The seeds of fascism, part 2

I’m taking my time but still planning on a fifth post in my Roads to WW3  series. It will focus on the reality that, the two most formidable obstacles to US full spectrum dominance being too powerful for head-on military attack (which does not rule out the nightmare of Armageddon by miscalculation) efforts to shore up US planetary rule pour billions into soft power, where it still enjoys a clear advantage, ¹ to bring states on China’s and Russia’s periphery into the US orbit by capturing their information space. Through dominance in news, entertainment and an American Dream packaged in global brands from Cola to Clooney, through CIA cut-outs like the National Endowment for Democracy, and through billionaire Foundations ² well placed to funnel funds to capitalise on grievances real or manufactured, the US has mastered the art of grooming and co-opting dissent, subverting governance and engineering Ukraine/Bangladesh/Honduras style colour revolutions sold to a credulous West as democratic.

The thrust of Roads to WW3 Part 4, by contrast, was that:

none of earth’s plethora of flash points and weeping sores should be be viewed in isolation. Not Ukraine, not the cancer that is Israel. Not Syria nor Sahel nor Venezuela … Iran nor Xinjiang nor drillings in the Arctic. None can be truly understood outside the context of so far undeclared war between US empire and axis of resistance.

A big part of my build up to that claim, however, was a reality no less significant – here moving in parallel, there intertwining in unholy dialectic – of Western decline and its consequences for labour sellers:

• The West is in decline. Over the late 19th and 20th centuries labour-sellers gained sufficient bargaining power to negotiate a social contract – higher real wages than in the global south, plus state welfarism at its zenith around 1950-80 – which gave them a stake in a colonialism reinventing itself, post WW2, as modern imperialism; defined by export from global north to south of monopoly capital, and south to north repatriation of profits.

• [But] the past five decades have seen the steady dismantling of that social contract as labour bargaining power has been weakened by automation, collapse of the Soviet Union (and with it the case for ‘bribing’ Western workers away from socialist solutions to capitalist crises) and the offshoring of wealth creation by rentier  oligarchies which found it more profitable to have the global south make our stuff and grow our food.

• Those corporate oligarchies became immensely powerful as super profits from Asia were recycled in the finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) sectors which now drive Western economies. Inequality (read Piketty) soared to levels as economically dysfunctional and democracy-incompatible as they are morally abhorrent. But with trade unions reduced to offering club perks, and social democrat parties jumping aboard the Neoliberal Express while Mr Fukuyama declared the end of history, too few were complaining. Workers had for profit leverage been recast as consumers on a crack cocaine of easy credit, house price bubble and cheap flights to sun-kissed beaches. Few noticed a burgeoning underclass out in the cold, or gave time of day to the doom-mongering of a tiny and perennially discontented subset of the intelligentsia.

Capitalism is predicated on most of humanity having no other means of satisfying its material needs, and those of dependents, than by selling its labour power to ruling classes defined by monopoly ownership of the capital required to set it to work. But for reasons just given, in the West capitalists either aren’t buying labour power at all, or are in the game – with barely more control than the labour sellers ³ – of driving down its price and terms of employment even as that erosion of welfarism continues apace.

Hence the entry to common parlance of the term, race to the bottom.

For the first time ever, hundreds of millions of men and women are permanently surplus – with billions likely to join them soon – to economic requirement. In a society whose economy served humanity not profit, this would be a blessing. It would free us to develop morally, spiritually and intellectually to realise our full potential as homo sapiens sapiens; doubly wise in that we know that we know. In the one you and I live in, however, the implications are dire when its elites have zero interest in changing that equation: sell your labour-power, no matter how diminished and cruel the market for it, on pain of mounting deprivation and despair. ⁴

None of the mainstream parties or media are remotely capable of acknowledging this truth, far less identifying causes and – built into their raison d’etre – still less capable of fixing it. Why? Because terrifying as this is when we truly let it in, no remedy is to be found within the bounds of ruling class, hence Overton Window, acceptability.

Leaving us in the eye of a perfect storm. The problem for such as me is that our remedies, even our identification of the nature and severity of the problem, are long and abstract and – since the ruling ideas of any age are those of its ruling class – counterintuitive. That confers a decided advantage on other radical voices, their proffered solutions short, concrete and easily grasped.

‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally, London September 13 2025. Read attendee comments

I’m again minded of Antonio Gramsci’s grim assessment from his jail cell:

The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters. 

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1. There’s reason to suppose however that even in soft power, a combination of BRICS, Belt & Road, AIIB and SCO on the one hand, blowback from US military, economic and fiscal overreach on the other, are making inroads into America’s lead.
2. Two examples of such billionaires being the close pal of Jeffrey Epstein who gave name and some of his ill-gotten to the Gates Foundation; and Open Society’s George Soros, he who trousered a cool $billion in 1992 by shorting sterling when “The Markets” forced John Major to take Britain out of the ERM just two years after joining it.
3. As I put it eight years ago, in an aside to my essay on Reading the Reformation:

   The horrors I speak of flow from laws of motion few understand (least of all economists, their salaries dependent on their not understanding) and which leave us with clear beneficiaries, yes, but not identifiable agents in the sense of individuals who by making other choices could reverse those laws of motion. On the contrary, by making different choices those agents would see their ‘power’ evaporate in an instant. I call them a ruling class, and with good reason, but ultimately that’s no more than a useful fiction when they too are enslaved.

4. Yanis Varoufakis claims that we no longer live under capitalism but techno-feudalism; an argument I’ll return to later in this series.