Iran’s Proposal Rejected: The Continuation of Crisis and War
On the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, Iran put forward a proposal: reopening the Strait of Hormuz and returning to nuclear negotiations in exchange for lifting the naval blockade, easing pressure on oil exports, and a ceasefire. Trump rejected it. But the issue is not the loss of a “peace opportunity.” What was rejected was a proposal to alter the conditions of confrontation between two states, not to end the relations that generate war. .
On the surface, the negotiations concern Hormuz; in reality, the struggle is over which power, and under what conditions, can regulate the circulation of capital and the regional order
Crisis of Order
The United States and Israel possess overwhelming military superiority and have destroyed parts of Iran’s military capacity and infrastructure. But operational success is not the same as a strategic outcome: Iran has neither surrendered nor seen its state collapse, and its capacity to impose costs in the Persian Gulf has not disappeared.
Imperialist power is not merely the capacity to bomb. Such a power must also be able to guarantee energy flows, the movement of ships, the confidence of allies, and a degree of predictability in trade. The war has disrupted precisely these conditions.
Before the war, around 125 commercial vessels passed through Hormuz each day; on one September weekend, only 17 did so. Ship-to-ship transfers rose to around 2.5 million barrels per day, while the transport cost of some cargoes exceeded $30 per barrel. This is not simply an “economic effect of war.” War has entered the very process of capital’s reproduction.
Capital does not require only factories and markets in order to reproduce itself. It also requires energy, transport, credit, secure trade routes, the state, relative stability, and a labour force capable of setting this entire network in motion again every day. When war disrupts these links, it is no longer an external event that merely affects the economy; it becomes one of the forms through which the crisis itself moves.
The central contradiction lies here: capital resorts to war in order to preserve its order, yet war destroys part of the conditions required for the reproduction of that same order.
The Strait of Hormuz: A Lever of Pressure
Iran cannot defeat the United States in a conventional confrontation, but through its geographical position, missiles, drones, and threats to energy routes, it can raise the cost of continuing the war. This capacity has also pushed the United States to reassess its war industries in order to strengthen its ability to counter Iran’s cheaper and effective drone and missile systems. In this sense, Iran’s military power has been effective in disrupting the circulation of capital and bargaining over a larger share of it. This merely exposes one aspect of the general crisis and the inability to reproduce order. (Reuters, 2026e; Cancian & Park, 2026)
The reactionary states of Iran and the United States are not equal in military power, global position, or the instruments at their disposal. But both operate within the relations of capital and the state, and both transfer the costs of their rivalry onto society.
From this standpoint, the Iranian state’s “resistance” not only offers no benefit to the working class; it reproduces the conditions of repression and exploitation. In the same way, “security” and “freedom of navigation” in the language of the United States are merely political names for preserving capital’s preferred order.
This also clarifies the meaning of Iran’s proposal and its rejection. If the issue were only the renewed passage of oil tankers, reopening Hormuz could have been advantageous to the United States. But accepting Iran’s proposal could have meant acknowledging that Tehran had turned disruption at one of the principal arteries of global capital into leverage for imposing conditions in negotiations.
Trump has said that he wants an agreement, but does not consider this agreement acceptable. The issue, therefore, is not negotiation as such; it is the conditions under which the war ends and the balance of power that remains afterward. (Reuters, 2026b)
War and negotiation are not opposing policies. Bombing is used to alter the conditions of negotiation; blockade to intensify pressure; Hormuz to raise the cost of the blockade; and negotiation to consolidate a balance that neither side has been able to impose solely on the battlefield.
In this sense, diplomacy is the continuation of conflict by other means, just as war is used to impose conditions that must later be consolidated politically.
The rejection of Iran’s proposal reveals, more than merely the failure of a negotiation, the limits of both sides’ power. The United States possesses far greater destructive power, but has still been unable to transform that power into a political order that can reproduce itself without rising costs. Iran has been able to raise the cost of war, but the power to disrupt provides no way out for Iranian society from its economic, social, and class crisis.
The Crisis of Capital
This is one of the forms taken by the historical crisis in the total reproduction of capital: in order to preserve the conditions of its own reproduction, capital turns to instruments that themselves disrupt those very conditions.
War makes energy routes insecure; raises transport costs; drives states to increase military budgets; reorganizes production around the requirements of war; and transfers the costs of that reorganization onto society.
Under such conditions, the issue is no longer simply the “victory or defeat” of one state. The issue is that the very mechanisms intended to preserve order contribute to the production of greater disorder. For the working class, this contradiction has an entirely different meaning.
The class line begins where the costs of war and “post-war reconstruction” are transferred onto labour: falling real wages, inflation, austerity, intensified work, the militarization of production, and the transfer of social wealth into war budgets.
The Anti-War Movement, the Anti-Capitalist Movement
But the working class is not merely the point onto which the costs of war are shifted. Arms production, energy extraction and refining, ports, transport, and the logistical network of war all rest on its social labour. Class independence is therefore not simply a moral position against war; it potentially rests on a material power without which the war machine cannot move. On this basis, workers’ resistance to attacks on their living standards in order to make them bear the costs of war and crisis is, in practice, also resistance to capital’s war and militarism. In this sense, every step toward organizing a class-based and internationalist movement against war must proceed by advancing the organization of this resistance and the ongoing struggles of the working class, linking them at the class and global levels—not through the jumping about of marginal sects that play no role in these struggles and are not even capable of understanding the mechanisms and forms of workers’ organization.
Iran’s proposal was rejected, but the problem that the war was supposed to solve remains unresolved. States can still mobilize enormous forces for destruction, yet they are increasingly unable to transform that power into a stable order. The war continues because destructive power has failed to resolve the crisis of order.
And as long as this crisis is reproduced within the same relations that produced it, every ceasefire can be only a pause on the way to another form of the same conflict.
The answer of the working class is not to choose between the states at war, but to build an independent force capable of challenging both the war machine and the capitalist relations that reproduce it.
References
Reuters (2026a), “Iran ready to reopen Strait of Hormuz if US eases military pressure and lifts blockade”, 22 September 2026.
Reuters (2026b), “Trump rejects Iranian proposal to open Hormuz and end fighting”, 26 September 2026.
Reuters (2026c), “Vessels trickle through Strait of Hormuz as Middle East conflict persists”, 21 September 2026.
Reuters (2026d), “Hormuz shuttles keep oil flowing, but at a high cost”, Reuters Open Interest, 21 September 2026.
Reuters (2026e), “US has used ‘virtually all’ of its long-range precision missiles during Iran war, sources say”, 4 August 2026.
Reuters (2026f), “US and allies push IAEA board to report Iran to UN Security Council, diplomats say”, 4 September 2026.
Reuters (2026g), “Trump says renewed US campaign against Iran won’t last long”, 2 September 2026.
Cancian, M. F. & Park, C. H. (2026), “How Quickly Can the DOD Rebuild and Recast the Munitions Industrial Base?”, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), August 2026.
The UN General Assembly: The Crisis in the Global Order on Display
The 2026 General Assembly was a moment in which the United Nations publicly exposed its own impotence. The President of the General Assembly acknowledged that people no longer ask whether the organization exists, but ask: “Does it work?” (Rahman, 2026) He also identified the paralysis of the Security Council as one of the factors calling the effectiveness of the entire organization into question. But this admission should not be reduced to a managerial problem or a procedural defect in an eighty-year-old institution.
The crisis of the United Nations is an expression of the crisis in the political structure of the global order and of the crisis in regulating the political relations among capitalist states on a world scale.
The United Nations as a Product of the Balance of Power
The United Nations did not arise in a vacuum. Its functioning has always depended on the capacity of the major capitalist powers to reach compromises over common rules. The 1990s – after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and under conditions of almost uncontested US supremacy – was the decade with the fewest Security Council vetoes: only ten draft resolutions were vetoed. Across the 25 years from 1990 to 2014, 36 vetoes were cast on 30 draft resolutions; yet in roughly one decade, from 2015 to 2024, 47 vetoes were cast on 37 draft resolutions. (Security Council Report, 2026a, p. 5)
There is no legal explanation for this statistical shift. Behind it lies a change in the global balance of power. China has become one of the main centres of production, trade and technology; Russia refuses the subordinate position assigned to it in the post-Soviet period; regional powers demand a larger share in the global order; and competition over markets, energy, technology, resources and trade routes has intensified. Alongside these changes, a wave of regional and proxy wars has developed into direct and indirect conflicts involving global and regional powers. The degree of consensus that once enabled joint action by the major powers has increasingly given way to political and military rivalry among states and competing blocs.
The Fundamental Contradiction
Capital today reproduces itself on a global scale. Production chains cross several continents; oil, credit, data, raw materials and commodities constantly move across national borders. A disruption in an energy route or in a single link of production can affect factories, transport and social life thousands of kilometres away. Yet political power remains organized in national capitalist states.
These states, on the one hand, require a global order: secure trade routes, legal rules, monetary and credit systems, and a degree of predictability. On the other hand, they compete with one another for markets, raw materials, technology, influence and strategic position. This contradiction is not new, but its intensity has changed.
In periods of growth and relatively stable balance, there is greater room for compromise. But when crises of accumulation, debt, industrial competition and militarization intensify, the scope for compromise narrows and states increasingly attempt to address their problems through tariffs, sanctions, economic blocs and military pressure.
The effect of this process on the United Nations is clear: an institution created to regulate contradictions itself becomes a site where those same contradictions erupt. Disagreements among the permanent members have repeatedly paralysed the possibility of joint Security Council action in Syria, Myanmar, Sudan, Ukraine and Palestine. (Security Council Report, 2026b)
At the same time, an important part of the actual regulation of power relations has shifted outside the UN framework. Direct negotiations among major powers, military alliances, regional pacts and economic blocs have acquired greater weight. The meeting between Trump and Xi over trade, artificial intelligence, Taiwan and geopolitical issues is a clear example: one of the most important negotiations concerning the future of global relations takes place not in the halls of the “United Nations”, but directly between two major powers. (Reuters, 2026)
Crisis in the Functioning of the United Nations
In the period when the United Nations had greater capacity to regulate contradictions among states, this function was presented as the realization of the “will of the international community”. Today, as compromise becomes more difficult, it is easier to see what stood behind that phrase: temporary agreements among capitalist states over rules that made the continuation of the existing order possible.
The United Nations is neither a parliament of the peoples of the world nor a power independent of and above states. Its real capacity has always depended on the degree of agreement among the very states whose rivalry has now intensified.
From this perspective, the present crisis is not a deviation from a neutral institution; it is a crisis of capital’s political capacity to regulate its own contradictions through the former institutional form.
The same crisis also reveals more clearly the class character of the organization. The United Nations was not created to abolish capitalism, end competition among states, or eliminate exploitation. Its task has been to regulate the relations of this order. Now, as capital’s contradictions intensify, even the performance of this function has become more difficult.
The Cost of the Crisis on the Backs of Workers
Contradictions among states do not remain at the level of diplomacy. As mechanisms of compromise weaken, competition is increasingly displaced into sanctions, war, militarization, bloc formation and the reorganization of production.
The cost of this displacement is paid from social resources: rising military budgets, inflation, cuts in public services, pressure on wages, intensified work, job insecurity and the reorganization of production according to the demands of global competition.
The crisis in the political structure of global capital, like economic crisis, transfers its burden onto labour.
For this reason, the crisis of the United Nations is not remote from the class struggle. Disruption in capital’s political mechanisms of regulation sooner or later appears in the workplace, public budgets, living standards and the intensity of exploitation.
Two Responses of Capital
Faced with this crisis, two major responses take shape within the politics of capital. One current calls for the revival of “multilateralism”, reform of the Security Council and the restoration of the authority of the United Nations. Another presents the rise of China and Russia, new blocs and a “multipolar world” as an alternative to the US-led order. From the standpoint of proletarian internationalism, both responses seek to secure the political and social conditions for the reproduction of the existing order.
The issue is not a choice between a US-centred unipolar order and a multipolar order of rival states. Both forms presuppose competition among national capitals and their states. Changing the composition of the Security Council, or shifting the centre of gravity from Washington to Beijing and Moscow, does not in itself abolish the wage relation, exploitation or state domination.
The Crisis of the Global Order
The 2026 General Assembly made the gap between the legal form of the global order and its material reality more visible. On the one hand, states speak of peace, cooperation and international law; on the other, those same states are engaged outside the hall in war, sanctions, increases in military spending and the formation of new blocs.
This contradiction cannot be resolved by reforming the Security Council’s rules of procedure. The fundamental problem is that capital operates on a global scale while its political power is organized in states that both need one another and are compelled to compete with one another. The deeper the crisis of these relations becomes, the more the capacity of common mechanisms to contain that rivalry declines.
The crisis of the United Nations is not a peripheral aspect of the global crisis, but one of the signs of the historical crisis in the total reproduction of capital: a disruption that no longer appears only in the rate of profit, credit or production, but also encompasses the political apparatus required to regulate the global relations of capital.
This crisis does not automatically work in favour of the working class. Capital can turn it into war, nationalism, militarization, the far right and greater repression. What can give this crisis a different direction is the growth of the independent struggle and organization of the working class and its international links.
The organization is still called the “United Nations”; but this year’s General Assembly showed that the states of capital find it increasingly difficult to produce the political unity required to administer a world whose economy is more interdependent than ever.
The class response to this crisis is neither reform of the United Nations nor choosing one pole of capital against another. The issue is the reconstruction of the independent and internationalist power of the working class: a force capable of organizing the ongoing resistance of workers against making them bear the costs of the crisis, and of building an internationalist movement on the basis of that resistance. As long as the absence of proletarian internationalism – that is, the absence of a class alternative – persists, the intensification of the crisis in the political structure can be transformed into various forms of chaos and capitalist barbarism. The issue is one of two paths: either the formation of a class alternative and a movement beyond the existing order, or the intensification of the barbarism of capitalist rule.
References
Rahman, Khalilur (2026), “Remarks at the opening of the general debate of the eighty-first session”, United Nations General Assembly, 22 September 2026.
Security Council Report (2026a), Living with the Veto, Research Report, 24 March 2026, “Patterns in the Use of the Veto: Cold War to Present”, p. 5.
Security Council Report (2026b), “Living with the Veto”, Research Report, 24 March 2026.
Reuters (2026), “Trump-Xi meeting outside UN spotlight tests world body’s clout”, 24 September 2026.
United Nations General Assembly
An Exhibition of Accumulated Crimes: New York, the Hall of Capital’s Stench
This year’s General Assembly was not a stage for diplomacy; it was an exhibition of accumulated crimes. The hall in New York reeked of capital’s decay. From every pore of this order, to use Marx’s formulation, blood and filth oozed.
Trump stood at the podium: the naked embodiment of capital. Instead of concealing aggression, he boasted of it, openly playing with the idea of destroying a society of tens of millions of people. And the audience — the perfumed representatives of this order — applauded. They applauded a threat of mass slaughter.
Then came the market’s executioners: al-Sharaa and Zelensky. There was no talk of the suffering of the masses, but of “commitments to investment”, a “free arms market” and “security for capital”. And once again, applause.
The envoys of bankrupt governments marched along the same path. The Iraqi representative spoke of peace, growth, stability and investment — the familiar language of capitalist states. Behind these words lies another offer to capital: invest here; the state will guarantee property, labour discipline and the tranquillity required for profitability. In class terms, the diplomatic language of “peace, investment, growth and stability” means security for capital, discipline for labour and guarantees for profit.
Then came Islamic fascism, whose point of pride was that its record of slaughter was somewhat smaller than Netanyahu’s. Crocodile tears for the people, boasts of peace, and an attempt to preserve the respectability of the national bourgeoisie through diplomatic bargaining.
And finally, Netanyahu: boasting of the destruction of Gaza, the slaughter of children and the ashes of the Middle East. All of them — from Trump and Netanyahu to the leaders of the Islamic regime and their regional clients — are stained by crimes against humanity. Even the bankrupt institutions of this very organization have been forced to issue indictments. Yet the General Assembly serves as a stage for mutual whitewashing: a hall where butchers stand shoulder to shoulder and applaud crime.
The bourgeois media did not leave this marketplace empty-handed either. With polished coverage and hollow analysis, they injected the infection into public consciousness — hired pens serving to legitimize the camp of the executioners.
In this hall, every state speaks of “peace” while preparing for war; speaks of “security” while strengthening the machinery of repression; speaks of “growth” while shifting the costs of crisis onto workers. What has gathered here is not the nations of the world, but the states of capital — each beneath its own flag, yet all defending the order of property, exploitation and war.
But beneath these putrid ceremonies, the truth is clear: the capitalist order has no path left but to drown in its own blood. No resolution in New York, no round of applause, can postpone the verdict of history. The machinery of crime will be overthrown — by a conscious and internationalist proletariat.
From Car Production to the Production of Instruments of Killing
The Militarization of Capital’s Crisis, Automation and Workers’ Power against the War Machine
Volkswagen’s Osnabrück plant offers a compressed image of a process drawing crisis-ridden capital ever more deeply into the war economy. Vehicle production at the plant is due to end in 2027. Under a preliminary agreement, the factory – under pressure from overcapacity, falling profitability and the crisis of the automotive industry – is to be transferred to new ownership and converted to the production of air-defence system components and other military products.
According to the parties to the deal, the plan could preserve around 1,400 of the existing 1,800 jobs. Reuters presented the project as an example of how rising European defence spending can absorb part of the automotive industry’s excess capacity (Reuters, 7 September 2026).
The equation placed before the worker appears simple: either the factory closes, or you produce for war. But this choice is neither natural nor the product of a technical necessity. It is the product of capitalist social relations and of state political decisions that, under conditions of crisis, channel productive capacity and labour power towards the war industries.
Crisis, Automation and the Basis of Militarization
The crisis of Germany’s automotive industry is real. Volkswagen has spoken of cutting around 50,000 jobs and of more than half a million units of excess capacity; at the same time, protests by auto workers against job losses and the threat of plant closures have spread (Reuters, 3 and 21 September 2026).
But this is not merely a sales crisis. Behind it lies a deeper transformation in the labour process itself: the rapid mechanization and robotization of production. The automotive industry is one of the most highly automated sectors of capitalist production. According to the International Federation of Robotics, the EU automotive industry installed more than 30,000 new industrial robots in 2024 alone. Across manufacturing as a whole, robot density in Western Europe reached a record 267 robots per 10,000 employees in the same year (International Federation of Robotics, 2025; 2026).
For the individual capitalist, automation is a means of raising productivity, cutting costs and defeating competitors. But what serves as a competitive strategy for one company can, on the social scale, expand productive capacity faster than the market can absorb commodities, reduce the relative demand for labour, and intensify pressure for job cuts and line closures.
Here one of capital’s contradictions becomes visible. In competition, capital constantly seeks to produce more commodities with less labour. Yet the social result of higher productivity is not a general reduction of working time and an expansion of welfare, but the threat of unemployment, intensified labour for those who remain employed, and growing idle capacity. It is on this terrain that the war economy enters the scene.
Capacity declared “surplus” in the civilian market can become profitable again through state orders – this time not for the production of social needs, but for missiles, drones, air-defence systems and military vehicles.
Mechanization, overcapacity and militarization are therefore not three unrelated phenomena. Higher productivity expands productive capacity and alters the composition of the workforce; the market crisis renders part of that capacity “surplus”; and the state, through military orders, creates a new market for part of it. It is precisely at this point that the political factor enters directly into the reorganization of capital.
Militarization: Displacing the Crisis, Not Solving It
The market did not decide by itself that vehicle production at Osnabrück should be transferred to the military sector. Defence budgets, multi-year contracts, purchase guarantees, public debt and state industrial policy create a demand that draws part of the capital and productive capacity trapped in crisis towards war.
Osnabrück is not an exception. In 2026 Rheinmetall sold its troubled automotive division in order to concentrate even more heavily on the defence industry, a shift directly connected to the boom in Europe’s arms market (Reuters, 3 June 2026). In the United States, military demand generated by recent wars pushed Northrop Grumman’s backlog to a record $104.7 billion, while the company expanded production capacity for several military systems (Reuters, 21 July 2026).
In Saudi Arabia, investment in drones, counter-drone systems and naval military technology has also accelerated. Global venture-capital investment in defence technology reached $19.4 billion in 2026 (Reuters, 22 September 2026).
In Russia this process has reached a much larger scale. Increased expenditure on the war and air defence, together with other fiscal pressures, has pushed the 2026 budget deficit to around 3% of GDP – almost twice the initial target of 1.6%. The state has turned to greater borrowing to finance it (Reuters, 21 September 2026).
These are not scattered examples of “growth in the defence industry”. Behind them lies a common mechanism: under conditions of crisis, the state is not merely an observer of capital; it becomes an active organizer of its reallocation.
Through budgets, debt, contracts and purchase guarantees, the state creates a market that capital cannot generate elsewhere. A factory facing excess capacity in the civilian market is set in motion again through military orders. But this is not a way out of the crisis.
A war budget does not create value out of nothing. It is financed through taxation, debt, cuts in social resources and the transfer of public wealth. Militarization can save a factory, raise a company’s profits and preserve employment for a time; but it does not abolish capital’s contradictions. It displaces them and reproduces them in a more political and violent form.
Capital turns to war in order to confront crisis; but war itself produces debt, inflation, destroyed infrastructure, energy disruption, fiscal pressure and new crises. In this sense, militarism is not merely a warlike ideology. It is a material relation among the state, capital, budgets, technology and production.
The more profitable military industries become, the more a material network is built around the continuation of militarization: corporations whose profits depend on war contracts; factories whose employment is tied to arms production; states that construct industrial policy around “security” and armament; and capitals that discover war as a growth market.
In this process, capital even turns technical progress against social life. Robots, artificial intelligence and automation could materially make it possible to reduce working time and expand welfare; under the command of capital they become instruments for eliminating jobs, intensifying competition and expanding military production capacity. The problem is not the machine or the robot; it is the class power that determines how they are used.
The Working Class at the Contradictory Core of the War Machine
Militarization, however, contains a contradiction that capital cannot abolish. Even the most automated factory cannot operate independently of social labour. Robots must be designed, programmed and repaired. Factories require energy and raw materials. Components must be transported. Ports must load cargo. Railways, trucks, warehouses, refineries and communication networks must function. The working class is present in every one of these links.
The dockworker does not declare war, but without their labour the military cargo does not move. The factory worker does not determine foreign policy, but without social labour weapons are not produced. The railway worker does not issue the order to attack, but without their labour the war machine does not reach its destination.
Automation changes the composition of the working class, but it does not abolish the social power of labour. It can even concentrate that power at particular points: the more complex the networks of production and circulation become, and the more dependent their links are on one another, the more a stoppage at strategic points can disrupt a larger section of the chain.
Limited but real examples have shown this possibility. In September 2025 dockworkers in Genoa, together with other protesters, blocked entrances to the port and struck against the use of Italian ports for shipping weapons to Israel; workers in Livorno also blocked port entrances (Reuters, 22 September 2025). In Ravenna, amid protests by dockworkers and labour groups, port authorities prevented two trucks carrying a shipment said to contain explosives bound for Haifa from entering the port (Reuters, 18 September 2025).
The significance of these actions should not be exaggerated. A few strikes and refusals do not yet constitute an independent and international movement of the working class against war. The same unions that at times enter protests under pressure from workers often seek to contain the struggle once again within the framework of “competitiveness”, the preservation of the company and compromise with the state. But these limits do not erase the material significance of the actions themselves.
The working class is not only a victim of militarism and the payer of war’s costs; the war machine depends on the social labour of this same class in order to move. It is here that the struggle against capital and the struggle against war can move beyond moral protest and become connected within the very process of production and circulation.
From Resistance to Class Power
Capital first exposes sections of workers to the threat of dismissal through industrial restructuring, competition, automation and higher productivity, and then turns that same threat into an instrument for accepting militarization: either become unemployed, or produce instruments of killing.
An independent workers’ response begins by rejecting this false alternative. Why should a massive rise in productivity become unemployment rather than shorter working time? Why should a factory whose social productive capacity has increased either be closed or turned into a war factory? Why should technology that makes it possible to produce more with less human labour be turned into an instrument for eliminating jobs and producing weapons instead of freeing time for life?
These are no longer merely anti-war questions. They lead directly to ownership, power and control over production. In this sense, the workplace is not only a site of exploitation; it is a battlefield of class struggle over the direction of social production.
Capital seeks to place the factory, the robot, science and the worker’s skill at the service of profit and military competition. The working-class response cannot be limited to demanding a larger share of the profits of the war industries or a guarantee of jobs in an arms factory. The issue is more fundamental: why should the worker’s livelihood be made conditional on continuing production that destroys the lives of other workers?
Class struggle can reverse this choice: shorter working time instead of dismissal; production for social needs instead of profit; the use of technology to free people from exhausting labour instead of intensifying exploitation; and the conversion of industrial capacity from an instrument of war into a means of reproducing life. This cannot be achieved by “humanizing” the war economy, but by extending the independent organization of workers.
Capital can reduce the number of workers on a production line through robots, but it cannot create a society that reproduces itself without social labour. The more complex and interconnected global production becomes, the more capital’s dependence on an immense network of human labour assumes new forms.
This dependence is the material basis of working-class power. Capital seeks to turn the crisis-ridden factory into a war factory; but the same social force that sets the factory, the port, energy and transport networks in motion can also bring this chain to a halt.
The connection between the struggle against war and the struggle against capital is formed precisely here: in the struggle over what is produced, for whom it is produced, what purpose technology serves, and which class determines the direction of social production.
References
International Federation of Robotics (2025), “EU’s Auto Sector Sees Sharp Drop in Robot Adoption”, 25 September 2025.
International Federation of Robotics (2026), “Robot Density Surges in Europe, Asia, and Americas”, 8 April 2026.
Reuters (18 September 2025), “Italian port blocks suspected arms shipment to Israel amid workers’ protests”.
Reuters (22 September 2025), report on port workers’ strikes in Genoa and Livorno against arms transit to Israel.
Reuters (3 June 2026), “Rheinmetall sells civilian automotive division to Munich-based Aequita”.
Reuters (21 July 2026), “Northrop Grumman raises 2026 forecasts on strong weapons demand”.
Reuters (3 September 2026), “Main points of Volkswagen’s restructuring plan”.
Reuters (7 September 2026), “Volkswagen finds defence future for German plant amid major overhaul”.
Reuters (21 September 2026), “VW works council calls for action from management, policymakers to help car industry”.
Reuters (21 September 2026), “Russia will have budget deficit not exceeding 3% of GDP in 2026, Finance Minister says”.
Reuters (22 September 2026), “Saudi defence fund speeds up maritime sector push following Houthi advance”.
Trump and Xi: Negotiating Amid the Crisis of the Global Order
China, the Relative Decline of U.S. Hegemony, and Competition over the Arteries of Capital Reproduction
The 24 September meeting between Trump and Xi cannot be regarded simply as another round of trade bargaining between two states. The issue is more fundamental: China has emerged, from within the very same world market and the same restructuring of capital that expanded under U.S. hegemony, as an industrial and technological power that can no longer be contained by rules designed for a period of uncontested Western predominance. From this perspective, the negotiations in Washington did not mark the end of competition, but an attempt to manage a rivalry produced by the transformation of global capitalism itself.
In 1990, China produced only 3 percent of global manufacturing value added; by 2023 its share had risen to 31.8 percent, while the U.S. share stood at 15 percent (UNIDO, 2024, p. 41). This shift is not simply a Chinese “victory” over the West. The relocation of production, the search for cheaper labour, the expansion of global value chains and China’s integration into the world market were part of capital’s response to the crisis of the 1970s. Western capital globalized factories, technology and production networks in order to restore profitability; but that same restructuring created a new centre of accumulation and state power. What was once one of capital’s solutions has now become one of the principal contradictions of its order.
The Crisis of the American Order, Not the End of American Power
The relative decline of U.S. hegemony should not be confused with its collapse. The United States continues to occupy a central position in global finance, the dollar system, technology and military power. What has become more limited is its capacity to determine the rules of the game unilaterally.
In 2025, despite a new wave of U.S. tariffs, China registered a trade surplus of nearly $1.2 trillion. Its exports to the United States fell by 20 percent, while exports to Africa increased by 25.8 percent, to ASEAN by 13.4 percent and to the European Union by 8.4 percent (Reuters, 14 January 2026). U.S. pressure altered the geographical direction of Chinese trade, but it did not halt China’s export power on a global scale.
Here the contradiction of liberal capitalism becomes visible. “Free trade” is presented as a universal principle as long as the global division of labour reproduces the predominance of dominant capital. But when that same world market produces an industrial competitor, tariffs, restrictions on technology exports, industrial subsidies and sanctions once again become ordinary instruments of state policy. The United States has not withdrawn from state intervention; rather, it increasingly uses state power to defend the position of its own capital.
Even in the field of critical minerals, Washington confronts the limits of its power. China controls roughly 70 percent of global rare-earth extraction and more than 85 percent of refining capacity. The dependence of U.S. technology, automobile and defence industries on this supply chain limits the scope of Washington’s pressure (Reuters, 21 September 2026a). For this reason, alongside tariffs and technology controls, negotiations and state mechanisms for trade and investment have also become part of the management of rivalry.
From the Market to Hormuz: Energy and Technology
Competition is not confined to commodity markets. China is the world’s largest importer of crude oil, and in 2024 around 54 percent of its oil imports came from the Middle East; Iran accounted for approximately 11 percent (EIA, 2025, p. 14). The disruption of oil flows through Hormuz in 2026 demonstrated this dependence in material terms: China’s crude-oil imports fell to 8.1 million barrels per day in the second quarter, 32 percent below the first quarter (EIA, 2026).
Iran and Hormuz are therefore not peripheral issues in U.S.–China relations. At the Washington meeting, Iran and international waterways were discussed alongside trade, critical minerals and technology (White House, 2026). This does not mean that U.S. policy in the Middle East can be reduced to an attempt to cut off China’s energy supplies. But control over the financial system, sanctions, shipping and energy chokepoints constitutes a real lever of power over a country that imports a large share of the fuel required by its industry from the region.
China’s economic expansion in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America is likewise not merely a matter of “diplomatic influence”; it is part of Chinese capital’s search for markets, raw materials, energy and secure routes for reproduction (Reuters, 14 January 2026; EIA, 2025).
Artificial intelligence and strategic minerals form another dimension of the same problem. The two states formalized mechanisms for dialogue on advanced technologies and incidents related to artificial intelligence (White House, 2026). At the same time, negotiations continued over the supply chains of critical minerals (Reuters, 21 September 2026b). Technology is no longer a sphere separate from geopolitics: semiconductors, artificial intelligence, telecommunications, energy and the military industries have become interconnected links in a single competition.
Negotiation to Contain the Contradiction, Not Resolve It
Trump and Xi did not negotiate in order to bring competition to an end. They are attempting to manage a rivalry in which complete rupture would impose enormous costs on both sides, while leaving it uncontrolled could turn markets, energy, technology and security into centres of crisis. Interdependence and competition are two contradictory poles of the same relationship.
This is the crisis of the global order: the production and circulation of capital have become increasingly global, while political power, armies, borders, sanctions and industrial policy remain concentrated in competing states. The United States seeks to preserve its historical predominance through economic, technological and military instruments; China, in the form of state capitalism, seeks a greater share of markets, technology and the conditions for the reproduction of global capital. Differences in political form do not negate the common reality that both operate within the logic of capital accumulation.
From this perspective, the Washington meeting was not a sign that the crisis had been resolved. On the contrary, it demonstrates that an order which once organized the world market under U.S. hegemony now requires permanent negotiation among powers, each of which attempts to transfer the costs of the crisis to the other and, ultimately, to labour.
The crisis of U.S. hegemony is not the end of liberal capitalism, but the revelation of its historical limits in organizing an order that has itself produced and nurtured its major rival.
References
EIA (2025), China Country Analysis Brief. U.S. Energy Information Administration, May 2025.
EIA (2026), “China’s crude oil imports fell in the second quarter”, 31 July 2026.
Reuters (14 January 2026), “China’s trade ends 2025 with record $1.2 trillion surplus despite Trump tariff jolt”.
Reuters (21 September 2026a), “Rare earths force Trump to be less hostile before Xi summit”.
Reuters (21 September 2026b), “US, China to meet again on AI safety in two months in Shenzhen, Bessent says”.
UNIDO (2024), International Yearbook of Industrial Statistics 2024. Vienna: UNIDO.
White House (2026), “Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Advances a Fair and Reciprocal Relationship with China While Hosting Historic State Visit”, 25 September 2026.
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