Happy New Year. Good-bye 2025! And good riddance. Hello 2003! And welcome. It feels like déjà vu all over again. The US bourgeoisie went to a party, got blackout drunk, woke up the next morning in bed with its own spouse. Talk about nightmares. Meet the new new year, same as the old old year.
The names changed, certo. But what’s in a name? Hussein, Maduro? Bush, Trump? Powell, Rubio? WMD, Fentanyl? Same-same. It’s all capitalism. You don’t need Google Maps to tell you that Iraq Venezuela is just a hop, skip, and jump across the Golf of America.
How did we get here? By aircraft carrier, of course. And helicopter. And West Texas Intermediate. All the hard work put into keeping the price of oil from slipping beneath the point of no return isn’t working. At Christmas time all the oil majors found under their poisoned trees were lumps of coal. The spot price of crude was down about 15 percent from the year prior as production outpaced consumption by more than 2 million barrels a day.
All that hard work, like the embargoes on Russian, Iranian, Venezuelan oil. All that hard work, like withdrawing tax break subsidies on electric vehicles, sequestering and defunding research into climate change. All that and none of that arrested the slide in oil prices brought about by increasingly efficient production. Nothing stimulates overproduction like overproduction. Crisis is never permanent for capital, but overproduction becomes chronic.
Some, those who think capitalism is an “economy,” and that an “economy” aims to establish “equilibrium” as its optimal operating environment, bemoan this “instability” as impairing profits. Ass-backwards is the closest these “economists” get to the reality of wrecker capitalism. First, capitalism may aim at equilibrium, but it always misses in that the generation and allocation of profit requires dynamic disequilibrium. It is the aim for profit, accurate or impaired as aim may be, that reproduces that disequilibrium as “instability.”
Price represents the commodity’s successful conversion to capital. So, the declining price of oil, the expression of oil as value, not the size of the reserves, not the accessibility of the reserves, not the grade or weight of the oil, is what drives the attack on Venezuela, like it did on Iraq. Like it will do on Iran.
Manufacture surplus, impose scarcity.
To Trump, Venezuela is just some rent-controlled building owned by a hostile landlord and filled with uncooperative tenants. The “emancipation” of value requires, at the very least, the elimination of the landlord and the expulsion of the tenants. Destroying the building itself, making the asset uninhabitable, unlivable—dispossession by arson—is the obvious method.
Chaos, disorganization, cruelty, rather than being the means to generate the instability essential to arbitrage the dissonance between price and value, increase in frequency and extent to become the ends in themselves.
Those who argue that Trump represents the decline of US capitalism in the confrontation with ascendant capitalism in China miss the point—not that US capitalism can’t be displaced, but that US capitalism won’t be displaced by a replacement bourgeoisie without one or two great depressions and one or two great wars. The decline is not the decline of US “hegemony,” it is a self-demolition of capitalism on the global stage, in the style of the grifter, laying waste to other peoples’ money. And other people.
S. Artesian
January 6, 2026
anticapital0.wordpress.com 
This is also defense of the dollar and thus the imperial seignorage, keeping all that crude from trading in the BRICS+ basket of currencies. Replacing or salvaging the deal with the Saudis back in 1975.
Amiri
Your analysis of the value, prices, and profits of oil companies and the attack on Venezuela is correct. And the likely attack on Iran as well. War is not politics by other means (Carl von Clausewitz), it is economics by other means. The Second Contradiction of the Capitalist Mode of Production.
“The decline is not the decline of American ‘hegemony,’ but a self-destruction of capitalism on a global level.” On the one hand, contrary to the BRICS supporters, I doubt that China, in its return to capitalism since Deng Xiaoping, just as all real socialism did due to the regressive phase of the CER socialist cycle of 1917, is capable of replacing the USA. On the other hand, it is true that Capitalism is ‘self-destructing,’ and there will be more sharp recessions (we’ve already had two with the 2008 Crisis and Covid-19) and world war will increase, but beware, capitalists don’t do all the demolition work. They go as far as the phase of surplus value. Growing surplus value since the 1980s (decreasing real wages demonstrate this) and surplus value that they don’t relinquish and will only increase until wages reach the subsistence level. This regression can only be stopped by the working class, and it must do so with a revolution after their bank account reaches the subsistence level. And it will be they who must wield the shovel that buries and completes the demolition of the Capitalist. Marx said that Capitalism raises its gravediggers. But these gravediggers, who are the workers, have to act, they have to use the shovel. The capitalists won’t.
Off-topic: I haven’t forgotten to send you the book on CER cycles. It’s just that I’m significantly behind schedule in its completion. It’s a book that was already written and manually completed in its nine chapters, but in recent months I’ve added a lot of new content on general socialist economics, which I believe will enhance the theory. The CER theory remains, and will continue to be, highly consistent with what happens in the long term (more than three years) in capitalism and society. Revolutions, the engine of history according to Marx, are what build and grow human society—economic structure and political and cultural superstructures—by increasing the population’s participation in production and its benefits.
Regards,