Analyzing the Primary Contradiction in the World System Today
Profound transformations underway in the world system are most readily grasped through an analysis of the primary contradiction: between the rising polycentric world order and the declining yet still (and perhaps even more) dangerous US imperialism. The emergent polycentric order includes new forms of South-South military and economic cooperation that challenge the US-led imperialist ‘rules-based order.’ This shift creates space, in Paris Yeros words, for ‘countries and regions to disconnect from the world law of value dominated by imperialism and build a path of auto-centered, sovereign and popular development.’ These transformations are both the symptoms as well as cause of the ‘world pre-revolutionary situation,’ marked by persistent insurrectionary pressures on the peripheries. From the latest phase of the Palestinian national liberation struggle, ignited by the October 7th Al-Aqsa Flood, to Haiti—home to what Jemima Pierre calls ‘one of the longest struggles for Black Liberation and anti-colonial independence in the world’—and the growing ‘anti-imperialist upsurge in the Sahel’, these developments illustrate the intensifying global struggle that has triggered the latest crisis of capitalist-imperialism.
Similar to past crises of capital accumulation, the current crisis has sparked intensified imperialist violence ‘abroad’ and the resurgence of fascism at ‘home’. This is all aimed at maintaining what Charisse Burden-Stelly terms capitalist racism— a ‘racially hierarchical political economy and social order constituting labor superexploitation, expropriation by domination, and ongoing racial/colonial primitive accumulation’ dialectically tied to the ‘international expropriation’ of ‘Wall Street Imperialism’. Today’s ideological infrastructure for ‘rationalizing’ repression of resistance to capitalist-imperialism likewise draws on the discourses of an earlier period of state repression, which specifically singled out Radical Black anti-imperialist organizers in what Burden-Stelly describes as the ‘Black Scare/Red Scare Longue Durée’.
Zionism - a form of white supremacy rooted in 19th-century European colonial projects- features more prominently in the ideological infrastructure normalizing capitalist racism and imperialism today. As L. Allday and S. Saleh argue, ‘zionism began and developed as a reactionary political ideology, one that aligned itself…with capitalist, imperialist, anti-semitic, right-wing, and fascist forces.’ Although its global iterations have changed over time according to the needs of imperialist core capital accumulation, zionism has consistently been used to justify the genocidal violence required to establish, maintain and expand israeli settler colonialism. A 1975 Organization of African Unity resolution described zionism as a form of ‘racist colonialism’ sharing a ‘common imperialist origin’ with the ‘racist regimes in Zimbabwe and South Africa’ and other colonies. Today, in addition to providing material support for imperialist interventions across the global South, zionism furnishes the ideological cover for fascist repression globally. It legitimizes this repression as a mechanism for stabilizing capitalist core accumulation by invoking claims to fighting antisemitism, authoritarianism, and terrorism.
As has been true historically, it is those who bear the brunt of the violence unleashed by the dying imperialist beast—those on the front lines of resistance—who offer the clearest and most incisive analyses of the current conjuncture. As Orisanmi Burton puts it, they are the ‘tip of the spear’ in revolutionary confrontation, and their insights are essential for understanding the transformative potential of these global struggles. This article reflects on historical and contemporary theorizations of fascism by insurgent thinkers most impacted by and engaged in resisting capitalist-imperialism, considering their work in conversation with the various forms of anti-fascist praxis by various anti-systemic movements and states as part of the effort to resolve the primary contradiction in a way that advances national liberation on a world scale.
Fascism, Zionism, and US Imperialism: A Global Counter-Revolutionary Project
From a Marxist perspective, fascism is not a deviation from capitalism but an intrinsic component of it, functioning as a mechanism to protect capitalist interests in times of crisis. Gabriel Rockhill’s discussion of the historical materialist and dialectical approach to fascism reveals the deep systemic connections between fascism and capitalism. This approach also underscores how fascism adapts to the specific conditions of each crisis, taking distinct forms in response to the unique characteristics of each crisis it addresses.
Rockhill argues that the primary distinction between fascist and liberal forms of governance (both ‘partners in capitalist crime’) lies in their methods of maintaining capitalist control. Liberal governance operates as a ‘good cop’ within capitalism, targeting the middle and upper-middle-class strata willing to comply with the system by offering minimal rights, legal structures, and controlled political participation to maintain hegemony. In contrast, fascist governance acts as a ‘bad cop’ toward racialized, colonized, and marginalized populations, relying on overt repression, state violence, and collaboration with vigilante groups to suppress dissent and maintain capitalist order.
Although monopoly capital is content with liberal governance during periods of stability, in times of crisis, it expands its ‘bad cop’ function and rallies behind overtly fascist forces to stabilize capital accumulation. For instance, a 1934 fascist coup plot in the US revealed the involvement of powerful corporate elites like Morgan, DuPont and Rockefeller, who backed a failed attempt to overthrow President Roosevelt's New Deal government and replace it with a fascist dictatorship. Similarly, several major corporations, including Ford and J.P. Morgan, supported Mussolini's fascist regime through investments, loans, and industrial collaborations, while Hitler’s rise found sustenance in both US and European financial elites. Big capital along with key players in the US National Security State, including Ford, General Motors, Standard Oil of New Jersey, and DuPont were heavily involved in and invested in Germany's weapons production during the interwar period, with US capital investment in Germany increasing some 48.5% between 1929 and 1940 while declining sharply everywhere else in Continental Europe at that time.
An analysis that focuses on individuals at the expense of the systems and structures that enable and perpetuate fascism, as well as the interests that benefit from it, invariably produces political confusion and makes anti-fascists movements vulnerable to ‘liberal recuperation’. In his Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire famously articulated the historical connections between the atrocities committed by European powers in the colonies and the rise of fascism in the capitalist core. He critiqued the West’s narrow focus on the Nazi genocide, pointing out the contradictions in a Western-dominated international legal system that refused to trace the genealogy of genocide back to colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade. Césaire argued that the violence of colonialism invariably circles back to haunt the metropole. The ‘boomerang effect of colonization,’ as he called it, means that the brutal systems of oppression imposed on colonized peoples eventually affect the colonizers themselves. The colonizer, accustomed to treating the colonized as subhuman, inevitably ‘transforms himself into an animal’ in the process.
This critique challenged the Western idea that Nazi violence was a distinct kind of barbarism. Césaire believed Europe’s inability to ‘forgive Hitler’ wasn’t about the crime against humanity, itself, ‘… but because he applied the same colonialist techniques of oppression to Europe that had long been reserved for the Arabs of Algeria, the Indians in British colonies, and the Africans during the transatlantic slave trade.’ This racialized violence, as Domenico Losurdo demonstrated, was not only central to colonialism but also informed Nazi ideology. For example, Nazi thinkers borrowed the concept of the 'Untermensch' (subhuman) directly from US racist theories, including those of Lothrop Stoddard, who advocated for eugenics and viewed Black people and colonized populations as inherently inferior. The Nazis also looked to the treatment of Indigenous nations and Jim Crow-era laws in the US as a model for their own racial policies and ideas for how an authoritarian state could safeguard white ‘civilization’ from non-white populations.
In this sense, fascism has always been a systemic feature of US governance, a point made by the martyr of an earlier generation’s insurrection, George Jackson. Jackson – a luminary in the ‘imprisoned Black radical tradition,’ - was killed by prison guards in 1971 at Soledad Prison. He had spent 11 years incarcerated, including seven and a half years in solitary confinement, having been convicted of stealing $70 from a gas station at age 18, and given a sentence of 1-99 years. While in prison, he joined the Black Panther Party in 1969. His writings on fascism, imperialism, and revolutionary struggle were deeply shaped by his commitment to Marxist-Leninist theory and the examples of ‘the struggles of the oppressed worldwide.’ Jackson connected his prison organizing to broader revolutionary work by articulating the Black Panther Party’s community service programs as part of a strategy to build an ‘autonomous infrastructure’ that could fortify a ‘people’s army,’ drawing inspiration from anticolonial movements and positioning the struggle against the racist prison regime as integral to a larger domestic and global war of liberation. As Jackson contended, we need to 'understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will die or live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act.'
The bourgeois press and mainstream academia's obsession with Donald Trump as the personification of fascism obscures this deeper, systemic analysis. This is why it is crucial to revisit the wisdom of this earlier generation of revolutionary thinkers and guerrilla intellectuals, who were most targeted by the imperialist-carceral state as they remind us to always approach fascism from a historical materialist perspective.
For example, the Black Panther Party’s understanding of fascism was heavily influenced by Georgi Dimitroff’s 1935 report on fascism, delivered at the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International. Robyn Spencer has highlighted how the Panthers saw fascism as the rule of finance capital, embodied by banks, corporations, racist police, and demagogic politicians. The Black Panther newspaper ran articles like 'Fascist Pigs must withdraw their troops from our communities or face the wrath of the armed people,' emphasizing the Panthers' role in the anti-fascist struggle and positioning the fight against racist state violence as central to anti-fascist organizing.
In 1969, the Panthers were key organizers of the United Front Against Fascism (UFAF) Conference, which drew 5,000 activists from groups like the Black Students Union, SDS, and the Young Lords. The conference aimed to create a common revolutionary program that addressed the needs of oppressed people in a racist, capitalist Amerikkka. It led to the formation of the National Committees to Combat Fascism (NCCF), a multiracial network focused on implementing community control of police, which was organized in cities across the US, from Richmond, Virginia, to Oakland, California.
As with the zionist settler colonial state, fascism as it has manifested in Turtle Island has always been genocidal in nature. The US capitalist base and superstructure are designed to perpetuate both slow and fast forms of genocide particularly targeting Black people, as meticulously documented in the 1951 Civil Rights Congress petition We Charge Genocide. While the more visible forms of violence, such as the thousands of (disproportionately Black, Indigenous, and Brown) people killed or brutalized by police each year, are stark, the mechanisms of ‘genocide for profit’— or what Ali Kadri drawing on Lenin refers to as ‘structural genocide’— can be just as, if not more, deadly. This includes the structural racism impacting wages, unemployment, overall wealth, access to healthcare and nutrition, housing, and the ethnic cleansing entailed by colonial gentrification- all of which drain communities of wealth and power and systematically hamper the social reproduction of especially racialised surplus populations resulting in reduced lifespans. These are the forms of ‘malicious murder’ that Lenin excoriated as they are ‘murder against which none can defend himself…because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission.’[2]
Slow genocide creates the conditions for the superexploitation required by capitalist racism. During COVID, we saw how the state, always prioritizing profit over human life, exploited the labor of vulnerable migrants—many of whom were lauded as 'frontline workers'—while simultaneously directly participating in their deaths through vaccine apartheid, lack of public health due to years of underfunding under neoliberal austerity, and the denial of federal and state aid to undocumented workers who are here
In the current conjecture, migrant vulnerability is once against enhanced as the Trump administration has escalated its settler-colonial deportation machine, with over 2,000 migrant arrests in just two days as ICE pushes to surpass the 113,431 arrests made by the Biden administration last year—an average of about 310 per day. While Trump's pledge to deport millions of undocumented migrants is unlikely to be fully realized, the highly mediatized ICE raids are also designed to create widespread fear in immigrant communities, shaping the material conditions for social control, super-exploitable labor and reduced access to the social wage. Ideologically, the moral panic generated by these raids helps to obscure the role of US imperialism in creating the very conditions driving migration from Global Majority countries and is mobilized in the attempt to discipline the sovereignty of states in ‘Nuestra América’. Moreover, increased migrant detentions will also provide new opportunities for accumulation as private prison corporations like CoreCivic and GEO Group stand to benefit.
In addition to their counter-insurgent function, prisons serve as sites of slow genocide, shortening the lives of countless individuals through the 'deliberate mental and physical violence' inflicted by the carceral system, as evidenced by the extensive documentation and testimony presented in the International Tribunal on U.S. Human Rights Abuses Against Black, Brown, and Indigenous Peoples. With nearly two million people incarcerated at any given time, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, disproportionately affecting poor Black and Brown communities. Toussaint Losier and Dan Berger draw a direct link between the ‘carceral state’ and the histories of chattel slavery, Indigenous genocide, and racialized exploitation—systems they argue are inherently carceral ('chattel slavery had been a vast prison')- each with equally long histories of struggle and resistance.
The recent example of California using incarcerated workers-disproportionately Black and Latino-to do the risky labor of putting out the devastating wildfires consuming large swathes of Greater Los Angeles and caused in part by capitalist-imperialist induced climate change, while paying these workers less than $10 a day, demonstrates how prisons are not only a site of slow genocide, but also of superexploitation. Incarcerated workers fill the gap caused by the capitalist racist restructuring of the state, where organized state abandonment means reducing spending for life-sustaining public goods, including a close to $18 million funding cut to the Los Angeles Fire Department, while increasing spending on its repressive apparatuses - in this case of the LA Police department, whose budget after an injection in 2024 of $126 million now totals $2.14 billion. Black Alliance for Peace draws important connections between the devaluation of life entailed by these systems of oppression and exploitation, with an ‘axiomatic nexus between how these inmates/political prisoners are treated and how Black, Brown, Indigenous and poor communities are treated in the context of the climate crisis…extend[ing] to the treatment of Palestinian people who continue to be dehumanized and exterminated while also being displaced from their homelands due to an inferno of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and militarism.’
Given the current conjuncture of capitalist-imperialist crisis we can expect to see not necessarily a qualitative change in the fascist elements of imperialist core states as much as their ‘intensification’. Rockhill’s dialectical materialist assessment of the transition from a Biden to Trump administration, leads him to argue that we can expect to see more of the ‘bad cop’ fascist war on ‘the most oppressed and exploited members of the working class.’ However, he contends that both bourgeois parties share the same fundamental goal: the ‘maintenance or expansion of capitalist social relations.’
Analyzing and Resisting the ‘International Fascist Counterrevolution’
Unlike much contemporary analysis of fascism, insurgent thinkers of an earlier revolutionary era like George Jackson consistently drew connections between its domestic and global causes and manifestations. In Blood in My Eye, Jackson described fascism as a ‘higher form of capitalism’ that emerges to protect the dominance of Western monopoly capital during periods of imperialist crisis, suppressing class struggle and revolutionary consciousness. He argued that fascism relies heavily on the institutions of organized violence to maintain control. Jackson’s concept of the ‘international fascist counterrevolution’ was used to describe how core capitalist states responded to the successes of socialist and anti-imperialist national liberation movements of the 1950s and 1960s.
There is a striking parallel today, as the primary contradiction of the current moment also lies between a capitalist-imperialist core in crisis and an emergent new world order being shaped by a global majority striving to complete the unfinished project of national liberation. As Jackson wrote:
The history of this country in the last fifty years and more, the very nature of all its fundamental elements, and its economic, social, political, and military mobilization distinguish it as the prototype of the international fascist counterrevolution. The US is the Korean problem, the Vietnamese problem, the problem in the Congo, Angola, Mozambique, the Middle East. It’s the grease in the British and Latin American guns that operate against the masses of common people.
Jackson argued that ‘one of the most definite characteristics of fascism is its international quality.’ Today, zionism stands out as one of the most prominent expressions of international fascism, with the zionist settler-colonial state an appendage of US imperialism. The zionist entity helps secure Western dominance in the region and globally by controlling a geostrategically vital area, enabling the exploitation of land and resources, and ensuring access to super-exploitable labor. Given the current conjuncture of capitalist-imperialist crisis, the zionist entity’s role takes on an even greater importance. As Ali Kadri asserts, global crises of capital accumulation ‘necessitate the subsumption of Third World labour and resources to US-led capital’. Capasso and Kadri point out how super-exploitation of labor in the periphery accelerates as militarism and war (‘accumulation by waste’) compresses the ‘wage bill and other costs’ by ‘reducing the average wage or the number of laborers.’ In this sense, zionism plays a crucial role in maintaining the imperialist ‘order’ by providing the material means and ideological cover to legitimize the escalation of violence- what is required for sustaining polarized accumulation on a world scale.
Dani Nabudere’s The Political Economy of Imperialism (1977) is also helpful for understanding the international dynamics of fascism. A Marxist-Leninist, Pan-Africanist, and anti-imperialist scholar, activist, and politician, Nabudere played a significant role in both intellectual and political struggles for African liberation. In his book, he also describes fascism as a response to capitalist crisis, arguing that it emerges as a reactionary solution to the challenges faced by monopoly capitalism, particularly the falling rate of profit. As Nabudere puts it: ‘Fascism came in to assist monopoly capitalism by smashing all the bourgeois individual democratic rights and institutions in order to protect the bourgeoisie as a class against the possibilities of socialist revolution,’ highlighting the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy after WWI as a key examples. Similar to Jackson, Nabudere recognized the global dimensions of fascism, linking it to imperialist violence. When capitalism faces crises of accumulation, imperialism intensifies, with the imperialist core requiring access to cheap raw materials and labor from the Global South to restore profitability and stabilize polarized accumulation in the world system. This, in turn, leads to heightened militarization. Nabudere’s analysis of imperialism underscores the symbiotic relationship between fascism and imperialism, where fascism functions to protect imperialist core capital accumulation in times of crisis.
In the imperialist core, intensified fascism bolsters the carceral state and increases state violence to control and pacify potentially insurgent forces, especially immigrant, Black, Indigenous and other racialized working-class communities, thereby preserving the social hierarchies of ‘capitalist racism.’ Internationally, while the crisis-induced decline of imperialism may lead to strategic accommodation and retrenchment/triage in some areas, elsewhere there will likely be accelerated imperialist intervention where deemed materially feasible and/or necessary. This will involve increased fascist-imperialist violence aimed at preserving a racialized global hierarchy, particularly targeting states and movements that are spearheading imperialist decline. Today, this includes the BRICS states (China and Russia in particular), the axis of resistance forces (including Iran, Yemen/Ansarallah, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the Palestinian resistance forces- led by the Izz el-Din al-Qassam Brigades of Hamas, and including Saraya al-Quds of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades of the PFLP, the National Resistance Brigades of the DFLP, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades- and, up until the December regime change, Syria) and the anti-systemic states of Latin America with a focus on socialist Cuba, the Venezuelan Bolivarian Republic and Nicaragua. We can also expect to see more violence- especially of a hybrid warfare nature- directed against even imperialist-aligned states in an effort to block any political-economic-ideological reorientation from emerging.
Hybrid warfare blends military tactics with economic, political, and ideological tools, such as electoral manipulation, proxy wars and destabilization. The particular tactics chosen are shaped by the material and ideological resources available and required at any given conjuncture. A salient feature of imperialist hybrid warfare is balkanization through mercenaries and various proxy forces, including so-called salafi-jihadi contras like ISIS, Al Qaeda, Al Nusra, HTS and others sectarian forces behind the imperialist-zionist regime change in Syria and attempts at destabilization through terrorist attacks in Iraq, Iran, Libya, and Mozambique, or cartels across Latin America and the Sahel region, as well as ‘gangs’ in Democratic Republic of Congo and Haiti (as Jemima Pierre says, Haiti does not have a ‘gang problem as opposed to a problem of US imperialism). It also includes the use of genocidal sanctions, blockades, embargoes and other coercive measures to drain wealth from and hollow out anti-systemic states, as well as manipulation through imperialist-dominated financial institutions like the IMF, World Bank, and the SWIFT payment system, which prevent targeted countries from exercising control over their own economies and monetary policies. The use of propaganda and legal warfare like the Foreign Terrorist Organization and Office of Foreign Assets Control listings delegitimize and criminalize national liberation struggles and states that assert meaningful sovereignty as ‘terrorist’ or terrorist supporting.
Counterinsurgent lawfare has been a defining feature of the national security state, particularly targeting Black and Indigenous, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-colonial movements within the imperialist core. Nina Farnia looks at the consolidation of the modern national security state in the post-World War II era, explaining that the US needed a unified political and military apparatus to combat global Communism, gain influence in the decolonizing world, and suppress domestic liberation struggles. A defining aspect of this counterinsurgency was the ‘state-manufactured moral panic that labeled both Black dissent and Communist dissent as threats to the safety and sanctity of American life.’
Given the roots of counterinsurgent lawfare in the ‘Black Scare/Red Scare Longue Durée’, it is unsurprising that the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) and its sister organization, the Uhuru Movement, have been targeted by a revival of interwar red scare tools, like the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). The ‘Uhuru 3’ were falsely charged with being Russian agents and eventually convicted on ‘conspiracy’ charges, which, as the Black Alliance for Peace stated, amounted to a conviction for ‘internationalism and the work of liberating African people.’ Similarly, Samidoun, an organization with a long history of advocating for Palestinians held captive in zionist colonial prisons- the ‘tip of the spear’ of the Palestinian anti-colonial resistance - was designated by the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) as ‘a sham charity that serves as an international fundraiser for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist organization.’ This designation, coordinated with the government of Canada as well as undoubtedly with the zionist entity, is aimed at chilling internationalist organizing and silencing movements that challenge imperialist narratives, reminiscent of the McCarthy-era witch hunts, with claims of terrorism being the new anti-communism. This lawfare strategy is further reflected in the ongoing prosecution of 61 protesters against the ‘Cop City’ project in Atlanta, who are facing RICO charges.
Following October 7th, the fascist counterinsurgency focused its sights on the burgeoning student intifada, most visibly during the crackdown on Gaza solidarity encampments last spring. These ‘de-occupations’ were seen as particularly dangerous during a moment of capitalist-imperialist crisis. By drawing connections – in terms of the investments, contracts and institutional ties - between their universities and the settler colonial genocide in Palestine, the more radical iterations of the encampments made clear the function of the academy in facilitating capital accumulation. The state has been particularly alarmed by some of the more radical analysis advanced by the student movement, which links the everyday fascism of the US police and carceral state (designed to uphold white supremacy and settler colonialism, and manage class relations) with the targeted fascism used in counterinsurgency efforts to undermine liberation struggles on Turtle Island and any expressions of solidarity with anti-imperialist movements/states and nationalist liberation struggles globally. This movement can be conceptualized as part of the ‘international popular cradle’ for the Palestinian resistance, as described by Charlotte Kates.
The movement has faced severe repression, with thousands arrested and brutalized, many still facing felony charges; and the crackdown continues. In October, riot police stormed the off-campus housing of University of Pennsylvania students without warrants, guns drawn, refusing to identify themselves, and threatening to use a battering ram to break down the door and seizing personal property in response to alleged vandalism linked to a Palestine solidarity protest. In December, two NYU professors and several students were arrested during a BDS protest, with the university calling in the ‘counter-terrorism’ Special Response Group (SRG); two professors have been designated ‘personae non gratae’ and remain barred from certain campus buildings. Many students and academic workers have been suspended, lost their jobs, or subjected to disciplinary action. Across universities, the fall 2024 semester saw new ‘time, place, and manner’ protest guidelines implemented, undermining academic freedom and First Amendment rights. Trump’s recent Executive Order to ‘Combat Anti-Semitism’ will undoubtedly accelerate the attacks on those teaching and organizing in solidarity with Palestine liberation, targeting especially Black and Brown students and faculty members. While this moment requires organization and collective courage to fight back against the repression, we must also not lose sight of the fact that it reflects the desperation of a system that is over-extended and struggling to fight on multiple fronts.
Genocide and National Liberation: Resolving the Primary Contradiction
Just as fascism was defeated by communist forces breaking with the system of capitalist exploitation in the 1940s, with millions of Soviet and Chinese soldiers sacrificing their lives for liberation on a world scale, today it is the oppressed peoples of the Global Majority who comprise the front lines of the struggle. Having recently survived a fascist coup attempt in Venezuela—one of many imperialist efforts to destabilize the over two-decade old Bolivarian Revolution—it is no surprise that Caracas recently hosted the World Anti-Fascist Parliamentary Forum. The forum brought together parliamentary delegations from across the global majority, united by the words of Venezuelan Vice President Rodríguez, who called on them ‘to raise their voice against fascism,’ describing it as one of ‘the greatest threats to humanity and the entire planet.’ The analysis of fascism that emerged from this gathering is rooted in the same anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, and anti-fascist tradition that guided earlier generations of revolutionary praxis.
What distinguishes the current conjuncture is the explicit connection drawn between imperialism, capitalism, and zionism. As Rodríguez stated, ‘We cannot talk about fascism without understanding that it expands globally as a response to a crisis in the capitalist system.’ She further emphasized that zionism, as an ideological and political movement, is ‘a fascist movement that denies life’ and is indifferent to the extermination of thousands of women and children, with no concern for ‘the annihilation of the future of a people.’ In the tradition of anti-imperialist, anti-fascist thought, Rodríguez explained that ‘Zionism is not limited to the Palestinian territory. Zionism is a global project,’ intimately linked to the defense of capitalist-imperialism. As a political leader in a state that has long been subjected to various forms of imperialist hybrid warfare and counterinsurgency—in which this zionist entity has historically played a key role—Rodríguez is uniquely positioned to make these vital connections.
Of course, the zionist entity’s role as US imperialist appendage is nothing new and the zionist settler colonial state has a history of carrying out key functions of hybrid warfare, from training contras, to supporting fascist coups, to arming fascist governments. Max Ajl and Alexander Aviña have documented the role of israel in US imperialist counterinsurgency across Africa and Latin America, offering plausible deniability for US empire as the US attempts to sabotage socialist, anti-imperialist, national liberation struggles and anti-systemic states in order to stabilize polarized accumulation on a world scale. The zionist-impeiralist genocide highlights the enduring function of this symbiotic relationship in manufacturing instability in strategic regions, which, in turn, benefits both US and zionist capital accumulation on a world scale.
Despite the heightened violence and instability generated by response to the capitalist-imperialist crisis, there is no question that the tide is turning and the rise of a multipolar world order creates space to complete the process of national liberation unleashed in the era of anti-colonial struggle. The heightened struggle against the zionist entity triggered by the Al Aqsa Flood operation and the regional axis of resistance is both a symptom as well as accelerator of this process. The January ceasefire saw the resistance securing the release of hundreds of imprisoned Palestinians, including revolutionaries with life sentences. Beyond death and destruction, the zionist/imperialist forces have failed to achieve any of their strategic military aims as Hamas continues to govern in Gaza, with the resistance’s command and control intact and deeply rooted in its popular cradle. Representing both a material and ideological victory for the resistance, the ceasefire must be understood within the context of these broader transformations at the level of the world system. The ‘colonized [have] rise[n] to declare the rightfulness of their Intifada,’ in Walaa Alqaisya’s words, and in doing so they have put the entire ‘waste-driven economy of the imperialists’ in crisis.
As the insights of insurgent thinkers engaged in anti-fascist praxis like George Jackson remind us, it is the oppressed on the front lines who offer the clearest path to a world beyond capitalist-imperialism and the fascist project that seeks to preserve polarized accumulation at the expense of human life. Although we must never minimize the immense losses entailed by the ongoing genocide in Gaza and fascist violence unleashed on anti-systemic movements and states across the globe, it is undeniable that the ‘insurrectionary pressure on the peripheries’ is in motion and history cannot be reversed.
[1] This article is adapted from an interview with Momodou Taal on The Malcolm Effect, titled 'The Political Economy of Fascism & the US Election,' recorded on November 21, 2024. Available at: https://kultural.podbean.com/e/the-political-economy-of-fascism-dr-corinna-mullin/.
[2] Cited in Ali Kadri, The Accumulation of Waste: A Political Economy of Systemic Destruction (Brill, 2023), 11.