Published in 1848, The Communist Manifesto has only gained in relevance over the decades. In the most striking prose, the founding text of our movement encapsulates the situation facing humanity in 2025:

Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule.

What does it mean for the productive forces to be in revolt against the conditions of production? The capitalists have brought together a working class of over three billion people and set us to work with the most advanced and efficient technologies humanity has ever known. As a result, in their desperate scramble for greater profits, the capitalists have created forces able to produce much more than can be profitably sold.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in China. Chinese capitalism developed an enormous productive capacity capable of exporting $3.6 trillion worth of goods last year—a figure roughly equivalent to the GDP of the entire world in 1972.

Chinese capitalists can sell these commodities more cheaply than their competitors. And as Marx and Engels explained, “The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which [the bourgeoisie] batters down all Chinese walls.” Today’s trade war is nothing but the US ruling class’s frenzied drive to defend and revive uncompetitive national industries by trying to rebuild a battered Chinese wall of their own.

What happens when, inevitably, the glut of commodities no longer finds a market? Marx and Engels described the absurd predicament of capitalism’s recurring crises of overproduction—when society is plunged into “momentary barbarism” because manufacturing capacity has outgrown the world market:

In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity—the epidemic of overproduction. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.

The capitalists are always searching for ways to avoid this disorder. For half a century, they pumped their economy with cheap credit, artificially expanding the limits of the market. From 1965 to 2007, the US credit market grew from $1 trillion to $50 trillion. Since then, it’s doubled again to $102 trillion. As Marx and Engels explained:

The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? . . . By paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.

Year after year, the capitalist state obliged by raising its debt limit, supplying all the cheap credit the capitalists needed to keep the system afloat, kicking the can down the road. The problem is that every time they kicked it, the size of the can grew exponentially.

From 1980 to 2020, federal spending on all combined interest payments grew from $100 billion to $500 billion—a significant but relatively gradual increase over a 40-year span. Then, from 2020 to 2024, it more than doubled, reaching $1.1 trillion last year. What was once unsustainable in the long run has become unsustainable now—interest payments now exceed the US military budget.

The dawning recognition of this impasse has covered American society in a shroud of pessimism and hopelessness. But Marx and Engels were not prophets of despair. They understood that the same forces which produced the crisis have also furnished a way out:

The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.

 

But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons—the modern working class—the proletarians.