Expand or die: a system that can’t stop creating crises

The two factories that tell the story

Walk through Fort Worth, Texas, and you’ll see the story of a collapsing empire written in steel and concrete.

At one end of town stands a vast Lockheed Martin plant, where workers in clean rooms assemble guidance systems for missiles. The plant runs three shifts a day. Its parking lot is full, the lights never go off, and the hum of war production fills the night.

A few miles away, the old General Motors transmission factory sits in silence. The windows are broken. Weeds push through the cracked pavement. The GM plant closed in 2009 — 1,100 workers lost their jobs. Lockheed opened its new plant in 2015. It employs 450.

 “Do the math,” a laid-off GM worker told a local reporter. “That’s what happened to this country.”

Capitalism can’t sit still

Corporate media calls this “globalization” or “market forces.” In reality, the U.S. economy has turned from one that made things into one that serves monopoly corporations and finance capital.

Capitalism is a system that must expand or die. A company that doesn’t crush competitors and extract ever-greater profit disappears. That’s true for corporations and for capitalist countries alike.

Profit doesn’t come from “innovation.” It comes from us — the working class. In every shift, part of the day covers wages; the rest produces unpaid value for the boss. That stolen time is the source of profit. The more the bosses can stretch it, the richer they get.

That’s why every struggle over housing, food, and health care is ultimately a fight over who controls the value workers create.

They shipped the jobs away — on purpose

For decades, U.S. corporations could afford higher wages because they had the world’s most advanced industry and access to cheap food and energy. But as other countries industrialized, the bosses sought new ways to keep profits up — slashing wages, busting unions, and exporting jobs.

Manufacturing’s share of the U.S. economy has dropped from about 16% in the 1990s to a little over 10% today, and the U.S. slice of global factory output has fallen as well. The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) reports that the U.S. share of world trade in manufactured goods was 7.9% in 2023.

China now produces more than 30% of the world’s manufactured goods. This isn’t just an economic change — it’s a reshaping of working-class power across the globe.

But there’s one exception. The U.S. still clearly dominates in arms production: Between 2020 and 2024, it accounted for 43% of global arms exports, making it the single largest supplier by a wide margin.

The war economy

Defense spending, military contracts, and state procurement dominate advanced U.S. manufacturing. 

Fighter jets, drones, submarines, and missile systems — Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and General Dynamics get billions in guaranteed government contracts.

Even the tech giants are in on the game. Amazon’s cloud hosts military intelligence. Microsoft’s $22 billion contract builds “battlefield cloud computing.” Google designed AI to help drones analyze targets.

Big tech AI was built on government-funded research and development and is maintained on Pentagon contracts. The military-industrial complex has moved into Silicon Valley.

Engineers and machinists who could be building trains, housing, or clean energy systems are instead building killing machines. Factories that could make solar panels produce missile components. Entire towns depend on defense contracts to survive.

Every war or near-war means billions more for the weapons industry. Lockheed and Raytheon make their biggest profits not in all-out wars, but in endless, low-level conflict that never ends.

An economy that needs constant war to keep the assembly lines running isn’t strong — it’s sick.

The dollar weapon and the empire’s decay

How does Washington afford endless subsidies for billionaires and corporations while cutting aid for workers? Through the dollar system that acts like a global siphon.

For decades, oil, food, and nearly all global trade have been priced in U.S. dollars. That forces countries to hold dollars, use Wall Street banks, and buy U.S. Treasury bonds just to keep trade moving. Wall Street turned the dollar into a weapon that props up the empire while draining the world.

When Washington froze $300 billion of Russia’s reserves in 2022, every country saw the warning: Their wealth is safe in U.S. banks only as long as they obey Washington.

Now, nations from China and India to Brazil, South Africa and Saudi Arabia, as well as Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia are moving away from the dollar — buying gold, trading in their own currencies, and building payment systems independent of Wall Street. On Oct. 7, 2025, gold broke $4,000 an ounce — a sign that the dollar’s grip is slipping, along with fears of Trump’s expanding war drive: trade wars, wars in Palestine and Ukraine, and the war buildup against Venezuela, Cuba, and China.

As the financial foundation weakens, the empire turns inward — seeking to preserve profit through repression at home.

Class war at home

While Wall Street and big corporations get blank checks, workers and the poor get the knife.

Trump’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” is an assault on survival. It cuts food stamps and Medicaid — pushing millions toward hunger and sickness. It forces people to “work” 80 hours a month, paid or unpaid “volunteer,” to keep health coverage — flooding the labor market with desperate workers and driving wages down.

Fifteen million people will lose health care under the new rules. That’s not an accident — it’s the point. A hungry, sick worker is easier to control.

The administration has purged hundreds of thousands of federal workers and gutted labor protections.

The austerity cuts, surveillance programs, and privatization drives are not separate events. They are a coordinated offensive — a dictatorship of capital to impose deeper exploitation in a crisis economy.

There’s always money for war. Never enough to keep people alive.

War doesn’t build — it destroys

Politicians love to say that military spending “creates jobs.” That’s half true.

Yes, war contracts make factories busy. But war production eats itself. You can’t live in a bomb. You can’t eat a missile. You can’t recycle a dead body.

Weapons don’t build wealth — they burn it.

World War II didn’t end the Great Depression because war is productive. It ended because it put idle factories and workers back to work — but at enormous human and material cost. After the war, the U.S. dominated only because every rival’s factories lay in ruins. That’s not happening again.

The empire abroad, repression at home

U.S. power abroad rests on the same foundation as inequality at home — domination through finance, coercion, and debt. Global South countries are forced to borrow in dollars, privatize services, and open their markets to U.S. corporations. At home, those same corporations cut wages, bust unions, and evict tenants.

The working class, both here and abroad, pays the same price for the same system.

To survive, capitalism must expand — into new markets, new resources, and new forms of exploitation. But every expansion creates new crises. The system’s hunger for profit is endless, and so is the destruction it brings — from shuttered towns in Texas to the burning forests of the Amazon.

Capitalism’s problem is not mismanagement or bad policy. It is the system itself — a machine that devours workers and the planet alike. To end its devastation, we need not reform it but replace it with an economy built on human need, not profit.