as $10,000. Compare that to an American car, the low end is about $33,000, it is more expensive to buy an American petroleum powered vehicle than a Chinese EV..
Trump to the rescue, with 100% tariffs on Chinese EV”s. Protectionism rears its head, bourgeois gas companies are favored to powering cars with electricity. Combine this with Detroit’s failure to go metric, and it all becomes clear.
Protectionism is required to keep 20th century industry moving. The petroleum powered car has reached its climax. It peaked about 4 years ago, and is now being replaced with cheap electric vehicles, in particular from China. A return to a past era is promoted, “make America great again” sums up this desire.
Small business will not be returning, without a massive crisis. The companies are all in trusts, monopoly or duopoly are the real conditions. These same conditions create a class of people who own little or no real property, they do not own the means of production. They are wage labor, they work part of the day for these large companies and are not paid for their labour. Rather surplus value is created. This surplus value is created any time productive labor is employed. And it increases as industry grows larger, more concentrated.
These old industries were all created to make surplus value, essentially profit. The whole pattern of industry and society was shaped by them. What will their end bring?
Will the companies that were most responsible for capitalism, and its surplus value, disappear? Will surplus value go with these monopolies and trusts being dismantled? It shouldn’t seem so ridiculous that with the failure of the 20th century non metric factories socialism is being discussed. The ecological movement taught us about what forms of repression come with asking the bourgeoisie to clean up their act. How can you trust them to clean up the environment when they sell pollution on the market, as carbon credits?
As we slowly leave the 20th century, society is progressing. Our reliance on petroleum is starting to end. Will we leave what we know of as capitalism, when we are no longer reliant on these forms of industry?
The presence of pesticides has been a persistent problem since their development in the 20th century. There have been a number of industrial failures attached to this technology, notable the use of DDT and a close call with the extinction of the Bald Eagle, the national bird.
This led to the banning of DDT. Compounding the bird problem was the use of DDT in Agent Orange, used to remove the Vietnamese rainforest, where the American bourgeoisie was fighting a land reform movement. Not only were the victims of Agent Orange the residents of Vietnam, their own soldiers came back with strange cancers.
The current pesticides it is now coming out are associated with autism, and gender reversal, and other gender problems.
“Chlorpyrifos (CPS), also known as chlorpyrifos ethyl, is an organophosphate pesticide that has been used on crops, animals, in buildings, and in other settings, to kill several pests, including insects and worms. It acts on the nervous systems of insects by inhibiting the acetylcholinesterase enzyme.[7][8] Chlorpyrifos was patented in 1966 by Dow Chemical Company”
“Chlorpyrifos is considered moderately hazardous to humans (Class II) by the World Health Organization based on acute toxicity information dating to 1999.[10] Exposure surpassing recommended levels has been linked to neurological effects, persistent developmental disorders, and autoimmune disorders. Exposure during pregnancy may harm the mental development of children.”
In the United Kingdom, the use of chlorpyrifos was banned as of 1 April 2016 (with one minor exception).[12] As of 2020, chlorpyrifos and chlorpyrifos-methyl were banned throughout the European Union, where they may no longer be used.[13] The EU also applied to have chlorpyrifos listed as a persistent organic pollutant under the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants.[14] In May 2025, it actually got listed as a POP.”
“As of August 18, 2021, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a ban on the use of chlorpyrifos on food crops in the United States.”
Long term
Development
“Epidemiological and experimental animal studies suggest that infants and children are more susceptible than adults to the effects of low-dose exposure.[49][50] Chlorpyrifos has been suggested to have negative impacts on cognitive functions in the developing brain.[51] The young have a decreased capacity to detoxify chlorpyrifos and its metabolites. It is suggested that adolescents differ from adults in the metabolism of these compounds due to the maturation of organs in adolescents.[52] This results in disruption in nervous system developmental processes, as observed in animal experiments.[49] There are several studies observed in animals that show that chlorpyrifos alters the expression of essential genes that assist in the development of the brain.”
“Human studies: In multiple epidemiological studies, chlorpyrifos exposure during gestation or childhood has been linked with lower birth weight and neurological changes such as slower motor development and attention problems.[50][53] Children with prenatal exposure to chlorpyrifos have been shown to have lower IQs.[54] They have also been shown to have a higher chance of developing autism, attention deficit problems, and developmental disorders.[55] A cohort of 7-year-old children was studied for neurological damage from prenatal exposure to chlorpyrifos. The study determined that the exposed children had deficits in working memory and full scale intelligence quotient (IQ).[55] In a study on groups of Chinese infants, those exposed to chlorpyrifos showed significant decreases in motor functions such as reflexes, locomotion, and grasping at 9 months compared to those not exposed.[56] Exposure to organophosphate pesticides in general has been increasingly associated with changes in children’s cognitive, behavioral and motor performance.[57][58] Infant girls were shown to be more susceptible to harmful effects from organophosphate insecticides than infant boys.”
“Animal experiments: In experiments with rats, early, short-term low-dose exposure to chlorpyrifos resulted in lasting neurological changes, with larger effects on emotional processing and cognition than on motor skills.[50] Such rats exhibited behaviors consistent with depression and reduced anxiety.[50] In rats, low-level exposure during development has its greatest neurotoxic effects during the period in which sex differences in the brain develop. Exposure leads to reductions or reversals of normal gender differences.[59] Exposure to low levels of chlorpyrifos early in rat life or as adults also affects metabolism and body weight.[60] These rats show increased body weight as well as changes in liver function and chemical indicators similar to prediabetes, likely associated with changes to the cyclic AMP system.[60] Moreover, experiments with zebrafish showed significant detriments to survivability, reproductive processes, and motor function. Varying doses created a 30%–100% mortality rate of embryos after 90 days. Embryos were shown to have decreased mitosis, resulting in mortality or developmental dysfunctions. In the experiments where embryos did survive, spinal lordosis and lower motor functions were observed. The same study showed that chlorpyrifos had more severe morphological deformities and mortality in embryos than diazinon, another commonly used organophosphate insecticide.”
Wikipedia Chlorpyrifos
Here we see Chlorpyrifos is clearly associated with Autism, and on the verge of being totally banned in America. It has already been banned in the European Union, as it causes neurological damage to humans.
In the animal studies it is remarkable the studies showed gender effects on young animals. Given the bent of the bourgeoisie who support DOW Chemicals, who brought us this material, the idea pesticides are causing people to be gay can only be described as humorous.
Article continues
“Children of agricultural workers are more likely to come into contact with chlorpyrifos. A study done in an agricultural community in Washington State showed that children who lived in closer proximity to farmlands had higher levels of chlorpyrifos residues from house dust.[82] Chlorpyrifos residues were also found on work boots and children’s hands, showing that agricultural families could take home these residues from their jobs.[82] Urban and suburban children get most of their chlorpyrifos exposure from fruits and vegetables.[83] A study done in North Carolina on children’s exposure showed that chlorpyrifos was detected in 50% of the food, dust, and air samples in both their homes and daycare, with the main route of exposure being through ingestion.[84] Certain other populations with higher likely exposure to chlorpyrifos, such as people who apply pesticides, work on farms, or live in agricultural communities, have been measured in the US to excrete TCPy in their urine at levels that are 5 to 10 times greater than levels in the general population.”
“As of 2016, chlorpyrifos was the most used conventional insecticide in the US and was used in over 40 states; the top five states (in total pounds applied) are California, North Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, and Texas. It was used on over 50 crops, with the top five crops (in total pounds applied) being soybeans, corn, alfalfa, oranges, and almonds. Additionally, crops with 30% or more of the crop treated (compared to total acres grown) include apples, asparagus, walnuts, table grapes, cherries, cauliflower, broccoli, and onions.”
“In 2007 Pesticide Action Network North America and Natural Resources Defense Council (collectively, PANNA) submitted an administrative petition requesting a chlorpyrifos ban, citing harm to the brains of developing children.[118] On 10 August 2015, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in PANNA v. EPA ordered the EPA to respond to PANNA’s petition by “revok[ing] all tolerances for the insecticide chlorpyrifos”, den[ying] the Petition or [issuing] a “proposed or final tolerance revocation” no later than 31 October 2015.[119][120] The EPA was “unable to conclude that the risk from aggregate exposure from the use of chlorpyrifos [met] the safety standard of section 408(b)(2) of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FFDCA)” and therefore proposed “to revoke all tolerances for chlorpyrifos.”[120]
“In an 30 October 2015 statement Dow AgroSciences disagreed with the EPA’s proposed revocation and “remain[ed] confident that authorized uses of chlorpyrifos products, as directed, offer wide margins of protection for human health and safety.” In a November 2016 press release, DOW argued that chlorpyrifos was “a critical tool for growers of more than 50 different types of crops in the United States” with limited or no viable alternatives.”[121] The Environment News Service quoted the Dow AgroSciences’ statement disagreeing with the EPA findings.[122]
“Chlorpyrifos is one of the most widely used pest control products in the world. It is authorized for use in about 100 nations, including the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, Spain, France, Italy, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, where it is registered for protection of essentially every crop now under cultivation. No other pesticide has been more thoroughly tested.
— Statement Dow AgroSciences October 30, 2015
“In November 2016, the EPA reassessed its ban proposal after taking into consideration recommendations made by the agency’s Science Advisory Panel which had rejected the EPA’s methodology in quantifying the risk posed by chlorpyrifos. Using a different methodology as suggested by the panel, the EPA retained its decision to completely ban chlorpyrifos. The EPA concluded that, while “uncertainties” remain, a number of studies provide “sufficient evidence” that children experience neurodevelopment effects even at low levels of chlorpyrifos exposure.”
“On 29 March 2017, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, appointed by the Trump administration, overturned the 2015 EPA revocation and denied the administrative petition by the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Pesticide Action Network North America to ban chlorpyrifos.[124][125][126][127]
“The American Academy of Pediatrics responded to the administration’s decision saying they are “deeply alarmed” by Pruitt’s decision to allow the pesticide’s continued use. “There is a wealth of science demonstrating the detrimental effects of chlorpyrifos exposure to developing fetuses, infants, children and pregnant women. The risk to infant and children’s health and development is unambiguous.”[128]
“EPA estimated that, between 1987 and 1998, about 21 million pounds of chlorpyrifos were used annually in the US.[25] In 2001, chlorpyrifos ranked 15th among pesticides used in the United States, with an estimated 8 to 11 million pounds applied. In 2007, it ranked 14th among pesticide ingredients used in agriculture in the United States.[28
Wikipedia ibid
So the situation sort of hovers between illegal and legal, with Scott Pruitt of the last Trump administration supporting DOW Chemicals in their efforts at stopping a ban on Chlorpyrifos.
He met with DOW and discussed the pesticides. Then they tried to cover it up.
Article continues
“Asked in April whether Pruitt had met with Dow Chemical Company executives or lobbyists before his decision, an EPA spokesman replied: “We have had no meetings with Dow on this topic.” In June, after several Freedom of Information Act requests, the EPA released a copy of Pruitt’s March meeting schedule which showed that a meeting had been scheduled between Pruitt and Dow CEO Andrew Liveris at a hotel in Houston, Texas, on 9 March.[128] Both men were featured speakers at an energy conference. An EPA spokesperson reported that the meeting was brief and the pesticide was not discussed.[129]
“In August, it was revealed that in fact Pruitt and other EPA officials had met with industry representatives on dozens of occasions in the weeks immediately prior to the March decision, promising them that it was “a new day” and assuring them that their wish to continue using chlorpyrifos had been heard. Ryan Jackson, Pruitt’s chief of staff, said in an 8 March email that he had “scared” career staff into going along with the political decision to deny the ban, adding “[T]hey know where this is headed and they are documenting it well.”[130]
Wikipedia chlorpyrifos
Yet there is little sympathy for gender problems in Trump’s Republican bourgeoisie. It is now not uncommon for a person to be gay, and the right to marriage is even allowed. The right to be with whoever you choose to be with has become a personal choice. It is supported by law, and a majority of people support gay marriage.
Which of course is offensive to Trump and his following. But when we find exposure to Chlorpyrifos in animal studies is connected with gender reversal, all we can do is feel sympathy for anyone who was exposed, and is now having gender issues.
Whatever. Instead of looking for the reason why more children have Autism in the foods and farming techniques being practiced, the Republican bourgeois instead blame the Autism problem with vaccinations.
“ATLANTA — Federal vaccine advisers installed by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. voted Thursday to effectively remove an ingredient from flu shots, achieving a longtime, controversial goal of anti-vaccine activists and illustrating how their priorities are becoming official government guidance.
“The vote to no longer recommend influenza vaccines that contain the preservative thimerosal, based on the presentation of a single vaccine critic, is likely to have limited impact because the vast majority of flu shots are thimerosal-free.
“Thimerosal has been at the heart of false claims that vaccines can cause autism…
“This particular kind of vaccine, the multi-dose vial, is going to children, little children, it’s destroying their brains,” Kennedy said in a July 2023 podcast appearance. “I believe my belief is strongly grounded in science.”
Washington Post 6 26 2025
You really have to wonder how far from the scientific community these types of decisions are. There has been no positive studies linking vaccines to Autism. But when we look at pesticides, obviously we find a smoking gun. Chlorpyrifos are causing Autistic children, this is supported by human research. Animal research has shown gender reversal and neurological disorders connected with exposure to Chlorpyrifos.
The bourgeoisie has consistently opposed any regulation and laws regarding pesticides. Every ban has come with a legal and political struggle, with Republicans opposing laws banning the pesticides. Here again we have support for the large capitalist chemical companies who make large profits selling this stuff to farmers, who are probalay mostly ignorant to the real effects of this on their children, and the people they sell their produce to.
I don’t know if they are conspiring as regards their autism vaccine connection. It would seem to remove some of the guilt from DOW Chemicals, who control parts of the state under Trump, and have the power to remove EPA workers and leadership that is not in favor of pesticides, if vaccines were really what was causing Autism in children.
This has been going on for some time now, the companies know their products are causing illness yet keep producing toxic products for pest control on farms.
Well here they are caught again. The research shows their dirty hands, and their disregard of human and ecological health is their quest to create ever larger amounts of surplus value. Will it matter this time?
The drama of Donald Trump’s budget continues. The Senate cannot rectify the cost of the bill, which will add about 4 trillion dollars to the national debt. They are trying to use a new method to calculate what the bill actually costs. The Republican bourgeoisie has lowered its estimates of cost 90% less than what it actually is going to cost, if calculated in the traditional manner.
By what I guess one could call clever:
“If Congress doesn’t act, most of Trump’s signature 2017 tax cuts will expire this year. Extending those cuts through 2034 accounts for the vast majority of the bill’s estimated impact on the national debt. But the Senate’s method of cost-counting compares the cost of extending the tax cuts against the government’s finances with the cuts in place, not against the government’s finances if the cuts expire. “
Washington Post 6 28 2025
So Trump’s “tax cuts” are what is making the 4 trillion dollar debt that is going to have to be paid by younger generations, risking default. By not including the extension of the tax cuts, which is probably the most important part of the bill, to the price of the bill, its cost is lowered 90%.
Which perhaps pleases the following of the Republicans who like to think they are masters of economics. Without the legislation, the tax cuts expire. By reasoning the tax cuts would not expire, the Senate simply adds on the cost of the bill without the tax cuts.
Would you feel comfortable about this group doing your bookkeeping? It overlooks a massive expenditure that will likely never be paid off. It defers payment to another generation, long past Trump’s ripe youth of 78 years old.
But what the heck? They always said someone would come to their assistance with nuclear waste. But it just keeps accumulating, a gift from the 20th century when long term effects of industry were less important than creating surplus value.
The government’s credit rating has already been degraded due to Trump. Moody’s was the last rating agency to downgrade the government’s credit rating. Yet Trump thinks he can remove the chairman of the Central Bank, and have lower interest rates.
The government’s credit rating falling means the bonds they are buying are riskier. This if anything would raise interest rates, as money is harder to get; the risk of default is rising.
In the end where this seems to be going is the currency is currently being devalued, which makes the debt lower as money is worth less. It also seems to make the stock market value rise.
If this continues wages will have to rise. If the value of money is less, workers have to undergo privations. This can only be maintained for so long without civil unrest, strikes, etc. resulting when workers on multimillion dollar machines are being paid minimum wages.
The whole thing looks increasingly like a powderkeg, and the Republican bourgeoisie are totally in control of the capitalist state. The debt was contracted to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. At some point it became clear Afghanistan’s natural resources, which was probably about all the country had for assets, could not pay the trillions of dollars borrowed.
This culminated in the defeat of the bourgeois state, and the subsequent debt. The whole adventure has to be written off as a failure, no profit is flowing in due to Afghanistan. Rather the opposite, with the weapons designed to be used there no good for fighting in Ukraine. The bomber planes may work in the developing world, but in Europe they seem to be a failure. They even gave Ukraine long range missiles, to no avail.
At some point the hard reality is going to have to sink in, probably when Moody’s cuts the government’s credit further. Then interest rates will have to rise again, just like now.
The downgrade of the government’s credit also came with the tariffs Trump is trying to place on Canada. He has gone so far as to suggest Canada becoming part of America.
After the overwhelming success of Afghanistan, how could Trump go wrong? I suppose Trump thinks the Canadians will just give in.
We have seen this road before. Iraq looked like a cakewalk, two interventions later the only profit to be made is selling the once nationalized oil under Iraq. They have yet to explain why they felt the need to expropriate the assets of the people of Iraq, who were represented by the Baath Socialist Party, the party that had nationalized the oil.
It is morally offensive that a sovereign country would have to endure this type of harassment. Canada is the second largest trading nation to America. They risk trade coming to a halt rather unceremoniously, if Trump attacked our neighbor to the north. I suppose then he thinks interest will fall.
Trump’s bill passed, and the tax cuts, at some point down the road, crisis is looming. Accounting tricks will not help them then, default or partial default will be the only answer. It already looks ridiculous to raise the interest rate, the amount of money the government buys its debts for. The bill could be more than 4 trillion if Trump has a new Fed chairman just keeps buying debt.
With both houses of Congress, and the president all being in the same political party, the Republicans, it would seem to be now that the bold moves would take place. Given the Republican bourgeoisie always preaches less government, and less taxes, just now has this unfolded?
Donald Trump and Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, just attempted to gut the state. They removed thousands of state workers and officials, in what was an attempt to pay off the national debt, which stands at 34.2 trillion dollars. It costs about a trillion dollars a year in interest. This money comes from taxes, through the more mysterious bond borrowing by the Central Bank. They buy money, to pay off expenses of the state, and the interest is paid for by taxes.
The Central Bank are indebting the state, and the bourgeois speculate on the ability of the state to be able to pay off its debts.
Musk’s effort seemed bold, and he promised to cut 2 trillion dollars from the state.
But then, things started to unfold that contradicted the Republican message we were so used to hearing about; how fat the state was, and how the assets of the state could be made private property. Musk started issuing to state offices and state industry ultimatums regarding their employment.
Musk really believed the Republican bourgeoisie, and attempted to gut the state. Things started to unravel though, and 2 trillion dollars became 1 trillion dollars. State workers really were losing their jobs, but it was becoming clear the state employees were there to help the bourgeois run industry that was needed but could not create a profit. The state industry could not be sold off to private businessmen, it turned out the state could not shrink in size much smaller than it already was, without causing civil unrest.
2 trillion went to 1 trillion, and at the end of Musk’s official work to make the state smaller, he saved about 150 billion dollars a year. This was about a half a percentage point of the expenditures of the state for 2024. This is about one sixth the size of the interest payments the bonds issued this year are paying.
Then Trump’s efforts at legislation, his budget “big Beautiful Bill” he was trying to pass, would indebt the state 2.4 trillion to 5 trillion dollars in 5 years.
So lowering taxes was fiction.
The massive tariffs also followed Republican leadership, taxes on imports. It’s simple; the importer buys a foreign product. When it arrives at the dock, the importer receives his receipt, with the tax on the purchase displayed on the bottom. In this case it is the tariff that is the tax, paid for by the importer. It is like Sales Tax, paid by the purchaser of the product, in this case the importer.
So much for lowering taxes. As far as the consumer goes, for instance WalMart has said prices there will be rising due to tariffs. Trump has said WalMart should make less profit, simply “eating the cost of the tariffs”. But stores like WalMart, where the proletariat shops, already were stretched to make a profit, having to compete with other stores like online giant Amazon. Amazon also has said prices are rising, due to tariffs.
The taxes from Trump on imports, whose Republicans preached about the “tax and spend” culture of Washington constantly to get elected, showed the latter was also fiction. At best they passed on the taxes to the next generation, by which time the next president will have to pay off the debt, or default.
Moody’s credit ratings are used to assess the creditworthiness of debt issuers, providing investors with insights into the likelihood of default and financial loss. The repayment of obligations is what is key here, and on May 16, 2025, Moody’s Ratings (Moody’s) downgraded the Government of United States of America’s long-term issuer and senior unsecured ratings to Aa1 from Aaa and changed the outlook to stable from negative.
This was the last credit ratings organization to downgrade the government’s credit rating, the others already concluded default by the bourgeoisie on its debts is a risk worthy of a downgrade.
Yet Trump kept suggesting the taxes he created on imports would help pay off the debts. But it was a drop in the bucket compared to the 32 trillion dollars owed by the government for its debts.
At this point Musk began sensing he had been made on ass of, and left the government. He would have a falling out with the president he paid 260 million dollars of his money to elect. It started getting ugly on social media, with Musk going so far as to suggest Trump should be impeached.
Trump then said Musk had a drug problem, which would explain why he was so easily taken when he heard the state was too fat, and its assets could be privatised.
I guess the only real question is why there are some who believe the economy has been helped by Trump and his Republicans. He threatened 150% taxes on Chinese imports. He backed off, but it remains about 50% on imports from China.
Trump is the taxman. And he is this with complete control of Congress, Senate and House. Perhaps the only question is is this not exactly what happens when the bourgeoisie has total control the state?
The structure of capitalist agriculture is an extension of the relationship of the owner of the company to wage labour. The farms are worked by people who do not own the land; they are not even renting it in most cases. The machinery like the tractors, harvesters, etc. are also not owned by the farming workers.
With the advent of farm machinery, it is now possible for large farms to be worked with a far higher productivity than in the recent past. There is far less labor in producing, for example, a potato, than ever before. The farms are a thousand acres or more, owned by a corporation, the workers basically wage labour, just like their proletarian cousins in the city.
A job in farming has become tending large machinery; driving a tractor, unloading trucks full of potatoes, etc. In many cases it is even beyond manufacture; workers are not using tools in skilled labour positions, rather are unskilled using machinery a child could learn to use.
The fact there are still small farms changes nothing about this. At best we can say it is remarkable that anyone can compete with the large farms that own and work most of the land.
The family farm, like the family grocery store, is becoming a memory. Those people left on the land have to make a hard decision; will they invest in large machinery in hopes competition with the corporations is possible? If they do not it may mean having to work in a town at a factory as well as farming. Or having to get credit to try to compete, knowing most people who attempt to compete with the corporation end up failing, and having to move \to the city.
The people left on the land may own a home and a car, but that is about the extent of the things they own. They do not own shares in the company they work for on the land, or industrial shares in joint stock companies. They are basically propertyless, like all wage labour.
There is a clear racial divide, in the north the farms being white owned. There are migrants though, often Mexican, who work sometimes legally or illegally on the farm. Needless to say they do not own the land they are working. They make the profits for the owners of the farms, they work hard, often for a small check they send much of back home to family as a remittance. It is their wage labour that creates the surplus value, which is the purpose of the operation to capitalists.
In this respect it is strange to hear the same bourgeoisie who control the farms coming out against migrant farmers. In the southwest it is common for farms to be worked by Mexicans, many of whom cross the border daily to work the fields. Without these low paid workers, it is questionable how many farms could even operate.
Yet constantly the republican bourgeoisie tries to remove migrants, and builds ramparts on the border, to stop immigration north. It looks like an Indian reservation, a demilitarized zone, and the army is even deployed there. All this to stop the same people who create the surplus value on the farms.
The landowners are overwhelmingly republican bourgeois, like the owners of urban factories. They supported Donald Trump as president , as he represents the owners of the means of production, as opposed to wage labour. The more concentrated ownership becomes on the land, the stronger corporations who own the land become,
This creates a rural population only one step removed from moving to the city. Those displaced by modern machinery stay out of the city only at the large farm owners’ mercy. They are a sort of unemployed army of workers of the land, like their urban counterparts of the city , who are also living check to check precarious positions as for their employment.
Unions of farm workers are rare, rebellion can lead to removal from the job and a transition to life in the big city. The lack of political organization of the wage labour on the farms is mercilessly taken advantage of by the landowners, who squeeze maximum surplus value out of workers, many of whom are recent arrivals from Mexico.
Production is for commodities; the workers do not work for their own food, at least not on purpose. They may eat potatoes they farmed, but their job is not to feed themselves, it is social labor. It is abstract labour, for society, controlled by the owner of the land.
It may be unfortunate, but large scale farming seems inevitable with the advent of large farm machinery. Competing with the potato harvester looks futile for a small farmer. It’s like returning to small business from monopoly; a futile endeavor. You cannot go back to a simpler time, even though the republican bourgeoisie seems to want a return to a past era, to “Make America Great Again”, when small businesses sold the groceries.
As far as large farms go, cooperative ownership is replacing capitalist ownership. Already there are large cooperative grocery stores, owned by the workers, selling the produce of cooperative production.
This isthe logical answer to the large scale corporations control of the land, employee ownership of large farms. With the ownership of farms no longer a mom and pop operation, unions mean for wage labour its emancipation from work that is sort of a mix of manufacture and large industry, on machines he does not control, to realization it is his own labour that is responsible for the machinery around him, and the state of the land.
The division of town and country has become stark, with the large farm starting immediately adjacent to the suburban worker’s dwelling. He owns no chickens or gardens, yet there is land all around him, often lying vacant. He has no gardens or land to speak of. The division between town and country could not be more evident.
It is this division which is also a product of the corporations owning the farms. They seem to be worried the workers will not be producing commodities, and will instead produce their own food. It’s like a fetish; any labour not subsumed by the social production of commodities is the target.
This barrier must be broken, and with it large scale private property on the land. When the proletariat is unleashed on the land a new stage of material and social development will have been reached. The city and the country will no longer be so divided, The two will merge into a fluid mesh, with city and country division becoming less obvious.
The current condition of society, modern culture, is a relatively recent phenomenon. It was only 1865 when it became illegal to own a human being.
It is hard to say that when slavery was present it was not a stage of barbarism. Slavery has its roots in the barbaric period of society, primarily in the mid to upper levels of barbarism. It would seem that black slavery was the higher stages of barbarism, eventually replaced by capitalism.
A slave was not paid. That is the most basic essence of slavery, the slave worked for a master who owned him, and was used as forced labour. In the east slaves were used for domestic purposes, for instance by the Muslim Arabs until fairly recently.
“Slavery was formally outlawed in Saudi Arabia in 1962 by a royal decree from King Faisal.”
Google search: What year did Saudi Arabia abolish slavery?
Christianity and Islam have much in common. Slavery was practiced in the New World from its discovery by Europeans. It lasted about 400 years; Spain and France were Catholic countries; clearly the ideology of the slave master was Catholicism.
The British practiced slavery in the New World too, they were Protestant Christians. Canada was the exception, black slavery was never practiced there. But the practice was present in America, and continued unabated for 91 years after independence.
The revolution did not abolish slavery. The feudal system of economics reigned supreme, with slavery practiced. Society was still barbaric. It wasn’t until 1863 slavery started to end.
It was replaced by capitalism; it was cheaper to hire a freeman to create commodities than a slave. Slaves escape, and when this occurred the owner was out the value of money he paid for the slave. They also had to be fed and clothed, and it was cheaper to have a freeman paid as wage labour than to have a slave to labour.
But barbarism is still partially present in capitalism. The practice of part of the day being worked with no pay may be an advancement from the whole day’s labour being unpaid, but the practice of working for a master and not being paid part of the day has lingered on into modern society.
It is precisely this relationship that capitalism is based on. It is rooted in the upper stages of barbarism, patriarchal society. The arrangement common to barbarians, slavery, was present in the New World. The slaves were for labouring on large farms, as opposed to Arab domestic slaves I mentioned earlier in this article. Domestic slavery took place in the New World too, but working slaves were more common in the west.
The lower stages of barbarism were a more civilized arrangement. Native Americans owned little property, and hunted and fished as a means of living for thousands of years before the upper stage of barbarism reached them, when Spain, France and Britain arrived. What they found was a matriarchal society with no state, at least nothing like what we know of as the state. There was little property, and no fraud or extortion. Society was organized in gens, familial and tribal. A good description of this is found in Friedrich Engels The Origin of the Family, State and Private Property.
The upper stages of barbarism also practiced genocide. Extermination of the native Americans can hardly be considered civilized. To qualify that though, the Holocaust should show us just how far we are from barbarism. Clearly we are still in the upper levels of barbarism.
Ecological society comes at and after the late stages of barbarism. Part of this is when the mechanism that creates the surplus value is uprooted, when the state machinery is placed in the museum. The state is the mechanism which, paid for with surplus value, the class structure is maintained. It is slowly going away, as less and less people own property, like joint stock company paper.
Another form of barbarism is the practice of polluting air and water by non metric industry. And it should be obvious the Republican bourgeoisie are still most connected to ownership of these primitive operations, periodically bailed out by the state.
Legal rights to pollute the ecology are a part of barbaric modern culture. Although pollution is inevitable, barbarism and modernism condone it.
An ecological society will outlaw pollution altogether, recycling and composting are part of this. These two movements came about out of ecological necessity rather than as a surplus value producer for capitalists. It may cause pollution to recycle, but it is a recognition of man’s effects on ecology to attempt to remove pollution. It does not condone pollution, rather accepts it as inevitable sometimes. Making it legal leads to modern ideas of trading carbon emissions, in other words condoning pollution, just making the more primitive pollution causing factories to have to pay for the right to pollute the air and water. The fact it is traded on the stock market should be enough to tell us where this is going. Society will no longer condone any pollution, but it will still pollute the ecology, the pollution will not be traded on the stock exchange, speculated on to create a profit.
The feudal system of property, when it was acceptable to own a human being, is only a little over a century away. In Asia minor it is only 63 years away. Modern society still retained wage labour; work for a master with no pay for part of the day. Ecological ideas came in the late modern period. Society will come to relate to ecology as a process of symbiosis, rather than as a source of resources to be exploited by capitalism for surplus value.
Money Capital. Interest. Role of the Central Bank. 4 21 2025
“Shortly after markets opened, Trump referred to Powell as a “major loser” on Truth Social and said the U.S. economy could slow without an immediate reduction in the cost of money amid the fallout from his trade war.”
Washington Post 4 21 2025
Note the “cost of money” This refers to money capital that is paid interest for its part in the production of commodities. The money is first loaned to, for example, an industrial capitalist, who uses the money to produce a commodity, then sells it, and repays the loan, with interest.
The interest is comes from the part of the surplus value created by the industrial capitalist, he calculates ahead of time that he is going to have to pay the money capitalist interest. The cost of the money capital is referred to as the price of money. It is the amount of surplus value that money as a commodity produces when loaned out.
Trump is making the price of money to be lower; Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell is in charge of this. Apparently there is a separation of powers agreement that Trump cannot just order interest rates to go down, instead we have Powell sort of independent to make these conclusions.
It may make the price of money lower, but it also must interfere with the average rate of profit. The interest rate is a tangible condition, and it is speculated on by money capitalists. Where the money capitalist keeps his money that he expects interest to accumulate on, would seem to have to sort of compete with industrial capital. If there was more than the average rate of profit to be made on money capital as opposed to industrial capital, people would invest their money in money capital instead of industrial capital.
But without industrial capital, there can be no money capital. There is no goose that lays golden eggs. The Alchemists of the Middle Ages thought all they had to do was figure out how to make gold and they could have anything they wanted. They failed to see the process by which productive labour created commodities. The money capitalists can get so caught up in speculation they forget industrial capital is where money capital comes from. The result is a bubble, where speculation runs rampant, often on high risk investments, backed by nothing more than paper.
It would seem the bubble is starting to break now, and Trump’s capitalists want the price of money to be cheaper. If it is cheaper to get a loan, you can invest the money and bring in more profit by speculating on money capital.
The irrational form of money as a commodity, which can be bought or sold for a price, would explain why in the previous article I noted the stock market feels they are trading commodities. The commodity money is bought and sold at the exchange, thus they trade commodities.
The exchange of commodities is not where this surplus value is created. All wealth is the product of human labor, whether or not it is paid for,. All this exchanging is a cost of production, money capital is originally a product of productive labour, the surplus value this labour has created is where money capital is derived.
Thus the foolishness of suggesting exchange of a commodity produces wealth. The merchant may make trading commodities run more smoothly for the industrial capitalist, but his wealth is from production. Exchange, even if he does make out like a bandit sometimes, the money he makes is a cost of production for the capitalist, the money comes out of industrial capital’s profit.
The accumulation of money capital has reached absurd amounts, the state’s debt alone is 32 trillion dollars. In this case it is not even speculation on a material commodity, there is no commodity or production of a commodity speculated on several years down the road. This practice, paid for by bonds, is also connected to the interest rate. The federal reserve uses its money it gets paid the interest rate for, the price of money, to loan out to money capitalists, who loan it to industrial capitalists, to produce commodities.
Calculation of interest on his profit is where money capital is formed. It has a sort of legal agreement, the money loaned has to be paid back with interest, regardless of if the capitalist made a profit producing commodities. There is a legal relationship between the leader and burrower, to pay a certain interest rate on the loan regardless of if it was used productively.
The price of money is real, and Trump knows what it means. He may not have had experience running a factory, but as a luxury real estate person, he knows what lowering the interest rate will do. It makes it easier to loan out money capital. Speculation on in the process by those in between the industrial capital and the money capital runs rampant.
Ecological Era 
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