The American Way of Fascism
We are living through a period of reemergence, rise, and surge of far right and fascist forces internationally. This includes reconstructed fascist political parties and movements from the past, alongside novel and neo-fascist formations taking shape inside capitalist states and electoral systems in the present.
The miasma of fascist regeneration emanates from within the cascading crises of the capitalist system, increasing in both depth and frequency over the last two decades. These crises include recurring episodes of recession and stagnation; imperialist and inter-imperial conflict and war; distress, weakening, and collapse of traditional bourgeois political parties; and the rising frequency and intensity of class struggle and authoritarianism, culminating in both revolutionary and counter-revolutionary movements.
The established political parties within the capitalist state systems are proving themselves incapable of understanding, addressing, or responding to the crisis of legitimacy of bourgeois politics amid widening inequality and social class polarization. Instead, they trudge on administering in the same manner. According to one contemporary analysis,
None of these neoliberal tendencies were significantly altered as a result of the great financial crisis. There was a momentary expectation, with the election of Obama, that a logical response to the crisis would be the establishment of a “New Deal” where the political economy would be reorganized perhaps heralding a [shift in policy.] But nothing of the sort materialized. In the way of comparison, after the last great demand-side economic crisis of the 1930s, the governmental response involved bailing out workers through jobs creation and social insurance, while more tightly regulating industry and finance. Today, we see the mirror opposite— finance has been bailed out and the mass of citizenry is more tightly regulated and monitored.
While capitalist economies undergo turbulence, traditional bourgeois parties continue implementing neoliberalism policies, while pursuing the same brand of neo-colonial free-trade agreements and debt-extraction abroad. At increasing frequency, the ruling classes can only respond with more of the same while provoking resistance and opposition to the point of social upheaval.
The resulting political crisis of bourgeois democracy, which in its most recent phase has been predicated on suppressing the forces of the Left, and enabling and aligning with those of the far right, has facilitated the resurgence and recomposition of fascist forces inside the electoral system, in the public sphere, and in the state apparatus.
In this setting forces of the far right and fascist political groupings have made some sweeping electoral gains and breakthroughs into the mainstream; or have orchestrated coups and efforts to smash left political organization and movement. In the US, fascists engage in mass murder; brazenly attack and threaten a wide range of political targets, their political adversaries, racial and ethnic, gender, and religious groups as a means to build capacity and train their forces; destroy national energy infrastructure to accelerate collapse; and openly flout, subvert, or are attempting to overthrow or restrict established political or democratic norms. They are also in full-throttled ideological war mode; attempting to erase, discredit, and suppress all forms of social, critical, and historical representation that challenges or counters their versions of a mythologized white nationalist pseudo-history.
For their part, established liberal and Democratic opponents of a resurgent far Right may bemoan the danger involved, but have neither the means nor the interest to understand or confront the threat that fascist movement poses. Instead of recognizing how the plague-ridden system of capitalism is driving the multiple crises that nourish fascist genesis and proliferation, they can only implore and shame people into voting for the same capitalist parties that exacerbate the processes that generated the crisis in the first place and that will ensure perpetuation of the social crisis fueling far right amplitude.
Furthermore, while political liberals and the leadership of the Democratic Party condemn the fascist far right forces in rhetorical denunciations, they have neither desire nor strategy to confront or resist it. This is because that would require policy approaches that would be antagonistic to the profit system. This has allowed the gathering forces of the political right to flip the script, and vilify leftwing activism and antifascism as the real existential threat to the American way of politics. It is the right wing—of the right-wing ruling capitalist class—that is firing on all cylinders to shift political narratives and drive policymaking to the far right in the US.
This, in turn, is inspiring and enabling their activated cells of reactionary and fascist petty bourgeois followers to take direct action in their own way. The convergence between reactionary sections of the big and small bourgeoisie and the deployment of political violence against workers, oppressed, and marginalized populations during times of crisis is an expression of primeval US nation building. It is characteristic of what I will define as settlerism, a fixed mechanism of how the ruling class rules in a nation formed out of settler-colonial capitalism.
Settlerism as political category refers to the phenomenon of reactionary violence carried out by petty bourgeois colonizers; those who’s primordial material interest, class consciousness, and ideological originations were and continue to be constituted through schematics of violence in the pursuit of, or in vigorous defense of, unfettered accumulation. In the ‘original accumulation’ of US capitalism throughout the colonial period, settler violence as a trajectory of history carried forth in three distinct ways. These were the wars and campaigns of elimination and removal of indigenous and original populations of the land; the imposition of forced, enslaved, degraded, and denationalized labor regimes for maximum exploitation and control; and through the building of a state apparatus to legislate and encode the new order and the formation of armed repressors to enforce it.
It is through these incipient aspects that social reproduction recurs and further echelons of state evolutionary development advance: class convergence and the ideology of “white nationhood” in pursuit of ongoing capitalist accumulation; the systematized exclusion of racialized and other oppressed peoples and the intensified exploitation of their labor; and the growth and expansion of the state repressive apparatus—especially during epochs of heightened class struggle, popular insurgency, and other forms of collective resistance. Further expansive forays and manifestations of colonial and imperial conquest project and translocate these forms and methods of reactionary violence across national boundaries.
All oppositional and disruptive forces that work against the machinery of capitalist accumulation are treated as an existential threat, especially when in the form of heightened class struggle of the exploited and oppressed. From the point of view of settler-capitalist politics, class struggle contains the possibly for revolutionary overthrow, expropriation, and reclamation—and so must be neutralized or obliterated. It is in this historical context that the state and capitalist classes of the US instinctively resort to disproportionate violence to all forms of working-class struggle and anticapitalist organization; and especially against the uprisings of racialized proletarians whose collective memory, historical trauma, and intrinsic opposition to settlerism and excessive exploitation situate them as the gravest threat to the white capitalist nation. All the constituent aspects of settler-colonial capitalism rely on perpetuating forms of social and political violence, that over time and in escalating and evolving form, can transubstantiate from “far-right violence” to fascism.
In trying to understand the resurgence and evolution of the fascist movement in the US in the contemporary period, it is necessary to first examine the theory, history, and the character of class and state formation and methods of accumulation in the establishment and trajectory of US capitalism. To begin, we must look beyond standard bourgeois explainers—which are blind to the systemic and ideological origins of fascism that are germinated within the capitalist mode of production, its class relations of production, and how these filter through colonial and imperialist expansion. For this, we will need a Marxist analysis.
Furthermore, we will need to analyze the following components of the how the capitalist system operates at its current conjunction and configuration: its methods of capital accumulation, the race and class character of class struggle, the contextual and evolutionary stages of development of the state repressive apparatus, the nexus between imperial expansion and fascist relay within the grooves of empire-building and maintenance, and the various crises of the US capitalist system—which, as the bulwark of a global system of its own making—is undergoing decline.
Lastly, in attempting to identify and explain how and why fascism is once again on the march, a discussion of how to fight it becomes warranted; a struggle that will neither be effectively waged nor won in the voting booth—but rather in the capacity to mobilize mass movement, critical resistance, and opposition across multiple fronts in what will likely become an existential struggle for years to come.
Marxist Analysis of Fascism
Marxist interpretation of fascism developed amid the conflux of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary movements of early 20th century Europe. Formative thinkers like Clara Zetkin, Antonio Gramsci, and Leon Trotsky identified the phenomenology of fascism as emerging within a critical juncture of class struggle, when the balance of class force and power begins a decisive shift from the hegemonic rule of the capitalist state to the working classes in the course of heightened revolutionary self-activity—presaging a tipping point toward the overthrow of the state and seizure of the means of production; i.e., proletarian revolution.
Jose Maria Mariategui, representing a Latin American and indigenous Marxist perspective, located fascist offensive in the retreat of a revolutionary uprising. Fascists took the initiative in the defeated ebbs of a revolutionary movement to reassert the dictatorship of capital in the most brutal way.
Black North American and Caribbean Marxist thinkers also contributed frameworks of analysis of fascism, expanding specifically on the different national traits and state characteristics of fascism. CLR James, Aimé Césaire, Claude McKay, and Langston Hughes, for instance, each compared Jim Crow racial persecution and segregation and European and American colonial methods of indigenous removal and extermination to the practices of the Nazis and Fascist in power.
In the period of civil rights struggle, Communist Party member Angela Davis and the Black Panthers turned their attention to the character of the US state repressive apparatus, and how it internalized fascist elements. Systemic violence meted out through racist policing, mass incarceration, and targeted political assassination and persecution of Black radicals and organizations were understood as institutionalized embodiments of fascism.[1]
From the general Marxist position, the ruling class can only rule over the vast and heterogenous populations of the proletariat through the impulsion of diverse methods of division, segregation, antipathy, and repression. These are the integral forms of racial, national, sexual, gender, and other categories of differentiation within the working classes that are stoked, enjoined through policy, law, and culture; and exploited to undermine and countervail class consciousness and inhibit unity and forms of collectivity inside the broader working class. When these mechanisms falter, the transition to a position of self-defense is at first predicated on the amplification and heightening of the extant reactionary ideological practices of bourgeois class rule, and the initial alignments of the bourgeoisie with its subsidiary petty bourgeois allies of the far and reactionary right.
When bourgeois ideological and political hegemony fracture and divide in the face of resolute and collective class struggle; and when the attendant mechanisms of state repression, and other means to retain control flounder and fail; the distressed ruling capitalist class desperately backs fascist organization and movement to neutralize the existential threat. Bourgeois democratic norms and legality are suspended to allow for ultraviolent methods of disarticulation of revolutionary movement. As the bourgeoisie cannot act as a class through its own means to repress the working classes in rebellion, it operates through the coercive force of the police and through the proxy of shock troops of the extreme political right to reorder the class structure by any means at its disposal.
Beyond Germany and Italy, fascist movements have taken power or wielded power within countries across the globe since the 20th century, from Indonesia to El Salvador to South Africa. Fascist movement and ideology, whether inchoate, small, or large exist in all capitalist countries. In the colonialist and imperialist countries, fascism takes on more extreme and systemic iterations due to their particular histories and character.
Genetics of American Fascism
Each capitalist nation-state has their own unique origination and ambit towards integration and interface within the global capitalist order. They have different historical routes, methods, and processes towards class and state formation. Each has its variable accumulations of experiences with class struggle and the capacitation of infrastructures of class power; attendant memories and self-consciousness; placement within imperialist alliances and institutions; distinct racial, ethnic, and cultural composition; and other factors that influence and inform the particularities of fascist ontogenesis.
The taxonomy of “Fascism” and “Nazism” are foreign in the vernacular of mainstream American bourgeois politics. This is because their European originators became imperialist rivals in competition with a rising American empire and were defeated in World War II with US support. The conflict with fascist states did not come into being for moral or ideological reasons, but rather for practical concerns. Amid Euro-Asian inter-imperialist war, the US ruling class strategically leveraged its position vis-à-vis its primary European imperial rivals (England and France) while also pivoting against the rising imperial ambitions of Germany, Japan, and Italy. These calculations were instrumental for their designs to attain global positioning and supremacy in a post-war context. Despite these turns, there was widespread sympathy, financial relations, racial views, and a shared emotive anti-communism between sections of the US ruling class and their counterparts in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy throughout the war and aftermath.
Despite this complex and contradictory character of the US state's historical “anti-fascism,” fundamental aspects of European fascism can be observed in American fascism, and the underlying class character of European fascist movement embedded therein can be applied and understood in a US historical context.
This contradiction can be identified and illustrated in how most US-based ideological fascists (or proto-fascists) abnegate European labels in preference for iconographies of a US settler, colonial, and ultra-nationalist past (“3 percenters,” “Oath-Keepers,” “Proud Boys,” “Minutemen”, “Patriots”, etc.); and often deny their white supremacist identities or that they operate outside of established bourgeois political norms. The most self-conscious and militant edge of US fascism even label their liberal and left wing opponents “fascist” as a form of irrational obfuscation, and feign innocence and deny their own extreme-right credentials while displaying admiration for fascist figureheads and historical movements; or by superficially coding their fascist overtures and undertones in signaling to their bases with a wink and nod. In fact, denialism as a political outlook and organizing framework is a long and historic characteristic of fascist movements. In his book, 1931: Debt, Crisis, and the Rise of Hitler, Tobias Straumann points out that in their initial phase of organizing, the Nazi movement intentionally downplayed or obscured their extremist philosophies and political views until they seized state power, using the slogan “first power, then policy” as an internal organizational mantra.[2]
While in practice there are universal forms expressed through fascism, and many North American fascists admire and emulate their European antecedents and identify and align with their direct descendants internationally, there is a distinct permutation of Anglo-American Fascism. To begin our search for its essence and its formulative combinations, we have to start at the beginning, incising into the primordial cell walls of the Anglo-American settler-colonial capitalist and imperialist project.
There is a distinct origin, evolution, and forms of atavistic continuity in the class and social character of fascist political violence in the US. This violence is patternable throughout US history as response to proletarian resistance to the more extreme methods of American capital accumulation. The re-activation of these viral cells occurs in conjunction manifests in reaction against class struggle, and especially during times of concerted social and economic crisis.
This begins with the hyper-violent processes of original capital accumulation in the colonial and post-independence and civil war periods; and subsequently splits into variegated branches of coercive class-based violence, racial terrorism, misogynistic violence, and state repressive violence. Therefore, the specific forms of state-led and publicly-orchestrated violence that characterized the incipient US colonization process, and has since reconfigured and resurged in reaction to junctures of heightened class struggle that threaten the system, are defining features national consciousness and state-building, including: enslavement; wars of colonial conquest, removal, and extermination; racial, national, and gendered working-class formation and exploitation; the particularities of development of the state-repressive apparatus in response to epochs of class struggle and resistance from working-class and racially proletarianized populations; and the transmission of these methods of labor control and repression internationally through colonial and imperialist expansion.
These are all combined and raveled into the genetics of the US political economy. These genes reactivate when working class and oppressed people revolt against the methods of production and reproduction of capital at junctures along the accumulative process. Therefore, the surges of fascist political violence growing in capacity, breadth, and frequency in the US in the 21st century are not just novel and spontaneous outcroppings of a political economy and mode of production in acute crisis. They are expressed through atavistic evocations of US fascist ideology and movement from the past, emerging from the very kernel of settler-colonial capitalism. Like with the nature of the capitalist system and its long trajectory toward deeper and more intractable crises, crisis-activated fascist movements are also likely to become exponentially more extensive, violent, self-conscious, and qualitatively more threatening.
The historical papering over of the proto-fascistic root and branch of settler-colonial capitalism is undone by rescoping a class analysis of US history. The religious-political ideological expressions in the foundational stages of settler-colonial capitalism are embedded in the Puritanical mysticism of the “City on the Hill”; the fabricated and mythologized “democratic spirit” of the Plymouth Compact; the slavery-expansionist yearnings of “Manifest Destiny”; the bourgeois totalitarianism and American supremacism informing the notion of “American Exceptionalism”; the capitalist class’s promotion of Frederick Jackson Turner’s genocide-justifying “Frontier Thesis” fantasy; and the Christian colonialist and supremacist conception of the “missionary civilizing project.”
These codas of settler-colonial violence have been subsequently reconceptualized into updated versions that subsume and conceal the scale of violence, rapacity, and repression that undergird the exigencies of capitalist exploitation, expansion, and accumulation. In transmitting the past into new packaging for each succeeding epoch, the ruling class ideologues and institutions generationally reify and reproduce a white nationalist identity of racial superiority, patriarchal violence, war and colonialism as benevolence, and the neo-metaphysics of predestination and divine right.
For the right-wing capitalist class and their petty-bourgeois enforcers, these tenets inform capitalist ideology and are at the core of reactionary nationalism, which under conditions of crisis-induced pressurization and social polarization and radicalization, become the fire and forge of neo-fascist ideology and movement. Put another way, all the preliminary assemblages of fascism are built into the architecture and the systemic functioning of the US capitalist system and combine and actuate as diverse elements in orchestrations of violence when the system is under severe stress.
The proto elements of US fascism are now visible in the interaction and interplay of distinct subsystems in concert that cannot necessarily be isolated, located, or understood as a singular phenomenon. Nevertheless, they can be understood through their composite motion towards similar political goals; in rallying around unifying tropes; in remonstrations in defense of authoritarian icons; in uniformity of opposition against vulnerable groups and political targets; in ultra-nationalist displays and performances; and most dangerously, in their convergence and collective deployment of violence.
Destabilized and radicalized petty-bourgeois individuals and groupings are activated through settler politics and memory. They are organized in private and secretive organizations, and inside the state and state-repressive institutions. They make qualitative steps towards organizing and aggregate further by appealing to reactionary and atomized sections of the working class and poor—especially based on racialist and religious appeals and through public demonstrations of their power.
The political creatures created and vetted through the electoral mechanisms of US settler-colonial capitalism ensure that the ruling class and the political party system that it administers remains closely aligned with the prerogatives of the broadest representation of capital’s interests in every scenario, even while public space is afforded for the performative difference over secondary issues or quibbles over details in the process of application. In the absence of a political left or sizeable, organized working-class-based opposition, the crisis-intensification of the US political economy creates a dissonant political reality for the far Right. In a crisis milieu, far right and fascist actors exaggerate and amplify the minuscule differentiations between the mainstreams of the Democrat and Republican parties. In this narrowed space, far Right ideologues cast Democratic Party politicians as surrogates for the “radical Left.” In a bizarre twist, the far Right treats the Democrats as a stand-in for a real socialist or anti-capitalist left which would try to synch with, and advance the class struggle of the oppressed—unlike the ruling class Democratic Party functionaries who are always trying to prove their credentials to the class they serve. This conundrum has nevertheless inspired far-right extremists who inhale the exhaust of these distorted narratives and take violent action against Democratic Party politicians in recent years.
This displacement of reality distorts how both parties have worked in unison in the administration of the capitalist system: in maintaining and expanding all forms and methods of class rule and capital accumulation; in building the state-repressive apparatus and carceral system; in jointly bailing out the capitalist class during economic crisis; in receiving the vast majority of their funding from the same capitalist class; in the pursuance and maintenance of colonial and imperial objectives; in the vigorous promotion of capitalist political ideology through all social institutions; and in the heavy-handed defense of a bipartisan bourgeois dictatorship that excludes the formal existence of a political left.
Furthermore, both political representatives of capital, the Democrats, and the Republicans, must build top-down, inverted pyramidal alliances with cross-sectional representatives of other classes to establish solid foundations for the rule of capital. This includes the petty bourgeoisie as their party stalwarts and mobilized elements (liberal and reactionary, respectively), and subsections and organizations of the working class as their voting bases (unions, church-groups, etc.). Within this matrix, the right wing of capitalist political economy reigns supreme; and during periods of spiraling crisis, the reactionary and activated petty bourgeois take an outsized and semi-independent role in developing and deploying the means to attack what they perceive to be the source of the social crisis, an existential threat to their way of life, or who are taking what is “rightfully theirs”. In sum, in any manifestation of power and resistance of the working class and oppressed groups that could undermine the hegemony of the white capitalist nation.
Rightwing political economy
The foundation and evolution of US settler-colonial capitalism give it a uniquely rightwing historical trajectory and standing political character. From its very inception, the US state has been a conductive agent of racial colonialism, a laboratory in unfettered accumulation, and an amalgamation of repressive institutions and special bodies of armed men tasked with eliminating, enslaving, killing, removing, policing, incarcerating, segregating, punishing, guarding, and controlling whole populations in different and evolving forms; and in perpetuity.
At the foundation of US political economy is the birth and evolution of the two oldest capitalist parties in world history, with the Federalist and Anti-Federalist wings of the colonial proto bourgeois gradually morphing into the Democrat and Republican parties. Except for during the Civil War, these two parties have ruled in perpetuity as the two mutually-loyalist parties of capital since the 19th century. Their jointly enforced lock on power, over and against the formation of parties of the other classes, have strived to limit the extent of democratization of the US variant of bourgeois democracy up to the present.
The political dictatorship of capital has occurred and sustained in myriad ways. Methods include the manufacturing of an exclusive electorate through racial and gender exclusion and disenfranchisement, carceral disqualification, citizenship restrictions, vote suppression, and political violence.[3] Even more direct and egregious has been the concerted effort to prevent and repress left-wing, radical, and working-class political formation (and revolt) across the 19th, 20th, and into the 21st centuries.[4]
Within this political ecosystem, US politics have steadfastly remained on the right wing of the political spectrum, in rhythm and motion with the ruling imperatives of capital in each epoch. It is also within this milieu that the reactionary petty bourgeoisie takes on an elevated role during periods of crisis, as the praetorian guard in defense of the capitalist order status quo ante. The leveraged power of capital, which has only increased over time, and all its aligned social forces which wield and exert disproportionate influence in the political economy, tilt US politics decisively to the right. The politic movements of the left are squelched, distorted, and erased.
The US political parties have become so ensconced in the management and direction of the capitalist system, that they become reconfigured in the folds of episodic crisis-induced restructuring. These historic transitions are based on the imperatives of accumulation and profit generation, the balance of class forces of labor and capital, and what is needed to restore functionality of the system.
Since the 1970s, the increasing turbulency of capitalism has shifted the mainstream of national politics even more to the right. This has become more defined and apparent since the onset of prolonged capitalist crisis and the onset of “neoliberal restructuring”. Driven by the prerogatives of capitalism, they have become compelled to deploy more disruptive and destructive measures to prop up methods of capital accumulation. These phenomena include accelerated neoliberal policies at home, increased application of neocolonial pillage abroad, an intensified arms build-up and war-making, and more aggressive forms of class exploitation. It also reflects in patterns of state policymaking that are designed to lower the standard of living of the subordinate classes as part of crisis-restructuring, even while profits sky-rocket.
Taken as a whole, the quantitative build-up of tension and contradiction in capitalist political economy is manifesting into another qualitative fragmentation and reordering. The politics of capitalist class-rule are already slanted to the right, as they are predicated on the force of hierarchical class relations. They are embedded in everyday and intrinsic forms of state repression and structured differentiations imposed to increase rates of labor exploitation based on existing race, ethnicity, sex and gender, nationality, culture, citizenship status, and other forms of discrimination and oppression. Intensifying social polarization and the attendant pressurization of class-rule amid economic crisis and widening types and instances of class struggle are the conditions in which contemporary fascism is reconfiguring. In the United States, the toxic seeds of fascism have germinated and are activating into organized movement—showing once more—a historic convergence between the far right wing of the capitalist class and their junior counterparts in the petty bourgeoisie.
The petty bourgeois and fascist ideology
The conjuncture of US fascism occurs in the axial convergence of interest alignment between the most rightwing and resolute sections of the capitalist ruling class with the most reactionary sections of the middle class, or petty bourgeoisie. The numerically smaller “big” bourgeoisie conjoins in alliance with the numerically bigger “small” bourgeoisie, whose larger numbers across the economy and placement within the capitalist state (especially in the bureaucracies, policing and carceral institutions, military, etc.) makes them indispensable allies in times of existential threat or crisis. In this role, according to Devin Zane Shaw, they can be characterized as the “para-military wing of settler-colonialism.”[5]
The heterogenous composition of the petty bourgeois class includes small investors, landowners, and business owners; self-employed, licensed, and credentialed agents and professionals; managers, supervisors, and administrators; the middle ranks of police and the armed forces; and other disparate actors that are socially situated in the economy above labor and below big capital. This intrinsically unstable class becomes even more compressed and rendered more vulnerable by economic crisis, given their smaller capital and closer social approximation to and dependence upon the exploitation of labor. In periods when class relations destabilize, when there is cascading social resistance to labor exploitation and oppression, and amid intensifications of class struggle and resistance to the established methods of class rule, they become triggered.
The activated settler mentality occurs in atavistic form, in which sections of the reactionary petty bourgeois reenact their colonial claims to the land and nation (“self—indigenization”), reassert their supremacy and superiority over the working class and racialized and colonized populations, and gravitate towards force, violence, and extremist methods to reassert their class position in the social hierarchy.
The activated settler mentality occurs in atavistic form, in which sections of the reactionary petty bourgeois reenact their colonial claims to the land and nation (“self—indigenization”[6]), reassert their supremacy and superiority over the working class and racialized and colonized populations, and gravitate towards force, violence, and extremist methods to reassert their class position in the social hierarchy.
The affirming symbology of the expropriative settler-turned-indigene is embodied in the self-reassuring and quasi-religious character of “patriot” culture; replete with liturgized rituals of flag waving and Pentecostal cadence; frenetic worship and manic emulation of charismatic reactionary elites among the bourgeois that rattle the cages of their disaffection; a witless obedience to authority and authoritarianism; and a Christian crusader conception of the world.
Settlerism as a socio-political phenomenon is legitimized and promoted within the mainstream parameters of US bourgeois politics. It is socially reproduced through each cycle of class reproduction, ebbing, and flowing in power and influence within a shifting balance of class forces. It coalesces as a mass phenomenon in concert with bourgeois reaction amid crisis, and even transcends bourgeois limitations and control to the extent in which the scale of extremist violence is deemed necessary and acted upon to restore class relations back into their “natural state.”
The ideological and organized right-wing elements of this class make hard-right and reactionary turns in the face of loss and impoverishment, rising class struggle, and especially the threat of expropriation. The reactionary mindset within this class combines various constitutive elements: precarity under capitalism as they buffet and batter under the weight and displacement by big capital; disdain for and fear of the working classes and their potential for active resistance to exploitation; feverish opposition to wealth redistributive taxes and policies that improve the lives of the poor at their self-perceived expense; enthusiastic support for wars of imperial expansion; militant political-religious identity; blind loyalty to paternalistic and repressive authority; and a visceral hatred for all things socialist—whether real or perceived.[7]
These factors position them to become the bulwark, advance guard, and shock troops of self-conscious fascist movement when aggregated in ideological and organized expression under conditions of social polarization and pressurization. Ideological fascists are those small groups and networks that base their organizing efforts on established doctrines of the past applied to present conditions. They study and analyze previous fascist ideology, movements, and organization; and attempt to emulate and apply the ideas, strategies, and methods in the current context.
These forces build and coalesce amid social crisis and take direct action to physically smash and atomize what they perceive to be the existential threat to the white capitalist nation. The paramount threats within this paradigm include leftwing organizations and political parties, radical labor unionism, and other types of worker-led, self-activity that can disrupt and hinder accumulation. They also target groupings and populations that are oppressed and marginalized within the nation based on race, sex, gender, nationality, culture, citizenship status, and other categories of oppressed proletarians. This is a fascist politic designed to exacerbate the existing divisions already in place under the “normal functioning” of class oppression.
The social position of the working class as the producer of the labor value that comprises capital and profit, and whose exploitation is contingent on the very functioning of capitalism, leads them to instinctively resist their own oppression. The latent and predictable tendency for it to act and erupt in resistance to all and any forms of class rule, informs in practice—from the point of view of those whose class position is more acutely dependent on smaller-scale capital accumulation—exactly how class rule is inherently contingent upon treating working class (and specially oppressed populations of that class) as a permanent, existential threat that needs to be contained, controlled, and repressed.
Far right, petty-bourgeois elements are qualitatively morphed into fascist orientation and action under conditions economic crisis, escalations of class struggle and radical action, and the attendant rise and reverberations of confidence and self activation among widening and inter-connecting sections of the working class engaged in struggle. In sum, fascism comes into being as ideology, as organized expression, and ultimately as a movement that identifies and targets its socially and politically constructed enemies for subjugation or obliteration through violent methods. Fascism exploits existing class inequality embedded in law, through which the bourgeoisie wields inordinate power to exist and operate outside the law that it imposes on the proletariat. When fascist movement is given license to act, it is provided space by the bourgeois ruling class to do so under the extralegal conditions that it typically reserves for itself. Violent actions become tolerated and even protected, which in turn, operates as a form of tacit promotion; creating a type of impunity like that which exists for the police.
When analyzing the core elements of Marxist analysis of fascism in the US context, we need to begin with this analytical framework, but also look beyond static or fixed iterations of the past. To reckon with the manifestations of US fascism into the third decade of the 21st century, this requires examination of the specific characteristics and conditions that give it rise and catalyzation. This includes an in-depth analysis of the specific character of the original accumulation of US capitalism, and its ongoing methods of accumulation, production, and reproduction; of the characteristics and methods of nation building, the incessant expansion of state-repressive apparatuses, and its ongoing colonialist and imperialist imperatives.
Settler-colonial capitalism
The variance of US fascism has its roots in the dually intertwined project of settler-colonial capitalism and the way its features reverberate through its territorial expansion and empire-building. At its base, this describes the incipient braiding of the corporate project rooted in the proto-capitalist, 17th century “company” model of accumulation, and administered through a cross-class alliance with land hungry proto-petty bourgeois settlers. Since their incipience, both classes were imbricated with the mindset of purging the land of its indigenous inhabitants for remunerative partition and driving out the “lesser races” in the path of their colonial ambitions. Through this process, these proto-Americans were reconstituted as the new landowners (big and small) who were singularly determined to take and make the land productive and profitable. Along this historical progression, the conquered, captured, and colonized people were rendered and reconstituted into extruded proletarians and subjugated armies of labor.
The Anglo-European colonizing project in North America was an extension of capitalist development in England and elaborated into statal and national entities as an uninhibited and unrestrained experiment to facilitate accumulation, extraction, and reproduction. Aristocratic, banking, and merchant capital had come to see the material world of land, resource, and labor in a new way; with an insatiable lust to turn nature into gold and people into enslaved and oppressed armies of labor. They invested in the Company of London’s expeditionary flotillas (with Virginia and Massachusetts Bay subsidiaries), which became “engines of capitalism and imperialism” that set out for the shores of Greater Virginia beginning in the early 17th century.[8] The mechanisms of original capital accumulation that Karl Marx identified manifested in the “New World” were thus set forth in operational motion:
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive [or original] accumulation.
Sylvia Federici observed that the specific characteristics of primitive accumulation in North America were predicated on racialized and gendered differentiation within the process of colonialism and proletarianization:
Primitive accumulation, then, was not simply an accumulation and concentration of exploitable workers and capital. It was also an accumulation of differences and divisions within the working class, whereby hierarchies built upon gender, as well as “race” and age, became constitutive of class rule and the formation of the modern proletariat.[9]
To realize their vision, the architects of colonial expansion assembled a corps of settlers, overseers, and speculators; utilized previously accumulated knowledge and experience with colonial violence and warfare; and a self-legitimizing and assuring ideology. The proto-petty bourgeois elements that comprised the transatlantic colonial settlers brought with them their own frontier mentality, musketry, and quick accommodation to a mercenary entitlement embodied in the first constitutions of globalizing capitalism referred to as the Doctrines of Discovery.[10] The lionized John Smith, for instance, was himself a veteran of the tail-end of the European crusades against the Ottoman Empire, who was steeped in a racist and colonizer mentality of the necessity of total war against the indigenous population to create a colonial outpost for the expanding British Empire.[11]
Therefore, the very conceptualization of the English colonial experiment was and has been predicated upon, socialized as, and structurally maintained through systems of violence against colonized people and racialized proletarians. The threat purview later expanded to include the immigrant working classes when engaged in struggle, and the radical oppositional parties and forces they built amid flare-ups of class struggle. The junctures of class repression that were pivotal to the turns in the process of original and on-going capital accumulation can be contextualized as the prototypical manifestations of US-specific fascist violence that presages, encodes, and intrinsically shapes each succeeding phase of national and state development.
These episodes occur at the points of convergence of significant oppositional factors to the means of capital accumulation. Like recurring replays of Indigenous removal, reenactment of punitive expeditions against slave uprisings, and wars of colonial conquest and expansion against original and autochthonous peoples of the land; the settler-colonial capitalist state and nation reconjures the social forces that become organized, mobilized, and unleashed to recapture, remove, and to obliterate—to the point of genocidal impulse—all manifestations of obstruction and opposition to its essential ordering and functioning.
Proto-fascist conjuncture
Within the first months of their beachheads into the land of the Tsenacomoco and Wampanoag, the English colonial expeditions let loose their weapons of war. They began redrawing their borders and boundaries through forts and walls, and amassing, assembling, and arraying the component materials of their archetypal political economy of capitalist accumulation. The imperatives of original accumulation can be traced through three fundamental and self-perpetuating characteristics of US capitalist expansion: incessant wars of removal, elimination, and marginalization of native and indigenous peoples; the legislatively-constructed maximalization of exploitation of colonized and marginalized populations through racialization, patriarchization, illegalization, and other forms of hierarchical segmentation of the labor economy; and the long and grinding industrial manufacture of a colonial and imperialized state-repressive agencies and attendant carceral apparatus.
The most critical formation points of the primordia of US proto fascism begin with the establishment of the “thirteen colonies” as the first phase of this ambit. Succeeding trajectories include the waging of over 25 major invasions and large-scale wars—along with hundreds of massacres, slaughters, and episodes of forced removal—against Native and indigenous nations over the course of 400 years. [12] Other epochal trajectories of formative convergence include the campaigns of repression and reprisal of over 250 slave rebellions[13] and the coordinated and widespread violence against the abolitionist movement. This also includes the multiple and recurring episodes of iron-fisted repression and dissolution of the left and radical labor organization once they assemble and wield demonstrable power and influence within the working classes.
Another point was the invasion and war on Mexico, and the subsequent annexation and colonization of the northern half of that country and the corresponding colonial-proletarianization of Mexican people.[14] This was followed by further colonial and imperial expansion of the US into Caribbean, Central American, South Pacific, and Asian nations. The destructive and displacing consequences of imperial expansion and enforced incorporation subsequently carved out the channels of emigration from these nations to feed the growing need for proletarian armies to build the US economy. This, alongside other movements of people from south and eastern Europe, combined and worked through a racialized schema of proletarianization that underwrote the model of maximizable exploitation and the extraction of surplus value that characterizes the brutal labor efficiency of settler-colonial capitalism.[15]
The progression of capitalist development through recurring episodes of colonial violence, and the ever-enlarging boundaries of a blood-stained frontier that transgressed all borders before it—rendering the very conception of territorial borders as reification of colonial expansion. The transition to national independence and continental expansion followed in similar configuration. The integer of the settler-colonial capitalist state is a nucleus of accumulation through incessant class warfare. Its emergent concentric membranal layers over time and space are the permutations that take new, combined, or recapitulated form in each succeeding epoch in response to the next threat to the administrative rule of capital and its unimpeded motors of accumulation.
Bourgeois and aligned petty bourgeois ideological convergence informed the execution of these conjunctural points of state, national, and imperial formation. This occurred through armed force of citizens’ militias, cross-class socio-political movements, the mediums of ideological production, and through the repressive agencies of the state. All phases of development relied on deploying violence to remove, access, enlarge, control, and repress an expansive and evolving pool of racialized proletarian subjects. Orchestrations of violence were also conducted to subdue and squash radical movements attempting to resist or overthrow existing systems of exploitation for which capital accumulation is dependent.
The arming of the most reactionary, bellicose, and activatable elements of the petty bourgeois was prerequisite to effectively function as the praetorians for capital, from its colonial genesis to its metamorphosis into global empire. From colonial-era militiamen tasked with “Indian clearing”[16] to a mass-shooter targeting Mexican people in a local Walmart in 2019 to do his part to “stop the invasion.” Some more historical examples of proto-fascist conjuncture follow.
Amid the rise and challenge of the abolitionist movement in the 1830s, reaction in defense of slavery was organized and effectuated through violent protest movements. These phenomena were a component of far-right capacity building that aligned rightwing sections of the bourgeois and petty bourgeois in defense of slavery and expressed themselves in politico-organizational form through the Democratic Party. This party initially served as the electoral and ideological vehicle representing the interests of the slave owning sections of the ruling class. The violence of the anti-abolitionist street movements, which routinely broke up public meetings, brutally beat and often killed abolitionists, and attempted to sow terror among all those who opposed slavery; corresponded to rise and ascendancy of Democrat Andrew Jackson. As the notorious general who made his name as an “Indian killer,” a stalwart defender of slavery, and a fierce proponent of white nationalism, Jackson was a catalyzing figure for this preliminary iteration of US proto-fascism.
The eight years of the Andrew Jackson Presidency would be marked by both the rise of an interracial abolition movement and some of the worst violence the nation has ever seen, often directed against that movement…The era featured the greatest concentration of rioting in American history, with more than 50 major incidents in two years alone: 1834 and 1834…more than anything, though, racial hatred fueled the mobs.[17]
This era of capacity-building of the violent and reactionary social forces in defense of slavery later reorganized in response to the defeat of the Confederacy in the Civil War, ushering in the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and other homologous and subsequent reconfigurations.
From the Ku Klux Klan to the Progressive Movement
The Ku Klux Klan emerged out of the cinders of the Civil War when a coterie of mid-level officers of the defeated Confederacy began to reconceptualize organizational resistance to Black freedom and social integration, and whose presence (and subsidiary and successional forms) in US society and polity persists into the present.[18] The group expanded their range of targets, theaters of operation, and activities nationally; and formed networks that have periodically aligned and concerted action among sections of the bourgeoisie, elected officials, the police, state bureaucracies, and small business and the professions. While they surely had members and adherents in the white working classes, they comprised neither the organic nor the structural leadership; nor have they typically functioned through the Klan as a class.
The full spectrum of Klan activities extended through all echelons of US government and society. These ranged from the legislative enactment and judicial enforcement of white national policy at the local, state, and federal levels; racial terrorism in black and brown working-class communities; assassination and lynching of antiracist and left-wing political activists and civil rights organizers; and as labor union busters.[19]
At its apex, Klan-aligned politicians within both Democratic and Republican Parties penetrated the edifices of local, state, and national politics. At the Democratic National Convention in 1924, the proposed KKK-aligned and endorsed candidate, William McAdoo of California (who was Treasury Secretary under Woodrow Wilson and a founding member of the Federal Reserve Bank) nearly won the party nomination for President. At that same convention,
the Invisible Empire could count on the support of 85 per cent of the Georgia delegation, 80 per cent of the Arkansas, Kansas, and Texas delegations, 75 per cent of the Mississippi one, and more than 50 per cent of the Iowa, Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Tennessee, and West Virginia delegations. [20]
This majority of southern and some midwestern states’ delegates, and sizeable minorities elsewhere openly aligned with the Klan, and rejected a party plank that would have forbid party support for Klan-aligned members. This convention reflected how deeply Klan ideology had permeated the party, which represented broad sections of the bourgeois and petty bourgeois for over a century. During the same period, another historical manifestation of the of proto-fascist formation transpired through the so-called Progressive Movement.
Like the Klan, the middle-class crusaders of the Progressive movement also constituted themselves as a class-based movement in reaction to what they perceived as proletarian social and political threats to the white capitalist nation—albeit in different form—and in this case, acting primarily through the Republican Party. The Progressives rehabilitated the discredited bourgeois ideology of “Social Darwinism,” and repackaged it into the pseudo-scientific movement for Eugenics. Eugenics refers to the notion of practicing racial “hygiene” and “improvement” into state policy to buttress and enforce white, class-based hierarchy predicated on the promotion of the pseudo-scientific idea of white European genetic superiority. This racial ideology was acted upon by the Progressives which catalyzed the state to act as an instrument to segregate, sterilize, incarcerate, and exclude those of “inferior” racial stock. According to historian Ann Gibson Winfield,
Further fueling European American middle and upper class fears during this period was an increasing level of militancy among the ranks of labor; socialism and anarchism reached a peak of popularity during the 1920s and 1930s as did the organizations of Progressive women fighting for suffrage and workers’ rights…
[T]he Progressive movement [was]…an amalgamation of extraordinarily activist constituent movements whose intent was to address fears of communism and socialism, to engage in labor union busting, promote birth control, prohibition, immigration restriction, racial segregation, super-patriotism, fundamentalism, and finally, to achieve the application of a business model efficiency to government and education.[21]
The Klan resurged in the 1950s in violent reaction to the growth, confrontational tactics, and political radicalization of the civil rights movements. Another fascist formation called White Citizen’s Councils (WCCs) also took concerted action against political uprisings of the oppressed, although the WCCs “typically drew a more middle and upper class membership than the Ku Klux Klan and, in addition to using violence and intimidation to counter civil rights goals, they sought to economically and socially oppress blacks.” The WCC was founded by Mississippi Circuit Court Judge Tom P. Brady, and was directly supported by members of the state legislature, and by southern capitalists. Their bourgeois class status led to them be nicknamed the “uptown Klan.”
The WCC’s claimed 80,000 dues-paying members and 250,000 supporters by the mid-1950s, and had a national radio and television show that claimed 10 million viewers and guests that included “Republicans and Democrats, politicians and religious leaders, military officers, and international figures.”[22] The WCCs persisted until 1989 when it rebranded. Into the 21st century, there has been a resurgence of Klan-linked groups, especially corresponding with the rise of Trump. Perhaps more significantly, the genetic essence of Klan politics and ideology have been widely diffused, subsumed, and reactivated through a of heterogenous assortment of groupings actively organizing fascist movements under the banners of “patriot”, “western supremacist”, anti-immigration, Christian identity, anti-abortion, citizens’ militias, armed “constitutionalists,” alongside overt neo-Nazis and others with ties to European-origin variants of fascism.
Repressing proletarian rebels
The state has unleashed enormous repression and violence against acts of resistance by colonized peoples, racialized proletarians, and radicalizing sections of the working class at the point of production. The state has also erected and deployed networks of armed agencies and the legal architecture to criminalize, disband, and otherwise eradicate leftwing organizations constructed by the oppressed in stages of widening and heightening class struggle. In conjunction with the state, the capitalist media and other institutions of class rule mobilize and amplify campaigns of propaganda against movements of resistance and opposition. The concertation of material and ideological forces of reaction to class struggle are also contingent upon the activation and catalyzation of the reactionary and fascist elements of the petty bourgeois as the mediatory sirens and shock troops. This cross-class convergence of reaction to movements of the oppressed is a recurrent theme throughout the history of the settler-colonial capitalist project.
Each iteration and elaboration of state repressive agency has been in reaction to, and in conjunction with, epochs of uprise and resistance of the oppressed and exploited classes; and followed by the subsequent institutionalization of each type of policing into an ever-enlarging toolbox of capitalist state-repressive power.
Police agencies are the frontline instruments of enforced class rule. They have been assembled, funded, and evolved in form and function throughout the nation’s history. Each iteration and elaboration of state repressive agency has been in reaction to, and in conjunction with, epochs of uprise and resistance of the oppressed and exploited classes; and followed by the subsequent institutionalization of each type of policing into an ever-enlarging toolbox of capitalist state-repressive power.
The power, purview, and autonomy of the policing agencies has also expanded over time, in such ways that what is referred to as “law enforcement” or “policing” can be better understood today as state mechanisms of force that have become more directly hardwired into the exploitative processes of capital accumulation through labor control and suppression. This becomes visible in the politics, geographies, and methods of policing; all of which all revolve around targeting populations of the oppressed and those most resistant to class subjugation and exploitation. Within the state hierarchy, policing is backed through legally sanctioned violence and the allowance for immunity and impunity in multiple ways and gradations.
The class character of federal governance in the United States manifests in its most unmasked form when the state activates against labor and leftwing radicalism. An early example occurred during the great railroad strike of 1877. According to Regin Schmidt,
The first attempt of the federal government at intervening in a major strike was made in response to the Great Strike of 1877, when a national railroad walkout triggered a wave of sympathy strikes, effectively paralyzing much of the industry. Federal troops were introduced to restore law and order and following the strike the federal and state governments, aided by generous business contributions, reorganized the national guard to be used in future labor disturbances.[23]
Over the last century, policing has become even more politicized and interfused with broader, state led campaigns to suppress and liquidate radical and oppositional movements. The expansion of industrial capitalism by the turn of the 20th century and the attendant formation of an industrial working class brought forth heightened class struggle and new forms of class organization and politics such as the Socialist Party, Partido Liberal Mexicano, the Industrial Workers of the World, the Communist Party, and others. Within the matrix of escalating class war, the state invented and deployed new policing agencies against all radical and anti-capitalist transgressors in direct response to the needs of capital. In this way, the repressive capacities of the capitalist state become the antithesis to labor radicalism, the ideological embodiment of anti-socialism, and eventually the disarticulating solvent of all forms of resistance to capitalist exploitation.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), for instance, was established in the early 20th century as the prototype of a federal police force whose foundational charge was to coordinate and centralize a crack-down on radical workers and organizations. As part of a state-led onslaught conducted under the conditions of anti-radical suspended legality, the FBI was instrumental in smashing the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) through raids and mass arrest, incarceration, deportation, surveillance, disinformation, and other bellicose measures. Campaigns of terror and collective punishment were carried out in response to the IWW’s growth and influence within the working class, their principled opposition to World War I and their role in the great strike wave of 1919-20. According to an early historian of the FBI, this model of labor repression led the agency to become the
nerve center of the entire Justice Department, and by January 1920 made its war on radicalism the department’s primary occupation…the hunt for radicals during the 1919-20 period ‘made’ the Bureau of Investigation and started it on the road to becoming the famous FBI of the present day.[24]
The FBI also conducted a sustained campaign against African-American political radicals, civil rights advocates, newspaper advocates, Pan-Africanists and others between 1919-25.[25]
During the post-World War II scorched-earth tactics of the anti-communist crusades conducted through all levels of the state, the FBI again played a lead role in the systematic decimation of the Communist Party and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The FBI especially targeted those union affiliates through which Communist Party cadres organized substantial numbers of Black, Chicano, and Latino workers.[26]
Between 1945-1990, the US state manufactured, built-up, and unleashed a formidable legal and extralegal framework, military apparatus, and policing operations to eradicate radical and revolutionary movements within and beyond its national boundaries. In the 1960s, the FBI and the police were repositioned to conduct warlike campaigns of disruption and eradication against civil rights and radical groups.
Military strategy and tactics such as development of a vast surveillance complex, Counter-Intelligence Programs (COINTELPRO), infiltration, provocation, targeted and collective punishments, assassination, and the development of a regime of police-empowering laws were some of the methods used to disrupt, repress, and dismantle the social and political movements of the civil rights era. These campaigns were carried out with the support and co-involvement of mass white supremacist and anti-communist counter-movements of the middle classes. The Ku Klux Klan, for instance, resurged and gained national political traction by equating communism with racial integration and gender and sex equality and mobilizing fascist movements to attack the political left on this basis.
Police agencies primarily targeted Black, brown, and Indigenous peoples for extralegal and violent forms of state repression. These targets ranged from moderate civil rights organizations like the Southern Christian Leadership Council to more radical and leftwing groups such as the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, Chicano movement organizations, and others.[27]
It was during this period that the agencies of state repression began to develop and deploy qualitatively different methods. Armed state agents became institutionalized to dehumanize, brutalize, subjugate, and contain marginalized subjects in perpetuity, and to react with disproportionate and exponential force in the face of resistance, rebellion, uprising, or any other type of confrontation with the class structure and hierarchy. As Stuart Schrader has described, the US state created a policing apparatus that embodies the formal institutionalization of “counterinsurgency” as its reason for existence and its modus operandi that has become international in scope.[28]
Historian Elizabeth Hinton has documented the historical and material context of this transitional process, showing how the racial and class character of policing has evolved spatially and politically in response to deepening racial and class fissures of the 1960s; and amid the emergence of anticolonial and revolutionary movements connecting and mutually-inspiring struggle on an international scale and in an unprecedented way.[29] Policing methods were recalculated and redeployed accordingly, shifting from the spatial enforcement of racial segregation to the direct paramilitary occupation of black and brown working-class communities.
Smashing popular insurgency
The reorientation of state repressive forces in the period of the 1960s and 70s viewed and treated racialized proletarian populations as potentially “insurgent” populations. It also required a new type of policing to increase control over these targeted populations. This was achieved through systematized methods of violent coercion, collective punishment, group profiling, surveillance and tracking, pre-emptive harassment and arrest, disproportionate response, virtual impunity from prosecution, and a host of other measures. In other words, the police came to operate like a wartime counterinsurgent force of occupation that objectified racialized proletarian populations as pre-determined resisters, insurgents, radicals, and revolutionaries; but now operating under the coded language of “crime prevention.”[30] In this qualitative transition, policing has come to incorporate and embody practical elements of fascistic forms of control, containment, and enforced submission.
By the late 20th century, the state further militarized the police, infusing military-grade armaments and equipment into everyday policing. These anti-radical, militarized, authoritarian, and punitive turns in policing have since become normalized and standardized in policing operations across the approximately 18,000 law enforcement agencies throughout the country.[31] In the last six years alone, over 6,300 people have been killed by police, with the number of fatalities increasing each year. Of the more than 10,000 people killed by police between 2013 and 2023, less than 2 percent of officers have been charged with a crime, and only about 4 percent of those charged have been convicted.
As the largest of the armed, state institutions, the police are granted sweeping powers and shielded from prosecution and investigation except in the most extreme cases. Prosecutors at all levels of the state routinely refuse to investigate or hold police accountable for the egregious crimes that they perpetuate daily. According to one study of Department of Justice records that documents complaints of police brutality and civil rights violations between 1995 to 2015, federal prosecutors declined to prosecute 96% of the 12,700 investigations involving police misconduct. The iron shield of protection that state agents afford police ensures their autonomy, immunity, and politicization to act.
The state’s means and methods to repress and crush movements of the oppressed have become more recurrent and aggressive in the last two decades. In 2011, tens of thousands of people converged and occupied city squares across the country as part of a left-wing appeal and call to “Occupy Wall Street” as a protest leveled against the 1% and their state apparatus. Their protest called attention to spiraling inequality amid an endless stream of publicly funded bailouts of bankers and capitalist speculators by both political parties of capital. Not long after the establishment of Occupy encampments and protest cites across all 50 states (and in over a dozen countries internationally), then President Barack Obama gave the order for a coordinated police attack to shut down the protests and occupations to eradicate the movement. According to one report of state documents describing the operation:
the violent crackdown on Occupy last fall…was not just coordinated at the level of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and local police. The crackdown, which involved…violent arrests, group disruption, canister missiles to the skulls of protesters, people held in handcuffs so tight they were injured, people held in bondage till they were forced to wet or soil themselves –was coordinated with the big banks themselves.
…a terrifying network of coordinated DHS, FBI, police, regional fusion center, and private-sector activity so completely merged into one …monstrous… entity: … bearing a single name, the Domestic Security Alliance Council. And it reveals this merged entity to have one centrally planned, locally executed mission. The documents, in short, show the cops and DHS working for and with banks to target, arrest, and politically disable peaceful American citizens.
In September of 2016, the honed forces of state repression were again mobilized against the Native American and Indigenous-led protests in opposition to the building of the Dakota Access Pipeline across the reservation land and waterways of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. Thousands of activists and supporters converged and encamped along the pipeline route, attempting to block its construction after all official requests and filings made by the Standing Rock Sioux and Cheyenne River Sioux were denied or ignored. Within the first days of the protest, North Dakota Gov. Jack Dalrymple activated and deployed 500 soldiers the North Dakota National Guard to back an array of state and local police agencies armed with military-grade hardware. The operator of the oil pipeline project, Energy Transfers Corporation, also hired and deployed militarized private security companies. This collection of heavily armed groups arrest, beat, and dispersed the protesters and destroying their encampments in concerted action.
In one particularly violent mass casualty incident in November, twenty-six people were hospitalized and more than 300 injured after armed state and private agents trained water cannons, shot teargas, and fired a barrage of other crowd-control weapons on unarmed activists in sub-freezing temperature. Injury reports included multiple broken bones and bone fractures, lacerations, hypothermia, internal bleeding, and other types of bodily harm as a result of the assault on the unarmed protestors. According to one report the documented the state operation:
It wasn’t just local police that would join the operation. In August, North Dakota’s Department of Emergency Services activated the Emergency Management Assistance Compact, which allows states to import police from other states. On October 27, 97 out-of-state officers participated in the raid – approximately a third of the force.
An array of federal agencies was involved… Ninety federal law enforcement officials from various agencies had taken part in monitoring the DAPL resistance by October 23, police records show — and 14 of them took part in the October 27 operations, according to police. Meanwhile, the law enforcement Emergency Operations Center in Bismarck, established to respond to the DAPL protests, hosted daily meetings that included intelligence officers from the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and other agencies.
The escalating juggernaut of authoritarian policing also provides the context for the suppression of the 2020 uprising and mass protests associated with the Black Lives Matter movement—the largest mass movement in US history and primarily directed against state violence. In response to over fifteen million people engaging in protest against systematic police violence and overt acts of lynching, federal and local police agencies responded with campaigns including heavy-handed violence against protestors, targeted arrests and criminal prosecutions against leaders and organizers, repressive legislation designed to criminalize protest, and disinformation campaigns as a concerted effort designed to disorganize and dismantle the movements.
Parallel pivots have also occurred in the agencies of “immigration enforcement.” The US Border Patrol and Immigration and Naturalization Service, especially since the 1950s, became instruments for racial targeting, detention, and mass deportation of Mexican working-class populations amid growing labor militancy and class organization. Historical examples include the mass deportation campaign of “Operation: Wetback,” a sustained campaign of raids, arrests, and expulsions across communities and workplaces in or near industrial belts where the Communist Party and Congress of Industrial Organizations had successfully organized tens of thousands into unions.[32] The Border Patrol and INS became an instrument of labor regulation and control along migration corridors that fed into key industries in the southwest such as agriculture and manufacturing, working with capitalist growers and factory managers to break strikes, squash union drives, police worker presence, and deport unruly workers when necessary.[33]
The creation of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in 2003 also fits into this mold, which ICE operational enforcement extended throughout the interior of the country, and now with the racialized migrant worker as the object of counterinsurgency. Border and migration enforcement agencies have become full-spectrum policing operations in which the deployment of violence, extralegal abduction and incarceration; and agents acting like an army of occupation within and around migrant population centers has become normalized.
After more than three million migrant workers and their families and supporters participated in mass strikes, protests, and walkouts against a growing raft of federal legislative proposals that intensified the criminalization of immigration in early 2006, the state unleashed ICE to conduct roundups in workplaces and migrant communities across the nation. Thousands of organizers, leaders, and participants were hunted down, arrested, detained, and deported; effectively crushing the mass movement and pushing migrant workers back into the margins.[34] The counterinsurgent, “low-intensity” war against denationalized workers that involved policing, detaining, surveilling, patrolling and hunting, and killing; and the selective and sustained deportation of over 8 million people since the 1990s all serve to render the millions who remain and come after vulnerable and segregated.
The border enforcement regime also kills hundreds of migrants and refugees each year, by channeling them through inhospitable and deadly terrain. The number of migrant and refugee deaths is estimated to have surpassed 10,000 since 1994, when the border wall and militarized enforcement have been greatly expanded. Deaths are once again rising at the US-Mexico border, as the deadly journey “regulates” who get to cross, survive, and work in the United States. This form of state violence and terror has become a permanent strategy for migrant labor procurement that allows for the maximum exploitation of their labor for capitalist valuation—and occurs nationwide and outside of most public view.
The state compulsion towards violent policing, repression, and prevention of labor radicalism to the point of fascist compulsion also crosses national boundaries through the channels of imperialism. As the US state expanded its imperial reach and more aggressively pursued mechanisms for neo-colonial reimplantation, so too have the dimensions of class war—and repression of left and labor radicalism—from the perspective of US capital become global in outlook.
Imperialism and Global Class War
Imperial politics revolve around the maintenance of relationships of power that facilitate the ability of the capitalist class to project its ownership and control of markets and the means of production beyond its national territorial boundaries. These arrangements, facilitated through the capitalist state and state-controlled international agencies, exist for the unitary purpose of facilitating capital accumulation and extracting profit from investments—making the world safe for US capitalism. These imperial arrangements initiated and encased in asymmetric relationships of economic and military subjugation—and therefore an ordering of international political power—and is subsequently bracketed by the permanence of unequal relationships through class hierarchization. Within the neurons of imperialist power arrangements, the US state has been in a long expansive process of deploying its militarized dispensaries of force as the apparatus of global domination since the end of the Second World War.
The rise of monopoly and then finance capital extended the terrestrial frontiers of capitalist globalization. The preeminence of the post-World War II US-centric model has since entered prolonged disequilibrium and its ability to project unquestioned power tearing the seams, giving way to a more volatile landscape characterized by burgeoning wars of redivision, intensifying inter-imperial rivalries, regional multi-polarization, and economic instability. For the architects of US imperialism, its once hegemonic projection and maintenance of power has given way to spasmodic episodes of crisis and immobility, characteristic of a relative weakening of position. This has become especially apparent in the longue durée of the neoliberal epoch of capitalism.
The neoliberal era has been marked by a general economic tendency toward stagnation as the economy functions below its productive potential, while suffering from significant levels of unemployment and inequality…US economic growth (taken as GDP per capita growth) has tended to stagnate below 4% in most of the period 1961–2012, although corporate profits have seen record uptrends, particularly since the 1970s. US corporate profits before tax rose from nearly $33.5 billion in the first quarter of 1950 and $58.8 billion in the first quarter of 1960 to $86.4 billion in the first quarter of 1970, $308.6 billion in the first quarter of 1980, $385.6 billion in the first quarter of 1990, $770.9 billion in the first quarter of 2000 and $2.7 trillion in the first quarter of 2021… This goes hand in hand with declining levels of industrial production, a rising share of long-term unemployment in total unemployment, and growing income inequality…[35]
The transition from Pax Americana to reactivated inter-imperial conflict, economic instability, emerging multipolarism, and its attendant military and economic re-division has also contributed to surging class conflict as well as revolutionary uprisings and counter-revolutionary violence. The transitions have reactivated fascist elements, ideology, and organization amid growing uncertainty and instability for the operations of capitalism.
While the US entered World War II to ostensibly defeat fascism, it was not an ideological opposition as much as a calculation of inter-imperial conflict. US war-planners were fundamentally anti-communist in orientation, and significant sectors of the ruling class and state favored Nazism and Fascism as pro-capitalist bulwarks against the advance of communist movements internationally.[36] The US state eventually sided against a fascist-led, redivision of Europe as a geostrategic decision. The weakening of the older empires (France and Great Britain especially) alongside the defeat of the emergent imperial rivals (Germany and Japan), and significant destruction of the Soviet Union, ensured that the US emerged from the fray more prominent and poised to play a leading role in building a new postwar order in its own image. In the aftermath of the war, the US state incorporated former Nazis and Fascists into its state apparatus in different capacities, including as agents in different branches of the intelligence services to help fight communism in the global “Cold War.” For instance, according to a report by the Comptroller General of the United States,
Lacking an intelligence network targeted against its former ally, the Soviet Union, U.S. intelligence units turned to European anti-Communist resources to fill information gaps. These resources included former German and East European intelligence operatives and East European emigre political groups. Among them were Nazis (including Gestapo and ss members) and members of East European Fascist organizations. They were considered invaluable as informants. For example, GAO was told that in order to learn more about German Communists, U.S. intelligence officers decided to question former Gestapo and SS members who had worked against such Communists.[37]
For the US state, the end of World War II seamlessly transitioned to the full-spectrum war on communism, thereby initiating a multidimensional and multigenerational war on domestic and international manifestations of anticapitalism, communism, socialism, and the emerging nationalisms in the colonized nations.
It refracted its anti-communist framework internationally, becoming the backer, mobilizer, and funder of reactionary and fascist state forces and movements against popular and working class manifestations of resistance and class struggle—all under the auspices of “counter-insurgency”. This positioned the US state in alliance with repressive dictatorial, anti-communist, genocidal, and overtly fascist regimes and movements in violent and bloody campaigns against popular uprisings, labor unionism, and left-wing political formation.
The US state and its policing agencies became the prime mover and motor of counter-revolutionary and neocolonialist operations on an international scale across the Americas, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Successive and bipartisan administrations weaponized foreign policy and provided material and political support for state violence (or counter-state violence), training military personnel or irregular armies for dirty war, dispensing large sums of overt and covert funding to death squad operations, engaging in economic sanction, sabotage and disinformation, and a vast arsenal of other means to squash challenges to the profitable functioning of capital.
Into the 21st century, once again the variegated and proletarianized social forces that are exploited, oppressed, displaced, killed off, or otherwise systematically harmed within the frameworks of capitalist imperialism work increasingly in episodic rhythm and harmony against the engineering and invasive machinations of international capital. Between 2010 and 2019, there have been a rising number of protests, revolts, and revolutions across six continents, with 2019 registering the most social unrest and highest level of class struggle in modern recorded history. Anti-government protests spiked across the globe again in 2020-2021. This was followed in 2022 by an unprecedented global wave of more than 12,500 protests across 148 countries over food, fuel and cost of living increases.
For instance, the “Arab Spring” revolts and revolutions swept across a dozen countries in the Middle East and North Africa, toppling regimes backed by the US state. Revolts and uprisings have also increased in frequency across Latin America in the last few years, with popular mass movements weakening or toppling US-backed regimes in Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Honduras. There has also been a corresponding push back in the form of coup attempts, and targeted violence against Left-wing, labor, environmental and indigenous leaders and organizers by US-backed Right-wing forces.
Mass mobilizations, strikes, revolts, and disruptive protests create a universal threat to the sanctity of investment, extraction, and exploitation on an international scale; and thus, are a danger to capital accumulation and profiteering across borders. For the ruling capitalist class and their generals, sentinels, logicians, and enforcers, the growing phenomenon of mass rebellion and its capacity to take shape along the transnational earthworks of its vascular system manifest the global proletariat—in its totality—as the ominous gravediggers that Marx warned them about.
This incipient manifestation of the global articulation of class struggle and mass opposition to both capitalism and its reverberation through colonialism and imperialism have had both domestic and international ramifications. The global deployment of a military apparatus used primarily as a force of counter-revolution; to force open or wrest control of markets, resources, or strategic interests or assets; to back reactionary and repressive regimes or topple others that impede or oppose free rein of foreign and international capital; and a sanguine record of crushing leftwing, labor, and popular movements across the international landscape has imbued US imperialism with functionally fascist characteristics.
This qualitative shift in the global character of class struggle concentrates institutional and ideological focus on the domestic policing of racialized, foreign, denationalized, and all other marginalized sections of the working class coming from colonized, semi-colonized, or other types of subordinate states within the vortex of US empire. Through the vector of its multifaceted, class war character, empire’s engineers and its foot soldiers are more prone to be susceptible adherents to fascist ideation and activation within national politics.
The imperial center of the US state deploys rhetoric about the sanctity of “democracy” as a governance form, but in practice understands that the maintenance of neo-colonial relationships depends on the perpetuation of variations of authoritarian state control–and even episodes of fascist violence when necessary–to exterminate or neutralize existential threats to capital at critical moments.
The imperial center of the US state deploys rhetoric about the sanctity of “democracy” as a governance form, but in practice understands that the maintenance of neo-colonial relationships depends on the perpetuation of variations of authoritarian state control—and even episodes of fascist violence when necessary—to exterminate or neutralize existential threats to capital at critical moments. Like Malcolm X observed that the assassination of John F. Kennedy was “merely a case of the chickens coming home to roost,” so too can we see the inversion of regime-toppling and imperial and colonial violence abroad playing out at home through the fascist imaginary.
Qualitative advances towards fascism
There have been qualitative advances towards fascist capacity-building and movement-building, and disparate forms of fascist terrorism (mass shootings, targeted murders and assassinations, attacks on abortion providers) on the rise across the United States. Settlerism, as its most continuous historical and political expression, has been reactivated amid the cascading crises of 21st century capitalism. New iterations of historical petty bourgeois far right reaction have emerged, are coalescing, and are expressing themselves. This is occurring through refashioned neotypes of the white citizens’ militia and white citizens’ council, in neo-segregationist and eugenicist movements, and in the religious extremist and violent misogynist movements. Far right billionaires and other rich bundlers and ideologues are bankrolling, underwriting, and giving legitimacy to the campaigns of reaction.
Elements of the professional military and the different policing agencies are increasingly aligning with or merging into the ranks of organizations that promote ideologically fascist doctrine. Simultaneously, ideological fascists have made organized efforts to enter the military and police departments to build bases and grow their ranks within those bodies. This accumulation of fascist capacity is inextricably linked to and compounded by the recurring crises of the capitalist system over the last two decades, and how the mechanics of capital accumulation come under increasing duress due to intensifying international competition, stagnation, decoupling, market fragmentation, and social disruption.
When the great motors of accumulation stall or retreat, especially in concert with significant upsurges of class struggle now reverberating and threatening the interconnected and transnational chains of the global capitalist system, the far right undergoes a type of agitation, centrifugal acceleration, and compositional pressurization. In this cauldron, fascist ideological consciousness crystallizes and creates the imperative for organizational coalescence to obliterate the obstacles of renewed accumulation.
The increasing incidence and frequency of armed insurrection by forces of the extreme right, whether performative or real are the most apparent characteristic of this period of acceleration towards explicitly fascist action and outcomes. Armed groups mobilizing against the political Left, and against racialized and sex and gender-oppressed groups is another feature. There is also a simultaneous and coordinated process underway to push a wide range of fascist-enabling policies through legislative procedure, especially emanating from the enlarged extreme rightwing of the Republican Party where there are points of convergence with overtly fascist elements. The movement of fascists into agencies of the state, and vice versa, is also an identifiable point of germination.
An FBI report documented this strategy of ideological fascists going back over a decade, as described by a more recent investigation updating of how deep the infiltration has spread:
In the 2006 bulletin, the FBI detailed the threat of white nationalists and skinheads infiltrating police in order to disrupt investigations against fellow members and recruit other supremacists. The bulletin was released during a period of scandal for many law enforcement agencies throughout the country, including a neo-Nazi gang formed by members of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department who harassed black and Latino communities. Similar investigations revealed officers and entire agencies with hate group ties in Illinois, Ohio and Texas.
A more recent study by Reuters reported found even wider spread.
The investigation adds to mounting academic research, government audits and news reporting that demonstrates the pervasiveness of white supremacy in U.S. law enforcement, and a continuing series of incidents documenting the presence of extremist groups and views among law enforcement.
Subsequent exposés have shown law enforcement officials with connections to white supremacist groups and fascist activity in Alabama, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and elsewhere.
It should come as no surprise that police and military agents of the state made up a significant portion of those that organized and led the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. One report noted:
More than 80 of the defendants charged in relation to the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol have ties to the U.S. military — most of those with a military background were veterans. A CBS News analysis of service records, attorney statements, and court documents has found that at least 81 current or former service members face charges and are accused of participating in the mob that led Congress to temporarily halt its counting of the 2020 presidential election's Electoral College votes.
At least 35 active duty police officers on the scene were investigated for collusion and aiding in the storming of the capital, while at least 24 off-duty police were an active part of the of crowd and events leading to the breaching of the capitol building.
While a small percentage of fascists may face repercussions for their insurrectionary actions, a much larger percentage will not; and any “examples” made by one sector of the state in this period will be countered and overshadowed by other sectors that offer unqualified defense and support for the homegrown fascists. The US state is an inherently right-wing political entity that has been developed as an instrument of authoritarian capitalist class rule. As such, this type of class rule is contingent upon building and maintaining an inordinate edifice of police power, perpetual imperial warfare, and on the ability to harness and mobilize reactionary shock troops against all insurgent and oppositional mobilizations of the oppressed, labor, and the anti-capitalist left.
The right-wing capitalist state cannot—and will not—repress its own offspring that bears its genetic disposition. It is under conditions of prolonged and destabilizing economic crisis; the widening of theaters of imperialist and inter-imperialist war; and the growing instance and frequency of proletarian resistance and revolt internationally that the vectors of American fascism are intensifying and multiplying. While we are not currently living under a “fascist state” in the United States, we are living in a state where fascism is gaining currency and capacity and expressing itself in fascist movements. This trajectory will continue its course into the foreseeable future regardless of which capitalist party is in power—as its roots are systemic, and not partisan. Neither the capitalist system nor the ruling capitalist class face existential threats in the current political moment; but capitalists are in the practice of hedging their bets just in case. This complex trajectory is a product of class consciousness, as they know the circumstances could change in the volatility of insurgency and class struggle that will certainly increase in the years ahead.
Notes
[1] See Angela Davis, If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance (New York: Verso, 2016), chapter 19; and Bill V. Mullen, “What Should Revolutionaries Say About Constitutions?”, Puntorojo Magazine, September 11, 2022. Available online at https://www.puntorojomag.org/2022/09/11/what-should-revolutionaries-say-about-constitutions/
[2] Tobias Straumann, 1931: Debt, Crisis, and the Rise of Hitler. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), p. 94.
[3] For an overview of the history of exclusion and disenfranchisement, see Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
[4] For an overview, see Patricia Cayo Sexton, The War on Labor and The Left: Understanding America's Unique Conservatism (New York: Routledge, 1991); and Howard Brick and Christopher Phelps, Radicals in America. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
[5] Devin Zane Shaw, Philosophy of Antifascism Punching Nazis and Fighting White Supremacy. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2020), p. 15.
[6] See Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Not “A Nation of Immigrants”: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion (Boston: Beacon Press, 2021), Introduction.
[7] For a contemporary overview and analysis of the petty bourgeois, see Dan Evans, A Nation of Shopkeepers: The Unstoppable Rise of the Petty Bourgeoisie (New York: Repeater Books, 2023), chapter 1.
[8] Andrew Phillips and J.C. Sharman. Outsourcing Empire: How Company-States Made the Modern World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), p. 1.
[9] Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004), p. 73.
[10] Robert J. Miller, Jacinta Ruru, Larissa Behrendt, Tracey Lindberg. Discovering Indigenous Lands:
The Doctrine of Discovery in the English Colonies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), chapter 2.
[11] Edward M. Lamont, The Forty Years that Created America: The Story of Explorers, Promoters, Investors, and Settlers Who Founded the First English Colony (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), Chapter 5.
[12] Jerry Keenan. Encyclopedia of American Indian wars, 1492-1890 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999).
[13] A history of slave revolts is meticulously documented in: Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts. (New York: International Publishers, 1974).
[14] Paul Foos. A Short, Offhand, Killing Affair: Soldiers and Social Conflict During the Mexican-American War (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press), Ch. 6.
[15] See Kitty Calavita, U.S. Immigration Law and the Control of Labor: 1820-1924 (New Orleans: Quid Pro Books, 2020), Chapter 1.
[16] See Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment (San Francisco: City Lights Publishers, 2018), Introduction.
[17] J.D. Dickey, The Republic of Violence: The Tormented Rise of Abolition in Andrew Jackson’s America. (New York: Pegasus Books, 2022, pp. 2-3.
[18] Sara Bullard, The Ku Klux Klan A History of Racism and Violence (Darby: DIANE Publishing Company, 1998), part one.
[19] For a comprehensive overview of lynching as a form of political violence throughout US history, see Christopher Waldrep, Lynching in America: A History in Documents. (New York: New York University Press, 2006).
[20] Arnold S. Rice, The Ku Klux Klan in American Politics (Washington D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1962), pp. 79-80.
[21] Ann Gibson Winfield. Eugenics and Education in America: Institutionalized Racism and the Implications of History, Ideology, and Memory (New York: Peter Lang Books, 2007).
[22] Stephanie R. Rolph, Resisting Equality: The Citizens’ Council, 1954–1989 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018), Chapter 3.
[23] Regin Schmidt, Red Scare, FBI, and the Origins of Anticommunism in the United States, 1919-1943 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, University Of Copenhagen, 2000), p. 69.
[24] Robert K. Murray, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955), p. 193.
[25] See Theodore Kornweibel, Jr, Seeing Red: Federal Campaigns Against Black Militancy, 1919-1925. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).
[26] See Judith Stepan-Norris and Maurice Zeitlin, Left Out: Reds and America’s Industrial Unions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
[27] For an overview, see Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI's Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States (Boston: South End Press, 2002).
[28] Stuart Schrader, Badges without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019).
[29] For an example of how revolutionary and anti-colonial movements inspired international solidarity and local action, see John Munro, The Anticolonial Front: The African American Freedom Struggle and Global Decolonization, 1945-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
[30] Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016), Ch. 5.
[31] See Joanna Schwartz, Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable (New York: Penguin Publishing, 2023), p. 14.
[32] Justin Akers Chacón, Radicals in the Barrio: Magonistas, Socialists, Wobblies, and Communists in the Mexican-American Working Class (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018), chapter 32.
[33] For an example, see United States. Congress. House. Committee on the Judiciary. Subcommittee No. 1. “Illegal Aliens”. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1971, p. 191.
[34] See Justin Akers Chacón and Mike Davis, No One Is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence along the US-Mexico Border (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018), Chapter 34.
[35] Efe Can Gürcan, Imperialism after the Neoliberal Turn (Philadelphia: Routledge Press, 2022), p. 25.
[36] See Bradley W. Hart, Hitler's American Friends: The Third Reich's Supporters in the United States (New York: St. Martin's Publishing Group, 2018; and Katy Hull, This Machine has a Soul: American Sympathy with Italian Fascism. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021); and Gian Giacomo Migone, The United States and Fascist Italy: The Rise of American Finance in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
[37] Report by Comptroller General of the United States: Nazis and Axis Collaborators Were Used To Further U.S. Anti-Communist Objectives In Europe–Some Immigrated To The United States.US General Accounting Office, Washington, D.C., 1985, p. ii.
Justin Akers Chacón is an educator, activist, and writer in the San Diego-Tijuana border region. His recent works include No One is Illegal: Fighting Racism and State Violence on the US-Mexico Border (with Mike Davis, Haymarket Books, 2nd edition, 2018), and Radicals in the Barrio: Magonistas, Socialists, Wobblies, and Communists in the Mexican-American Working Class (Haymarket Books, 2018).
