The New Dark Age

The lines at the grocery store in early 2026 tell a story that the evening news tries to hide. While officials in Washington brag about a rising Gross Domestic Product, the person ahead of you is putting back a carton of eggs because the price on the shelf changed twice since Monday.

In the high-rise offices of Manhattan and London, the mood is frantic. Gold has shattered every record, climbing past $5,100 an ounce this January. This isn’t just a “market trend.” It is a massive vote of no confidence in the U.S. dollar. But the rush into gold didn’t start this crisis — it reflects a deeper breakdown in profitable production.

For decades, the billionaires who run this country have treated the dollar like a magic wand, printing money to fund wars and bail out banks. But the trick is wearing thin.

Last June, gold officially overtook the euro as the world’s second-most important reserve asset. Countries like Poland, China and Egypt are reducing their exposure to U.S. Treasury IOUs and bringing physical gold back onto their own soil. This isn’t a mood swing in the markets. It is a defensive move by states that have watched Washington freeze the assets of entire countries — from Russia’s central bank reserves to the $2 billion in Venezuelan gold held in London. The lesson is material, not ideological: Any wealth parked inside the dollar system can be seized overnight.

The wall of physical reality

The owners of the big banks are facing a problem they cannot solve with a press release. They have flooded the world with paper tokens — dollars — that are losing their connection to the real world of work and production.

Gold isn’t valuable because it’s shiny; it’s valuable because it takes an immense amount of human labor to find, mine, and refine it. But gold doesn’t create wealth — it stores it. Capital only runs toward gold when it can no longer find profitable places to invest in real production. The surge in gold prices is not driving the crisis; it is exposing it. It signals that surplus capital is piling up with nowhere productive to go.

As profits fall, the people who own the factories and the land pull back from productive investment and rush to park their wealth in things that can hold value, like gold and silver. This is what we are seeing now: a crisis of overproduction. Warehouses are full of goods that workers can’t afford to buy because wages have been squeezed for years — a permanent feature of capitalism that becomes explosive when profits fall and investment stalls. The owners won’t cut prices, not because of sentiment about the dollar, but because doing so would force them to accept losses and devalue their capital.

The Federal Reserve is trapped — not by bad decisions, but by the limits of the system itself. If it prints more money to keep banks and markets afloat, it inflates asset bubbles and drives more capital into gold, speeding the dollar’s decline. If it raises interest rates, it crushes already weak profit margins, makes federal debt unpayable, and triggers bankruptcies across the economy. Either way, there isn’t enough surplus value being produced to support the mountain of debt and speculation that has built up over decades.

This didn’t start with gold or the dollar. It started when corporations stopped making enough profit by producing things people actually use. For years, they shifted money out of factories and into speculation, debt and stock buybacks instead. Now mountains of debt and stock market bets outweigh what workers really produce. So capital is turning back to physical resources — oil, land and labor — and using the federal government, the military and police agencies to take them by force.

From trade wars to direct seizures

Because the U.S. can no longer dominate the world through simple bank transfers, the military is being sent in to take what the banks can’t buy. The capture of President Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores in Caracas on Jan. 3 wasn’t framed as a mission of mercy or a diplomatic correction. Trump’s Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, openly framed the operation as a profit-making venture. He complained that past U.S. wars cost lives without delivering economic returns. This time, he said, Trump intends to “flip the script” — seize assets, sell oil, and make the intervention pay.

The administration has already seized seven oil tankers, begun selling Venezuelan crude, and deposited the first $500 million in U.S.-controlled accounts. Trump announced that U.S. oil companies will “go in, spend billions of dollars” and declared he will “run” Venezuela and “indefinitely” control its oil sales. “Let’s start making money for the country,” he said at his Mar-a-Lago press conference.

This isn’t the language of democracy promotion. It is the language of seizure.

By treating the sovereign resources of the Americas as a private U.S. gas station, Washington is trying to restart accumulation by force. Venezuela sits on 303 billion barrels of proven oil reserves — 17% of the global total. When profits dry up at home, imperialist capital turns outward, seizing land, energy and labor to restore revenue streams it can no longer generate through normal production. U.S. energy corporations and the finance capital behind them need that oil priced in dollars and flowing through channels they control. When Maduro refused to surrender, they sent in Delta Force.

The occupation at home

The violence in Caracas and the violence in Minneapolis are not separate stories. They share institutional roots.

Since the early 2000s, ICE agents and executives have trained alongside Israeli military and police forces. The surveillance technology on the U.S.-Mexico border comes from Elbit Systems, the same Israeli defense contractor that builds the walls around Gaza. The tactics used against Palestinians — checkpoints, mass surveillance, shoot-first escalation — are now deployed against working-class communities in the United States.

The same security agencies that train ICE and supply its weapons also shape the language used to justify the violence. When Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem labeled Good and Pretti “domestic terrorists” to justify their killings, she was borrowing from the same playbook that Israel uses to criminalize Palestinian resistance. Since Oct. 7, 2023, the Palestinian resistance has inspired millions around the world to confront the Israeli state and its U.S. backers through mass protests, boycotts, and direct actions led by students and workers. That movement survives despite being demonized as “terrorist” and targeted with assassinations. Now the same language is being used against people in Minneapolis who stood between ICE agents and their neighbors.

On Jan. 6, the Department of Homeland Security announced what it called the largest immigration enforcement operation ever carried out, sending 2,000 paramilitary troopers to Minneapolis. ICE troopers have kicked in doors without warrants, surrounded schools, and shot three U.S. citizens in three weeks, killing two. None of the troopers responsible have been arrested.

Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old lesbian mom, was killed on Jan. 7 when an ICE agent fired three shots into her car. Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse at the Minneapolis VA, was killed on Jan. 24 while filming agents and trying to help a woman who had been shoved to the ground.

The monopoly is broken

The reason the capitalists are so panicked is that they’ve lost their edge. For a long time, the U.S. and Europe had a monopoly on the tools of the trade — the high-tech machines and computers used to make everything.

That monopoly is gone. China has moved from making cheap products to dominating the world in electric vehicles, batteries and green energy. This isn’t just cheaper labor — it’s higher productivity, coordinated planning and production at a scale Western firms can’t match. They aren’t just competing; they are making it impossible for Western corporations to charge the massive markups they’ve enjoyed for a century. When U.S. automakers realize they can no longer extract super-profits because someone else can make a better product for less, they don’t innovate — they turn to Washington for tariffs and military protection.

The domestic icons — Ford and General Motors — are caught in the same terminal bind. In the final months of 2025, Ford and GM took a combined $27 billion in restructuring charges to write down their failing EV programs. Ford’s Model e division has lost more than $13 billion in less than three years. GM discontinued its BrightDrop electric van and paid $4.6 billion in contract cancellations to suppliers who had expanded capacity based on sales projections that will never materialize.

These companies aren’t retreating because they lack the technology. They are retreating because they cannot make a profit competing with more efficient production methods. Instead of innovating, they have turned to the state for a protectionist shield. The 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs, first imposed in September 2024 and maintained by both administrations, aren’t about saving jobs. They are about creating a captive market where the Big Two can continue to sell high-priced, high-margin trucks to a working class that is being denied cheaper alternatives.

At the same time, Trump moved to end federal EV subsidies, pulling support from electric vehicle buyers just as U.S. automakers were retreating from their own EV commitments. The message was clear: Instead of competing with China on efficiency or planning, Washington chose to shield failing manufacturers and push consumers back toward gas-powered vehicles and oil.

No way back to 1979

Wall Street economists and austerity advocates say we need a “Volcker Shock,” referring to 1979 when the Fed raised interest rates so high it broke the back of inflation — and the back of the labor movement. But 2026 is not 1979.

In 1979, the U.S. was the world’s biggest lender. Today, it is the world’s biggest debtor. A massive rate hike today wouldn’t just hurt workers; it would cause the U.S. Treasury to default. The system is shaking because profits are collapsing and the limits of accumulation have been reached. The owners can no longer pretend mountains of debt and stock market bets are the same as real production.

This violence — in Caracas, in Minneapolis, in the “Big Beautiful Bill” that gutted Medicaid and SNAP in July 2025 — is not a policy choice. It is the system working as designed. When the dollar fails, the owners reach for the gun. When workers organize, DHS and federal police agencies send in armed agents trained in occupation tactics. When a country refuses to hand over its oil, the military captures its president and calls it law enforcement.

Where hope lies

Hope doesn’t lie in the next election or a change in Federal Reserve policy. It lies in understanding what this moment actually is.

The same forces driving war abroad are being turned on communities at home. In Minneapolis, federal agents kill with impunity. In Caracas, U.S. forces seize a country’s oil and call it law enforcement. These are not excesses. They are how capital responds when profit collapses and mountains of debt and stock market bets outrun what workers actually produce.

From Venezuela’s oil fields to Minneapolis hospital wards, working people are paying for this crisis through layoffs, repression, rising prices and debt. The capitalists answer crisis with seizure. The government supplies the guns. Nothing in this arrangement can be reformed. It can only be dismantled — and replaced with an economy organized for human need, not imperialist extraction.