Author: Blade Runner (Plan C Friend)
The year began with fresh bloodshed in Iran and Syria, adding to the ongoing catastrophe in Gaza. The Middle East, as Abdullah Öcalan—ideological leader of the Kurdish movement in northeastern Syria—has argued, is the cradle of nation-state civilisation. From the Sumerian ziggurat to today’s capitalist modernity, the region has long seen patriarchal, hierarchical structures emerge, deeply embedded in state power. The Kurds, who have experienced genocide in their history, state-less, now face another looming threat in Rojava, where Turkish-backed jihadist militias operate with impunity. In Iran, a youth- and middle-class-led uprising is being brutally crushed by the Islamist regime, with Kurdish-majority areas paying the highest price in blood.
These developments expose a broader split in the Western left: some emphasise grassroots liberation struggles from below, while others focus on geopolitics and great-power alignments. Still, both camps acknowledge the surge in militarisation—rooted in the agendas of white men in power, securing their castles as the world burns.
Trump’s version of fascism, built on brute-force governance, gave new expression to an old white supremacist worldview: domination as virtue, state violence as default. In the US, vulnerable communities are under attack both in law and daily life, while federal institutions are being hollowed out and reshaped by far-right actors exploiting the left’s strategic collapse. As capitalism slams into ecological and resource limits, elites double down—playing the fascist card as their system fractures alongside the ecosystem.
Much of the Western left remains trapped in a framework inherited from the postwar compromise—where revolutionary potential was traded for social peace and welfare became the terrain of struggle. This strategic vacuum continues today.
How did we get here?
Capital’s restructuring since the 80s through digitalisation and financialisation detached life from collective decision-making. Based on a drastic technical shift, the neoliberal political design enforced the merger of state and capital into a hierarchy-preserving machine, that protects the pyramidic structure of economy and power while producing dependence to it.
The neoliberal assault to the working class under the ‘less state’ marquise staged a spectacle on which the unions negotiate in the midst of a raging social war waged on the lowest classes. There is a deeper continuity here that remains protected—the very architecture of the welfare state is tied to capital accumulation and state sovereignty. Reforms, however welcome, cannot do much to erode its core functions for discipline, control and population management.
Welfare, even at its heights, never enabled autonomy. Today, we find ourselves defending scraps—yet unable to replace the model with bottom-up infrastructures not based on extraction or obedience.
A great shift towards consumerist abundance has taken place: smart phones, branded clothing, laptops, vehicles, traveling, are now accessible to wider strata than ever before. Or at least this is the promise that has been built upon decades of urban gentrification and the expansion of the services economy. Middle classes are deeply invested in this materialistic social contract, so much that leisure time is willingly being replaced with commercial entrepreneurship. For many activists of the white middle class, the boundaries between “the struggle” or “the action” and a paid relationship with charities or NGOs is becoming increasingly blur.
This new reality has been conditioned as ‘freedom,’ to justify the installation of the core-zone insulation through militarised borders and technocratic management. Welfare state and the promise of consumerist abundance is not a function of solidarity anymore—it is a cushioned internal border, mirroring its reverse spiky version from the outside.
In this context, the mainstream narrative frames the uprisings of the 2010s as relics or cautionary tales. But the uprisings led by Gen Z across Asia, Africa, and Latin America is a reality check: mass militant street action not only remains possible—it continues to erupt as the clearest threat to regimes when electoral politics stall. This signals a shift from demands for inclusion and integration, to anti-hierarchial participation, to construction of new autonomous spaces. Forms of resistance not aimed at improving state functions, but bypassing or replacing them.
Genocide at the borders
The fractures in today’s Western left echo the deeper planetary divide. The neoliberal information age sharpened the separation between the fortified Western citadel and the militarised periphery. In the global South, war is a reality for many, and its toll is most brutally felt by women—those raped, enslaved, executed by jihadists and warlords. Patriarchal terror that feels like time travel to the Dark Ages thrives under structures propped up by the liberal West.
That terror arrives at the beaches of Fortress Europe. Tens of thousands of immigrants die every year attempting to reach safety, mostly at sea. Over 10,000 people died in transit to Spain in 2024 alone. The real number is likely far higher, since undocumented movement is difficult to trace. In 2023, the Greek Coast Guard allowed more than 600 people drown in a single shipwreck—a direct result of the informal pushback policy. Deadly incidents as a result brutal push-back operations are reported every year. Frontex—Europe’s ICE—has become the EU’s most heavily funded agency, with its own ships, aircraft, drones, and weapons. Its 10,000-strong Standing Corps is the first and only pan-European armed force, operating with a budget that rivals those of small countries.
But border violence is only one face of the system’s breakdown. Behind it lies a deeper contradiction: capitalism has always emerged from a largely peasant and rural society. The agrarian question remains structurally unresolved: how can capital dismantle, discipline, or absorb peasant production while preventing rural populations rendered surplus from becoming a source of instability? What happens to land, labour, food systems, and social relations when profit demands endless expansion in a world of finite resources?
As ecosystems collapse and agriculture fails, more and more people are forced into motion—some fleeing drought and desertification, others pushed by floods, fires, or rising seas. Climate displacement is here and will become increasingly a major factor in global migration. The uneven impact of eco-collapse mirrors and reinforces the divide between the fortified Western citadel and the militarised, expendable periphery. It is overwhelmingly the poorest who are forced to move, while the wealthiest retreat behind borders, flood walls, and drone-enforced no-go zones.
In a way, rivers of people returning to the source close an infinite loop, further sharpening the divide between resurgent nationalism and emancipatory politics. And there is no ‘new world’ left to colonise with Europe’s so-called ‘dangerous classes’—its surplus poor, displaced, and radicalised. Increasingly, capitalism’s only remaining ‘solution’ appears to be mass death. The systematic slaughtering of migrants on Europe’s shores is not a malfunction but a structural expression of a dead end.
The farmers in Europe have felt that dead end too, that they are among those slated for sacrifice. Greece saw one of the largest agricultural uprisings in years as farmers face soaring fuel costs, livestock disease, and decades of rural neglect. Their demands go beyond subsidies, asking for the reversal of the whole neoliberal EU agricultural design. The repression has been severe and has been met with widespread solidarity from workers, students, anarchists, and local communities. The agricultural sector is another frontline in the wider collapse of extractive economies under the state/capitalist-created climate stress.
Genocides are becoming a permanent tendency in a system that, having exploited the planet to its limits, now turns inward, consuming its own surplus population in a futile attempt to stay alive. Neocolonialism delayed this reckoning by exporting social conflict and looting the periphery to build welfare at the core. This pacified the working classes of the West. But immigration undoes this arrangement, reverses the flow, and brings the contradictions home.
Fascism has returned out of necessity—from the ruling class’s need to retain control when the old arrangement no longer works. Social democracy is entirely unfit for the current moment, stuck in domestic redistribution politics while the global system itself rots. Electoral results across Europe confirm this irrelevance.
What was always a fragile compromise is now in terminal decline. The migrant genocide is not just a consequence—it’s an expression of this slow breakdown. Western foreign policy increasingly centres on keeping immigration contained at the source. Governments can’t resolve the global agrarian question. And so border violence, genocide, and militarisation all flow from the same unresolved root.
The system is now operating at boiling point. Rising mass radicalisation at home has led to escalated repression. Dissent is criminalised, disruptive direct action is proscribed as domestic terrorism, and zero tolerance becomes doctrine.
Militarisation, then, becomes the new organising logic. The Cold War’s ideological veneer has melted. What remains is open competition, brute force, and intensified suppression of disagreement. The logic that obliterates Gaza and threatens the Kurds in Rojava, is the same logic that drowns migrants in the Mediterranean, assassinates them and their supporters in the US, demonises migrants in Britain, criminalises dissent, and elevates white supremacist narratives.
What can we do?
All state actors—despite tactical differences—ultimately reinforce the same oppressive capitalist modernity. They align in their efforts to crush any alternatives. Our task, as the libertarian anti-authoritarian communist tendency, is to expose this machinery and stand with those at the front lines of resistance—from London to Minneapolis, from Iran to Sri Lanka, from Gaza to Peru, and beyond.
The US may soon lose its role as the lead architect of the world system—and it will not fall quietly. For us, this may also be an opportunity. Our role is to articulate and express a libertarian communist perspective: the destruction of the state and the creation of horizontal cooperation among communities from below. Taking action means embracing a diversity of tactics, supporting those targeted by state surveillance and carceral violence, and building bonds of trust with communities under attack. We must carve out spaces of refusal where strategy can be shared and disagreement doesn’t splinter solidarity. We need local defence and mutual aid structures rooted in everyday life, rather than reactive pursuits of far-right narratives and media spectacle.
Some tendencies on the left continue to back authoritarian regimes simply because they oppose the West. But true anti-imperialism isn’t about choosing sides in a geopolitical chess match, but supporting the poor, the colonised, the non-binary, the femmes, the non-whites, the children, the underdogs that suffer under any regime. We need to keep grounding our efforts in the lives and resistance of the displaced, the exploited, and the exiled. To build trust in our communities, we must come as allies and co-conspirators against the enemies at the top. And we need to rethink the ideological habits that isolate us and make us appear like a lifestyle cult rather than a political force.
There is a persistent tendency within both liberal and radical activism to treat issues like Palestine or climate collapse as isolated causes, each with their own branding, tactics, and acceptable narratives. In Palestine solidarity spaces, mass marches are welcomed—rightly—but dissenting tactics are often policed. Protesters who reject pacified, choreographed action get framed as threats to “unity,” exposing a vanguardist obsession with respectability and non-violence. Meanwhile, in environmental campaigns, urban symbolic action that leads to arrests—with minimal strategic impact—has popularised a model of low-barrier, media-friendly protest. This spectacle has come at a cost: hundreds jailed, public support thinned, and long-term grassroots organising sidelined. For all the visibility, the material impact on emissions, extraction, or capital flows remains negligible in the face of accelerating ecocide.
Palestine Action was proscribed because its targeted, disruptive tactics—like shutting down weapons factories—began to seriously impact arms production. Similarly, in Germany, Ende Gelände’s mass blockades of coal infrastructure have repeatedly disrupted mining operations and transport, forcing coal phase-out into the political mainstream. What gets criminalised is often what works.
We will not be passive observers to suffering and collapse. The system is cracking. Our task is not to patch it—but to resist with a variety of tactics—and build the ground beneath us before it falls.
iThis section refers to info and arguments from this post: https://mronline.org/2025/06/18/the-migrant-genocide-toward-a-third-world-analysis-of-european-class-struggle/
