William I. Robinson*
AND
The starting point For any analysis of the impressive situation that shakes the world – commercial warnings, genocide, fascism – is the unprecedented crisis of global capitalism. The crisis involves four intertwined dimensions: the overequulation and chronic stagnation, the generalized social disintegration, the collapse of the international order after World War II, and threatens to exhaust the biosphere.
The system experiences a new radical restructuring and transformation based on the digital revolution, especially in artificial intelligence (AI), which modifies productive forces and alters the relationship of transnational capital with work and the State. The emerging hegemonic block combines large technological ones with finance and the military-industrial-security complex. Global economy and society depend more and more on digital technologies. Corporations, states and political and military institutions cannot work without digital technologies, which causes global society to depend largely on the gigantic technological corporations that manage and control these technologies, as well as knowledge to develop and apply them.
Global markets are saturated. There is massive industrial overcapacity. The profit rate has been decreasing since the beginning of the century. The transnational capitalist class (CCT) desperately seeks where to download its surpluses and open new spaces for accumulation. The predatory extractivist expansion implies dispossession waves. The states are in intense competence for markets and resources, trying to attract the investment of the CCT and ensure the resources that accumulation requires within the national territory. The desire to seize resources is fundamental in the events of Palestine, Congo, Sudan, Mexico, Colombia and other places, as well as in Trump’s claim on the minerals of Greenland, Canada and Ukraine. Incessant expansive pressure increases instability and conflict.
The institutions of bourgeois democracy cannot manage the crisis and constitute obstacles to capitalist expansion. The new authoritarianism, the fascism of the 21st century and the populism of the extreme right imply new modalities of control over civil society as other forms of state arise. Trump, Milei, Bukele, Noboa, Netanyahu, Erdogan: these and similar figures represent new political dispensations that accelerate the collapse of the rule of law. These dispensations correspond closely with the economic transformations that have occurred, especially the unprecedented concentration of power and global richness in the CCT multimillion -dollar clique.
There is a reconfiguration of the power block in the state. The old forms of legitimation do not work. Bourgeois democracy is an impediment to the reconstruction of the capitalist order under the direct control of the emerging hegemonic block that seeks alternative forms of legitimacy, governance by force and decree, and the normalization of mafia treatment. Some elements within the Trump regime, backed by powerful technological and financial capitalists and advised by a clique of gloomy political and intellectual figures, such as Curtis Yarvin, with his idea of the dark illustration
they want the constitutionally established state to collapse and be looted; Hence the metaphor of Milei’s chainsaw.
The impulse to massively compact the US state is a frontal attack against the working class, including its most unionized sector (public officials). Its objective is to destroy what remains of the regulatory state and social welfare. Decades of neoliberalism have involved the continuous privatization of the State, from war and intelligence compilation to social services, prisons and infrastructure. The objective is not only to privatize the State, but to create private gangsters. The first, prosperous, in Honduras, serves as a model.
The digital revolution causes rapid expansion of the surplus population: billions have been expelled and must be controlled and even exterminated. Research strategies of containment include Gaza option
of a total genocide, the Salvadoran option
of the mega-inarceration, and a radical expansion of the global police state, applying new technologies for mass surveillance, social control and repression. Another way of dealing with the surplus of humanity is the simple abandonment, as in the case of the Rural areas of the US, where opioids conveniently annihilate whole communities. Trump has proposed a budget of one billion dollars for the Pentagon, while increasing military spending worldwide. Militarized accumulation and repression accumulation are fundamental to sustain global capital and control rebellion from below.
This repression has a crucial symbolic dimension. The surplus of humanity must be criminalized, dehumanized and turned into an atoning goat in all possible ways. This explains the indescribable cruelty that the prisoners of the Salvadoran Gulag are mistreated and humiliated before the cameras of the world. In the US, the brutality of the war against immigrants, which includes arbitrary arrests, often violent, and public kidnappings, is presented as a powerful show 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 classes war from above seeks to transfer the weight of the crisis to the laborious masses: divide and disorganize the working classes, spray wages, attack the unions, intensify the exploitation rate and impose states of exception. It is not surprising that attacks against immigrants have been specifically aimed at trade unionists and work organizers, for their arrest and deportation. The fascist state strives to instill fear and prevent the development of the subjective conditions necessary for mass resistance.
This analysis requires an urgent warning: there is a huge gap between intention and capacity. The global fascist project is full of contradictions! Mass resistance from below must identify and exploit those contradictions. Currently, there is a correlation of forces favorable to the fascist project. Our task is to reverse that correlation through mass struggle.
* Distinguished Professor of Sociology. University of California in Santa Barbara
