[News] Digital Fascism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism

[Anti-Imperialist News]

counterpunch.org
<https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/07/20/digital-fascism-the-highest-stage-of-capitalism/>
Digital Fascism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
Rezgar Akrawi
July 20, 2026
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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

When Vladimir Lenin
<https://us.list-manage.com/q9i3MEC9otG?e=ab710e72ba&c2id=f321d43f53c84255b4c6e069654d6298>
wrote about imperialism and considered it the highest stage of capitalism,
<https://us.list-manage.com/7D5fXDx9FGO?e=ab710e72ba&c2id=f321d43f53c84255b4c6e069654d6298>
he was tracking the moment capital shifted from the space of free
competition into the world of monopoly, where banks merged with industry,
the state turned into a direct instrument serving finance capital, and the
world was redivided by force among the great monopolistic blocs. Today,
more than a century later, we stand before a transformation similar in
essence, different in tools: digital fascism represents the stage in which
monopoly capitalism moves beyond the boundaries of classical imperialism,
invading the space of consciousness, behaviour, and data, through an
organic merger between monopolistic technology capital and extreme
nationalist political power. This merger finds its most vivid expression
today in the Trumpist project, its alliances, and its aggressive wars.

Many well-known digital and technology companies known for their close
relations with the Israeli military and the forced deportation systems in
the United States, among them Palantir
<https://us.list-manage.com/tOnMaN28h9V?e=ab710e72ba&c2id=f321d43f53c84255b4c6e069654d6298>,
constitute a revealing model of this stage. Yet the issue is broader than a
single company. The core matter lies in the fact that monopolistic digital
capital, having exhausted the possibilities of expansion through consumer
markets alone, is today turning to weaponize its tools and employ them in
an aggressive nationalist political project that reproduces the logic of
colonial domination, this time backed by the language of algorithms.

*From the Monopoly of Money to the Domination of Algorithms*

In Lenin’s time, monopoly rested on control over the means of industrial
production and financial markets. Today, control over the digital
infrastructure itself is added to that: algorithms, databases, targeting
systems, and communication platforms. This new monopoly is no less central
than its financial predecessor, and in fact surpasses it in its ability to
infiltrate the finest details of daily life. Every user, male and female,
today turns into digital serfs inside systems they do not own, and over
which they hold no real capacity to exert influence.

Unlike the classical financial monopoly that Lenin analysed, digital
monopoly does not settle for silent economic exploitation. It moves rapidly
into a stage in which the major monopolistic companies declare their
ideological and political project with growing frankness, abandoning the
mask of technical neutrality behind which they long hid. Philosophical and
political statements issued by the leaderships of these companies frame
investment in tools of targeting and surveillance as a moral duty toward
the nation and civilization and portray refusal to participate in this
project as failure or negligence.

*Digital Fascism: The Alliance of Silicon Valley with the Aggressive Nation
State*

This alliance finds its clearest translation in the second Trump
administration. The technological accelerationism
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movement, with its influential figures in Silicon Valley, supplies this
administration with the digital tools to turn its aggressive nationalist
rhetoric into actual control, domestically through the forced deportation
of migrants, and externally through targeting systems that support military
campaigns. Venezuela stands as a revealing model of this dimension, since
Washington has, since mid 2025, relied on advanced digital surveillance and
intelligence systems
<https://us.list-manage.com/yVUFlJVhc0r?e=ab710e72ba&c2id=f321d43f53c84255b4c6e069654d6298>
to track movements and identify targets, which led to air and naval strikes
and a wide ranging military operation in early January 2026 that ended with
the crime of abducting the Venezuelan president, in a flagrant violation of
international law. Nor is this aggression separate from the brutal blockade
imposed on Cuba for more than six decades.

As for the partnership between Washington and Tel Aviv, it is a deep
technical partnership that provides Israel with data and targeting systems
powered by artificial intelligence, which makes America and the major
digital companies actual partners
<https://us.list-manage.com/qBPveMIx7D3?e=ab710e72ba&c2id=f321d43f53c84255b4c6e069654d6298>
in documented war crimes against Palestinian civilians, while Trump works
to deepen this alliance through massive security and military contracts
that grant these companies growing influence in shaping policy.

Unlike traditional fascism, which needed a visible police state and a loud
propaganda discourse, killing today does not need a responsible human
decision or a declaration of war, instead, it needs an algorithm, data, and
a green light from a device subject to no accountability whatsoever. The
crime begins with classification, not with the bomb, and when entire
communities are described as a threat through silent digital criteria, the
killing of civilians turns into mere “security management” rather than
genocidal crimes requiring accountability, in a logic that reproduces
classical colonialism in the language of big data.

Yet the gravest danger lies in the surveillance society, where control
becomes internal more than external. When an individual knows that they are
constantly watched, they restrict themselves and move away from opposing
ideas, and this voluntary self-surveillance restrains leftist and labour
movements from within without the need for arrests, becoming the most
efficient form of ideological domination, and the hardest to resist,
because it penetrates the fabric of daily life and reshapes it from within.

*The Alternative: Collective Ownership and Digital Socialism*

Linking imperialism to digital fascism is not a theoretical metaphor,
rather, it is an analytical necessity for understanding that the tools of
domination have evolved, while their class essence has remained constant.
The struggle today does not revolve only around how technology is used,
rather, around who owns it, who determines its goals, and in favour of
which social class it is employed.

Technology will not turn into a tool of liberation as long as it remains
under the control of digital monopolies allied with the projects of the
extreme right, wars, and repression. Therefore, any serious discussion
about the future of technology must proceed from the necessity of building
a digital socialist alternative resting on collective and communal
ownership of digital infrastructure, and subjecting algorithms and
artificial intelligence to genuine mass democratic oversight, through local
and global legislation that expresses the interests of the working masses
and the communities harmed by digital domination.

The struggle for social justice today inevitably passes through the
struggle to liberate technology from this rightist, racist, and aggressive
class alliance. Just as Lenin diagnosed imperialism as the highest stage of
capitalism in his era, we can say today that digital fascism represents the
highest stage in the development of that same imperialism, where
technological digital monopoly capital merges with the extreme nationalist
project into one organic alliance, whose goal is to concentrate power,
wealth, consciousness, and human destiny in the hands of a small minority
of the wealthy and the politicians.

To confront this reality, criticism and analysis are not enough, instead,
we must move toward building joint internationalist work through digital
leftist internationals capable of waging the struggle in the technological
space and on the ground. This will be the subject of our next article.

*This article was produced by Globetrotter
<https://us.list-manage.com/VsKSA92o5nW?e=ab710e72ba&c2id=f321d43f53c84255b4c6e069654d6298>.*

*Rezgar Akrawi is a leftist writer and researcher focused on technology,
AI, the digital revolution, and the development of contemporary leftist
thought and practice in response to these transformations. He works as an
expert in systems development and e-governance and is a theorist of the
concept of the ‘Electronic Left’.*
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