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Sunday, December 01, 2024

The Fascist Counter-revolution



Karl Korsch

 1940

First Published: in Living Marxism, Volume 5, Number 2, Fall 1940, pp. 29-37
Source: Class Against Class;
Transcribed: by Zdravko Saveski, for marxists.org 2009;

What hope have we revolutionary Marxists, remnants of a past epoch, inheritors of its most advanced theories, illusions, ideologies-what hope have we left for a revolutionary turn of the sweeping counterrevolutionary movement of victorious fascism? The fate of France has finally proved that the old Marxist slogan of "world revolution" has in our epoch assumed a new meaning. We find ourselves today in the midst not of a socialist and proletarian but of an ultra-imperialistic and fascist world revolution. Just as in the preceding epoch every major defeat-the defeat of France in 1871, that of Russia, Germany, Hungary in 1905, 1917, 1918-resulted in a genuine revolution, so in our time each defeated country resorts to a fascist counterrevolution. Moreover, present-day war itself has become a revolutionary process, a civil war with an unmistakably predominant counterrevolutionary tendency. Just as in a horse race we do not know which horse will win but we do know that it will be a horse, so in the present war the victory of either party will result in a further gigantic step toward the fascization of Europe, if not of the whole European, American, Asiatic world of tomorrow.

I

There seem to be two easy ways for the "orthodox" Marxist of today to handle this difficult problem. Well-trained in Hegelian philosophical thought, he might say that all that is, is reasonable, and that, by one of those dialectical shifts in which history rejoices, socialism has been fulfilled by the social revolution implied in the victory of fascism. Thus Hegel himself at first followed the rising star of the French Revolution, later embraced the cause of Napoleon, and ended by acclaiming the Prussian state that emerged from the anti-Napoleonic wars of 1812-1815 as the fulfilment of the philosophical "idea" and as the "state of reason" corresponding to the given stage of its historical development.

Or, for that matter, our orthodox Marxist might not be willing, for the present, to go so far as to acknowledge the fascist allies of Stalin as the genuine promoters of socialism in our time. He would then content himself with feeling that the victory of fascism, planned economy, state capitalism, and the weeding out of all ideas and institutions of traditional "bourgeois democracy" will bring us to the very threshold of the genuine social revolution and proletarian dictatorship - just as, according to the teachings of the early church, the ultimate coming of Christ will be immediately preceded by the coming of the Anti-Christ who will be so much like Christ in his appearance and in his actions that the faithful will have considerable difficulty in seeing the difference.

In so reasoning, our orthodox Marxist would not only conform with the church but would also keep well in line with the precedents set by the earlier socialists and "revolutionary" Marxists themselves. It was not only the moderately progressive bourgeois ex-minister Guizot who was deceived by the revolutionary trimmings of Louis Napoleon's coup d'etat of 1851 and, when he heard the news burst out into the alarmed cry, "This is the complete and final triumph of socialism." Even the leading representative of French socialism, P. J. Proudhon, was taken in by the violently anti-bourgeois attitude displayed by the revolutionary imperialist, and he devoted a famous pamphlet to the thesis that the coup d'etat of the Second of December did in fact "demonstrate the social revolution."[1]

Indeed, in many ways that counterrevolutionary aftermath of 1848 is comparable to the infinitely more serious and more extended counterrevolutionary movement through which European society is passing today after the experience of the Russian, the German, and the other European revolutions which followed in the wake of the First World War. Every party and every political tendency had to go through a certain period of bewilderment until it had adapted itself to a totally changed situation. Marx himself, although he utterly despised the imperialist adventurer because of his personal inadequacy, was inclined to believe in the revolutionary significance of the counterrevolutionary coup. He described the historical outcome of the two years of revolutionary defeat from 1848 to 1849 by the paradoxical statement that "this time the advance of the revolutionary movement did not effect itself through its immediate tragicomic achievements but, the other way round, through the creation of a united and powerful counterrevolution, through the creation of an antagonist by opposing whom the party of revolt will reach its real revolutionary maturity." And even after the fateful event he most emphatically restated his conviction that "the destruction of the parliamentary republic contains the germs of the triumph of the proletarian revolution." This is exactly what the German Communists and their Russian masters said 80 years later when they welcomed the advent of Nazism in Germany as a "victory of revolutionary communism."

This ambiguous attitude of Proudhon and Marx toward counterrevolution was repeated ten years later by Ferdinand Lassalle, a close theoretical disciple of Marx and at that time the foremost leader of the growing socialist movement in Germany. He was prepared to cooperate with Bismarck at the time when that unscrupulous statesman was toying with the idea of bribing the workers into acceptance of his imperialistic plans by an apparent adoption of the universal franchise and some other ideas borrowed from the 1848 revolution and the Second Empire. Lasalle did not live to see Bismarck at the end of the 70's, when he had subdued the liberals and the ultra-montane Catholic party, revert to his old dream of enforcing a kind of "tory-socialism" based on a ruthless persecution and suppression of all genuine socialist workers' movements.

There is no need to discuss the wholesale conversion of internationalists into nationalists and proletarian Social Democrats into bourgeois democratic parliamentarians during and after the First World War. Even such former Marxists as Paul Lensch accepted the war of the Kaiser as a realistic fulfilment of the dreams of a socialist revolution, and the about-face of the socialists they themselves glorified as a "revolutionization of the revolutionaries." There was a "national-bolshevist" fraction of the German Communist party long before there was a Hitlerian National Socialist Party. Nor does the military alliance that was concluded "seriously and for a long time" between Stalin and Hitler in August 1939, contain any novelty for those who have followed the historical development of the relations between Soviet Russia and imperial, republican, and Hitlerian Germany throughout the last twenty years. The Moscow treaty of 1939 had been preceded by the treaties of Rapallo in 1920 and of Berlin in 1926. Mussolini had already for several years openly proclaimed his new fascist credo when Lenin was scolding the Italian Communists for their failure to enlist that invaluable dynamic personality in the service of their revolutionary cause. As early as 1917, during the peace negotiations in Brest Litovsk, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht had been aware of the dreadful danger that was threatening the proletarian revolution from that side. They had said in so many words that "Russian socialism based on reactionary Prussian bayonets would be the worst that still could happen to the revolutionary workers' movement."

It appears from this historical record that there is indeed something basically wrong with the traditional Marxian theory of the social revolution and with its practical application. There is no doubt, today less than at any former time in history, that the Marxian analysis of the working of the capitalist mode of production and of its historical development is fundamentally correct. Yet it seems that the Marxian theory in its hitherto accepted form is unable to deal with the new problems that arise in the course of a not merely occasional and temporary but deep-rooted, comprehensive, and enduring counterrevolutionary development.

II

The main deficiency of the Marxian concept of the counterrevolution is that Marx did not, and from the viewpoint of his historical experience could not, conceive of the counterrevolution as a normal phase of social development. Like the bourgeois liberals he thought of the counterrevolution as an "abnormal" temporary disturbance of a normally progressive development. (In the same manner, pacifists to the present day think of war as an abnormal interruption of the normal state of peace, and physicians and psychiatrists until recently thought of disease and more especially the diseases of the mind as an abnormal state of the organism.) There is, however, between the Marxian approach and that of the typical bourgeois liberal this important difference: they start from a totally different idea about just what is a normal condition. The bourgeois liberal regards existing conditions or at least their basic features as the normal state of things, and any radical change as its abnormal interruption. It does not matter to him whether that disturbance of existing normal conditions results from a genuinely progressive movement or from a reactionary attempt to borrow revolution's thunder for the purpose of a counterrevolutionary aggression. He is afraid of the counterrevolution just as much as of the revolution and just because of its resemblance to a genuine revolution. That is why Guizot called the coup d'etat "the complete and final triumph of the socialist revolution" and why, for that matter, Hermann Rauschning today describes the advent of Hitlerism as a "revolt of nihilism."

As against the bourgeois concept, the Marxian theory has a distinct superiority. It understands revolution as a completely normal process. Some of the best Marxists, including Marx himself and Lenin, even said on occasion that revolution is the only normal state of society. So it is, indeed, under those objective historical conditions which are soberly stated by Marx in his preface to the "Critique of Political Economy."

Marx did not, however, apply the same objective and historical principle to the process of counterrevolution, which was known to him only in an undeveloped form. Thus, he did not see, and most people do not see today, that such important counterrevolutionary developments as those of present-day fascism and nazism have, in spite of their violent revolutionary methods, much more in common with evolution than they have with a genuine revolutionary process. It is true that in their talk and propaganda both Hitler and Mussolini have directed their attack mostly against revolutionary Marxism and communism. It is also true that before and after their seizure of state power they made a most violent attempt to weed out every Marxist and Communist tendency in the working classes. Yet this was not the main content of the fascist counterrevolution. In its actual results the fascist attempt to renovate and transform the traditional state of society does not offer an alternative to the radical solution aimed at by the revolutionary Communists. The fascist counterrevolution rather tried to replace the reformist socialist parties and trade unions, and in this it succeeded to a great extent.

The underlying historical law, the law of the fully developed fascist counterrevolution of our time, can be formulated in the following manner: After the complete exhaustion and defeat of the revolutionary forces, the fascist counterrevolution attempts to fulfil, by new revolutionary methods and in widely different form, those social and political tasks which the so-called reformistic parties and trade unions had promised to achieve but in which they could no longer succeed under the given historical conditions.

A revolution does not occur at some arbitrary point of social development but only at a definite stage. "At a certain stage of their development the material productive forces of society come into contradiction with the existing production-relations (or property-relations) within which they hitherto moved. From being forms of development, those relations turn into fetters upon the forces of production. Then a period of social revolution sets in." And again Marx emphasized, and even to a certain extent exaggerated, the objectivistic principle of his materialist theory of revolution according to which "a formation of society never perishes until all the forces of production for which it is wide enough have been developed." All this is true enough as far as it goes. We have all seen how evolutionary socialism reached the end of its rope. We have seen how the old capitalistic system based on free competition and the whole of its vast political and ideological superstructure was faced by chronic depression and decay. There seemed no way open except a wholesale transition to another, more highly developed form of society, to be effected by the social revolution of the proletarian class.

The new historical development during the last twenty years showed, however, that there was yet another course open. The transition to a new type of capitalistic society, that could no longer be achieved by the democratic and peaceful means of traditional socialism and trade unionism, was performed by a counterrevolutionary and anti-proletarian yet objectively progressive and ideologically anti-capitalistic and plebeian movement that had learned to apply to its restricted evolutionary aims the unrestricted methods developed during the preceding revolution. (More particularly, both Hitler and Mussolini had learned much in the school of Russian Bolshevism.) Thus, it appeared that the evolution of capitalistic society had not reached its utter historical limit when the ruling classes and the reformistic socialists-those self-appointed "doctors at the sickbed of capitalism" -reached the limits of their evolutionary possibilities. The phase of peaceful democratic reforms was followed by another evolutionary phase of development-that of the fascist transformation, revolutionary in its political form but evolutionary in its objective social contents.

The decisive reason that the capitalistic formation of society did not perish after the collapse of the First World War is that the workers did not make their revolution. "Fascism," said its closest enemy, "is a counterrevolution against a revolution that never took place." Capitalistic society did not perish, but instead entered a new revolutionary phase under the counterrevolutionary regime of fascism, because it was not destroyed by a successful workers' revolution, and because it had not, in fact, developed all the forces of production. The objective and the subjective premises are equally important for the counterrevolutionary conclusion.

From this viewpoint all those comfortable illusions about a hidden revolutionary significance in the temporary victory of the counterrevolution, in which the earlier Marxists so frequently indulged, must be entirely abandoned. If counterrevolution is only extremely and superficially connected with a social revolution by its procedures, but in its actual content is much more closely related to the further evolution of a given social system, and is in fact a particular historical phase of that social evolution, then it can no longer be regarded as a revolution in disguise. There is no reason to hail it either as an immediate prelude to the genuine revolution, or as an intrinsic phase of the revolutionary process itself. It appears as a particular phase of the whole developmental process, not inevitable like revolution yet becoming an inevitable step within the development of a given society under certain historical conditions. It has reached its up-to-now most comprehensive and important form in the present day fascist renovation and transformation of Europe, which in its basic economic aspect appears as a transition from the private and anarchic form of competitive capitalism to a system of planned and organized monopoly capitalism or state capitalism.

III

It would be the greatest folly and, for people even slightly imbued with the great discoveries of Marx in the field of the social sciences, a total relapse into a pre-materialist and pre-scientific manner of thought if one were to expect that the historical progress from competitive capitalism to planned economy and state capitalism could be repealed by any power in the world. Least of all can fascism be defeated by those people who, after a hundred years of shameless acquiescence in the total abandonment of their original ideals, now hasten to conjure up the infancy of the capitalist age with its belief in liberty, equity, fraternity, and free trade, while at the same time they surreptitiously and inefficiently try to imitate as far as possible fascism's abolition of the last remnants of those early capitalist ideas. They feel a sudden and unexpected urge to celebrate the French Revolution's fourteenth of July and at the same time dream of destroying fascism by adopting fascist methods.

In opposition to the artisan and petty-bourgeois spirit of early utopian socialism, the first word of scientific and proletarian socialism stated that big industry and the machine age had come to stay, that modern industrial workers had to find a cure for the evils of the industrial age on the basis of a further development of the new industrial forces themselves. In the same manner the scientific and proletarian socialists of our time must try to find remedies for the wrongs of monopoly capitalism and fascist dictatorship on the basis of monopoly and state capitalism itself. Neither free trade (that was not so free for the workers after all) nor the other aspects of traditional bourgeois democracy - free discussion and free press and free radio - will ever be restored. They have never existed for the suppressed and exploited class. As far as the workers are concerned, they have only exchanged one form of serfdom for another.

There is no essential difference between the way the New York Times and the Nazi press publish daily "all the news that's fit to print"-under existing conditions of privilege and coercion and hypocrisy. There is no difference in principle between the eighty-odd voices of capitalist mammoth corporations-which, over the American radio, recommend to legions of silent listeners the use of Ex-Lax, Camels, and neighbourhood groceries, along with music, war, baseball and domestic news, and dramatic sketches-and one suave voice of Mr. Goebbels who recommends armaments, race-purity, and worship of the Fuehrer. He too is quite willing to let them have music along with it-plenty of music, sporting news, and all the unpolitical stuff they can take.

This criticism of the inept and sentimental methods of present-day anti-fascism does not imply by any means that the workers should do openly what the bourgeoisie does under the disguise of a so-called antifascist fight: acquiesce in the victory of fascism. The point is to fight fascism not by fascist means but on its own ground. This seems to the present writer to be the rational meaning of what was somewhat mystically described by Alpha in the spring issue of Living Marxism as the specific task of "shock-troops" in the anti-fascist fight. Alpha anticipated that even if the localized war-of-siege waged during the first seven months of the present conflict were to extend into a general fascist world war, this would not be a "total war" and an unrestricted release of the existing powers of production for the purpose of destruction. Rather, it would still remain a monopolistic war in which the existing powers of production (destruction) would be fettered in many ways for the benefit of the monopolistic interests of privileged groups and classes. It would remain that kind of war from fear of the emancipatory effect that a total mobilization of the productive forces, even restricted to the purpose of destruction, would be bound to have for the workers or, under the present-day conditions of totally mechanized warfare, for the shocktroopers who perform the real work of that totally mechanized war.

This argument of Alpha’s can be applied more widely and much more convincingly. First of all we can disregard for the moment (although we shall have to return to it at a later stage) the peculiar restriction of the argument to the "shock-troops" and to the conditions of war. The whole traditional distinction between peace and war, production and destruction, has lost in recent times much of that semblance of truth that it had in an earlier period of modern capitalistic society. The history of the last ten years has shown that ever since, in a world drunk with apparent prosperity, the American Kellogg Pact outlawed war, peace has been abolished. From the outset Marxism was comparatively free from that simple-mindedness which believed in an immediate and clear-cut difference between production-for-use and production-for-profit. The only form of production-for-use under existing capitalistic conditions is just the production-for-profit. Productive labor for Marx, as for Smith and Ricardo, is that labor which produces a profit for the capitalist and, incidentally, a thing which may also be useful for human needs. There is no possibility of establishing a further distinction between a "good" and a "bad," a constructive and a destructive usefulness. The Goebbelian defense of the "productivity" of the labor spent on armaments in Germany by referring to the amount of "useful" labor spent in the United States for cosmetics had no novelty for the Marxist. Marx, who described the working class in its revolutionary fight as "the greatest of all productive forces" would not have been afraid to recognize war itself as an act of production, and the destructive forces of modern mechanized warfare as part of the productive forces of modern capitalistic society, such as it is. He, like Alpha, would have recognized the "shock-troops" in their "destructive" activity in war as well as in their productive activity in industry (armament and other industries-war industries all!) as real workers, a revolutionary vanguard of the modern working class. Historically it is a well-established fact that the soldier (the hired mercenary) was the first modern wage-laborer.

Thus, the old Marxian contradiction between the productive forces and the given production relations reappears in the warlike as well as in the peaceful activities of modern fascism. With it there appear again the old contrast between the workers, who as a class are interested in the full application and development of the productive forces, and the privileged classes, the monopolists of the material means of production. More than at any previous time the monopoly of political power reveals itself as the power to rule and control the social process of production. At the same time this means, under present conditions, the power to restrict production-both the production of industry in peace and destructive production in time of war-and to regulate it in the interest of the monopolist class. Even the "national" interest that was supposed to underly the present-day fascist war waged by Hitler and Mussolini is revealed by the war itself and will be revealed much more clearly by the coming peace as being ultimately an interest of the international capitalist and monopolist class. Much more clearly than at the end of the First World War it will appear that this war is waged by both parties-by the attacking fascists as well as by the defending "democrats"-as a united counterrevolutionary struggle against the workers and the soldiers who by their labor in peace and war prepared and fought the truly suicidal war.

What, then, is the hope left for the anti-fascists who are opposing the present European war and who will oppose the coming war of the hemisphere? The answer is that, just as life itself does not stop at the entrance of war, neither does the material work of modern industrial production. Fascists today quite correctly conceive the whole of their economy-that substitute for a genuine socialist economy-in terms of a "war economy" (Wehrwirtschaft). Thus, it is the task of the workers and the soldier to see to it that this job is no longer done within the restrictive rules imposed upon human labor in present-day capitalist, monopolist, and oppressive society. It has to be done in the manner prescribed by the particular instruments used; that is, in the manner prescribed by the productive forces available at the present stage of industrial development. In this manner both the productive and the destructive forces of present-day society-as every worker, every soldier knows-can be used only if they are used against their present monopolistic rulers. Total mobilization of the productive forces presupposes total mobilization of that greatest productive force which is the revolutionary working class itself.

Notes

[1] Oeuvres Completes de Proudhon, vol. VIII, Paris, 1868.

[2] First article on Class Struggles in France, Neue Rheinische Zeitung, January, 1850.

[3] The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, February, 1852.

[4] Ignazio Silone, School of Dictators, 1938.

[5] Living Marxism, vol. V, no. I, pp. 44-58.

Karl Korsch Archive

How ICE recruitment propaganda targets the worst of the worst

Sabrina Haake
January 18, 2026

RAW STORY


Federal agents stand guard in Minneapolis. REUTERS/Ryan Murphy

Before Renee Nicole Good’s body was cold, Donald Trump, Kristi Noem, and JD Vance grabbed the national spotlight to defame her (terrorist mows down federal agents!) while defending the goon who murdered her.

The masked ICE agent who shot Good at close range held his cellphone in one hand while firing his gun with the other, showing more interest in spectacle than fear. His video will be added to the Department of Homeland Security library of recordings to generate bloodlust among the type of recruits ICE seeks: Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, pardoned J-6ers, and basement-dwelling incels craving skin on skin action of any kind.

Under Noem’s guidance, and on the American taxpayers’ considerable dime, DHS records high-resolution, highly-edited, "cinematic" style videos of their own brutality for recruitment propaganda. Like the midnight raid of a Chicago apartment building when DHS filmed a Black Hawk helicopter swooping in to terrify sleeping people with flash-bang grenades, most violence is staged, performative horror.

With the Supreme Court temporarily blocking Trump’s deployment of military forces into U.S. cities, ICE is stepping up, morphing into Trump’s Praetorian guard. A look at DHS’ recruitment materials makes clear that ICE isn’t targeting intelligent, law-respecting recruits, but a rabid ethnic cleansing force to serve Steve Miller’s white nationalist agenda.

Emotional appeals to racists

In ICE’s August recruitment push, DHS posted on X, “Which way, American man?” with signs on a deserted road pointing Uncle Sam to “Cultural Decline” and other destinations.

“Which way, American man” is a call for white nationalism, and was the title of William Gayley Simpson’s 1978 white nationalist, neo-Nazi book.

An online review shows DHS similarly misusing American iconography to recruit new agents, manipulating emotions with depictions of a fictitious, ‘happier’ time in America by turning homey Norman Rockwell-style graphics into sinister appeals for violence.

In September, DHS started using Rockwell’s images on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, starting with the 1946 Working on the Statue of Liberty. The image appears with ICE slogans, “Protect Your Homeland. Defend Your Culture,” and adds a racist dog whistle by Calvin Coolidge — “Those who do not want to be partakers of the American spirit ought not to settle in America” — along with a URL where people can sign up with ICE.

Rockwell’s family has asked federal agencies to stop using his work because DHS has “become infamous in recent months for its increasingly brutal and often illegal enforcement methods.” In early November, Rockwell’s family wrote an op-ed in USA Today complaining that the Trump messages behind the posts run so contrary to the artist’s personal beliefs that he would be “devastated” to see his art “marshaled for the cause of persecution toward immigrant communities and people of color.”

Us vs. them propaganda

ICE.gov features job postings in which a Civil War era Uncle Sam points and intones, “America needs you. America has been invaded by criminals and predators. We need YOU to get them out.” Then, in smaller print, “You do not need an undergraduate degree.”

ICE’s YouTube site features video after video of Fox News “interviews” — propaganda — alongside professionally filmed fast-action shorts. One video, “Veterans Day Message,” is an interview with acting Director Todd Lyons conflating ICE agents with the military. Spliced with war-time footage, it shows fast action war scenes, paratroopers dropping from planes, armed troops descending from helicopters, and a war-gaming situation room.

Another, “Florida 287(g) with Collier County Sheriff Rambosk,” is accompanied by video game music and features an “Alligator Alcatraz” sign above swampland complete with live alligators waiting for prey.

Another, “Break the law. We regulate” appeals to directly to thugs. It opens showing six masked ICE officers pulling a man out of his car and shoving him to the ground, then segues to other arrests as a narrator says, “Regulators. We regulate the stealing of his property. We damn good too. But you can’t be any geek off the street. You gotta be good with the steal, you know what I mean, to earn your keep.”

Another features an Ohio sheriff in a ten gallon cowboy hat bragging about how many illegal aliens are in his jail, proclaiming, “Thank God that we have an administration, that we have ICE and President Trump actually doing what people want.”

This racist, political propaganda, illegally funded with federal tax dollars, obviously targets low-intellect applicants.

Minnesota fights back

Immediately after Good’s murder, the Trump regime doubled down, and sent 1000 more ICE agents into Minnesota, on top of an already unwanted 2,100 DHS and Border Patrol agents.

Trump officials know that increased ICE forces, now expanding without legal authority into traffic stops, elevate the threat to civilians. Since increased violence and civic unrest will hasten the day Trump declares martial law, escalation appears to be the goal.

St. Paul, Minneapolis, and the state of Minnesota are fighting back. On Monday, they filed suit, alleging that thousands of armed and masked DHS agents have stormed the Twin Cities to conduct militarized raids and carry out dangerous, illegal, and unconstitutional stops and arrests in sensitive public places, including schools and hospitals — all under the guise of lawful immigration enforcement.

This operation is driven by nothing more than the Trump administration’s desire to punish political opponents and score partisan points — at the direct expense of Plaintiffs’ residents. Defendants’ actions appear designed to provoke community outrage, sow fear, and inflict emotional distress, and they are interfering with the ability of state and local officials to protect and care for their residents….

Minnesota notes that state and city governments are bearing the costs of ICE’s civil rights violations. Government brutality, broad-scale and publicly excused by Trump’s spokespeople, “recklessly endangers the public safety, health, and welfare of all Minnesotans. Additionally, Defendants’ agents’ inflammatory and unlawful policing tactics provoke the protests the federal government seeks to suppress…”

Kristi Noem’s DHS podium is inscribed with “One of ours, all of yours,” the Nazi philosophy of collective punishment. By lore or fact, when one SS officer was killed in a Czech Village, the Nazis killed every resident of that village in retribution. Wildly disproportionate, lawless, ignorant, and brutal, the slogan complements ICE recruitment materials perfectly, and draws a map of where Trump’s ICE is heading.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.

Is It about the Oil?

by Greg Godels / January 19th, 2026

“No War for Oil” is one of the most popular slogans in the many emergency demonstrations sprouting up around the world in response to the criminal kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro and Cilia Flores from their residence in Caracas, Venezuela and their forced removal to detention in the US.

For many outraged by the naked military aggression on Venezuelan sovereignty, the abduction is an escalated step toward the capture of Venezuelan energy resources by the US government, given that Venezuela has the largest proven petroleum reserves of any country at this moment.

The argument goes that– when you pull the curtain back– the ultimate goal of US imperialist designs is the control over and possible exploitation of Venezuela’s most important resource.

Having argued frequently that oil-imperialism or energy-imperialism is often an important– if not decisive– factor in capitalist foreign policy, this claim is appealing. Since the time when Britain in the early twentieth century turned from coal-burning naval ships to oil, petroleum has become more and more essential for the functioning, growth, and protection of capitalist economies. Consequently, intense competition for a rapidly diminishing, increasingly hard to discover, and growing-costly-to-exploit resource dictates the actions of great power rivals.

History gives us important examples of resource-scarcity spurring devastating imperialist aggression by capitalist powers. Nazi Germany’s Lebensraum program had at its core the necessity of acquiring energy resources to propel its imperialist designs– a program that led to world war. Similarly, Hirohito’s Japan– a resource-poor island nation– launched its Pacific offensive largely to acquire the oil to continue its war against China in the face of a US embargo.

The US embargo to deny oil to Republican Spain was, conversely, an aggressive act in oil imperialism, as is today’s blockade of Cuba. The war in Ukraine is indirectly a war over energy resources, since US resolve was stoked by the opportunity to win the vast EU market from Russia– a convenient, inexpensive, and formerly reliable supplier.

Less well known, the major oil and gas suppliers are constantly influencing global politics through manipulating production and prices. The most well-known example is the 1970’s OPEC oil strike against Israel’s Western supporters (an act that the Arab countries have lost the stomach for in recent times).

As a wise friend speculated once: “Why do you think the US never occupied Somalia after the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993 left 92 US casualties? Because there was no oil!”

Yet many believe that the attack on Venezuelan sovereignty was not about the oil… even with the President of the aggressor state saying that it was!

Instead, they believe it was about Western values, the rule of law, democracy, petty grievances, hubris, or even drug smuggling. Those in the loyal opposition– Democratic Party leaders– share many of these same explanations, but fault the Trump administration for its procedural or legalistic errors.

The center-left, the bogus-left, and the anti-Communist left deny that oil could be the motive because they imagine that it might bolster the case for an explanation based upon classical Leninist imperialism– that the invasion of Venezuela was motivated by corporate interests, by exploitation of resource-rich countries.

Thus,  widely-followed liberal economist Paul Krugman scoffs at the idea that Venezuela was invaded for oil: “… whatever it is we’re doing in Venezuela isn’t really a war for oil. It is, instead, a war for oil fantasies. The vast wealth Trump imagines is waiting there to be taken doesn’t exist.”

Krugman collects and endorses the most popular arguments against the “war for oil” viewpoint:

1. Venezuela reserves are a lie.

2. Venezuela’s heavy crude oil is uneconomic, undesirable, and unwanted.

3. The Venezuelan industry is so decrepit that it is beyond rescue.

4. The US has so much sweet, light crude oil available at low cost that no one would want Venezuelan oil.

The Nobel prize award-winner’s dismissal could easily be dismissed by simply asking why– if acquiring Venezuelan oil is so pointless– did Chevron ship 1.68 million barrels of Venezuelan crude oil in the first week of January, according to Bloomberg?

And then there is the ever-voracious, parasitic Haliburton– the consummate insider corporation– that announced that it’s ready to go into Venezuela within months!

It is worth looking a little deeper into the reasons that Venezuela’s oil is a possible target of imperialist design.

If Venezuela’s oil reserves are even one-third of what OPEC, The US Energy Information Administration, or The Energy Institute concede, their reserves would still be double those of the US.

While Venezuela’s heavy, sour crude is costlier to extract and refine, it remains as a legacy with many refineries in the US that were established before the shale boom. Naked Capitalism concedes that “[i]t is true that the US has motive, in that our refineries are tuned so that 70% of the oil they process is heavier grades, despite the US producing light sweet crudes.” It further quotes The American Fuel and Petroleum Manufacturer’s website:

Long before the U.S. shale boom, when global production of light sweet crude oil was declining, we made significant investments in our refineries to process heavier, high-sulfur crude oils that were more widely available in the global market. These investments were made to ensure U.S. refineries would have access to the feedstocks needed to produce gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. Heavier crude is now an essential feedstock for many U.S. refineries. Substituting it for U.S. light sweet crude oil would make these facilities less efficient and competitive, leading to a decline in fuel production and higher costs for consumers.

Currently, Canada exports 90% of its very heavy, sour oil to the US, accounting for approximately a quarter of its total exports to the US. Oil from the Alberta oil sands is also expensive to extract and refine, but nonetheless amounts to 4 to 4.5 million barrels per day exported to the US. It must be acknowledged that future Venezuelan oil counts as powerful leverage in the recent and continuing political and economic friction between the US and Canada, especially as Canada is defying the US by building “a new strategic partnership” with China.

Much has been made of the state of the Venezuelan oil industry, today producing around a million barrels a day, down from its peak at over 3.5 million barrels per day decades ago. Indeed, the US blockade has stifled investments, shuttered export markets, and denied technological advances. Nonetheless, Venezuela has produced as much as 2 million barrels a day as recently as 2017. Admittedly, it would take significant investment to return to the 2017 level and vast investment to restore the level of the 1970s.

Many commentators are “shocked” by the enormous capital required to upgrade the Venezuelan oil industry. They forget earlier “shocking” assessments of the fracking revolution: “The U.S. shale oil industry hailed as a “revolution” has burned through a quarter trillion dollars more than it has brought in over the last decade. It has been a money-losing endeavor of epic proportions.”

Still, the Trump administration’s gambit has many competitors concerned that US control over Venezuela’s oil “would reshape the global oil map–putting the US in charge of the output of one of the founding members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and, along with America’s own prodigious production, give it a potentially disruptive role in a market already struggling with oversupply.” According to the Wall Street Journal, US oil production, US political and corporate domination of Guyana’s emerging energy sector, and now Venezuela’s reserves, may place the US in a position to unbalance the market, particularly at the expense of the OPEC alliance, a move of enormous political consequence.

The critics of oil-imperialism fail to understand all of its dimensions. They crudely simplify the politics of oil to the immediacy of extraction and its costs of the moment, ignoring indirect impacts, the wider prospects, and the longer term.

Nor do they grasp the issues that are facing the US domestic oil industry. While fracking has allowed the industry to return to being the largest crude oil producer in the world, the industry faces the perennial question of peak production for a given technology– the ever-present problem of rising costs of discovery and extraction. Further, the exalted Permian Basin is “becoming a pressure cooker”, pressing upon both costs and public acceptance. “Swaths of the Permian appear to be on the verge of geological malfunction. Pressure in the injection reservoirs in a prime portion of the basin runs as high as 0.7 pound per square inch per foot, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data from researchers at the University of Texas at Austin’s Bureau of Economic Geology.” As The Wall Street Journal also reports: “A buildup in pressure across the region is propelling wastewater up ancient wellbores, birthing geysers that can cost millions of dollars to clean up. Companies are wrestling with drilling hazards that make it costlier to operate and complaining that the marinade is creeping into their oil-and-gas reservoirs. Communities friendly to oil and gas are growing worried about injection.”

Because of the current glut of oil (likely retaliation by OPEC+ producers seeking to drive down US production below its cost of production and recover market share) the number of operating rigs is down 14% in the Permian. Oil markets are volatile, competitive, and transient. Where Venezuelan crude will fit into these equations remains an open question.

And then there is the Essequibo, a region currently within the borders of Guyana, but disputed by Venezuela. Recent discoveries in the area promise a potential of over 11 billion barrels of oil, with Exxon estimating a production of 1.7 million barrels per day by 2030. This economic plum is now off the table in the conflict between the Maduro government and Guyana and Exxon. As OILPRICE.com puts it succinctly: Trump’s Venezuela Takeover Will Make Guyana Oil Safer… for the US and Exxon.

Let us not forget China. The People’s Republic of China has granted around $106 billion in loans to Venezuela since 2000. Daniel Chavez, writing in TNI, notes that those loans place “it fourth among recipients of Chinese official credit globally.” Estimates vary, but the PRC imports between 400,000 and 600,000 barrels per day from Venezuela, at least doubling since 2020. While it is less than 5% of PRC usage, it is not inconsequential. And it represents a serious penetration of capital and trade in the Western hemisphere– the US sphere of interest.

It underscores the reality that oil-politics is not merely about the immediacy of reserves, extraction, costs, and price, but also about competition and rivalry within the imperialist system. The competition and conflict between the US, Venezuela, Guyana, Canada, PRC, OPEC, and other oil-producing countries is intrinsic to a system that lives and breathes thanks to its exploitation of energy resources. In that regard, it is still most clearly viewed through the prism of Lenin’s theory of advanced capitalism devised over a hundred years ago.

I give the last word to the informed and serious student of the oil industry, Antonia Juhasz:

If the greatest lie the devil ever told was to convince us that he wasn’t real, the greatest lie the oil industry ever told us is to convince us that they don’t want oil. Where do we even begin to think about that as possible? They want to control when they produce it and how, and under what terms. They need to show a growing amount of oil that they can count as their reserves.

There are very few big pots of oil left sitting around anywhere unclaimed. The only way to get that is to increase technology, go into very expensive, technologically complex modes of production that face a lot of resistance. Venezuela is a country that [the big oil companies] were producing in not that long ago and making money in not that long ago and have wanted to get back into but on their own terms.

So I think when they protest publicly, one, it’s to distance themselves from Trump’s extremism, but two, it’s a great public negotiating tactic. They’re basically saying publicly, and the media is repeating it, “We wouldn’t want to operate in Venezuela. Oh, my God, it’s expensive, it’s technologically complex.” I actually think those are ridiculous things if you look where else they operate.

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Greg Godels writes on current events, political economy, and the Communist movement from a Marxist-Leninist perspective. Read other articles by Greg, or visit Greg's website.

The Disconnected Present: Neoliberal Fascism and the Politics of Erasure

Henry Giroux

 January 19, 2026

LONG READ

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Death comes calling. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Weaponizing Distraction: Spectacle as Governance

Under the Trump administration, the politics of diversion has hardened into a governing strategy and been normalized by a compliant mainstream media ecosystem. As James Oliphant observes in Reuters, “Donald Trump is a human hurricane,” generating so many simultaneous controversies that tracking any single event becomes nearly impossible. Oliphant is only partly right,  because what he describes as chaos is in fact method.  Trump is more than a whirlwind of chaos and distraction. He is an unchecked authoritarian who poses a grave threat to democracy and the planet—he is a modern day avatar of domestic terrorism. What masquerades as spectacle and turbulence is, in fact, the calculated exercise of power, a form of governance that weaponizes confusion, accelerates cruelty, and functions as a domestic analogue of terrorism, designed to intimidate, disorient, and exhaust the public into submission. It is through this machinery of distraction and shock that state terrorism now takes shape, not as a single event, but as a continuous sequence of calculated ruptures and relentless acts of violence.

Aftershocks of Power: Kinetic Action and State Terror

State terrorism unfolds through what the historian Nikhil Pal Singh calls its “aftershocks,” a cascading sequence of spectacles engineered to generate emotional outrage intense enough to displace sustained analysis and comprehensive understanding. As Singh writes, such shocks fragment public attention and dull critical judgment, rendering brutality episodic rather than systemic. These acts do not simply terrorize; they instruct. In this register, “kinetic action” names a new grammar of governance: landing a Black Hawk helicopter packed with armed police atop an apartment building in Chicago’s South Shore, hurling stun grenades and zip-tying residents; seizing roofers at gunpoint from the top of a house in upstate New York; or blowing up a small boat carrying people in the Caribbean.

In this political climate, outrage is incessantly manufactured and then swiftly displaced, replaced by the next shock before the public can assemble the fragments into a coherent political picture. Each incident appears as an isolated rupture rather than as part of an unfolding structure of power, severed from the conditions that produce it and from the larger architecture of domination it sustains. This fragmentation is not accidental. It is a calculated strategy to drain meaning from public life, exhaust critical attention, and foreclose any sustained democratic reckoning or resistance. In the age of escalating fascism and a nihilistic worship of greed and raw power, American politics has devolved into a theater of violence aligned with a ceaseless stream of spectacles severed from history and emptied of systemic meaning. What vanishes in this fractured field of sensation is the recognition that these acts are not excesses or breakdowns. They are the governing grammar of a neoliberal–fascist gangster capitalist order, organized around militarization, white supremacy, historical erasure, dispossession, and punishment, now treated as inevitabilities rather than indictments.

Depoliticization by Design: Renée Good and the Machinery of Erasure

In early January 2026, the U.S. staged a dramatic military abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, a flagrant breach of sovereignty that should have dominated global headlines and provoked profound legal and ethical debate. Instead, by the time many Americans were beginning to process that emerging foreign crisis, the nation’s attention had been reshaped by another state-sanctioned act of violence: on January 7, Minneapolis resident Renée Nicole Good was murdered by a federal ICE agent during an immigration operation. Good, a 37-year-old mother, was killed while driving away from federal agents, a lethal encounter the administration defended as self-defense despite eyewitness accounts and video footage disproving the official narrative.

 Racist violence now saturates American society, no longer confined to the margins but woven into the fabric of everyday governance. Under Trump, people of color, whether citizens or noncitizens, are rarely exempt from being cast as targets, whether inside the nation’s borders or beyond them. As the historian Greg Grandin observes, the logics of extraction, violence, and permanent threat have fused foreign and domestic policy into a single, brutal continuum. He writes: “The same rule by domination Mr. Trump showcases abroad  is little different from what is being applied at home. Polarization is deepening, cities are under assault by federal forces, and the degrading, at times lethal treatment of citizens and noncitizens alike by government agents is now routine.” What emerges is a politics that governs through fear and force, erasing any meaningful distinction between war overseas and repression at home.

What followed reveals how distraction functions not merely as diversion but as a technology of depoliticization. Rather than treating Good’s killing as a moment demanding scrutiny of unaccountable force and part of a broader strategy of state violence and domestic terrorism, top federal officials immediately doubled down on enforcement and sought to recast the incident as evidence of domestic threat. Homeland Security leaders described her actions as “domestic terrorism,” and the administration launched Operation Salvo — a nationwide increase in ICE raids and enforcement initiatives in the aftermath of her death. This mass retribution was choreographed through government-produced propaganda videos.

 Vice President JD Vance alleged, without a vestige of evidence that Renee Good was “part of a broader left-wing network to attack, to dox, to assault and to make it impossible for our ICE officers to do their job” and “that she used the techniques of domestic terrorism to target federal officials.” He further stated, shamelessly and without evidence, that she was “brainwashed” and tied to a “broader, left-wing network.”

Within days of Renée Good’s killing, the mainstream media cycle shifted once again, overtaken by a cascading series of distractions engineered to smother sustained attention. Trump allies demanded criminal investigations of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Federal officials revived anti-communist delusions, falsely claiming that left-wing organizations constituted domestic terrorist threats, while repeated speculation erupted over Epstein-linked scandals. At the same time, renewed fascination attached itself to Trump’s incendiary threats against Mexico, Cuba, and Colombia, alongside his grotesque annexation “fantasies” directed at Greenland.

The mainstream press once again performs its role as an army of stenographers, loudly amplifying Trump’s feigned concern for Iranian protesters while remaining willfully blind to the central contradiction it refuses to name, his ruthless suppression of dissent at home, most notably his escalating assault on those who stand in solidarity with Palestinian freedom. These spectacles did not merely compete for public attention, they functioned as acts of erasure, actively burying any serious reckoning with Good’s killing and with the chilling threat issued by the proto-fascist ideologue Stephen Miller to “create an empire in reverse,” that is, to turn the full machinery of a militarized empire inward, “toward the homeland, and its enemies within.”

In this inversion, the war on terror comes home saturated with state violence, marked by the routine shooting of civilians by an increasingly rogue police apparatus and by a calculated effort to ensure that public attention dissipates before the underlying pattern of domestic terrorism and authoritarian rule can be named. What is lost in this relentless mix is not simply narrative or a comprehensive understanding of the many strands of neoliberal fascism, but the very capacity to recognize these acts as part of a coherent political project, one aimed at normalizing repression, criminalizing dissent, fragmenting resistance, and emptying democracy of its remaining substance.

This is the operation of the politics of disconnection: a system in which state violence, institutional complicity, and media spectacle combine to fragment public consciousness. One crisis eclipses another not because they are unrelated but because meaning itself is being strategically dissolved, emptied out, and walled into rhetorical silos. Violence becomes episodic, power becomes opaque, and citizens are trained to react rather than analyze, conditions that enable dangerous forms of authoritarian governance and fascist politics to take hold. This is pedagogy at the level of governance, teaching people how not to think historically, critically, and comprehensively. What makes this regime of depoliticization both durable and deadly is that it is anchored in an economic ideology that rarely names itself, even as it structures the conditions under which disconnection becomes common sense.

Neoliberalism is the dominant ideology of our time, yet it remains largely unnamed within mainstream political discourse. Its power lies precisely in this invisibility. Shielded by anonymity, neoliberalism disguises the systemic devastation it produces, the evisceration of public health care and education, the assault on the global environment, the dismantling of public services, and the normalization of staggering inequality, political corruption, and an expanding punishing state. Rarely are these crises understood as interconnected expressions of a single economic and political order. Instead, crumbling infrastructures, mass poverty, food insecurity, social isolation, and massive tax giveaways to the wealthy are treated as isolated failures rather than as symptoms of neoliberal capitalism itself. At the core of this politics of disconnection, private suffering is severed from public responsibility, structural causes disappear from view, and crises intensify in isolation. It is under these conditions that authoritarianism mutates into rebranded forms of fascism, nourished by economic abandonment, historical amnesia, and the systematic evacuation of political accountability and ethical and social responsibility.

What makes this regime of depoliticization both durable and deadly is that it is anchored in an economic ideology that rarely names itself, even as it structures the conditions under which disconnection becomes common sense. State violence is fragmented into isolated incidents, militarism is recoded as security, dissent is reframed as extremism, and institutions charged with defending democratic life  either become complicitous with Trump’s extortion politics or retreat into silence. The killing of Renée Good by federal agents, the militarization of U.S. cities through ICE raids, the open embrace of imperial aggression abroad, and the brutal attack on immigrants and people of color at home are treated as unrelated crises. They are not. Together, they reveal a governing logic whose primary function is depoliticization, a strategy that severs events from historical contexts, structural causes, private suffering from public responsibility, and erodes the very language through which power can be held accountable and democracy can be named, defended, and struggled over.

Politics, at its most vital, is the domain of collective engagement, where citizens deliberate, contest power, and negotiate, name, and struggle over the conditions of a shared future. Yet under contemporary authoritarianism, politics is steadily hollowed out and replaced by a culture of fear, fragmentation, manufactured ignorance, and managed spectacles. What emerges is a politics of disconnection that isolates social problems, obscures systemic violence, and transforms collective struggle into individualized anxiety. This not only represses dissent; it also renders it unintelligible by stripping it of context, history, and ethical meaning.

To understand how the logic of Trump’s gangster capitalism operates, it is crucial to refuse the temptation to treat its manifestations as discrete or unrelated phenomena. In the most immediate sense, Ruth Fowler writing in Counterpunchis right to insist, for instance, that Renée Good’s death cannot be “processed by the right as an isolated incident, or by the left as a symbol of the horrors of Trump’s America.” It is neither. Rather, it belongs to a decades-long continuum in which state violence has come to mirror the “dynamics survivors recognize from private life: domination framed as protection,” punishment justified as necessity, and “rage framed as fear.” Trump could only accelerate this necropolitical machinery because “America was already deeply rotten long before he arrived.”

The escalation of ICE violence, the normalization of permanent war abroad, the assault on higher education, and the granting of unchecked state power are not parallel developments unfolding by chance. They are interlocking components of a coherent political project that governs through fear, erasure, unchecked militarization, and the systematic dismantling of the foundations of a robust democracy. Together, they form an ensemble of horrors rooted in America’s darkest historical legacies, now reanimated through corporate-controlled disimagination machines, a complicit media culture, the scandalous surrender of higher education to extortionary politics, the creation of a military apparatus that is unaccountable to Congress, and a sustained attack on social responsibility, informed and engaged thought, and the institutions capable of cultivating civic courage, critical thought, and compassionate citizens.

Militarism Without Limits: Empire Abroad, Occupation at Home

What links the Trump administration’s escalating threats and interventions abroad with the militarization of cities at home is not merely a shared reliance on force, but a more profound transformation in how power itself now operates. Militarism has been severed from accountability, constitutional restraint, and international law, mutating into a roaming logic of governance void of morality and unmoored from limits and increasingly insulated from democratic oversight. We now inhabit an age of unaccountable power, naked in its ambitions, theatrical in its display, and relentlessly militarized in its brutality.

 Trump has long treated the U.S. military not as a constitutional institution bound by law and public consent, but as a personal instrument of domination, an extension of authoritarian politics repurposed as a roaming police force. In doing so, he follows the well-worn playbook of past dictators, seeking to sever military power from public accountability and democratic restraint. This is the defining logic of a police state: armed force unmoored from law, answerable not to the people but to the imperatives of domination itself. Unconstrained by congressional approval, military power is aggressively deployed as both spectacle and threat, used to intimidate the public and normalize the permanent presence of armed force in civilian life.

This same logic governs Trump’s actions abroad. His assault on Venezuela, alongside open threats aimed at Mexico, Greenland, Cuba, and Brazil, signals the return of an imperial order stripped even of its liberal alibis, an empire no longer burdened by the need to disguise domination as diplomacy. Trump has become increasingly entangled in Latin American politics, collapsing foreign policy into a blunt instrument of coercion and punishment. Sovereignty is rendered conditional, borders reduced to inconveniences, and international law recast as an obstacle to be bypassed rather than a constraint to be honored. Military force is no longer framed as a tragic last resort but as an ordinary instrument of rule, a form of gangster diplomacy that collapses the distinction between law enforcement and war. When the kidnapping or removal of foreign leaders can be normalized through bureaucratic euphemisms such as “capture” or “stabilization,” militarism becomes self-justifying, accountable only to itself, and indistinguishable from the authoritarian violence it claims to secure.

What makes this moment especially dangerous is that the same logic of domination now operates fully inside the United States. The militarization of ICE is not an aberration or policy excess but the domestic extension of an imperial, colonizing mindset long rehearsed abroad. ICE has metastasized into a sprawling internal lawless enforcement regime, brutal in its methods and expansive in its reach, equipped with military-grade weapons, aerial surveillance, sweeping discretionary power, and near-total immunity. Operating with minimal transparency and virtually no public accountability, federal agents now conduct raids with helicopters, battering rams, and tactical gear once reserved for war zones. Entire neighborhoods are treated as hostile territory, civilian space reimagined as a battlefield.

What has followed, as documented by investigative journalists and civil rights advocates, is an escalation that marks a decisive crossing of the line into the political terrors historically associated with dictatorships. ICE agents have fired into civilian vehicles, with multiple reports of people being shot in this manner, including confirmed fatalities. Other cases reveal a pattern of systemic abuse rather than isolated excess: an autistic, disabled woman forcibly removed from her car while driving to a medical appointment; vehicles stopped and windows smashed to apprehend occupants; tear gas canisters and pepper balls deployed against peaceful demonstrators; detainees denied medication and subjected to degrading conditions inside immigration facilities.

 As reported by Zeteo, Americans have been inundated with viral images of ICE agents conducting Gestapo-like “citizen checks,” using battering rams to force entry into homes, allegedly without warrants, and “routinely threatening civilians with bullet-to-face murder.” Due process is suspended in the name of security, and fear itself becomes a governing instrument, teaching obedience through terror and normalizing the disappearance of rights once presumed inviolable.

This is not law enforcement in any democratic sense. It is a form of domestic occupation that deliberately blurs the boundary between policing and warfare. ICE shootings, arbitrary detentions, and the use of overwhelming force are not unfortunate excesses; they are pedagogical acts. They teach not only fear, but racial hierarchy and political exclusion. They teach the public who is disposable, whose lives are ungrievable, and which populations can be governed through terror rather than consent. Militarism, in this form, functions as a mode of depoliticization. Violence is individualized, stripped of context, and presented as a technical response to threats rather than as a political strategy rooted in racialized power and authoritarian control.

The crucial point is this: when the military and militarized agencies are freed from democratic restraint, they no longer serve the public. They serve power itself. The same contempt for limits that enables foreign interventions without congressional authorization or international legitimacy also authorizes domestic enforcement regimes that operate beyond constitutional norms. Militarism becomes a unifying force, binding foreign aggression to internal repression. What emerges is a state that increasingly governs through force while hollowing out the political language needed to contest it.

Just as crucial to this transformation is the role of corporate media in laundering and legitimating this militarized power. As Trump expands imperial aggression in Venezuela, major news networks have not interrogated the legality, morality, or geopolitical consequences of the assault. Instead, they have fallen into lockstep with state power, broadcasting images of celebration, repeating official talking points, and refusing to name the invasion for what it is: a flagrant violation of sovereignty and international law. In this coverage, the kidnapping of a foreign leader is rendered routine, even triumphant, while fundamental questions about legality, civilian harm, and imperial ambition disappear from view.

This is not journalistic failure alone; it is a pedagogical failure with enormous political consequences. Militarism is not only enforced through weapons and raids, but taught through images, language, and spectacle. By framing imperial violence as a necessary security response or a moment of national pride, corporate media help transform war into entertainment and domination into common sense. Violence is stripped of history and politics, repackaged as inevitability. In this way, the public is trained to witness brutality without moral reckoning and to accept aggression without democratic debate.

What emerges is a tightly coordinated apparatus of power in which state violence, corporate media, and public consciousness collapse into a single regime of normalization. Militarism becomes not only unaccountable in practice but unquestionable in narrative. This is the cultural machinery that makes the politics of disconnection possible, severing imperial aggression abroad from its domestic counterparts and insulating both from collective resistance.

This is how the politics of disconnection works. By treating militarized violence abroad and at home as separate issues, the public is prevented from seeing their shared logic. Citizens are encouraged to debate tactics rather than question legitimacy. Militarism becomes normalized, routinized, and ultimately invisible, even as it corrodes the foundations of democratic life.

ICE Violence and the Pedagogy of Fear

The killing of Renée Nicole Good, a U.S. citizen shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, should have provoked national outrage and institutional reckoning among the mainstream media. Instead, it has largely been absorbed into the background noise of normalized state violence. Treated as an isolated incident rather than a structural indictment, her death exemplifies how the politics of disconnection shields authoritarian power from accountability. And this torrent of mindless dribble takes place against massive protests in Minneapolis and other cities around the United States.

In recent years, federal immigration enforcement has shifted from sporadic border control to an interior hard-line regime that treats entire cities as zones of control. Militarized raids, mass detentions, and surveillance operations now function less as mechanisms of law enforcement than as public spectacles designed to intimidate and discipline. The expansion of ICE’s budget, staffing, and technological infrastructure has transformed it into a domestic security force deeply intertwined with private detention industries, defense contractors, and local police departments.

This apparatus is not simply about immigration policy. It represents a broader project to redraw the boundaries of civic belonging through force. When entire communities are subjected to raids, when ordinary citizens are detained for monitoring federal activity, and when protest is met with flash-bangs and tear gas, the message is unmistakable. Fear is governance. Compliance is survival.

Crucially, these practices are depoliticized through bureaucratic language and media framing. Raids become enforcement priorities. Shootings become tragic encounters. Violence is detached from power and recoded as necessity. In this way, the enforcement regime weakens civic trust, fractures solidarity, and conditions the public to accept terror as administrative routine.

Higher Education Under Siege: Criminalizing Dissent

Nowhere is the politics of disconnection more devastating than in the Trump administration’s ongoing assault on higher education. Universities, once understood, however imperfectly, as spaces for critical inquiry, moral witness, and democratic debate, are increasingly recast as threats to national security. Students and faculty who protest state violence, militarism, or racial injustice are no longer recognized as engaged citizens but are instead branded as radicals, extremists, or even domestic terrorists. In this climate, dissent itself becomes a crime. Education is dangerous to authoritarians precisely because it cultivates the capacities they most fear. At their best, higher and public education offer students the histories, knowledge, and ethical frameworks necessary to think critically, act courageously, and recognize injustice when it appears. Such institutions nurture engaged and critical agents, capable of holding power accountable, asking the questions that must be asked, and speaking, writing, and acting from positions of agency and collective responsibility. That type of empowering pedagogy  has no place in Trump’s America.

In the wake of ICE violence, the killing of Renée Good, and the broader militarization of public life, many universities have responded with silence or evasive neutrality. This silence is not politically innocent. It signals a profound institutional failure, a retreat from the university’s responsibility to speak when fundamental rights are under assault. When institutions issue statements for reputational safety but fall quiet in the face of state violence, neutrality becomes a form of complicity.

This failure is compounded by direct political pressure. Universities are increasingly threatened with funding cuts, investigations, and public vilification if they do not conform to authoritarian demands. Protest is reframed as disruption, solidarity as extremism, and critique as indoctrination. Faculty are surveilled, students disciplined, and entire fields of study, especially those addressing race, colonialism, gender, and imperial power, are marked as suspect. The consequences are already visible. In conservative universities such as Texas A&M professors are warned not to teach subjects dealing with race and gender, resulting in one instance of removing the teaching of Plato from their courses.

Universities are targeted precisely because they connect private troubles and suffering to structural forces. They provide the language through which people learn to see beyond isolated events and recognize systemic injustice. By criminalizing protest and narrowing the boundaries of permissible discourse, authoritarian power seeks to depoliticize the very act of thinking critically. Students are trained to fear consequences rather than exercise judgment. Faculty are encouraged to self-censor rather than bear witness. The result is a university hollowed out from within, reduced to a managerial institution that prioritizes compliance over conscience.

This is pedagogical repression. It teaches withdrawal rather than engagement, silence rather than solidarity. When universities abandon their role as sites of critique and moral courage, they help produce a citizenry habituated to disconnection, if not authoritarianism.

Neoliberal Fascism and the Struggle for Democratic Language

 Taken together, militarism abroad, ICE violence at home, and the repression of higher education reveal not chaos but a coherent political project. Each depends on severing events from structures, erasing historical memory, and criminalizing the very forms of critique capable of challenging authoritarian power. What appears as disorder is, in fact, a carefully orchestrated pedagogy of domination. At its core lies an unabashed commitment to white supremacy, now normalized as policy and spectacle alike. The evidence is unmistakable: Black history is censored in schools and museums; ships and military bases are renamed after Confederate figures; the language of white grievance is openly embraced by Trump and echoed by his appointees; and leading acolytes such as Steve Bannon and Elon Musk perform Nazi salutes in public without consequence. ICE recruiters openly court white nationalists with lavish signing bonuses to “repel foreign invaders,” while racist propaganda invites Americans to imagine a nation purified “after 100 million deportations.”

As Liz Landers notes, media platforms are increasingly saturated with images and posts that borrow directly from the language and symbolism of right-wing and white nationalist movements. Slogans such as “One homeland, one people, one heritage. Remember who you are, American” do not merely echo fascist rhetoric, they actively reproduce its racial logic. These messages circulate relentlessly, reinforced and legitimated by Trump’s own public racism. This is evident in his interview with The New York Times, where he claimed that the 1964 Civil Rights Act, legislation designed to end racial segregation and guarantee Black Americans equal access to education and employment, “accomplished some very wonderful things, but it also hurt a lot of people,” dismissing its core purpose as “reverse discrimination.” This is a classic white supremacist trope which argues that white men are the real victims in American society.

 Such statements invert history, recasting white grievance as victimhood while erasing the structural violence the law sought to confront. This racial and white nationalist reasoning does not stop at the nation’s borders. It extends outward into foreign policy, surfacing in Trump’s warnings about a supposed European “civilization crisis” allegedly caused by immigration itself. In this way, racism becomes a governing framework rather than an aberration, normalizing domination by making it feel natural rather than imposed. Politics is reduced to affect and reaction, while power trains the public to feel fear and resentment instead of engaging in critical thought.

In this model, citizens are invited not to engage politically but to react emotionally. Fear replaces critique. Fragmentation replaces solidarity. Spectacle replaces deliberation. The politics of disconnection functions as a technology of power, ensuring that people experience injustice without understanding its causes and witness violence without recognizing their collective capacity to resist it.

What we are witnessing is not simply a return to older forms of authoritarianism but the consolidation of neoliberal fascism as a pedagogical project. This project does not rule primarily through persuasion or democratic consent but through the management of consciousness, the normalization of cruelty, and the systematic dismantling of the public imagination. It educates people to disconnect, to see violence as inevitable, to accept militarism as common sense, normalize racial cleansing, white Christian nationalism, and authoritarian cruelty. It replaces political agency with fear, historical memory with amnesia, and solidarity with atomization.

Neoliberal fascism thrives precisely because it empties politics of meaning while saturating everyday life with intimidation and spectacle. It teaches through raids and bombings, through censorship and silence, through the criminalization of protest and the hollowing out of institutions charged with defending democracy. Its success depends on destroying the language that allows people to connect the dots and recognize patterns of power.

What is urgently needed as a precondition for a mass movement of resistance is a new democratic language, one capable of reconnecting what authoritarianism works relentlessly to fracture. Such a language must name militarism as a political choice rather than an inevitability, repression as a mode of governance rather than a form of security, and education as a site of struggle rather than a neutral space. It must insist that democracy is not merely a set of procedures or rituals, but a way of life grounded in shared responsibility, historical consciousness, and the courage to hold power accountable.

This language must also reclaim pedagogy itself as a central terrain of resistance. Education, broadly understood, remains one of the few forces capable of transforming fear into understanding, outrage into solidarity, and private suffering into collective action. To resist neoliberal fascism is to refuse the politics of disconnection and to rebuild the connective tissue of democratic life, linking struggles across borders, institutions, and communities. It is to recognize that resistance begins not only in the streets or the courts, but in the stories we tell, the histories we preserve, and the forms of knowledge that shape how people imagine themselves and their futures.

The task and challenge of mass resistance before us is neither abstract nor optional. Without a language capable of exposing the economic, racist, and authoritarian pedagogical machinery that sustains contemporary forms of domination, resistance will remain fragmented, reactive, and easily contained. Martin Luther King Jr. was right to call for a revolution in values, one inseparable from a rhetoric of systemic analysis that linked militarism, racism, and poverty as mutually reinforcing forces. To name neoliberal fascism as a pedagogical project is to recognize that the struggle for democracy is inseparable from the struggle over meaning, memory, and education itself. In this fight, silence is complicity, neutrality is surrender, and reconnecting the political becomes not simply a strategy of resistance but the first act of democratic renewal.

Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s board of directors.