From The Philosophical Salon, March 16:
The U.S. attack on Iran is but the latest in a dizzying array of global upheavals – ranging from geopolitical conflict in Ukraine and the Middle East to the Myanmar and Sudanese civil wars, tariff disputes, the spread of fascism, the U.S. assault on Venezuela, Washington’s Greenland grab, and ICE terror in U.S. cities, among others. Far from a series of disconnected incidents, the global firestorm is driven by a common, systemic catalyst: the violent expansionary strategies of a new hegemonic complex of transnational capital in response to the epochal crisis of global capitalism. The apparent chaos is further accelerated by the destabilizing impact of artificial intelligence and the amplified class power that the new digital technologies give to capital and to the embryonic fascist state.
The emergent hegemonic complex of transnational capital is at the center of this worldwide maelstrom as global capitalism enters a deadly new phase. The triangulated bloc brings together the giant tech companies, transnational finance capital, and the military-industrial-repression complex. Big Tech controls the entire ecosystem of digitalized capitalism, converting its enormous structural power into direct political control through the fascist state. To advance its agenda the bloc has turned to ‘Global Trumpism’ – one of several morbid political symptoms emerging as the post-World War II international order crumbles.
Big tech has taken the global economy by storm since the turn of the century, especially over the past decade with the rise to dominance of platforms and the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI). The new digital technologies and the billionaires that control them are driving a radical new round of restructuring and transformation of the global political economy. The leading tech corporations, most of them headquartered in the United States and China, draw investors from all over the world as they suck in immense amounts of surplus capital. The top 20 tech firms worldwide had a combined market capitalization exceeding $20 trillion in 2025, some one-fifth of the total global stock market valuation.
Big tech and the transnational industrial and commercial capitals it brings together are in turn enmeshed with the giant global financial conglomerates that own more than half of the leading tech firms. In 2022 there were 33 trillion and multitrillion dollar capital investment management companies worldwide, up from just 17 in 2017. These titans of capital controlled more than $83 trillion in combined assets, over four-fifths the value that year of the entire global GDP. This economic totalitarianism is spawning a political totalitarianism. Every economic, social, and political institution in the world, including governments and militaries, is dependent on the new digital technologies to function and on the tech behemoths that own or control them and the knowledge to develop and apply them.
Silicon Valley and its financial backers are pivoting towards digital technologies for war and repression as they fuse with the military-industrial repression complex, completing the capital power axis, which in turn is moving into alignment with authoritarian, dictatorial and fascist states. The tech and financial billionaires are becoming global geopolitical actors. They are wielding their enormous structural power through Global Trumpism, developing new modalities of control over civil society and seeking alternative forms of legitimacy founded on instability and chaos that facilitates control over countries and resources. Nothing captures the militarization of big tech and its fusion with the fascist state as the surreal commissioning in 2025 of the technology CEOs of the leading U.S-based tech corporations to the rank of lieutenant colonels in the U.S. army even though they are civilians who have never served in the military.
The U.S. State Department has referred to the new global dispensation as Pax Silica. “If the twentieth century ran on oil and steel, the twenty-first century runs on compute and the minerals that feed it,” declared U.S. Under Secretary for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg. Pax Silica involves developing “global AI supply chains” that are to drive “historic opportunity and demand for energy, critical minerals, manufacturing, technological hardware, infrastructure, and new markets not yet invented.” Pursuant this Pax Silica, the Trump regime has undertaken sweeping deregulation of AI and of finance as it promotes a vast expansion of data centers. It has used executive orders to take a whopping 646 deregulator actions in the first year of its second term. Abroad, it has pursued a strategy of digital mercantilism, inscribing into its tariff negotiations with other countries the demand for abrogation of their laws regulating AI as big tech seeks their elimination in at least 64 countries.
The Epochal Crisis of Global Capitalism
The backdrop to the global maelstrom is the epochal crisis of global capitalism. Structurally, the system faces a crisis of overaccumulation, chronic stagnation, and a decades-long decline in the rate of profit. In the years since the 2008 global financial collapse, the rate of profit has continued to decline, even as corporations registered record profits. On the one hand, a 2011 study found that “the rate of return on assets and the rate of return on invested capital are today less than one-third of what they were in 1965.” On the other hand, in 2024, the cash reserves of nonbanking U.S.-based companies alone stood at $6.9 trillion. In the United States, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that corporate profits reach an all-time high of $3.4 trillion in the third quarter of 2025, while globally, the world’s largest listed companies projected a record profit of nearly $5 trillion in 2025, a 12.2 percent increase from 2024. This simultaneous decrease in the rate of profit alongside an increase in the total mass of profit is a key sign of capitalist breakdown.
The global economy has sputtered forward since 2008 through debt-driven growth, state bailouts, and financial speculation. Consumer and state debt reached a record $337 trillion at the end of 2025, nearly three times the global GDP of $117 trillion. These historically high levels of debt are unsustainable, as is the rampant financial speculation. Shadow banking, largely a speculative financial space, grew from 150 percent of global GDP in 2008 to 225 percent in 2024, reaching $257 trillion. An even more damning sign of the chasm between the real economy and fictitious capital is the breakdown of total global assets: of the $1.7 quadrillion in assets in 2024, only $620 trillion corresponded to material assets, with the remaining $1 quadrillion constituting pure fictitious capital.
The overaccumulation crisis generates intense pressure for expansion as the transnational capitalist class (TCC) seeks outlets to unload surplus accumulated capital. In 2025, China registered a record $1.2 trillion trade surplus – a 20 percent increase from 2024 – signaling massive global overcapacity and contributing to mounting geopolitical competition over markets and investment outlets. Led by the new hegemonic capital complex, the TCC is currently unleashing a predatory round of digitally-driven expansion, pivoting towards more savage forms of extractivist accumulation as it seizes land, energy, and mineral resources to fuel the demands of AI technology and data centers. It is this relentless drive remains the force behind the headlines shaking the world.
Global Trumpism...
....MUCH MORE
I'm not sure that the left - right paradigm is an accurate framework for understanding the evolution of societies and governments.
It appears that no matter the original intent and high-minded ideals espoused by founders/proponents of these systems, they all trend toward totalitarianism.
Here are a couple quotes from former Soviet Minister of Gas Industry, Russian Ambassador to Ukraine, Russian Prime Minister and head of Gazprom, Viktor Chernomyrdin. He puts the issue plainly, though through a decidedly Russian lens:
On economic reform: "We wanted better, but it turned out as always."
On Russia's unstable party system: "Whatever party we establish, it always turns out to be the Soviet Communist Party."
In addition to his official posts, Viktor was an internationally-known wordsmith.
Some backlinks from May, 2024's World's most powerful diesel-engine icebreaker makes maiden voyage in Arctic ice":
Ah, an opportunity to revisit the ship's namesake. First though, from The Barents Observer, May 2:
The Viktor Chernomyrdin for the first time sails into the thick sea-ice of the Yenisey Bay....
*****
On his background on energy minister: "I have grown up in the atmosphere of oil and gas."
On dealing with the frequently uncooperative Duma: "Government is not the organ in which one uses his tongue only."
On his critics: "If your hands are itchy, scratch yourselves in other spots."
On the future: "We will live so well that our children and grandchildren will envy us!"
On Ukraine's Orange Revolution: "American ears are sticking out everywhere."
On his family: "I have approximately two sons."
On political efficiency: "We accomplished all items: from A to B."
On women: "You can't scare a woman with high-heeled shoes."
On language: I can talk to anyone in any language, but I try not to use that instrument."
On the life of the mind: "I am far from thought."...
