Authors | Andrés Piqueras |

December 4, 2025

Andrés Piqueras presents an in-depth analysis of the current state of capitalism, identifying the overaccumulation of capital as its chronic disease and observing its implications. The main idea revolves around how this condition has led to a multitude of social, economic, and ecological problems, culminating in military escalation and violence as a means of controlling resources.

While capitalism develops the productive forces, it increasingly uses machinery, robotization, and now artificial intelligence to replace human labor. This substitution increases the proportion of “dead labor” relative to “living labor,” causing a fundamental contradiction that provokes the current crisis of falling surplus value, for which capitalism is finding it increasingly hard to find a way out.

As technology reduces the time necessary to produce commodities, their value decreases accordingly. Capitalism responds by producing more of the same goods and continuously expanding markets to maintain profitability. However, this path is unsustainable, as markets and planetary resources are finite. As resources are depleted, the dominant sectors of capital become increasingly desperate to control the remaining resources, creating growing tensions in the global economic system.

Decreasing profitability leads to a shift from productive investment to financial speculation. Capital has a tendency to revert to its simple form, as money, rather than being invested in production or labor. This creates an enormous bubble of “fictitious capital”—i.e., stocks, public debt, bank money, and derivatives—which is actually debt, and a good part of which is based on the assumption of a hypothetical future value. This financialization has generated generalized debt that currently stands at around 360% of global GDP, creating an unsustainable economic structure that circulates largely through money that does not actually exist.

As economic power wanes, violence becomes the remaining tool to maintain dominance, causing all these contradictions to converge towards militarization and war.