William I. Robinson
The starting point for any analysis of the shocking conjuncture of events now rocking the world — trade wars, genocide, fascism — is the unprecedented crisis of global capitalism. There are four interwoven dimensions: 1) economic involving overaccumulation and chronic stagnation; 2) social reproduction and widespread social disintegration; 3) a crisis of state legitimacy and capitalist hegemony as the post-WWII international order cracks up; 4) an ecological crisis that threatens to exhaust the biosphere. What follows is an effort to paint in the broadest possible strokes – in 1000 words — the “big picture” of the historic conjuncture.
The system is experiencing a radical new round of restructuring and transformation based on the digital revolution, above all on artificial intelligence (AI), which revolutionizes the forces of production and also alters the relationship of transnational capital to labor and to the state. The emerging hegemonic bloc brings together tech with finance and the military-industrial-security complex. The entire global economy and society are becoming ever-more dependent on digital technologies. AI is now able to instantaneously process unquantifiable amounts of data and to generate its own algorithms. Corporations, states, political and military institutions, cannot function now without digital technologies, which makes global society extremely dependent on the giant tech corporations that manage and control these technologies and 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 turn of century. The transnational capitalist class (TCC) is in a desperate search for where to unload surpluses and open up new spaces of accumulation. Predatory extractivist expansion involves waves of displacement. States are engaged in intense competition over markets and resources as each tries to attract TCC investment and assure the resources that accumulation requires inside the national territory. The drive to seize resources is central to events in Palestine, the Congo, the Sudan, Mexico, Colombia, and elsewhere, to Trump’s claim to Greenland, Canada, and Ukraine minerals. Relentless pressure for expansion increases instability and conflict. Splits among political and economic elites intensify as the global capitalist historic bloc that formed in the late twentieth century crumbles.
New Political Dispensations
The institutions of bourgeois democracy cannot manage the crisis and are obstacles to capitalist expansion. The new authoritarianism, twenty-first century fascism, and far-right populism involve novel modalities of control over civil society as new state forms emerge. U.S. President Donald Trump, Argentine President Javier Milei, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa, Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, Turkish President Recep Erdogan — these and other such figures represent new political dispensations that hasten the breakdown of the rule of law as it has been constituted. 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 cabal of the TCC.
There is a reconfiguration of the power bloc 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 bloc that seeks alternative forms of legitimacy, rule by force and decree, and the normalization of mafioso dealings. &Elements within the Trump regime, backed by powerful tech and financial capitalists and advised by a cabal of shadowy political and intellectual figures such as Curtis Yarvin, with his notion of the “dark enlightenment,” want the constitutionally-established (“Administrative”) state to collapse and be plundered — hence Milei’s chainsaw metaphor.
The drive to massively compress the U.S. state is a frontal attack on the working class, including its most unionized sector (civil servants). It aims to smash what remains of the regulatory and social welfare state. Decades of neoliberalism have involved the ongoing privatization of the state, from war and intelligence gathering, to social services, prisons, and infrastructure. The goal now is not just to privatize the state but to create private mafia states. The first of these, Próspera in Honduras, serves as a model.
Surplus Humanity
The digital revolution is bringing about a rapid expansion of surplus populations — billions have been expelled and must be controlled and even exterminated. Nightmarish strategies of containment include the Gaza option of outright genocide, the Salvadoran option of mega-imprisonment, and a radical expansion of the global police state, applying the new technologies for mass surveillance, social control, and repression. Another form of dealing with surplus humanity is simple abandonment, as in the case of rural United States, where opioids conveniently wipe out whole communities. Trump has proposed a $1 trillion Pentagon budget as military spending around the world escalates. Militarized accumulation and accumulation by repression are pivotal to sustaining global accumulation and controlling rebellion from below.
There is a crucial symbolic dimension to this repression. Surplus humanity must be criminalized, dehumanized, and scapegoated in every possible way. This explains the unspeakable cruelty with which prisoners in El Salvador’s gulag are manhandled and humiliated before the cameras of the world. In the United States, the brutality of the war on immigrants, involving arbitrary, often violent arrests and public abductions, are intended as potent spectacles 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.
Fascist class warfare from above seeks to shift the burden of the crisis onto the laboring masses: to divide and disorganize working classes, pulverize wages, attack unions, intensify the rate of exploitation, and impose states of exception. It is no surprise that the attacks on immigrants have specifically singled out for arrest and deportation union members and labor organizers. The fascist state strives to instill fear and impede the development of the subjective conditions necessary for mass resistance.
Everything 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 those contradictions. There is at this time a favorable correlation of forces for the fascist project. Our task is to reverse that correlation through mass struggle.
Z, April 23, 2025