Capitalism’s self-preservation relies on crises that construct fascism, endless war, genocide, and slavery---Extinction. It’s try or die for the alt.

Moreover, a global police state is centrally aimed at coercive exclusion of surplus humanity. The restructuring of world capitalism through globalization has greatly expanded the ranks of the surplus labor population. The processes by which surplus labor is generated have accelerated under globalization. Spatial reorganization has helped transnational capital to break the territorially bound power of organized labor and impose new capital–labor relations based on fragmentation, flexibilization, and the cheapening of labor. Crises provide capital with the opportunity to accelerate the process of forcing greater productivity out of fewer workers. These developments, combined with a massive new round of primitive accumulation and displacement of hundreds of millions, have given rise to a new global army of superfluous labor that goes well beyond the traditional reserve army of labor that Marx discussed. Global capitalism has no direct use for surplus humanity. But indirectly, it holds wages down everywhere and makes new systems of 21st-century slavery possible (on the new slavery, see, i.a., Patel and Moore, 2017, 30). Surplus humanity cannot consume and so does not provide transnational capital with a significant market. Dominant groups face the challenge of how to contain both the real and potential rebellion of surplus humanity. As world capitalism reaches the limits of its extensive expansion, new spaces have to be violently cracked open and the peoples in these spaces must be repressed by a global police state. The mechanisms of coercive exclusion include mass incarceration and the spread of prison-industrial complexes, pervasive policing, anti-immigrant legislation and deportation regimes, and the manipulation of space in new ways so that both gated communities and ghettos are controlled by armies of private security guards and technologically advanced surveillance systems, ubiquitous, often paramilitarized policing, “non-lethal” crowd control methods, and mobilization of the culture industries and state ideological apparatuses to dehumanize victims of global capitalism as dangerous, depraved, and culturally degenerate. States abandon efforts to secure legitimacy among this surplus population, and instead turn to criminalizing the poor and the dispossessed, with tendencies towards genocide in some cases. But these mechanisms also involve ideological campaigns aimed at seduction and passivity among those locked out. The newfound ability of transnational capital to achieve political domination through control over the means of intellectual production, the mass media, the educational system, and the culture industries allows it to achieve a much more profound and complete penetration into the spheres of culture and community, indeed, into the life world itself. Corporate marketing strategies depoliticize through the manipulation of desire and of libido, so that the grievances and frustrated aspirations of the excluded become channeled into petty consumption and flight into fantasy rather than into placing political demands on the system through collective mobilization. In this regard, I observed in my earlier work that the heightened role of political and ideological domination in this digital age through control over media and the flow of images and symbols would make any project of 21st-century fascism more sophisticated and, together with new panoptical surveillance and social control technologies, probably allow it to rely more on selective than generalized repression — unless a revolt from below comes to actually threaten the rule of the TCC. These new modalities of social control and ideological domination blur boundaries, so that there may be a constitutional and normalized neo-fascism (with formal representative institutions, a constitution, political parties and elections), all while the political system is tightly controlled by transnational capital and its representatives and any dissent that actually threatens the system is neutralized if not liquidated (see Robinson and Barrera, 2012). We may see a “withering away” of constitutional order rather than a rupture, if a global police state and the impulse towards 21st century fascism are not contained. The Social Bases of 21st-Century Fascism Twentieth-century fascism took root in an earlier stage of capitalist development, when middle classes and the petty bourgeoisie that represented a significant portion of the population were experiencing a destabilization of their status and the threat of downward mobility into the ranks of the proletariat. Fascist movements offered the ruling groups the ability to successfully compete with mass working-class parties for the allegiance of the middle classes and the petty bourgeoisie, although these movements did recruit among the working class as well. These strata came to be seen as the core social base of the fascist movements — instruments in the hands of national capitalist classes attempting to resolve the crisis of capitalism (Rosengarten, 2014). The middle classes and the petty bourgeoisie are strata that own their own means of livelihood and therefore do not have to sell their labor to capital; among them, small shopkeepers, businesspeople, independent artisans and professionals, family farmers, and other small commodity producers. These strata were reduced to small pockets in the cores of world capitalism as proletarianization accelerated in the latter half of the 20th century, and especially in the age of globalization. While analysis of the petty bourgeoisie remains important in assessing current political processes, this class is not numerous enough to form a critical mass that could provide a viable social base for 21st-century fascism to triumph.