Dow 50,000 — and workers selling blood

In February 2026, the Dow Jones Industrial Average crossed 50,000. Television anchors called it strength.

At the same time, an estimated 200,000 people a day are selling their blood plasma to pay rent, buy groceries or cover medical bills.

That is the U.S. economy.

A million jobs vanish

The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently revised down nonfarm payroll growth for 2024–2025 by 1.03 million jobs. For months, officials celebrated a “strong labor market.” Now we learn that more than a million of those jobs never showed up in the payroll tax records.

January job growth was concentrated in health care and social assistance — including child care and family services. Much of the rest of the economy was flat or losing ground.

Inflation tells a similar story. Core services — health care, insurance, basic necessities — continue rising. Yet housing components in the Consumer Price Index understate rent pressures, holding down official inflation figures. Because Social Security cost-of-living adjustments are tied to those numbers, retirees receive increases that lag behind real expenses.

Workers are told conditions are solid. Their bills say otherwise.

Wages down, profits up

In 1980, labor’s share of gross domestic income stood at 58%. By 2025, it had fallen to 51.4%.

That shift represents roughly $2 trillion a year that no longer goes to wages. It flows upward as profits, interest and dividends. The average worker loses about $12,000 a year compared to the 1980 distribution.

Over the same period, the top 1% doubled its share of national income.

This is why people making $75,000 or even $120,000 a year report selling plasma to stay afloat. Most of the people called “middle class” are workers with higher salaries, not owners. When even they are selling plasma, it shows how far conditions have fallen.

Grocery prices have risen more than 25% in the past five years. Child care costs in most states are rising faster than overall inflation. More than 70% of people in the United States say raising children is unaffordable.

Around six in 10 people in the United States report living paycheck to paycheck — including many households earning over $100,000 a year. That is what a $2 trillion transfer from wages to profits produces. One missed paycheck becomes a crisis.

Overproduction and postponed crisis

Capitalist crises are crises of overproduction — too many goods are produced to be sold at a profit. Companies can fill warehouses, but they cannot sell enough at a price that sustains profit. Profits fall. Weaker firms go bankrupt. Factories close. Workers are laid off.

For working people, it is devastation. For the system, it has a function. Bankruptcies wipe out smaller competitors. Assets are sold cheap. Wages are pushed down. After enough damage, profits recover for big capital and the largest corporations.

The state manages crisis in the interests of the largest corporations. Markets are propped up. Speculation is rescued. Asset prices are inflated. Losses are shifted onto the public. That deepens instability — and makes the next downturn more severe.

That fragility surfaced in January when political pressure intensified against the Federal Reserve. As doubts grew that monetary policy would be bent to short-term political demands, gold surged to nearly $5,500 an ounce before settling near $5,000. Gold spikes when confidence in the dollar and the institutions behind it weakens.

Automation under strain

Artificial intelligence is accelerating layoffs across the workforce. Office staff are being cut first. Warehouses and factories are next.

This is not neutral progress. In an economy strained by overproduction, automation becomes a tool to defend profit margins. Workers lose jobs not because their work is unnecessary, but because it is not profitable enough.

The capacity exists to shorten the workweek and raise living standards. Instead, productivity gains are used to cut payrolls and intensify insecurity.

Minneapolis breaks the narrative

On Jan. 23, 2026, Minneapolis saw its first general strike since 1934. Up to 100,000 people mobilized after federal police killings and an ICE surge turned working-class neighborhoods into occupied zones.

The strike was political. It targeted federal authority, not a single employer or contract.

The same state that overstated job growth and understated inflation deployed paramilitary forces in a major U.S. city. The people who lost jobs and the people who faced ICE raids live in the same neighborhoods.

Crisis abroad

The blockade of Cuba, threats against Iran, tariff wars, military deployments and talk of seizing territory are presented as strength. They defend U.S. financial power and force other countries to absorb the shock of a weakening dollar and a fragile domestic economy.

In January 2026, Washington went further — invading Venezuela, kidnapping President Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores and transporting them to the United States.

At the same time, U.S. naval and air operations in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific have killed more than a hundred people in actions that constitute extrajudicial assassinations under international law.

These measures reflect a state under strain — using blockades, financial pressure and military force to maintain global dominance as conditions at home deteriorate.

That is what a declining empire does — it bombs, blockades and kidnaps to hold power its economy can no longer secure.

One system, two headlines

Dow 50,000 and workers selling blood describe the same system.

The stock market measures the wealth of those who own stocks. It does not measure whether working people can live without selling part of their bodies.

In Minneapolis, workers answered federal violence with a general strike. That showed where real power lies — not in the Dow, not in the Federal Reserve, not in the balance sheets of the largest corporations, but in the ability of working people to shut things down.

The state manages crisis for big capital. Workers can manage their own future only by organizing to confront it.