By: Black Alliance for Peace National Co-Coordinators Austin Cole, Erica Caines, Tunde Osazua
As African/Black movements and organizations in the struggle to defeat the war on our people, it is essential that we collectively understand and interpret the conditions and terrain of that war. Fascism is a historical reaction to the recurring threat of revolutionary decolonization and the chronic instability of a geopolitical system structured around capitalist empires treated as a neat category of political ideology. The current capitalist crisis and turn to global fascism has stripped away the liberal vocabulary that once obscured that reality. As the irreversible crisis of late-stage monopoly capital intensifies, the material foundations of Western capitalist hegemony weaken, along with its legitimacy and the global balance of power shifts away from the West.
In this context, the ideological language of universalism that has been a foundation of U.S. foreign policy since the fall of the USSR, has given way to a more explicit politics of white, Western civilizational hierarchy as the rationale for the emergence of U.S. led fascism on a global scale – most evidently expressed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Athens, Washington, and Munich this year. Rubio’s civilizational discourse is an emergence and re-legitimation of liberal Western thought as an ideological weapon wielded by the most right-wing, violent, nuclear-armed nation on the planet, posing a threat to global humanity, especially non-European peoples.
Neoliberalism and fascism are representatives of two distinct structures or expressions of the same underlying class rule and yet, contemporarily, the rise of fascism in the west is a very real response to the ravages of neoliberalism. This is a dialectical relationship. Neoliberal restructuring has paved the way for a figure like Trump, and a fascist regime, to gain power. The market discipline that neoliberalism has imposed through privatization, austerity, and deregulation is now supplemented by the designation of entire populations and political oppositions as existential threats to “Western civilization” itself. The liberal bourgeois democracy, historically and contemporarily, plays a role in the expansion and assertion of fascism.
The U.S. state’s agenda, in its own words, is full-spectrum domination domestically and across the globe, and it is in this context that political opposition and popular self-determination have been redefined a civilizational threat. The administration is constructing “western civilization” as the object requiring state protection by equating anti-fascist organizing, anti-colonial politics, and radical critiques of capitalism with terrorism. This was made evident on September 22, 2025, when the Trump administration signed an executive order designating Antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization.” The order frames Antifa’s alleged “terror” as “part of the trend of Radical Left violence that has permeated the nation”, expanding a circle of criminalization from street-level antifascists to the entire infrastructure of left political opposition. Multi- agency domestic intelligence and policing apparatus of up to two hundred Joint Terrorism Task Forces are now available for deployment against political opposition redefined as “terrorism” across the nation.
What does this mean for the African, for Black people and communities? The civilizational hierarchy being constructed explicitly places non-European humanity outside of the circle of protection. The same administration that designates antifascists as terrorists has conducted countless strikes on alleged drug vessels in the Caribbean and off Latin America’s Pacific coast, killing well over 200 people. The same logic of “narco- terrorism” designation justifying these murders are turned inward against domestic political opposition, as Black/African neocolonial city, state, and federal elected officials progressively expand the surveillance and militarization in our streets and at our doorsteps. 35 years after the police mob assault on Rodney King; 12 years after the murder of Mike Brown and uprising in Ferguson, MO; 6 years on from the high-profile state and vigilante killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and many others; and 3 years after the murder of Tortuguita and the violent repression of the Stop Cop City movement, the apparatus of U.S. state militarization domestically and globally that protects the interests of the ruling class has only accelerated and expanded.
Today, Black/African movements, organizations, and communities must equip ourselves to combat these conditions through an organizational praxis forged in a radical rupture from the liberal political status quo that has walked us up to the doors of fascism that is bent on exterminating our and other colonized people, and our planet. We maintain the need for African/Black people to develop an independent radical analysis built from our own socio-historical experience, and to create a unified framework for collective struggle emanating from and defined by us collectively. Such a radical African/Black analysis takes as a starting point the need for an anti-imperialist praxis that is based in grassroots class struggle, towards developing class consciousness and eventually revolutionary consciousness amongst the masses of our people.
Our condition of potential without consolidation creates an opening, and a responsibility, for Black radical movement to intervene through an organized, principled, anti-imperialist praxis that moves from sporadic resistance to coordinated power-building.
In this moment, our radical and revolutionary leadership must be grounded in this materialist analysis of the U.S. as a settler-colonial state on a fascist neoliberal advance, and we must comprehend the integrated nature of militarized policing, imperial repression, ideological warfare, social oppression, and economic and cultural de-development. Our grounding and our unified activity must prepare us to resist in a coordinated and consistent manner, and to build together towards realizing our People(s)-Centered Human Rights.
This is only possible through the conscious, unified, and sustained struggle of Black/African people and movements in the U.S. and globally.
No Compromise. No Retreat.
View a recording of this political education session here.