Wealth destruction, a universal feature of social revolutions
Branko Milanovic, a prominent inequality scholar and former lead economist at the World Bank, recently posted on X: “Every socialist revolution started w/ either confiscation of K, nationalization of K, or de facto destruction of rich people’s wealth through the debasement of currency or stock market. Now, Trump, an unlikely candidate, is leading this revolution.” Milanovic is a serious thinker whose work on global income distribution and capitalism’s historical evolution I greatly respect. But in this case, I find his post misleading. It misrepresents both the history of revolutions and the nature of Trump’s economic agenda — conflating superficial disruption with structural transformation.
While this wealth was not capital in the strict Marxist sense, it nonetheless anchored class dominance and surplus extraction — and its abolition marked a historic rupture in the mode of production. Hence, the destruction of the ruling class’s wealth is not unique to socialist revolutions. It is a defining feature of all social revolutions, whether they are transitions from slavery to feudalism, from feudalism to capitalism, or from capitalism to socialism. What these revolutions share is the displacement of the dominant class and the devaluation or restructuring of its material power.
When slavery was abolished, slaveholders didn’t just lose political power — they lost the very basis of their wealth: the ownership of human beings. The same applies to feudal landlords, whose landholdings lost much of their value when serfs were emancipated and feudal rents were abolished. The land remained, but without legally-bound labor to work it, it could no longer produce surplus on the same scale. Their wealth, and with it their dominance, was structurally undermined.
The rise of capitalism itself involved the destruction of feudal wealth, whether through revolutionary expropriation (as in the French Revolution), legal reform (as in England), or colonial and military force. In each case, old forms of wealth were devalued or forcibly restructured, clearing the way for a new mode of production and a new ruling class.
What distinguishes socialist revolutions is not that they destroy wealth, but that they aim to destroy capital as a social relation — the exploitation of labor for profit — and replace it with collective ownership. In that sense, the destruction of ruling-class wealth is a necessary but not sufficient condition for revolutionary transformation.
So when Milanovic suggests that Trump is “leading a socialist revolution” because some sectors of wealth are being threatened or disrupted, he conflates structural expropriation with tactical disruption. That distinction becomes even more crucial in light of what’s actually happening to US capital under Trump — which is the subject of the next section.
Trump is not destroying capital — he’s trying to save it
What we are observing under Trump is not the destruction of capitalist wealth but a desperate effort to preserve, inflate, and revalorize it — particularly its most speculative and fragile forms.
The US stock market is grossly overvalued, with estimates placing the gap between market capitalization and the real productive base of the economy at anywhere between $20 to $30 trillion. This ballooning of asset prices was driven not by productive investment, but by massive injections of liquidity by the Federal Reserve during the 2008–09 financial crisis and again during the COVID-19 pandemic. The result is the proliferation of what Marx called fictitious capital: paper claims on future profits that are increasingly detached from any underlying value-producing activity.
Fictitious capital is highly unstable. As the recent stock market rollercoaster demonstrates, its “value” is vulnerable to even modest shifts in interest rates, investment flows, or trade expectations. These fluctuations are not a sign of revolutionary expropriation but a threat to capital itself — particularly to the financial and rentier segments of the capitalist class.
Trump’s economic strategy — tariffs, industrial reshoring, restrictions on Chinese capital, and aggressive demands that other countries buy more US goods — is designed not to attack this capital, but to shore it up. As outlined in my analysis “Tariffs Are a Beautiful Thing to Behold,” these policies aim to recenter surplus value extraction within US borders, shield domestic capital from foreign competition, bolster demand for the US dollar (which supports Treasury bond purchases), and ultimately, prevent a major devaluation of inflated asset values.
Far from expropriating the capitalist class, the Trump administration is offering it a lifeline. The goal is not to replace capital with a new social order, but to rescue US capital from its internal contradictions — in particular, the falling profitability of productive investment and the growing reliance on speculative financial instruments.
In short, this is not destruction but preservation, not revolution but reaction. Trump’s economic nationalism is best understood not as an attack on capital, but as a strategy to defend and revalorize it — using the state to absorb and displace the costs of systemic crisis.
Redistribution Within the Capitalist Class Is Not a Revolution
Even if some capitalists lose out under Trump’s economic policies — for instance, tech firms dependent on global supply chains or investors exposed to foreign markets — this does not amount to a revolution. It is simply a redistribution of wealth and power within the capitalist class. That’s not unusual during periods of capitalist crisis. In fact, it’s how capitalism often restructures itself to survive.
In Capital, Marx emphasized that the capitalist system is not a monolith but a totality composed of many individual capitals, each competing with others but collectively reproducing the system as a whole. Capital as such exists only through this network of competing capitals, and the temporary loss of some is often the condition for the survival of the rest. Restructuring within this totality is not a rupture but a renewal — one segment of capital sacrifices another in order to preserve the broader system of accumulation.
In Marxist terms, a revolutionary rupture entails a transformation in class power — the displacement of one ruling class by another, or the suppression of class rule altogether (as socialism aspires to do). It means that the source of surplus value and ownership over the means of production are fundamentally restructured. In capitalist revolutions, the bourgeoisie expropriated the feudal lords. In socialist revolutions, workers attempted to expropriate the capitalists.
What is happening under Trump, by contrast, is a reallocation of resources among capitalists — not their expropriation. Industrial capital may be favored over financial capital in some areas, or domestic producers over multinationals, but the organizing principles of capitalism remain intact: private ownership, profit maximization, wage labor, and capital accumulation. No property relations are overturned, no class loses its dominance, and no new mode of production emerges.
Indeed, as shown in “Tariffs Are a Beautiful Thing to Behold,” these redistributive measures are best understood as a form of crisis displacement. Tariffs and other nationalist economic tools do not resolve capitalism’s contradictions — they simply try to shift the burden onto rival capitals, peripheral economies, or working people at home through inflation and job precarity. The US capitalist state, far from undermining capital, is actively managing its internal divisions in an effort to restore profitability and delay systemic breakdown.
This is not revolutionary. It is capitalism fighting for survival. It is not the negation of capital, but a reorganization in its favor. Milanovic’s framing treats any disruption to existing capital flows or asset valuations as revolutionary, but in doing so, he misses the class structure. What’s unfolding is not a revolt against the capitalist class — it is capitalism defending itself by temporarily sacrificing some of its own limbs.
“Wealth Destruction” as a strategy to boost profit rates
Ironically, what Milanovic describes as a form of “wealth destruction” may in fact play an important restorative role for US capital. As outlined in “Tariffs Are a Beautiful Thing to Behold,” short-term fluctuations in asset values — including sharp stock market corrections — can actually function as mechanisms to boost the average rate of profit in the medium term.
Lower asset prices facilitate share buybacks by major corporations, which reduce the number of outstanding shares and inflate earnings per share — without requiring any real investment in production. Simultaneously, market instability triggers a flight to safety, with foreign capital pouring into U.S. Treasury securities. This increases demand for U.S. debt, driving down yields and creating favorable borrowing conditions for the U.S. government.
In effect, these dynamics expand fiscal space, enabling the state to spend more — including on industrial policy, military procurement, and subsidies to favored sectors — without immediate inflationary or financial constraints. The end result is not a socialist redistribution of wealth, but a state-mediated reconsolidation of capitalist power, both domestically and globally.
So while some may interpret volatility in asset markets or tariff-induced disruptions as signs of anti-capitalist revolt, the reality is far more mundane — and far more dangerous. These are instruments of capitalist self-preservation, not transformation.
In short, Milanovic (provocatively, I guess) presents turbulence as transformation. What we are witnessing is not a socialist revolution, nor even a break with capitalist logic, but rather a desperate attempt to stabilize and restructure the system in crisis — on behalf of capital. The state is not expropriating the rich; it is working overtime to preserve their wealth, inflate their assets, and redirect global surplus in their favor. If there is a revolution underway, it is not against capitalism but for its continuation by other means.