The 2008 global financial collapse marked the onset of a new structural crisis in the world capitalist system. An emerging transnational capitalist class (TCC) launched globalization in response to the last great structural crisis of the 1970s, and in response to global class struggle from below, as a strategy to reconstitute the hegemony of capital and recover the rate of profit. Through globalization processes, countries integrated into a new globally integrated production, financial, and service system. The TCC sought a strategy of generating absolute surplus value through the exploitation of cheap labor made available by globalization processes. By the turn of century, surplus capital had reached enormous proportions as global markets became saturated and stagnation set in. The TCC turned to wild financial speculation, debt-driven growth, the plunder of state finance, and militarized accumulation to unload surplus capital. The digital revolution driven by artificial intelligence may lead to widespread automation, renew the global circuits of capital, and usher in a new round of expansion, but it will also aggravate the underlying contradictions that generate crisis.