The starting point for any analysis of the shocking state of affairs shaking the world – trade wars, genocide, fascism – is the unprecedented crisis of global capitalism. The crisis involves four intertwined dimensions: chronic overaccumulation and stagnation, widespread social disintegration, the collapse of the post-World War II international order, and the threat of depleting the biosphere.
The system is undergoing a radical new round of restructuring and transformation based on the digital revolution, especially artificial intelligence (AI), which modifies productive forces and alters the relationship of transnational capital to labor and the state. The emerging hegemonic bloc brings together big technology with finance and the military-industrial security complex. The global economy and society are increasingly dependent on digital technologies. Corporations, states, and political and military institutions cannot function without digital technologies, making global society highly dependent on the giant technology corporations that manage and control these technologies, as well as the knowledge to develop and apply them.
Global markets are saturated. There is massive industrial overcapacity. The rate of profit has been declining since the beginning of the century. The transnational capitalist class (TCC) is desperately seeking where to unload its surpluses and open up new spaces of accumulation. Predatory extractivist expansion involves waves of dispossession. States find themselves in intense competition for markets and resources, trying to attract TCC investment and secure the resources required for accumulation within the national territory. The drive to seize resources is central to events in Palestine, Congo, Sudan, Mexico, Colombia and elsewhere, as well as Trump’s claim to minerals in Greenland, Canada and Ukraine. The relentless expansionary pressure fuels instability and conflict.
The institutions of bourgeois democracy cannot manage the crisis and they represent obstacles to capitalist expansion. The new authoritarianism, 21st century fascism and far-right populism involve new modalities of control over civil society as other forms of state emerge. Trump, Milei, Bukele, Noboa, Netanyahu, Erdogan: these and like figures represent new political dispensations that accelerate the collapse of the rule of law. These dispensations correspond closely with the economic transformations that have taken place, especially the unprecedented concentration of power and wealth on a global scale in the billionaire CCT cabal.
There is a reconfiguration of the power bloc in the State. The old forms of legitimization do not work. Bourgeois democracy is an impediment to the reconstruction of the capitalist order under the direct control of the emerging hegemonic bloc that seeks alternative forms of legitimacy, governance by force and decree, and the normalization of mafia deals. Some elements within the Trump regime, backed by powerful tech and finance capitalists and advised by a coterie of shadowy political and intellectual figures, such as Curtis Yarvin, with his “dark enlightenment” idea, want the constitutionally established state to collapse and be plundered; hence Milei’s chainsaw metaphor.
The drive to massively compact the U.S. state is a frontal attack on the working class, including its most unionized sector (public servants). Its aim is to destroy what remains of the regulatory and welfare state. Decades of neoliberalism have involved the continued privatization of the state, from war and intelligence gathering to social services, prisons and infrastructure. The goal now is not only to privatize the state, but to create private mafia states. The first, Prospera, in Honduras, serves as a model.
The digital revolution provokes a rapid expansion of the surplus population: billions have been expelled and must be controlled and even exterminated. Nightmarish strategies of containment include the “Gaza option” of total genocide, the “Salvadoran option” of mega-incarceration, and a radical expansion of the global police state, applying the new technologies for mass surveillance, social control and repression. Another way to deal with the surplus of humanity is simple abandonment, as in the case of rural America, where opioids conveniently annihilate entire communities. Trump has proposed a trillion dollar budget for the Pentagon, while increasing military spending around the world. Militarized accumulation and accumulation by repression are fundamental to sustaining global capital and controlling rebellion from below.
This repression has a crucial symbolic dimension. The surplus of humanity must be criminalized, dehumanized and scapegoated in every possible way. This explains the indescribable cruelty with which the prisoners of the Salvadoran gulag are mistreated and humiliated before the cameras of the world. In the U.S., the brutality of the war on immigrants, including arbitrary, often violent arrests and public kidnappings, is presented as a potent spectacle of the power of the emerging fascist state and a more general warning that political dissent and class struggle from below will not be tolerated. The fascist class war from above seeks to shift the burden of the crisis onto the toiling masses: to divide and disorganize the working classes, pulverize wages, attack unions, intensify the rate of exploitation and impose states of exception. Not surprisingly, the attacks on immigrants have specifically targeted trade unionists and labor organizers for arrest and deportation. The fascist state strives to instill fear and prevent the development of the subjective conditions necessary for mass resistance.
Everythig laid out in this analysis requires an urgent caveat: there is a huge gap between intent and ability. The global fascist project is riddled with contradictions! Mass resistance from below must identify and exploit these contradictions. At present, there is a correlation of forces favorable to the fascist project. Our task is to reverse that correlation through mass struggle.
*William I. Robinson is a distinguished Professor of Sociology. University of California at Santa Barbara
Original text published by La Jornada on April 24th, 2025.
Translation by Schools for Chiapas.