Zionism, Imperialism, and the Struggle Against Global Fascism: Palestine as the ‘Hornet's Nest’ of US Empire
To grasp the profound transformations reshaping the world system, we must confront its primary contradiction: the intensifying clash between a rising multipolar world order and a declining—yet still (and perhaps even more) aggressive—US imperialism. This emergent multipolarity is marked by unprecedented economic and military South-South cooperation—including the burgeoning Iran-China-Russia partnership—as well as a growing rejection of Western financial domination. The imperialist sanctions regime, ever expanding in its reach, has laid bare the fragility of dollar hegemony, spurring the Global Majority to forge a new financial architecture grounded in de-risking strategies. From BRICS payment systems to local currency settlements and reserve diversification, this collective shift undermines dollar dominance while building alternative structures to resist imperialist coercion—accelerating the transition toward a multipolar world no longer shackled to Western financial infrastructure. Meanwhile, beyond the coming upheaval this portends for the US economy, US military overextension reaches breaking point—hamstrung by production shortages that leave it unable to sustain the war in Ukraine, contain Yemen's resistance, or deter China's rise. No infusion of blood money—neither $ 1 trillion war economy boost promised by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth nor the claimed 'trillions' in investments pledged by the Gulf states—can reverse the inevitable decline of the US empire.
These developments strike at the heart of the US-led ‘rules-based order,’ plunging US imperialism into a crisis of both material power and ideological legitimacy. In a rare moment of ruling class candor, Vice President J.D. Vance acknowledged the growing crisis, decrying the threat posed by China and other Global Majority states to the ability of US capital to continue dominating global value chains and maintain peripheral and semi-peripheral states in the perpetual position of producers of low-value added commodities. The subtext here is captured by Paris Yeros’s analysis: the imperialist core’s existential anxiety is driven by the realization that the Global Majority’s ‘catching up’ may enable these states to break free from the imperialist-dominated world law of value and instead pursue ‘auto-centered, sovereign, and popular development.’ Taken together, these transformations represent a global ‘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.
Facing a renewed crisis of capital accumulation, the ruling class has intensified its dual strategies of imperialist aggression abroad and fascist repression at home. Internationally, this is evident in the ongoing zionist-imperialist genocide in Gaza, US-backed destabilization campaigns in Syria and Venezuela, the assault on Yemen for its anti-genocide resistance, escalating threats against Iran and North Korea, sweeping tariffs on key trading partners, and heightened militarization in the South China Sea. Washington has also escalated its hybrid war against the Bolivarian Republic, imposing secondary tariffs on Venezuelan oil while cynically scapegoating Venezuelan migrants as ‘narco-terrorist invaders’—deporting hundreds under the archaic Alien Enemies Act to El Salvador’s notoriously brutal ‘Terrorism Confinement Center’ (CECOT) prison and charging others under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. The racist weaponization of ‘counterterrorism’ laws continues, now threatening Haitian migrants through pending ‘foreign terrorist organization’ designations that would enable mass deportations.
Meanwhile, intensified class warfare unfolds through attacks on federal unions, corporate tax cuts for wealthy individuals and corporations, accelerated neoliberal deregulation and privatization, attempts to drastically reduce the social wage (with cuts to spending on welfare, social security, housing, public health and education that would 'rival Thatcher'). The administration has ended the student loan repayment moratorium, revoked more than 1,000 international student visas, and sanctioned abductions and kidnapping by masked ICE agents—the brown shirts of our time—along with expanded detentions, deportations, and the targeting of immigrant workers.
Simultaneously, the state—along with largely compliant university administrations—has launched a McCarthyite campaign of administrative repression targeting student organizers and academic workers who challenge zionist genocide, settler colonialism, and imperialist violence, exposing a system resorting to increasingly desperate measures to maintain control amid deepening crisis.
This is all aimed at upholding 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’.[2] The latter entails bolstering the mechanisms of unequal exchange to compress wages, prices and profits in the Global Majority states as part of the efforts to ‘stabilize’, in Walter Roney’s terms, capitalist relations in the imperialist core by perpetuating unequal exchange and wealth transfer from the periphery to the core. Today’s ideological infrastructure for ‘rationalizing’ the repression of all forms of resistance to capitalist-imperialism likewise draws on the discursive architecture 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’.[3]
Zionism—a form of white supremacy rooted in 19th-century European colonial projects—features more prominently in the ideological infrastructure normalizing capitalist racism, fascism 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.
Throughout history, those who endure the violence of a crumbling imperialist order—those on the front lines of resistance—have produced the clearest and most incisive analyses of the current conjuncture. As Orisanmi Burton observes, they are the tip of the spear in revolutionary struggle, and their insights illuminate the transformative potential of global movements.[4] This article examines historical and contemporary theories of fascism from insurgent thinkers engaged in anti-imperialist struggle, placing their work in dialogue with the various forms of anti-fascist praxis underway by anti-systemic movements and states. Ultimately, it will argue that fascist-imperialist maneuvers designed to delay collapse may paradoxically heighten the contradictions and aggravate the imperialist crisis 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 ruling class 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 specific conjunctures, 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’ in the bourgeois state, 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 percent between 1929 and 1940 while declining sharply everywhere else in continental Europe at that time.
Focusing on individuals while neglecting the systems and structures that enable and perpetuate fascism—along with the interests that benefit from it—inevitably leads to political confusion and leaves anti-fascist movements vulnerable to ‘liberal recuperation.’[5] 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 blinkered 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. 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.’
The ‘colonialist techniques of oppression’ profoundly shaped Nazi ideology, as Domenico Losurdo has demonstrated. Nazi thinkers, for instance, directly appropriated the concept of the Untermensch (subhuman) from white supremacist theories advanced by eugenicists like Lothrop Stoddard. They also looked to the US for inspiration—studying both the genocide of Indigenous nations[6] under its ‘continental imperialism’[7] and the racial terror of Jim Crow—as models for their own authoritarian racial order. In doing so, they sought to codify a system that would protect ‘white civilization’ through state violence.
This reveals a deeper truth: fascism has long been a systemic feature of US governance—a point powerfully articulated by George Jackson, the martyred revolutionary of an earlier generation’s struggle. Jackson—a luminary in the ‘imprisoned Black radical tradition,’—was murdered by prison guards in 1971 at Soledad Prison after enduring 11 years of incarceration—seven and a half of them in solitary confinement. His original ‘crime’? Stealing $70 from a gas station at age 18, for which he received a draconian sentence of one to 99 years. While imprisoned, he joined the Black Panther Party in 1969, and his writings on fascism, imperialism, and revolution—steeped in Marxist-Leninist theory and the examples of 'the struggles of the oppressed worldwide.' Jackson connected his prison organizing to broader revolutionary strategy, by framing the Black Panthers’ community programs as efforts to build an ‘autonomous infrastructure’ capable of sustaining a ‘people’s army.’ For him, the domestic struggle against capitalism and the racist prison regime was inseparable from the global war for liberation. His warning remains chillingly relevant: ‘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.’
Nina Farnia extends this analysis, arguing that ‘American fascism is an endogenous project, organic to the United States, with an etiology that is acutely local.’[8] It emerges, she writes, from ‘the reservations holding the survivors of Indigenous genocide, the prison cells confining the descendants of the enslaved—or, as Orisonmi Burton terms them, the captives of a defeated war.’ It is sustained by ‘broken treaties, laws that enforce land theft, and policies that continue to tear children from their families.’
The bourgeois press and mainstream academia’s fixation on Donald Trump as the embodiment of fascism obscures the systemic nature of the phenomenon. Trump is not an aberration but a product of the current conjuncture—his policies do not exist outside the framework of the racist capitalist state; they intensify and accelerate the political economy of American fascism. This is why it is essential to return to the insights of earlier generations of revolutionary thinkers and guerrilla intellectuals, who were often the primary targets of the imperialist-carceral state. Their work reminds us that fascism must always be analyzed through a historical materialist lens.
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 unequal 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 racialized 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.’[9]
Slow genocide creates the material conditions for the superexploitation required by capitalist racism. During COVID-19, the bourgeois state—consistently prioritizing profit over human life—exploited the labor of vulnerable migrants, many of whom were hailed as ‘frontline workers,’ even as it actively contributed to their deaths. This occurred through vaccine apartheid, the intentional collapse of public health infrastructure after decades of neoliberal austerity, and the exclusion of undocumented workers from federal and state aid.
Under Trump, a renewed wave of austerity is being pursued—anchored in sweeping executive spending cuts, the gutting of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and the defunding of federal research. Over $11 billion in federal funding to universities has been frozen, impacting programs in medicine, agriculture, and technology. Cuts are being made under the false pretext of combating ‘antisemitism’ or targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Additional measures include plans to slash Medicaid and food stamps. As Clara Mattei has documented in her analysis of post-World War I Italy, austerity is a handmaiden of fascism.[10] In the early 1920s, Mussolini slashed wages by decree and crushed labor unions, increasing the rate of exploitation. Unemployment soared from 2% to 11.3% contributing to the expanding reserve army of labor, while corporate profits more than tripled. Mussoloni implemented a scorched-earth approach, carried out in the name of ‘budgetary rigor.’[11] Its main aim was to consolidate ruling-class power, and stabilize capital accumulation amid systemic crisis.
Trump’s austerity agenda, similarly, is not only—or even primarily—concerned with balancing budgets. It instead signals a broader class project: using the guise of fiscal responsibility to discipline labor and dismantle public institutions, all in an effort to stave off the looming crisis of accumulation sparked by imperialist decline. Trump’s policies thus echo a long-standing pattern of austerity as counterrevolution, attempting to restore ruling class power under the cover of economic necessity.
This political strategy extends beyond economic policy and into domains like immigration, where Trump has similarly leveraged the rhetoric of crisis to consolidate power and justify fascist measures. In his first 100 days back in office, Trump issued 181 immigration-related executive actions—six times more than during the same period in his first term. He significantly escalated racist border enforcement by deploying 10,000 troops to the southern border, tripling ICE cooperation agreements with local law enforcement to 456, and expanding international agreements with countries such as El Salvador, Panama, and Costa Rica to facilitate the abduction, detention and deportation of migrants. ICE arrest rates have roughly doubled since fiscal year 2024, rising from 310 to about 650 per day as of mid-March. Although the Department of Homeland Security no longer publishes monthly removal statistics, NBC reported that in February, ICE deported 4,300 noncitizens from within the US—a slight increase from the Biden-era monthly average of 3,200 (FY 2021–24), but still below the 6,800 monthly under Trump (FY 2017–20) and significantly lower than the 12,900 monthly average during the Obama— ‘deporter in chief’—years (FY 2009–16). Limited detention capacity and logistical challenges have slowed removals, though officials expect numbers to rise as new enforcement strategies and international agreements take hold.
While Trump’s promise to deport millions of undocumented migrants is unlikely to be fully realized, these highly mediatized raids are designed to instill fear in migrant communities, reinforcing the material conditions for social control, superexploitation, and diminished access to the social wage. At the ideological level, the moral panic surrounding migration obscures US imperialism’s role in producing the very crises that drive Global Majority displacement and it is weaponized to discipline the sovereignty of states in 'Nuestra América.' Moreover, increased migrant detentions will create lucrative opportunities for capital accumulation as private prison corporations like CoreCivic and GEO Group stand to benefit.
These detention facilities are not simply tools of immigration enforcement but are extensions of the broader carceral system—what Assata Shakur aptly described as a ‘new kind of plantation.’ Beyond their counter-insurgent function, prisons enact a form slow genocide, shortening the lives of countless individuals through the 'deliberate mental and physical violence' inflicted, as documented extensively in the International Tribunal on US 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. Scholars like Toussaint Losier and Dan Berger argue that the ‘carceral state’ is inseparable from the historical legacies of chattel slavery, Indigenous genocide, and racialized exploitation—systems inherently carceral in nature, each defined not only by domination but also by enduring traditions of resistance.[12]
A recent example from California illustrates how prisons function not only as sites of slow genocide but also of superexploitation. Incarcerated workers—disproportionately Black and Latino—have been used to perform the dangerous labor of battling the wildfires devastating large swaths of Greater Los Angeles. These fires, fueled in part by capitalist-imperialist-induced climate change, are being fought by individuals paid less than $10 a day. This exploitation fills the gap left by the capitalist racist restructuring of the state, in which organized state abandonment leads to deep cuts in funding for life-sustaining public goods. For instance, the Los Angeles Fire Department recently faced a funding cut of nearly $18 million, even as spending on the state’s repressive apparatuses continues to grow—most notably the LAPD, whose budget, following a $126 million increase in 2024, now stands at $2.14 billion.
The Black Alliance for Peace draws critical connections between the devaluation of life under these systems of oppression and exploitation. They argue that there exists an ‘axiomatic nexus’ between how incarcerated people—many of whom are political prisoners—are treated and how Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poor communities are abandoned and dehumanized in the face of the climate crisis. This logic of disposability, they contend, extends globally—to the treatment of Palestinians, who continue to be displaced, dehumanized, and exterminated in a context of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and militarized domination.
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 offered a far more capacious and internationalist understanding of its roots and expressions. In Blood in My Eye, Jackson characterized fascism as a ‘higher form of capitalism’—a reactionary force that emerges to safeguard Western monopoly capital during periods of imperialist crisis, systematically suppressing class struggle and revolutionary consciousness.[13] For Jackson, fascism was inseparable from the institutionalized violence it required to maintain control. His notion of an ‘international fascist counterrevolution’ captured how core capitalist states mobilized against the rising tide of socialist and anti-imperialist national liberation movements throughout the 1950s and 1960s. That framework resonates powerfully today, as the primary contradiction of our moment likewise pits a crisis-ridden capitalist-imperialist core against a resurgent Global Majority seeking to complete the unfinished work of decolonization and 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.[14]
Jackson argued that ‘one of the most definite characteristics of fascism is its international quality.’[15] 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’.[16] Capasso and Kadri emphasize 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 escalate violence-what is required for sustaining polarized accumulation on a world scale.
Dani Nabudere’s 1977 text, The Political Economy of Imperialism, 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 similarly 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. 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.
Building on this understanding, we can see how contemporary imperialist powers, particularly the United States, continue to respond to crises with increasingly aggressive and contradictory strategies. While imperialism’s decline may force tactical retreats in some regions, it simultaneously provokes heightened intervention elsewhere—wherever material conditions permit or demand it. Prabhat Patnaik exposes the ultimate futility of these desperate maneuvers, demonstrating how Trump’s foreign policy seeks to salvage Western imperialism by escaping the failures of prior strategies—like the Ukraine war and sanctions on Russia, which backfired by strengthening the ruble, increasing the trade deficit, and accelerating challenges to dollar hegemony. Trump’s ‘carrot-and-stick’ approach offers an end to the Ukraine war (the carrot) to fracture the emerging anti-imperialist bloc, while wielding economic coercion—tariffs against ‘countries that went in for de-dollarization’—and energy blackmail, such as the Nord Stream II sabotage. Yet this strategy is self-defeating: by refusing to tolerate trade deficits—the traditional cost of imperial leadership—and instead imposing ‘beggar-thy-neighbor’ policies, Patnaik explains how Trump’s policies merely replace one imperialist dead end with another, deepening the global capitalist crisis.
This contradiction is further evident in Trump’s claimed agenda to reverse the long-term decline of US manufacturing—a decline rooted in the neoliberal era’s prioritization of short-term profit, financial speculation, and offshoring over industrial development. However, the policies his administration has adopted—including weaponized tariffs, immigration restrictions, combined with a lack of state investment in high-tech industries, skilled labor, and public infrastructure—seem likely to accelerate rather than reverse deindustrialization and result in economic isolation.
At the same time, Trump’s economic strategy abroad reveals continuity with longstanding imperialist practices, particularly in the Middle East. While his administration has touted over $1 trillion in investment pledges from Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states—including $600 billion from Saudi Arabia, $243 billion from Qatar, and $200 billion from the UAE—as evidence of renewed global partnerships, these agreements do not signal a break with past policy. Instead, they deepen the entrenched US alliance with reactionary Gulf monarchies, a cornerstone of US imperialist strategy in the region since the 1970s. Following the nationalization of crude oil during that decade as well as the quadrupling of oil prices in 1973-1974 as a result of the Arab oil embargo imposed by the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC), US policy pivoted toward securing the flow of petrodollars and shoring up Gulf regimes through arms deals, financial integration, and a sustained military presence. As Adam Hanieh notes, this entrenchment was accompanied by efforts to economically integrate the settler colonial state into the regional economy—most notably through initiatives such as the Qualifying Industrial Zones and the MEFTA initiative, which tethered normalization with the Zionist entity to trade and investment. Trump’s renewed partnerships with GCC states, then, represent not a rupture but rather a consolidation of this alliance, further imbricating Gulf capital with imperialist-zionist strategic interests.
This consolidation of imperialist power in the Gulf region is part of a broader strategy of hybrid warfare—one that blends military aggression with economic, political, and ideological tools to maintain global dominance. Hybrid warfare adapts to each conjuncture, deploying proxy forces, sanctions, electoral manipulation, propaganda, and institutional coercion depending on what is materially and ideologically effective at any given conjuncture. A particularly salient tactic of imperialist hybrid warfare is the use of balkanization through mercenaries and proxies—including sectarian contras like ISIS, Al Qaeda, Al Nusra, and HTS—deployed in regime-change operations in Syria and in broader destabilization efforts through terrorist attacks in places such as Iraq, Iran, Libya, and Mozambique. This strategy is mirrored in the use of 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). Imperialist warfare also relies on genocidal sanctions, blockades, embargoes and other coercive measures to drain wealth from and hollow out anti-systemic states. These interventions are enforced by international financial institutions like the IMF, World Bank, and SWIFT, which deprive targeted states of economic sovereignty. Meanwhile, legal and ideological warfare—via terrorist designations, financial blacklists, and disinformation campaigns—aims to delegitimize and criminalize national liberation struggles by branding them as criminal or terrorist threats to the ‘rules based order’.
As Patnaik underscores, ‘capitalism by its very nature is against peace’—quoting Jean Jaurès, ‘Capitalism carries war within it, just like clouds carry rain’. It would not be unreasonable to anticipate escalating fascist-imperialist violence in an attempt to pacify those states and movements that are spurring imperialist decline: the BRICS nations (notably China and Russia), Iran and the Axis of Resistance, the Alliance of Sahel States, as well as Latin America’s anti-systemic states (socialist Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua). Even imperialist-aligned states face the threat of hybrid warfare as the US seeks to preempt any political-economic or ideological realignment.
The ‘War at Home’: Zionism, Imperialism and Fascist Repression
Within the imperialist core, the carceral state escalates violence to pacify potential insurgent forces—particularly immigrant, Black, Indigenous, and other racialized working-class communities—thereby reinforcing the social relations underpinning capitalist racism. 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 the Al Aqsa Flood, the fascist counterinsurgency apparatus turned its attention to the burgeoning student intifada, most visibly through the violent suppression of Gaza solidarity encampments in spring 2024. These campus ‘de-occupations’ were perceived as especially threatening amid a broader capitalist-imperialist crisis. By exposing the web of investments, contracts, and institutional ties between their universities and the ongoing settler-colonial genocide in Palestine, the more radical encampments revealed the academy’s structural role in sustaining US imperialist domination and facilitating core capital accumulation. What has particularly alarmed the state is the movement’s moral courage, analytical sharpness, and ideological clarity. Student organizers have drawn incisive links between the everyday fascism of the US police and carceral system—designed to uphold white supremacy, settler colonialism, and manage class relations—and the more overt, targeted forms of fascism deployed through counterinsurgency campaigns. These efforts seek to repress not only resistance within the imperial core, including on Turtle Island, but also global solidarity with anti-imperialist states and national liberation movements.
Comprising part of the ‘international cradle’ of support for Palestinian national liberation movement, the student intifada 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 property damage 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 were designated ‘personae non gratae’ and 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.
Zionism continues to provide ideological cover for the fascist state crackdown on the growing student intifada, as evidenced by Donald Trump’s recent Executive Orders—most notably the January 29th EO that falsely conflates criticism of zionist settler colonialism with antisemitism as well as the ‘Task Force to Combat Antisemitism’—spearheaded by the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division alongside the Departments of Education and Health. Through measures such as visa revocations, suspension of federal funding, ICE abductions and detentions, and the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act as part of the McCarthyite targeting of vulnerable migrants and dissidents, universities are once again revealing their role as sites of state intervention, surveillance, and repression—especially impacting Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, Black, Brown, and undocumented students and workers who speak out in support of Palestinian liberation. This is illustrated by the ICE abduction of Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil, the attempted deportation of Yunseo Chung for Palestine solidarity protest, the dismissal of Yale scholar Helyeh Doutaghi based on an AI-generated Zionist smear, and the threatened deportation of Cornell’s Momodou Taal.
Campuses are now being pressured to report international students for vaguely defined offenses, effectively weaponizing antisemitism claims to silence anti-colonial and anti-imperialist voices. These measures erode already limited civil liberties and academic freedoms, further entrenching the role of colonial-capitalist universities as instruments of state repression and setting a dangerous precedent for broader suppression of political dissent. Zionist organizations such as Betar and Canary Mission compile blacklists of Palestine solidarity organizers as part of a broader campaign to doxx and harass them on social media—drawing the attention of university administrations, employers, and federal agencies to impose disciplinary action, and increasingly, to enable detention, deportation, and heightened surveillance. The right-wing Heritage Foundation has deepened this witch hunt through its recently launched ‘Project Esther,’ which falsely equates anti-genocide and Palestine solidarity organizing with ‘terrorism’, seeking to criminalize dissent by targeting students and institutions through funding threats, deportations, and intelligence coordination. A compliant bourgeois media contributes through manufacturing consent for the genocide in Gaza and repression here, in the belly of the beast.
Attempts to pacify the student intifada have escalated into a coordinated campaign of state and institutional violence, with universities increasingly deploying militarized force to crush dissent. What once seemed shocking—snipers stationed on UCLA rooftops and riot police brought in to dismantle student encampments—has rapidly become normalized. At Brooklyn College, students in early May 2025 established the ‘Hassan Ayyad Liberated Zone’ on the East Quad to protest CUNY’s financial and institutional ties to the zionist-imperialist genocide and settler colonialism. In response to the peaceful protest, the administration placed the campus on lockdown and called in the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group (SRG)—a notoriously violent unit formed in 2015, ostensibly to combat terrorism but routinely deployed against protest movements. SRG officers raided the encampment, beating, tasing, and arresting several students after forcing the protest into the street. Meanwhile, campus ‘public safety’ barred credentialed journalists from entering, prompting a First Amendment lawsuit. Similarly, at Columbia University, students transformed the Lawrence A. Wien Reading Room into the ‘Basel Al-Araj Popular University,’ demanding full divestment, and ICE free campus and amnesty for university students and workers targeted by Columbia’s disciplinary procedures. In retaliation, campus Public Safety officers—granted arrest powers—violently attacked the students, with several choked, concussed, and denied medical attention. These brutal assaults on liberated zones reveal the fascist convergence of university administrations and repressive state apparatuses in violently suppressing a surging student movement that dares to expose the academy’s role in upholding zionist settler colonialism, genocide, and the global imperialist-capitalist order.
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. In addition to the looming economic crisis the US is overstretched militarily. The US military-industrial complex is hampered by critical shortages—unable to ramp up missile and artillery shell production fast enough to sustain the war in Ukraine or subdue the resistance from Yemen, let alone confront China—exposing an unsustainable overstretch that can’t be fixed even with a $1trillion dollar injection into the war economy as promised by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
As Helyeh Doutaghi poignantly argues, accelerated fascism attempts to ‘sustain the illusion of domestic stability…[as well as] US and Zionist impunity…but nothing will stop the demise of the American empire.’ Despite the repression, the campus movement continues with the sprouting of new encampments and organizing around sanctuary and popular university demands.
Genocide and National Liberation: Resolving the Primary Contradiction
History teaches us that fascism can only be defeated through revolutionary rupture with capitalism’s death drive—a lesson written in the blood of millions of Soviet and Chinese soldiers who turned the tide in the 1940s. Today, it is the oppressed of the Global Majority on the front lines of resistance, as evidenced by Venezuela’s recent hosting of the World Anti-Fascist Parliamentary Forum on the heels of its successful defeat of another US-backed coup attempt. Vice President Rodríguez’s clarion call—to recognize fascism as capitalism’s crisis-response and zionism as its genocidal vanguard—does not merely echo anti-colonial struggles past; it recalibrates anti-colonial praxis for imperialism’s death throes, where decline manifests as escalating brutality.
The zionist entity’s function as imperialism’s mercenary force—training Contra death squads, propping up reactionary regimes, and spearheading counterinsurgency across Africa and Latin America—has been thoroughly documented by scholars like Max Ajl and Alexander Aviña. The latest example is Israel’s support for the fascist government of El Salvador, where it has armed and equipped Nayib Bukele’s security forces with weapons, spyware surveillance technology, and training—tools that have enabled mass incarceration, including of migrants abducted and deported by ICE from the US (and potentially US citizens in the future)—while repressing all forms of dissent. This partnership provides US imperialism with a military proxy, plausible deniability and ideological cover as it seeks to sabotage liberation struggles worldwide. Gaza’s genocide stands as the latest horrific chapter in this symbiosis of settler-colonial violence and imperialist core accumulation.
Yet the fissures in US empire’s foundation deepen, heralding the tortuous but inexorable birth of a multipolar world order. The Al-Aqsa Flood has irrevocably altered the trajectory of zionist-imperialist domination, accelerating its decline despite the desperate genocidal violence in Gaza. Although the January ceasefire was almost immediately violated by the death cult known as the IOF, the fact that Hamas managed to secure freedom for hundreds of Palestinians, including lifelong revolutionary prisoners—stands as a testament to their resilience. The imperialist-zionist assault has since escalated, with a deliberate campaign of mass displacement, starvation, and indiscriminate killing—openly admitted by zionist officials and enforced through total siege and ruthless bombing—transforming 'aid' corridors into instruments of extermination. Beyond death and destruction, the zionist-imperialist forces have failed to achieve their strategic military aims as the resistance’s command and control remains intact and deeply rooted in its popular cradle. Likewise, Yemen remains steadfast in its solidarity with the Palestinian people, as the relentless imperialist bombing campaign failed to halt the government’s anti-genocide efforts and Red Sea maritime blockade. These are not mere tactical victories but seismic shifts in what Walaa Alqaisya terms the ‘intifada against imperialism’s waste-economy.’
While we must never minimize the horrors unleashed by this genocide, we cannot ignore the tectonic realignment taking place on a world scale. The ‘insurrectionary pressure’ on the peripheries has become an unstoppable force—no amount of fascist violence can reverse the rising dawn of liberation for the Global Majority. Palestine, much like Algeria before it, has become, as another insurgent thinker of an earlier generation, Frantz Fanon, put it, the ‘hornet’s nest’ where US-led imperialism has gotten stuck, its ‘insensate hopes’ devoured by the very liberation struggle it sought to crush.[17]
[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 here. The ‘Hornet’s Nest’ referenced in title comes from Frantz Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, trans. (1967; repr., New York: Grove Press, 1988), 147. The author would like to thank Max Ajl, Audrey Bomse, Charisse Burden-Stelly, and Nina Farnia for their incisive feedback on this piece.
[2] Charisse Burden-Stelly, Black Scare / Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023), p. 15.
[3] Ibid., p. 6.
[4] Orisanmi Burton, Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2023).
[5] Gabriel Rockhill, Counter-History of the Present: Untimely Interrogations into Globalization, Technology, Democracy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), p. 58.
[6] See for example, Carroll P. Kakel III, The American West and the Nazi East: A Comparative and Interpretive Perspective (Bluebird Books, 2022).
[7] Manu Karuka, Empire's Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019).
[8] Nina Farnia, 'The Architecture of U.S. Fascism: Part I,' CUNY Law Review 28, no. 2 (2025).
[9] Cited in Ali Kadri, The Accumulation of Waste: A Political Economy of Systemic Destruction (Brill, 2023), 11.
[10] Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022), 278.
[11] Ibid., p. 180.
[12] Dan Berger and Toussaint Losier, Rethinking the American Prison Movement (New York: Routledge, 2018), p. 20.
[13] George Jackson, Blood in My Eye (New York: Random House, 1972).
[14] Ibid., p. 134.
[15] Ibid., p. 136.
[16] Ali Kadri, Arab Development Denied: Dynamics of Accumulation by Wars of Encroachment (London and New York: Anthem Press, 2015), p. 4.
[17] Fanon, 1967, p. 147.