Drawing on this long experience, we do not believe that the challenges of the present period will be easy to overcome and expect a very protracted period of crisis, decay, and even civilizational collapse. The danger of fascism is very real and a case can, in fact, be made that it has already arrived, if perhaps in a peculiar, divided, and occult form. On the one hand the alienation generated by the commodification of labor power has created a mass base of roughly one third of the population which has actively embraced patriarchal and racist ideology. This base has been mobilized by an alliance between the more backward sectors of the bourgeoisie based in extractive and low technology industries and a group of capitalist magnates drawn from the high technology sectors, anxious to destroy the liberal and democratic order –the first in order to defend their position in what would otherwise be rapidly declining sectors, the second out of agonistic as much as economic motives. Meanwhile, the liberal bourgeoisie, cowed by the bullying to which they have been subjected by the Right –and especially by their erstwhile allies in the high technology sector– and alarmed by the temporary gains made by workers as a result of the labor shortages caused by the pandemic, has consistently given ground on key questions, such as continued efforts to mitigate the pandemic, and has in many cases actively and explicitly embraced a eugenic agenda, leveraging the pandemic to thin the population and reduce the “burden” of the “unproductive.” The vast majority, meanwhile, have been lied to so often that they no longer believe anyone and are thus nearly impossible to organize. And all of this is taking place against the background new technologies which threaten to render human labor power redundant, especially for creative activity, by the emergence of Capital as an autonomous intelligence independent of the historic bourgeoisie, able to allocate resources through global markets in a way that defeats even those reforms that the liberal bourgeoisie allows, and the global resurgence of authoritarianism among previously marginalized territorial empires, such as Russia, which are manipulating the contradictions we have analyzed to their own advantage.
