The U.S. has been in a constant state of war, with a wartime economy offering up ever greater shares of the public treasury to Pentagon profiteers, at least since Sept. 11, 2001, and some legitimately argue since the settler-colonial government’s 1776 inception.
It is often claimed by bourgeois economists, historians and politicians that endless war has been good for the U.S. capitalist economy, providing jobs in weapons production and the rebuilding of what U.S. bombs destroy. For example, the high school and college textbook “America’s History” (2011) argues throughout its telling of every war — from the 19th-century Civil War to the 1940s World War II, from the 1960s and 1970s slaughter in Vietnam to the 1991 and 2003 “shock and awe” bombings and occupation of Iraq — that U.S. wartime economies turned domestic capitalist economic recessions and depressions into general boom times for the population.
Certainly for the wealthy CEOs of BAE Systems, Boeing, Honeywell Aerospace, L3Harris Technologies Missile Solutions, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and RTX Corporation who met with President Donald Trump and Secretary of War Peter Hegseth at the White House on March 6, business has never been better. As Trump reported on his social media, “They have agreed to quadruple Production of the ‘Exquisite Class’ Weaponry in that we want to reach, as rapidly as possible, the highest levels of quantity.” (CNBC, March 6) Exquisite too were the hundreds of billions of dollars in procurement contracts promised.
But for the working class of the U.S., even employees at the weapons manufacturers, a look behind the giant-font, front-page headlines about the bombing, rising death toll and destruction of infrastructure in the ancient, scientifically advanced, multiethnic state of Iran tells another story. It’s one of rising layoffs, unemployment and skyrocketing inflation at home, with a looming financial crisis poised to take down Wall Street gamblers and workers’ retirement savings alike.
Bombshell unemployment
On March 6, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) dropped a February jobs report that hit like an earthquake on shop floors and Wall Street trading floors alike. Gone was the Big Lie — covered up for months by political firings and government shutdowns at the Labor Department — that Trump’s tariffs, “bombings for peace,” mass firings of federal workers, union busting, ICE raids against immigrants and attacks on transgender people are somehow good for workers.
Nearly 100,000 jobs in all sectors of the economy — including aerospace and weapons manufacturing — were eliminated in February. Statistical revisions due to previously limited corporate data showed that the U.S. capitalist economy destroyed even more jobs in health care, financial services, transportation, restaurant and hotel services, high-tech, farming, etc., in January, December and months prior, increasing the overall unemployment rate to a conservative estimate of 4.4%. (bls.gov) On March 6, stocks on Wall Street fell to their lowest levels in a year as financial gamblers digested the BLS jobs report.
This now open domestic war against workers’ livelihoods was signaled two days before the opening barrage of the U.S.-Israeli slaughter of Iranian government officials and school children, when on Feb. 26, one of the richest men in the world announced the firing of nearly half of his company’s 10,000 workers. Billionaire Jack Dorsey, a founder of Twitter, announced the termination of over 4,000 high-paid tech workers at Block, Inc, who run the financial payment systems of Square, CashApp and Tidal.
Dorsey announced that these workers are being replaced by artificial intelligence (AI) technology. He issued a call to arms to his fellow CEOs that they should “act decisively” and “don’t hesitate” with their own AI-driven job cuts. He wrote: “Something has changed. We’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company, and that’s accelerating rapidly.” (New York Times, Feb. 26)
The New York Times reporter commented, “While Mr. Dorsey’s post is likely to make rank-and-file tech workers at other companies nervous about their future, investors embraced it. Block’s share price jumped more than 26% in after-hours trading.”
Exploding oil prices
Days later, as Iranian retaliatory missiles took out U.S.-controlled oil facilities, tankers and military bases located in U.S.-sponsored monarchies throughout the Persian Gulf, and the Strait of Hormuz was closed, world oil prices skyrocketed in response. Overnight, home heating oil prices for millions of U.S. workers weathering the coldest winter in years spiked by a third and more – a staggering increase from under $4 per gallon to over $5.50 in a day. (Boston Globe, March 6)
For millions of U.S. workers reliant on gasoline-powered vehicles to work and generally survive in cities and rural townships alike, a similar jump in prices at the pump gouged their dwindling incomes immediately, with economists predicting drastic inflation in supply chains for food and other essential commodities coming soon.
Trump’s racist diatribes and warmongering can’t cover up what has now become systemic and historic stagflation — the capitalist double-whammy crisis of high inflation and simultaneous stagnant growth and unemployment, which in the religion of capitalist economics is theoretically not supposed to happen. (Workers World, Dec. 16, 2025)
Nor can pumping over a trillion dollars into the war budget this year cover up that the owners of the means of production under capitalism profit by dramatically eliminating labor through the introduction of new technologies like AI. They have done so throughout the entire history of capitalism going back to the mechanized “power” loom invented in 1785, which shifted the manual, artisanal cloth-making by thousands of people at home to production by just hundreds of workers weaving in industrial factory settings.
Only now in the advanced high-tech era, billionaires in charge like Dorsey are declaring that use of AI technology to reduce the workforce is going to happen very quickly and on a global scale.
Private equity landmines
The onset of open, genocidal-level destruction of Iranian and Lebanese cities by U.S. and Israeli total war tactics, following up their two-and-a-half-year-long devastation of Gaza, has exacerbated a growing crisis in the financial system based n the U.S. A multitrillion-dollar sector known as “private equity” experienced last week what some bourgeois commentators are describing as the start of “a run on the bank.”
During the “Great Recession” of 2007-2009, President Barack Obama led the federal government in bailing out some of the nation’s largest banks and corporations. which were on the brink of bankruptcy after the predatory housing mortgage bubble burst. The U.S. Congress put some modest restrictions on banks — such as limiting risky, “subprime” loans to poor people and shaky, debt-addled corporations.
Since then, wealthy hedge fund managers have created or expanded “private equity” funds like Ares, Blackstone, Blue Owl and Cliffwater, among thousands, to provide risky, subprime loans that banks are prohibited from making. Wall Street investors gambled nearly $7.5 trillion on these funds in 2026, which are supposed to be considered “long-term and illiquid,” where fund managers have diverted unfathomable amounts of collective workers’ retirement savings, i.e., deferred wages, in pension and 401(k) plans.
In October 2025, two moderately sized companies – auto parts giant First Brands and subprime auto lender Tricolor – which didn’t qualify for bank loans, but were heavily indebted to private equity lender Blue Owl. declared bankruptcy and abruptly shut down. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon remarked at the time, “When you see one cockroach, there’s probably more,” after his bank also disclosed a $170 million loss related to Tricolor. (Business Insider, Oct. 18, 2025)
By March 3, investors were demanding to withdraw hundreds of billions of dollars from Blue Owl and other private equity funds as panic about bad loans was exacerbated by every announcement of ships sunk and missiles fired in the Persian Gulf. A New York Times headline that day tucked into the back-page business section stated: “Big Lenders’ Risky Loans Are Rattling Wall Street. Lending troubles at Blue Owl Capital and other so-called private credit behemoths are setting off fears of a ‘bank run,’ as one hedge fund put it.”
As the U.S. war economy steamrolls ahead with the commander in chief’s impossible demand for Iran’s “unconditional surrender,” capitalist bankers are running for the exit of their own schemes. Now is the time for the working class and oppressed peoples inside the imperial core to strike, put a final end to the capitalists’ endless wartime economy and organize a socialist system to put an end to war forever and for all.
