Globalization 2.0: Artificial Intelligence and the New Fascist Order

How American tech supremacy forges a transnational fascist alliance through artificial intelligence

The Trump administration has committed itself to a violent reordering of global relations. After nearly a year of systematic brutality at home and imperial bullying internationally, a dangerous consensus has emerged for a vicious new world order - powered by the dominance of compute and enforced through fascist discipline. Having once underwritten globalization as the spatial fix to capital’s accumulation crisis, where geographic expansion violently incorporated the Global South’s labor and resources to resolve capital’s drive for endless growth, the United States now aggressively postures toward isolationism, even as AI promises globalization’s continuation by other means. The result is naked collaboration between global capitalists for the purposes of profit generation, stripped of any pretense of democracy, development, or climate change. The American state apparatus, its comprador global partners, and big tech are revealing capitalism in its most predatory form.

The American fascists point to multilateralism - a system of interlocking global class interests and declare it the source of what their base understands as America’s most lethal wound - the disappearance of manufacturing jobs. Their stated intentions are to rein in the excess and overcome the burden of a hegemony built on capital circulation across borders. But which parts burden them? Perhaps the overvalued dollar or perhaps something else entirely. Of course, it is most likely that this theater of anti-multilateralism with the spectacle of tariffs and withdrawn accords has little to do with systemic critique. Instead it constitutes raw imperial arrogance that believes it can bully the international order into submission through sheer force. Furthermore, it reflects the fascist need to externalize internal contradictions and project domestic failures outward onto foreign threats.

The question of whether the emerging order will remain centered on U.S. hegemony or fracture into competing spheres of influence between Washington and Beijing cannot yet be definitively answered. What is unmistakable, however, is that techno-fascism has been ordained as capital’s chosen solution for now - a brutal response to both the structural contradictions capital itself has generated and the accelerating political crisis of American imperial legitimacy. This article - the final installment in a series examining AI and finance capital - dissects the multifaceted crises this techno-fascist turn attempts to resolve. I analyze the positionality of the transnational capitalist class within this project. What is the degree of their material integration with and structural dependence upon the American empire and their class interest in preserving that subordinate relationship. Finally, what function does fascism serve as capital’s emergency response to its crisis of legitimacy.

This is Part 3 in a three-part series. Part 1 explained how the financing scheme behind Meta’s Hyperion data center in Louisiana reveals the mechanisms of the state, tech companies, and their financiers work together for the purpose of capital extraction. Part 2 focused on how the state provides the institutional scaffolding necessary for the evolution of Finance Capital. Part 3 places AI in conversation with the role of the U.S. in perpetuating a system of global capitalism with American institutions at its center.

The Historical Creation And Complicity of a Transnational Capitalist Class

For decades, a global capitalist class has generated vast returns from within a system guaranteed by American state power. The benefits to private capital - which we examined in parts 1 and 2 - from U.S. superintendency of this financial architecture extended to transnational capitalists. They extracted surplus from the Global South proletariat and transferred the lion’s share of that to American financial institutions. This American hegemony was enforced by the dollar’s role as global reserve currency and the Federal Reserve’s position as de facto central bank to the world.

In practice this meant that assets were denominated and traded in US Dollar which provided liquidity and safety that no other currency can currently match. Despite some devaluation, the sheer amount of liquidity and the lack of any viable immediate alternative has kept the U.S. dollar’s position secure - at least for now. Foreign capitalists hold U.S. Treasury bonds and corporate debt because the Fed’s implicit guarantee makes these assets more secure than their domestic alternatives. The shadow banking system - repo markets, securitization chains, money market funds allow for global capital circulation but are centered in New York City. The system made global capital dependent on American institutional architecture, but because this dependency served transnational accumulation, global capitalists happily complied.

K19, former squat and current women’s support center in Fredrichshain. Colorful art on the building’s facade with text “Fight fascism smash capitalism” and “Life is a risk”. Photo by Quill Kukla

The Fascist Convergence of Global Capitalism on Artificial Intelligence

The client states at the periphery of empire in the era of American financialization stand ready to embrace artificial intelligence as the defining feature of the next set of global realtions. The particular configurations of this global regime are not set yet and may shift considerably over time. But the Americans intend for the fundamental architecture to remain the same: global capitalism under American command. Washington’s rhetorical assault on multilateralism masks what a belligerent United States truly demands - international collaboration but on fascist terms that explicitly subordinate these relations to capitalist discipline. The empire will forge alliances exclusively among capitalist states that wield the necessary enforcement mechanisms for this violent modality of extraction. American fascists seek one thing - other fascists.

Authoritarian regimes make for ideal enforcers of technological dependency within their spheres of influence. Global South countries with highly developed capitalist classes may contribute through investments in American corporate bonds, capital poured into AI use cases, and access to vast markets of internet users. Countries lacking such developed capitalist classes continue to scramble for whatever regional investment they can attract and more crucially continue to serve as resource extraction sites for critical minerals and supply chain elements.

Consider India, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, each possessing well-established authoritarian apparatuses and thus emerging as fitting allies in this reconfigured imperial network. Where dictatorships of this fashion are not in power, the technological drive will itself manufacture them, consolidating various forms of right-wing rule across Europe and the Global South.

Saudi Arabia is positioning itself as the regional enforcer of AI infrastructure in Asia and Africa, disciplining Global South compute dependence into subordination to American technological hegemony. The kingdom intends to become the third-largest player in AI compute capacity, and the U.S. is content for Saudi Arabia to serve demand from Asia and Africa - especially as these investments occur in partnership with American tech companies. Major U.S. firms are investing substantially through partnerships spanning the entire roster of American tech. Nvidia, Amazon, Qualcomm, and others, committing to construct six gigawatts in data center capacity by 2034. Saudi Arabia is also entering partnerships with firms like Blackstone and borrowing from American private credit, further embedding American finance capital into the Saudi technological transformation and vice versa. Trump’s reversal of Biden-era export controls, approving 70,000 advanced AI chips for the state-backed HumAIn initiative, cements Saudi Arabia as a critical node in American AI hegemony. In return, the Saudi government has committed to spending over $600 billion in the U.S. and is adopting measures to lock out Chinese investment in the region. To that end, HumAIn has pledged not to purchase Huawei equipment, effectively blocking over $400 million in Chinese investment.

Despite significant tensions around India’s de-dollarization rhetoric, Mukesh Ambani’s profiteering from Russian oil refinement (which the Biden administration very conveniently ignored), and the racist backlash against H-1B visas, AI remains the untouchable zone where imperial collaboration between India and the U.S. is frictionless.

Indian capital readily offers its vast proletarian and semi-proletarian masses as both the testing ground and the reserve army of digital labor. The Adanis, Tatas, and Ambanis understand that their ascendancy within the global hierarchy of capital depends on mediating global access to the exploitation of India’s 1.4 billion people and over 900 million internet users. Indians have emerged as the second-largest users of ChatGPT prompting OpenAI to provide free access for a year and to build a 1-gigawatt data center. Google’s Gemini platform and Perplexity AI have entered into partnerships with telecommunications firms Reliance Jio and Airtel respectively. Another slew of partnerships is emerging between hyperscalers, AI companies and Indian conglomerates including a $15 billion partnership between Meta and Reliance, a $5 billion partnership between Google and Adani Group, and a $14 billion partnership between TATA and Intel to produce semiconductor chips. Microsoft, Amazon, and Google have also committed to investing $17.5 billion, $35 billion, and $15 billion respectively in AI-related investments.

India produces millions of students fluent in machine learning and entrepreneurs who build and refine AI applications at wages far below what American capital would pay domestically. This pool of super-exploitable talent has been indispensable to these tech companies, and with the xenophobic restrictions over H-1B visas that allow for the smooth extraction of this labor into Silicon Valley, firms like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google are expanding offices in India and hiring aggressively.

The Violence that Binds Fascist Enterprises

These deepening multilateral relationships in an era of supposed isolationism confirm that fascism and technology forge their alliance not through ideological affinity but through capital accumulation. AI-driven growth delivers returns exclusively to investors and perhaps a narrow stratum of small capitalists compounding the skyrocketing inequality already tearing these societies apart. The rest of the global proletariat faces accelerating immiseration. Indian education institutions, healthcare systems, and agricultural organizations serve as unregulated laboratories for AI experimentation, subsidized by the state, inflicting material harm on millions with no recourse. In Saudi Arabia, the data centers in the desert are constructed by Nepali and Bangladeshi workers who endure slavery-like conditions endemic to the Gulf’s migrant labor regime. Communities adjacent to these facilities everywhere will confront rapidly deteriorating land and water. The fossil fuels required to power data center consumption at this unimaginable scale will accelerate climate catastrophes, hitting Global South countries with minimal resources for climate adaptation or mitigation first and most brutally .

The relationship between globalized artificial intelligence and militarization is perhaps the most crucial pillar of the new fascist world order being constructed before our eyes. Tools of surveillance, tracking, debilitation, and murder are unfortunately the most common use cases of these technologies. Empires seek client states capable of wielding the repressive apparatus necessary to extract surplus value at genocidal scale. In fact, in its most vicious form, military applications of AI do facilitate genocide. Israeli occupation forces have deployed AI-powered targeting systems like Lavender to generate kill lists based on opaque algorithmic predictions. Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon host surveillance data that abate the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, while Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT process intelligence for violent arrest raids and airstrikes that have murdered thousands of Palestinians.

American tech firms and many global enterprises readily provide this digital infrastructure enabling the Zionist entity’s occupation and genocide. This same architecture spreads globally. India deploys it in Kashmir, Saudi Arabia wields it in Yemen. Ultimately, this is the American empire extending itself through private tech companies providing infrastructure for surveillance, targeting, and extermination. Gaza is used as both testing ground and showcase for technologies that will be endlessly deployed against Palestinians, migrants, protesters, and colonized people everywhere.

Capital’s Legitimacy Crisis and Fascism

Thus, the needs and imperatives of the transnational capitalists are materially connected by violence. Fascism in many ways, is the terrorist manifestation of finance capital - when accumulation can no longer secure popular consent and must therefore impose itself through terror. Tech firms have concentrated wealth at unprecedented rates at the cost of the livelihoods, health, environments, and in many cases the very lives of working people. No apparatus, even vaguely democratic can justify the scale and rate of profits concentrated in the hands of this capitalist class.

This is the crisis of legitimacy that confronts the United States. The global regime of capital accumulation that underwrote its domination has lost popular consent within its borders. The Make America Great Again movement has emerged from this crisis and the perceived decomposition of Christian White American exceptionalism. The loss of manufacturing jobs, combined with neoliberalism’s brutal austerity offensive, dissolved what essentially was an American labor aristocracy masquerading as working class - a privileged stratum whose identity is derived directly from their history as settler-colonizers and slave owners and whose ideological orientation is aligned to that of the ruling class, even as their material conditions are far from comparable. This disintegrating class formation constitutes a key segment of the MAGA base, now demanding the return of an alleged capitalism that included a thriving working class. In practice, their demands merely constitute the restoration of racial privileges their aristocratic position once awarded them and economic privileges that capital’s own success has rendered obsolete.

Tech supremacy and fascism thus emerge as capital’s necessary response and neither is capable nor interested in addressing the material crisis. Tech supremacy merely generates growth in abstraction from workers’ lives and fascism can only provide racist smokescreens. With no change in material conditions, democracy can no longer legitimize extraction at this scale and terror becomes the only enforcement mechanism available. American Big Tech, finance capital, and the imperial state apparatus construct digital totalitarianism as their solution. Capitalists worldwide embrace this arrangement because they recognize it as a continuation of capitalist accumulation. Ultimately, capital demands this violence because its own success has exhausted every alternative.