21st Century Fascism in World-Systems Perspective

• In Event: US Militarism and Militarization in World Historical Perspective

Abstract

Today we see the development of a fascist movement centered in and extending far beyond the United States, global in scale and scope. This movement has gained force through the misogyny, patriarchy, racism, and xenophobia, now culminating in an ongoing campaign of paramilitary fascist ethnic cleansing in Minnesota and beyond, fueled by the Great Replacement theory, with a view towards constructing a fascist state and polity in the US and on a global scale. Coming together here are ideologies of Manifest Destiny and a new global military interventionism, seeking to remake the US and global system on fascist social foundations. Drawing on Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System, we see overlapping aspects of processes of hegemonic decline, systemic cycles of accumulation, and what Immanuel Wallerstein called “the ideological tensions of capitalism…universalism…and racism and sexism,” and related contradictions as giving recurrent birth to fascist waves in the global system. This is not simply “authoritarianism,” or an eternal return of past processes. It is a genuinely new world-historical moment, albeit with important analogies in interwar Europe and Japan, recurrent features of US and global history, on a trajectory towards world destruction and global conflagration. Drawing on the work of leading analysts of fascism, and critical race and feminist theorists, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Harry Harootunian, the special issue of Review on “Chicano Labor and Unequal Development,” Maria Mies’s Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, as well as the decolonial perspectives on the global system, we develop an original creative synthesis on fascist waves – including our current moment - in world-systems perspective, as well as possibilities for resistance and global transformation. Finally, we examine the possibilities for a new antifascist internationalism, in the US and abroad, that can remake the global system on new, enlarged and more solidaristic global foundations.

Author

• Thomas Ehrlich Reifer, University of San Diego