PAX SILICA

Pax Silica and the Embryonic Fascist State

In the depraved logic of global capitalism in crisis, accumulation of butchery is but the counterpart to the accumulation of capital.     William Robinson

The U.S. attack on Iran is but the latest in a dizzying array of global upheavals – ranging from geopolitical conflict in Ukraine and the Middle East to the Myanmar and Sudanese civil wars, tariff disputes, the spread of fascism, the U.S. assault on Venezuela, Washington’s Greenland grab, and ICE terror in U.S. cities, among others. Far from a series of disconnected incidents, the global firestorm is driven by a common, systemic catalyst: the violent expansionary strategies of a new hegemonic complex of transnational capital in response to the epochal crisis of global capitalism. The apparent chaos is further accelerated by the destabilizing impact of artificial intelligence and the amplified class power that the new digital technologies give to capital and to the embryonic fascist state.

The emergent hegemonic complex of transnational capital is at the center of this worldwide maelstrom as global capitalism enters a deadly new phase. The triangulated bloc brings together the giant tech companies, transnational finance capital, and the military-industrial-repression complex. Big Tech controls the entire ecosystem of digitalized capitalism, converting its enormous structural power into direct political control through the fascist state. To advance its agenda the bloc has turned to ‘Global Trumpism’ – one of several morbid political symptoms emerging as the post-World War II international order crumbles.

Big tech has taken the global economy by storm since the turn of the century, especially over the past decade with the rise to dominance of platforms and the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI). The new digital technologies and the billionaires that control them are driving a radical new round of restructuring and transformation of the global political economy. The leading tech corporations, most of them headquartered in the United States and China, draw investors from all over the world as they suck in immense amounts of surplus capital. The top 20 tech firms worldwide had a combined market capitalization exceeding $20 trillion in 2025, some one-fifth of the total global stock market valuation.

Big tech and the transnational industrial and commercial capitals it brings together are in turn enmeshed with the giant global financial conglomerates that own more than half of the leading tech firms. In 2022 there were 33 trillion and multitrillion dollar capital investment management companies worldwide, up from just 17 in 2017. These titans of capital controlled more than $83 trillion in combined assets, over four-fifths the value that year of the entire global GDP. This economic totalitarianism is spawning a political totalitarianism. Every economic, social, and political institution in the world, including governments and militaries, is dependent on the new digital technologies to function and on the tech behemoths that own or control them and the knowledge to develop and apply them.

The Political Economy of Genocide:  Gaza

 Silicon Valley and its financial backers are pivoting towards digital technologies for war and repression as they fuse with the military-industrial repression complex, completing the capital power axis, which in turn is moving into alignment with authoritarian, dictatorial and fascist states. The tech and financial billionaires are becoming global geopolitical actors. They are wielding their enormous structural power through Global Trumpism, developing new modalities of control over civil society and seeking alternative forms of legitimacy founded on instability and chaos that facilitates control over countries and resources. Nothing captures the militarization of big tech and its fusion with the fascist state as the surreal commissioning in 2025 of the technology CEOs of the leading U.S-based tech corporations to the rank of lieutenant colonels in the U.S. army even though they are civilians who have never served in the military.

The U.S. State Department has referred to the new global dispensation as Pax Silica. “If the twentieth century ran on oil and steel, the twenty-first century runs on compute and the minerals that feed it,” declared U.S. Under Secretary for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg. Pax Silica involves developing “global AI supply chains” that are to drive “historic opportunity and demand for energy, critical minerals, manufacturing, technological hardware, infrastructure, and new markets not yet invented.” Pursuant this Pax Silica, the Trump regime has undertaken sweeping deregulation of AI and of finance as it promotes a vast expansion of data centers. It has used executive orders to take a whopping 646 deregulator actions in the first year of its second term. Abroad, it has pursued a strategy of digital mercantilism, inscribing into its tariff negotiations with other countries the demand for abrogation of their laws regulating AI as big tech seeks their elimination in at least 64 countries. 

The Epochal Crisis of Global Capitalism

The backdrop to the global maelstrom is the epochal crisis of global capitalism. Structurally, the system faces a crisis of overaccumulation, chronic stagnation, and a decades-long decline in the rate of profit. In the years since the 2008 global financial collapse, the rate of profit has continued to decline, even as corporations registered record profits. On the one hand, a 2011 study found that “the rate of return on assets and the rate of return on invested capital are today less than one-third of what they were in 1965.” On the other hand, in 2024, the cash reserves of nonbanking U.S.-based companies alone stood at $6.9 trillion. In the United States, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that corporate profits reach an all-time high of $3.4 trillion in the third quarter of 2025, while globally, the world’s largest listed companies projected a record profit of nearly $5 trillion in 2025, a 12.2 percent increase from 2024. This simultaneous decrease in the rate of profit alongside an increase in the total mass of profit is a key sign of capitalist breakdown.

The global economy has sputtered forward since 2008 through debt-driven growth, state bailouts, and financial speculation. Consumer and state debt reached a record $337 trillion at the end of 2025, nearly three times the global GDP of $117 trillion. These historically high levels of debt are unsustainable, as is the rampant financial speculation. Shadow banking, largely a speculative financial space, grew from 150 percent of global GDP in 2008 to 225 percent in 2024, reaching $257 trillion. An even more damning sign of the chasm between the real economy and fictitious capital is the breakdown of total global assets: of the $1.7 quadrillion in assets in 2024, only $620 trillion corresponded to material assets, with the remaining $1 quadrillion constituting pure fictitious capital

.The overaccumulation crisis generates intense pressure for expansion as the transnational capitalist class (TCC) seeks outlets to unload surplus accumulated capital. In 2025, China registered a record $1.2 trillion trade surplus – a 20 percent increase from 2024 – signaling massive global overcapacity and contributing to mounting geopolitical competition over markets and investment outlets. Led by the new hegemonic capital complex, the TCC is currently unleashing a predatory round of digitally-driven expansion, pivoting towards more savage forms of extractivist accumulation as it seizes land, energy, and mineral resources to fuel the demands of AI technology and data centers. It is this relentless drive remains the force behind the headlines shaking the world. 

Global Trumpism

Trumpism in the United States constitutes an embryonic fascist state that is developing new alliances with repressive states around the world as the transnational elite continues to fracture. Global Trumpism is an instrument of the worldwide wave of capitalist expansion. If the TCC is banking on the AI revolution to restore profit levels and productive expansion, it is coming to rely on the fascist state to smash open access to resources, control restive populations, and adopt the policies necessary for expansion.

Fascism in the industrial era and fascism in the digital era are distinct, with twenty-first century fascism emerging as a far-right response to the deepening crisis of global capitalism. New digital technologies have amplified the power of transnational capital and enhanced the capacity of states to surveil and control. Twenty-first century fascism involves the fusion of transnational capital with repressive and reactionary political power in the state and with a fascist mobilization in civil society – a fusion increasingly visible in the United States under the Trump regime. Increasingly dependent on state contracts, subsidies, deregulatory and other state policies that establish the conditions for tech, financial, and military expansion, the hegemonic complex of capital is coming to embrace the fascist state.

Scroll to Continue

Within the United States, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is emerging as a fascist paramilitary force; a modern iteration of the brownshirts that serve as a bridge between the development of the fascist state and a fascist reorganization of civil society. ICE aggression, beyond an assault on immigrant workers, is aimed at normalizing paramilitary terror. The institutions of the capitalist state are contested terrain. The Department of Homeland Security, which overseas ICE and immigrant enforcement, and the Department of Justice, which manages several federal police and security forces and is the highest prosecutorial agency of the state, appear to form the nucleus for the attempt to restructure the state along fascist lines.

By Global Trumpism I refer to a specific faction among fractious transnational elites and the states they control. Global Trumpism represents perhaps be the most brazenly authoritarian grouping among global elites. Symbolized, by Donald Trump and supported by such figures as Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, Argentinian President Javier Milei, Hungarian President Viktor Organ, and the U.K.’s Nigel Farage, among others, Global Trumpism pulls together a range of ideologically and politically aligned far-right authoritarian and neofascist forces that champion the Trumpist agenda and applaud its transnational gangsterism. 

The Global Crisis of Capitalism: Why Mass Deportations, AI, and War Go Hand in Hand

The consolidation of the hegemonic capital complex appears now to hinge on the ideological extremism and political warlordism of Global Trumpism. This complex is deeply invested in transnational systems of warfare, social control, repression and surveillance. These systems are becoming digitalized, automated, and deeply embedded in the global economy and society. Militarized accumulation and accumulation by repression pry open access to markets and resources. Investment in these systems provide a major outlet for unloading surplus accumulated capital. States and transnational capitalists may face one another in fierce competition over expanding the frontiers of global accumulation and dividing up shares of surplus value yet every capitalist on the planet needs a global police state to repress and control the working and popular classes while every capitalist state serves this mandate.

World military spending reached an unprecedented $2.72 trillion in 2024, a nearly 10 percent increase from the previous year – the steepest rise since the end of the Cold War. In 2025, over 100 countries raising their military budgets, many of them by double digits. This has fueled an explosion in the value of military stocks around the world alongside massive new investment in military-oriented tech firms. As digital technologies become inscribed into war and repression, high-tech military startups – so-called “defense tech” – have proliferated. In the second quarter of 2025 alone, investors poured more than $19 billion into these startups, a 200 percent increase from the previous year. Europe’s weapons industry has seen an expansion at three times the rate prior to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. The global mercenary market is booming as mafioso states and paramilitaries multiply. China trains police and domestic security forces in 138 countries as its policing and surveillance tech exports soar.

Global foreign direct investment (FDI) in military technologies reached a record high in the first nine months of 2025, driven by surging demand and geopolitical tensions. Military stocks spiked after Trump announced on January 8 that he would seek an increase in the 2027 military budget to $1.5 trillion, up from $901 billion slated for 2026. The National Defense Strategy for 2026 calls for “supercharg[ing] the U.S. Defense Industrial Base.” Similarly, stocks in CoreCivic and GEO Group, two of the leading corporations that run private, for-profit immigrant concentration camps, shot up after Trump expanded the war on immigrants, raising its budget to $170 billion. These funds included a massive increase in ICE funding – from $10 billion to $85 billion – along with $45 billion to construct new immigrant concentration camps, a 400 percent increase over the previous year’s allocation.

Butchery: The New Accumulation Strategy

The fascist state is an AI state. Emblematic of the power of the hegemonic capital complex as it fuses with the fascist state is the case of billionaire Elon Musk’s Starlink internet system. Much of the world is dependent for its internet access on the 10,000 satellites placed into orbit by Starlink, which gives it vast powers – exercised through the fascist state–over whole countries and peoples, literally over war and peace. In February 2025, for instance when the Ukraine government refused to buckle under U.S. demands for access to that country’s critical AI minerals, U.S. negotiators threatened to cut off Kyiv’s Starlink access, effectively crippling its military communication on the battlefield.

Epitomizing the new breed of Pax Silica fascist tech firms driven by this public-private fusion is Palantir. CEO Alex Karp has touted the use of his company’s software by military and intelligence agencies to identify, target, and kill people, helping states to develop and streamline the capability for a “digital kill chain.” Following the AI boom of the 2020s, the company went from a niche government contractor to a leading AI-driven data integration platform, with its tentacles reaching into numerous sectors, from war and repression to health care, education, finance, industrial manufacturing, data analytics, and supply-chain management. Flush with government contracts, its share price jumped nearly 800 percent from 2019 to 2026 and its market capitalization surged over 1,700 percent since 2020. U.S. vice president J.D. Vance is a protégé of the billionaire Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel. The Israeli military has used Palantir technology in its attacks on Lebanon and its genocide in Gaza.

The Gaza “Board of Peace” inaugurated by Trump at the January World Economic Forum (WEF) conclave is aimed at establishing a new Israeli-Gulf State axis as a regional dry run for global Pax Silica. This Board of Genocide is a political instrument of Global Trumpism in its effort to establish an alternative international institutional order to the United Nations system, the G7 and the G20. As Israel moves from high-intensity to low-intensity genocide in Gaza, the Board is intended to open up the Strip to its gas and oil, its beachfront real estate, and its tourist potential. But its core mission is to convert the Strip into a hub for the public-private power axis around which tech and finance will have free rein to develop a sovereign corporate fiefdom. The Board plan calls for a “voluntary” departure of Palestinians to another country, a string of AI-powered high-tech megacities, and some rump, unspecified Palestinian authority. It is, in essence, a massive plan for the takeover of Gaza by transnational capital, led by big tech, under the “iron dome” of Israeli military and Global Trumpism control. 

Fascism, war and accumulation are thus all inextricably conjoined in the modality of accumulation now pursued by the hegemonic capital complex. Crypto billionaire, real estate developer, and Trump son in law Jared Kushner, appointed by the U.S. president as his “envoy of peace,” has positioned the Board as a model “for other complex and difficult situations” around the world.

Gaza is the first AI war of the twenty-first century, an algorithmic genocide. Razing the Strip to the ground has been wildly profitable. Two years of utter destruction is now to be followed by the bonanza – “reconstruction” led by the hegemonic capital complex. The accumulation of capital by war and repression can only be sustained through endless rounds of destruction and reconstruction. Weapons must be expended to make way for new orders. The more conflict and destruction take place, the bigger is the reconstruction boom and the more the structures of extraction can be established over bloodied smoldering ruins. In the depraved logic of global capitalism in crisis this accumulation of butchery is but the counterpart to the accumulation of capital.

Led by the hegemonic complex, the TCC is on the rampage against the global working and popular classes. Yet the fascist state remains embryonic. It is riddled with contradictions and far from consolidated. Herein lies the rub: fascism needs a mass social base yet the project cannot deliver material reward to the global working and popular classes. Unprecedented levels of global social polarization, widespread deprivation, and the expulsion of millions are fueling everywhere mass discontent and popular youth-led revolts. The anti-ICE uprising in Minnesota galvanized world attention and fired the will to resist. Dissention within the TCC and its political agents in states has spilled out into open political conflict, evidenced in the January 2026 WEB conclave in Davos, as geopolitical confrontation escalates. It is clear that capital cannot be governed. It must be dethroned.

 

On the Turn to Industry, the American SWP and other questions of IMG history: Phil Hearse

April 2020

Source: Red Mole Rising

reement about is the history of revolutionary organisations, especially from participants. We are usually wedded to the correctness of what we did and our memories – face it comrades – are fallible. A lot of what is being discussed here refers to events up to 40 years ago, and some before that. Inevitably you start to get factual disagreements as well as disagreements of assessment. So I am not writing here to disagree with what Penny, Phil or Mike have written, but just to explain my take on it. In fact, what’s amazing is that we are all still here, and still at it in our different ways.

Postmodernism, a New Stage of the Spewctacle

Debord and the Postmodern Turn: New Stages of the Spectacle

By Steven Best and Douglas Kellner

Kellner homepage: http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/kellner.html
Curriculum Vitae: http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/DK97CV.htm
Best homepage: http://www.utep.edu/philos/best.htm

"But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence, ... illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness," Ludwig Feuerbach.

"There is no doubt for aynone who examines the question coldly that those who really want to shake an established society must formulate a theory which fundamentally explains this society, or which at least quite seems to give a satisfactory explantion," Guy Debord

 

New Faces of Fascism (2018)

 Phil Hearse reviews New Faces of Fascism by Enzo Traverso, Verso, 2018

The forward surge of fascist and far right movements, symbolised by figures like Trump, Bolsonaro in Brazil and Salvini in Italy, poses important theoretical and political questions for the militant left. Enzo Traverso’s new book is one of the best responses from a Marxist viewpoint. Unlike many studies of this subject, this book does not attempt to provide a factual account of the progress of the hard right, but goes straight to some of the main analytical problems. These include how we can understand the new hard right in relation to ‘classical fascism’ in the 20^th century, the idea of ‘populism’, identity politics (left and right), Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, as well as the usefulness (or otherwise) of the notion of totalitarianism. This is a big agenda, undertaken by an historian with a deep knowledge of modern politics and culture, and is therefore quite dense – decidedly not a basic introduction.

Myths of Ayn Rand (2009)

 Phil Hearse (2009)

Most people outside the United States have probably never heard of Ayn Rand, and a brief introduction to her ultra-pro-free market views would doubtless be enough to convince most of them they haven't missed anything. Yet 27 years after her death, Ayn Rand continues to be seriously debated in the US, her books sell hundreds of thousands each year, her views are propagated by right-wing think tanks and foundations and - bizarrely - Charlize Theron is in discussions to turn Rand's 1088-page magnum opus Atlas Shrugged into a TV mini-series. The Times Educational Supplement claimed in July 2009  that the Ayn Rand revival is gathering pace on US campuses. According to the TES:

Radical right threat to internet freedom (2019)

 Phil Hearse

Two recent events have focused attention on extreme right social media. The shooter in the Christchurch massacre was an addict of white supremacist message boards on platforms like Reddit and 4Chan. Like the alt-right platform Gab, these noticeboards are filled with overt racism, homophobia, misogyny and Hitler worship. A very different sort of hard right social media fuels Vox, the Spanish neo-fascist party that won 13% of the vote in the April general election. Like its siblings in France and Germany its racism is thinly-disguised Islamophobia, and it tries to present a ‘respectable’ image. One aspect of far-right social media often overlooked, but highly relevant with Vox, is the immense amount of money that funds it – generally from millionaire or billionaire backers.

REMEMBERING PETER GOWAN

Peter Gowan died on 12 June 2009. This obituary was written at the time.
Peter Gowan, Professor at London Metropolitan University, a member of the New Left Review editorial board and a former leader of the International Marxist Group (IMG), died on 12 June 2009. He was probably the leading Marxist expert on international relations writing in English, and wrote and spoke with an astonishing grasp of the inter-relationship between economic, political and military power in the modern world. His ability to knit together theory with a vast range of factual knowledge held his audiences spellbound.
But he was far from a detached academic; he was an utterly partisan, determined and vitriolic critic of American imperialism. For him, the central obstacle to world progress and social justice were what he called the “Dollar-Wall St regime”. After 9/11 Peter was in demand around the world to explain why the US had gone to war and what the ‘axis of evil’ and ‘war on terror’ were all about. He claimed American imperialism had made a ‘Faustian bid’ for world dominance, and that military violence was central to that bid. He was also convinced that it could not succeed; that ultimately world domination was impossible by a single imperialist power and that the United States was ‘triumphing towards disaster’.