Anti-racism, Feminism, Fascism and Civil Rights

Mireille Fanon-Mendès France

Mireille Fanon-Mendès France of the Frantz Fanon Foundation and former UN expert (standing), speaking at the March 29 antifascist plenary. To her left is Fernanda Melcciona (deputy, MES/PSOL) and to her right is a representative from Colombia’s Pacto Historico.

WHAT DOES THE succession of serious events that have been constantly shattering the balance of international relations and, above all, dismantling all the peremptory norms of international law in recent months tell us?

• Starting with the illegal kidnapping of President Maduro and the abduction of Congresswoman Cilia Flores, the Trump administration’s implementation of a state policy against migrants amounts to a declaration of war against the wretched.

• In Haiti, the United States’ decision to manage the security crisis following the failure of the Kenyan military force, meant sending three ships — the USS Stockdale, USCGC Stone, and USCGC Diligence — off Port-au-Prince. Then, after the appointment of the Prime Minister, resolution of this crisis was awarded to the transnational firm Evergreen Trading System Limited. This puts the Haitian state under guardianship, obligated to pay the sum of $542 million within 10 years. It does not matter that the socio-economic and political crisis that Haiti is going through is the result of policies imposed from the outside, including the illegal debt imposed by the former French colonizer in 1825.

• Cuba, for its part, is declared an “extraordinary and direct unusual threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States” and is in fact under total blockade. Any country that, out of solidarity, comes to its aid will be subject to the wrath of the tenant of the White House.

• A Board of Peace claims to take control of the UN with an entry price of one billion dollars.

• This same tenant boasts about the “official” resumption of the Monroe Doctrine against the countries of South America. It is effectively waging a declared war against the right to self-determination and political sovereignty (Article 1-1, Charter of the United Nations), in short, against non-aggression and friendly international relations (Articles 1-2 and 1-3, Charter of the United Nations), against its own people and against other peoples.

• Meanwhile, Palestine remains under bombardment, the victim of endless genocide and ethnocide, its territory increasingly swallowed up by illegal settlements. We must not forget the aggression suffered for the past month by the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has never had its finger on the nuclear missile button, just as it has never been the first to attack the United States or the State of Israel.

This acceleration towards an uncertain world, and particularly since October 7, 2023, finds its justification in the talking points uttered by Marco Rubio in Munich:

“…We are bound to one another by the deepest ties that can unite nations, forged by centuries of common history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices made by our ancestors for the common civilization of which we are the heirs.”

These are elements echoed by tech proponents raised on the ideology of apartheid in South Africa, including racial cleansing, homogenization, and hierarchical structures.

What human disasters lie ahead with institutional racism no longer operating under a mask but with its head held high, and more necessary than ever to an authoritarian project demanding profit for an elite and the imposition of colonial power over the marginalized, taken to far greater heights than currently exists? We will move from a democracy — even though much could be said about this model haunted by profit, corruption, and power, where social movements could give meaning and substance to demands for economic, social, and cultural rights — to a hyper-hierarchical social body defending the values of white supremacy.

The question of political and collective reparations will be even more pressing. They may eventually benefit from some visibility as long as they limit themselves to memorial and psychological aspects.

All this in the name of law and order, leading to a future where only the elite will be able to breathe. For the proponents of technofascism, this is the price humanity — or at least a portion of it — will have to pay to reach the future. Transhumanism, where humankind will be freed from its chains, is only for the chosen few. For the rest of us, isn’t this both a return to the plantation system and a war of endless conflict against resisting populations?

The “doctrine of discovery” (the Catholic Church’s justification of colonial slavery —ed.) will be replaced by the hoarding of rare earth elements and natural resources in the name of a future of authoritarian and violent white supremacy, defended by the rights of the richest and strongest. What will become of Black bodies and other racialized people in such a project?

If Black bodies once challenged white Eurocentric domination and were deprived of all rights (and since the abolitions were merely tolerated), today the bodies of racialized and marginalized people, if they demonstrate any willingness to hinder the mission of transnational corporations, will be perceived as infringing upon the fundamental rights and freedoms of tech and transnational companies. These companies, through the power of fascist ideology, suddenly find themselves endowed with humanity, while certain bodies, particularly those of racialized and marginalized people, revert to mere commodities and lose all rights. This is a far cry from the fascism that emerged in the 1930s.

What is certain is that, from enslavement to technofascism, the Black question will once again be the structural adjustment variable of this new future upon us. Therefore, it is essential that social movements not forget that fighting capitalism requires fighting institutional racism. There is no racism without capitalism, just as there is no capitalism without racism. This inherent alliance between racism and capitalism is too often overlooked in our movements, which has left Black bodies absent and invisible.

In Brazil, where 54% of the population is Afro-descendant and Indigenous, it took years for their voices to begin to be heard and accepted. And within our own movements, even though there have been changes, the battle is far from over. At the opening of this first conference on fascism, all the panelists were white. And this is still far too often the case. Resisting, inventing, fighting, and declaring solidarity are forms of struggle that must break with the internalized colonial model that has kept racialized people marginalized for far too long.

If this ideology specifies that the transformations to come are only aimed at improving the future, we must question this vision of the future which would be so desirable that it must be adopted as quickly as possible at the risk of losing the right to access a future where only those who ARE will survive in the light. For all the others, reduced to what they DO, they will be assigned shadow and darkness. Is this the return to the hold of the ships that transported our ancestors?

Understanding “Non-Being”

The decolonial understanding of what “non-being” means has never been more relevant. And this is what is foreshadowed by the genocide and ethnocide of the Palestinian people, aimed at the emergence of a new Middle East through a Board of Peace that violates all the norms of international relations and a Mar-a-Lago-style reconstruction of Gaza for a state that has proclaimed itself a start-up nation.

In this new world order, law and order are reinforced by the establishment of a private justice system administered by international arbitration tribunals, allowing multinational corporations to sue states when public policies run counter to their interests.

This system of justice was conceived and implemented to guarantee transnational corporations the exploitation of natural resources in newly decolonized countries.

Hasn’t the right of predatory transnational corporations to block state public policies fostered collusion between some of these corporations, whose budgets far exceed those of many states and tech companies, in favor of a hegemonic, imperialist, racist, and fascist approach?

All these questions we face compel us to implement radical processes that allow us to extricate ourselves from what has entrenched Eurocentric modernity, embodying the ideal of the white liberal man. How can we conceive of the mutation of an illiberal, capitalist society that openly admits to being racist and fascist?

Is it possible to organize resistance by politicizing common objectives in struggles aimed at the autonomy and emancipation of oppressed communities? In To Die for the People, Huey P. Newton spoke of intercommunalism as a means to better combat North American imperialism, which had “transformed all other nations into oppressed communities.”

In concrete terms, we should direct our political and economic commitments, our resistance, our rebellions against technofascism to the emergence of new institutions, since those we face have never met the needs of the people.

• This should begin, among other things, by supporting the people of Haiti: being the echo of their voice demanding on the one hand, the end of the foreign control which decides its presidents and destroys both its self-determination and its sovereignty and on the other hand, the restitution of the illegal debt imposed by France.

• We should stand with Palestine, in a global campaign to demand the total and unconditional cessation of the genocide in Palestine with the application of UN resolutions, demanding that the ICC sue the perpetrators of genocide and war criminals.

• We should demand an end to the illegal colonial military operation against the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Lebanese Republic, among other things by fighting for the liberation of these oppressed communities from a murderous imperialist system.

For the damned, this must become, as Frantz Fanon put it, “an attitude of mind and a way of life, a struggle pursued with love, demonstrating a positive attitude, without abandoning one’s rage.”

Love and rage being the expression of “Yes” and “No,” the primary expression of a decolonial attitude. This is a significant challenge, but it is at this price that a balance of power can eventually be built, aiming to overturn the will of an even more hegemonic and even more deadly power.

July-August 2026, ATC 243