INTRODUCTION

Fear is associated with the expectation that something destructive will happen to
us (Aristotle c. 350 BCE Rhetoric 2.5.1383).

Defeat in battle starts always with the eyes (Tacitus c.98 Germania 137)

For men injure either from fear or hatred (23). . . . men have less scruple in
offending one who is beloved than one who is feared, for love is preserved by the
link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every
opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment
which never fails (Machiavelli 1513/3, 46-7)

Our twentieth century is the century of fear.

...
My view, however, is that rather than blame our fear, we should regard it as a
basic element of the situation and try to remedy it.
...
In order to come to terms with fear, we need to understand what it signifies and
what it rejects. It signifies and rejects the same fact: a world in which murder is
legitimate and human life is considered futile. … Before we can build anything,
we need to ask two questions: “Yes or no, directly or indirectly, do you want to be
killed or assaulted? Yes or no, directly or indirectly, do you want to kill or
assault? (Camus 1946, 257-259).

History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when
constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure. The World War II relocation
camp cases and the Red scare and McCarthy-era internal subversion cases are
only the most extreme reminders that when we allow fundamental freedoms to be
sacrificed in the name of real or perceived exigency, we invariably come to regret
it. Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives 489 US 602-55, 635 (1989) (Thurgood
Marshall, J. dissenting)

As the epigraphs above suggest, governing through fear is not new. Make a people afraid,
and controlling them becomes much easier. Political fear comes from anticipatory coercion. It
has two variants, often found together. In one, people fear physical force will be used against
them by their governors. In the other, people fear attack by some enemy and depend on their
governors to protect them. Both variants require apparatuses to effect them. They are the

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apparatuses of physical force and the apparatuses of belief—repressive apparatuses and
ideological apparatuses (Althusser 1970, 1995). Such strategies of control may not be new, but
not until the twenty-first century was there a ruling class that aspired to apply them on a global
scale. The principal seat of the global ruling class and the two apparatuses is the United States.
An American culture of fear is dominating the world in the twenty-first century. Its
purpose is exploitation. Its means are ideology and repressive physical force. Its exemplar is the
American global war on terror. Its form is empire. The United States promotes it through its
ideological and repressive apparatuses. The fear culture grows from the dissolution of the
capitalist world system as it passes through a period of chaos and the establishment of a new
global political economy (Wallerstein 2003, 2004). The precursor of this early twenty-first
century fear culture was fascism between the world wars of the twentieth century. Since history
can instruct, it may pay to examine the salient characteristics of fascism, especially the
eponymous Italian type and German Nazism.
Their power came from their symbiotic relationship to the haute bourgeoisie of the two
countries, Italy and Germany, and to a lesser extent the global haute bourgeoisie. It was lesser
because the global ruling class was less mature, self conscious, and coordinated in the period
after the First World War than it is in the twenty-first century. Fascists and Nazis employed
militarism to gain markets, raw materials, and low-cost labor. They regulated their domestic
populations through nationalist propaganda carried out by ideological apparatuses in
combination with repressive state apparatuses such as the Nazi Gestapo, among others.
By the time this book is published, 70 years will have passed since the defeat of fascism.
The two main aggressors of the Second World War, Germany and Japan, are undertaking
remilitarization in the service of the global ruling class and American geopolitics. Ironically in
coming full circle, the central targets are the same as in that war—China and Russia. Irony aside,
lucid analysis shows that history has not reversed the sides of the antagonists. They have
remained the same as they have been since the advent of the world system of capital. The
principal adversaries are the exploiters and those who resist exploitation, those who produce
value and those who siphon off the surplus. They are capital and labor.
Not only have the adversaries remained the same, but the cause is the same. It is the basic
contradiction of capitalism. Karl Marx gave a detailed explanation of it in “The General Law of
Capitalist Accumulation,” chapter 25 of Capital (1867) and in the posthumously published third
volume of Capital (1894). Capitalism necessarily entails the continual production of surplus
value. Surplus value can only come from human creativity and resourcefulness—that is, labor.
The capitalist system brings together natural resources, human resources (labor), and forces of
production in the form of capital goods (e.g., machines) to produce commodities (goods and
services for sale on a market). The need to produce surplus value means that the total amount of
capital plus a surplus must be reproduced continually. But competition and the need to produce a
profit result in cutting the number of workers actually engaged in production. Still, the entire

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workforce must reproduce. The costs of reproduction of the workforce constitute the market for
consumption, which cannot be greater than those costs. Constant production, however, produces
more than the market can absorb. Value not devoted to consumption (i.e., use value) has only
three places to go: more capital goods, which are really congealed or dead labor, interest, and
rent. That is why financial speculation and land bubbles accompany periods of over-
accumulation of capital, which is typically followed by overproduction and economic downturns.
As capital expands and accumulates, it results in crises of overproduction in which there is so
much capital tied up in dead labor that return on investment approaches zero; that is, more
production produces no surplus value. Capital goods by themselves produce no surplus value.
Steel mills, automobile factories, and computer software do not in and of themselves produce
surplus value, and therefore investing in them cannot produce surplus value (phenomenally
recognized as profit). Cutting variable costs, labor costs, by reducing the number of workers
actually employed in production, does nothing to reduce the costs of reproducing the entire labor
force. Production, therefore, continually produces dead labor (capital), and therefore produces
the persistent conflict between capital (dead labor) and (living) labor. It also results in a declining
rate of profit, which produces crises that can only be resolved by destruction of capital. The last
time this happened, capital destruction took the form of the global great depression and the
Second World War. A signal of such crises is that capital flows from production of commodities
into rent. The flow of capital investment away from production and into rent yields such
phenomena as housing bubbles and intellectual property bubbles like the dot com bubble at the
turn of the twenty-first century. In the early part of the twenty-first century it is impossible to
foresee the outcome of the present crisis, but its cultural manifestation takes the form of fear and
violence.
Crises and Control
Capitalism produces accumulation of capital, and it is that accumulation which reduces
return on investment (profit), and leads to economic crises. This is the often remarked boom and
bust cycle. The bust destroys capital allowing a renewed period of accumulation (boom). There
are cycles within cycles with various shorter term business cycles operating within longer cycles.
The most dramatic cycles are the long term ones such as the period of capital destruction in the
global great depression and the Second World War, roughly 1930 to 1945. What followed was a
golden age, at least economically, from 1945 to about 1970. During that period the countries
most devastated by the war—Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union—rebuilt, and entered a
period of capital accumulation. In that same period a political development made possible the
buoying of the next expected period of capital destruction so that instead of another great
depression, the world capitalist system merely stagnated. The political development was a
change in the nature of imperialism beginning with the post-Second World War’s decolonization
followed by the new imperialism of neoliberalism. This period saw places like China, Southeast
Asia, and other former colonial areas industrialize. The neoliberal period of imperialism allowed

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accumulated capital to flow to hitherto uncapitalized geographic areas of the globe. More
succinctly, capital penetrated the entire world, just as Marx and Engels foresaw as early as their
1848 Manifesto. The neoliberal politics that allowed capital to continue to accumulate also led to
declining consumption in capitalism’s centers—North America, Western Europe, and Japan—
that is, stagnating wages and a resultant geometric increase in wealth and income inequality,
most recently documented by Thomas Piketty (2013). Therefore the period beginning around
1970 introduced a period of growing material inequality after a long period of growing equality
which had begun with the great depression. Equality had increased in the United States from
about 1930 until the early 1970s. Growing economic equality was paralleled by growing political
equality, and most portentously, an increasing demand for even more equality. Therein lay the
seeds of the creation of the fear culture.
Growing equality was coupled with demands for liberation from Black Americans,
Chicanos and other Latins, women, and people with a variety of minority statuses. Mobilized for
making these and other political demands, cessation of the Vietnam War for example, Americans
were beginning to cooperate for the public good. The ruling class fought back on two fronts:
repression and ideology. The repression used surveillance, infiltration, and violence. Ideological
efforts promoted fears of crime, disorder, and disruption. All three kinds of fear mongering used
deep seated racialism that had been part of American culture since the European invasion of the
Americas.
In the second half of the 1960s, uprisings of Black ghettos in US cities spread across the
country. Long before they ceased, President Lyndon Johnson created a commission to study their
causes. Led by Otto Kerner, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders issued its
report in 1968 (Kerner 1968). The Kerner Commission found that racial inequality was the
underlying cause, and that the spark for the urban rebellions almost always came from police
violence and misconduct. Later that same year, at the Democratic National Convention, Chicago
police attacked protesters in what another study commission called a police riot (Walker 1968).
The main issues for the protesters were racial inequality and the Vietnam War. These protests
and uprisings reflected demands for equality, liberation, and an end to militarism and
imperialism. The American protests had counterparts throughout the world: The Events of May
in Paris, the Taltelolco Massacre in Mexico City, the Prague Spring, and the beginning of the
Troubles in Northern Ireland are among the better known. Each had its particular background
according to national conditions, but the overall pattern arose from the same sources: the
possibilities of equality and democracy. Each uprising was put down by force followed by
concerted ideological campaigns to mystify, divert, and divide. The dialectic of capital and
political orders was approaching a turning point. The global ruling class began to construct a
culture of fear.
An article in the New York Times of June 9, 2014 reveals much about how a fear
culture is constructed. The headline is “War Gear Flows to Police Departments” (Apuzzo

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2014). Under the headers is a photograph of an armored personnel carrier. The dateline
for the article is Neenah, Wisconsin. The article notes that Neenah is a town of about
25,000 in the middle of Wisconsin that “has a violent crime rate that is far below the
national average. Neenah has not had a homicide in more than five years.” The article
continues, saying that small town police and rural sheriff’s departments have been
acquiring military equipment and weapons. That is, the New York Times in 2014 reported
on the militarization of police in the United States. It failed to note that militarized
policing dates from at least the 1980s (Kraska 1999), and arguably began in the late
1960s with the Law Enforcement Assistance Act that gave federal monies to local police
mainly for crowd control equipment, training, and computers for record keeping. The
timing is significant as it shows the ruling class buildup of repressive forces just when
popular resistance and demand began to accelerate. The Times article is instructive,
because of its timing and because the New York Times is probably the main mass media
organ of the ideological apparatus of the United States. It records the position of the state
and the words of the ruling class. That is what makes it the paper of record. The first
salient point is that in 2014 the paper of record reported what has in fact been going on
for decades. The second salient point is the extent of militarization, which can have no
other purpose than repression of the population. In sum, the ruling class used the New
York Times to impress on the population that resistance is futile. The machinery of force
itself becomes ideology.
Surveillance, Cybernetics, and Manipulation
About one year before the Times article on militarized police, at the start of June 2013,
the world learned of proof that the US National Security Agency (NSA) had been gathering
much of the world’s electronic communication. The proof came from documents that Edward
Snowden released to several journalists who wrote about them in several newspapers, including
The Guardian and the Washington Post. Glenn Greenwald, one of those journalists, has
recounted the story in his No Place to Hide (2014). Before Edward Snowden provided the proof
of total surveillance, James Bamford (2008), William Binney (2012), Thomas Drake (2013), and
J. Kirk Wiebe (2013) said it was possible and probably going on. Common sense should have
dictated that therefore it was going on. Before Snowden, people could take refuge in the myth
that individuals controlled their own consciousness, despite assiduous efforts to bend it toward
certain desires by advertisements and public relations campaigns. After June 2013 there was no
refuge. Edward Snowden, erstwhile CIA operative and employee of intelligence apparatus
contractors Booze Allen Hamilton and Dell, showed documentary proof that the NSA captured
all electronic communications in searchable data bases, and stored them so they could be
searched at any time in the future. In their tortuous attempts to spin the evidence, politicians in
the United States and its comprador regimes pointed to the attacks of September 11, 2001 (9/11)
as their excuse. It was, they said, all to protect the people from murderous attacks by terrorists.

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Similarly, many of these same politicians, bureaucrats, and the state apparatuses where they
work, devised ways to destroy electronic communications systems of people they did not like—
for instance the government of Iran. The very same apparatuses boasted of their capabilities for
cyber warfare.
Zygmunt Bauman characterizes the early twenty-first century as a time of fear. “Fear has
now settled inside, saturating our daily routines . . . . the self-reproduction of the tangle of fear
and fear-inspired actions comes closest to claiming pride of place. It looks as if our fears have
become self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing; as if they have acquired a momentum of their
own” (2007, 9).
In keeping with Bauman’s assertion, the United States in consort with its European allies,
especially Britain, threatened to attack Syria (Martin and Williams 2013). Their excuse was a
possible use of chemical weapons in the ongoing Syrian civil war. The evidence supporting the
claim that Syrian government forces used chemical weapons against Syrian rebel forces remains
somewhere between murky and non-existent. Russia claimed the rebels used the chemical
weapons (Euronews 2013), and there is a serious question of whether they were used at all.
Despite good reason to doubt, US Secretary of State John Kerry claimed Syrian government’s
use of chemical weapons was a virtual surety (Gordon and Landler 2013); a not very novel
reprise of Colin Powell’s (Guardian 2003) spurious claims about Iraq to justify the US invasion
in 2003. The overall effect is a positive feedback spiral in which perceived, imagined, and
engineered fears spawn defenses that produce increasing fears, which call forth more defenses
(Altheide 2003). In psychology, it is called neurosis.
Much of this feedback spiral comes from deliberate policies of states that use public fears
to control that very same public through securitization—policing and militarized domestic
control apparatuses. The epitome of such a pattern emerges from the conduct of the US
government. It began slowly in the 1970s reaching ever greater crescendos by 2014. Such a
historically apparent pattern coincides with the establishment of the US Empire by the beginning
of the twenty-first century. The US Empire follows the pattern of all previous empires: military
force to control foreign states and their populations (DuFour 2007) and militarized policing to
control its domestic populace (Graham 2010). The Empire relies on its organs—popular media
that includes but is not limited to print, broadcast, and online newspapers, the Hollywood
entertainment industry, and generally the policies of the handful of companies that own all media
in the world. These organs continually repeat discourses to incite fear, such as the use of
chemical weapons. Control of discourses is crucial, which is why US policing apparatuses like
the NSA must monitor, retrieve, and store all personalized electronic communication. Since
something like 90 percent of internet traffic is either spam (about two thirds) or entertainment
like streamed music or videos (one quarter) their task is not as gargantuan as it may seem.
The imperial project demands both offensive and defensive actions. Electronic
surveillance and control of media messages about world, national, and local events fall into the

6
defensive category. They are defensive because empires need a compliant populace. The Empire
also uses cybernetics in its offensive strategies, such as its attack against computers in Iran by
implanting the Stuxnet worm (Blunden and Cheung 2014; Kerr, Rollins, and Theohary 2010;
Risen 2006) and the use of electronic intelligence in support of military operations (US Army
2012). A problematic with the offensive versus defensive distinction is that it depends on an
Orwellian distortion of language, since all control apparatuses of an empire are offensive outside
the imperial metropole and defensive within it, but their nature remains the same: they control
people. Historical evidence is clear. The Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88 was the last major inter-state
war. For the last thirty plus years military conflicts have taken the form of civil wars or military
suppression of domestic populations, otherwise known as death squad operations. Indeed, since
the end of the Second World War in 1945 inter-state wars have been rare exceptions, but that has
not abated slaughter. Many of these slaughters have been instigated if not controlled by the
Empire beginning with the 1964 military coup in Brazil (Loveman and Davies 1997).
The Empire should be understood as a political-economic formation that includes the
United States, its Anglophone allies, Japan, and the leading states in the European Union. It also
includes the main holdings of capital in the world. The trope of synecdoche would identify the
Empire as a Wall Street and Washington axis. To return to an example in August 2013 Syria,
there is a memorandum of understanding to build an Iran-Iraq-Syria oil and gas pipeline
(Tsakiris 2013) and a long term plan to topple and replace the Syrian government, the latter of
which goes back to 9/11 or even before (Greenwald 2011). To achieve strategic control of raw
materials and markets, the Empire uses military force, which includes support of guerrilla forces
and psychological operations called in military language, ‘psyops.’ As part of both clandestine
forces and psyops, the Empire uses electronic information systems, cybernetics, to surveille,
disrupt, and communicate. Cybernetics is part of the US Pentagon’s determination to achieve and
maintain what it calls full spectrum dominance of the world (Engdahl 2009). Full spectrum refers
to land, sea, air, outer space, and cyber space. In sum, control of cybernetics and all electronic
signaling in the world, a meta-cybernetics, is a strategy of the Empire.
As with mass electronic surveillance, mass psyops to create public consciousness is not
just possible, it is ongoing. A program by Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters
(GCHQ) was designed to carry it out. Part of the cache of documents from Edward Snowden
revealed the plan “to control, infiltrate, manipulate, and warp online discourse” (Greenwald
2014a). In the words of the plan by GCHQ, the objective is to deny, disrupt, degrade, and
deceive (GCHQ 2014). The program uses the tools of public relations enhanced by the social
sciences, especially psychology, anthropology, and sociology. In the following, the US
Department of Defense outlined its strategy for cybernetic dominance. Expressed in that odd mix
of euphemism, obfuscation, and hyper rationality characteristic of military language, it explains
why cybernetic control is necessary and how they plan to achieve it.

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 Information, information processing, and communications networks are at
the core of every military activity. Throughout history, military leaders have
regarded information superiority as a key enabler of victory. However, the
ongoing “information revolution” is creating not only a quantitative, but a
qualitative change in the information environment that by 2020 will result in
profound changes in the conduct of military operations.
...
The qualitative change in the information environment extends the
conceptual underpinnings of information superiority beyond the mere
accumulation of more, or even better, information. The word “superiority”
implies a state or condition of imbalance in one’s favor. Information superiority
is transitory in nature and must be created and sustained by the joint force through
the conduct of information operations.
...
However, the creation of information superiority is not an end in itself.
Information superiority provides the joint force a competitive advantage only
when it is effectively translated into superior knowledge and decisions. The joint
force must be able to take advantage of superior information converted to superior
knowledge to achieve “decision superiority” – better decisions arrived at and
implemented faster than an opponent can react, or in a noncombat situation, at a
tempo that allows the force to shape the situation or react to changes and
accomplish its mission.
...
The joint force of 2020 will use superior information and knowledge to
achieve decision superiority, to support advanced command and control
capabilities, and to reach the full potential of dominant maneuver, precision
engagement, full dimensional protection, and focused logistics. (DOD 2000, 8-10)
Translated into recognizably meaningful English, they plan to achieve the following.

 Total surveillance of all electronic communications.

 Command of all weapons systems.
 Surveillance at the individual level such as face recognition and electronic
tracking.
 Capabilities of targeting individuals, groups, and larger targets with
destructive weapons.

In sum, the military and police apparatuses of the Empire plan to keep track of everyone
and what they communicate. The NSA has come close to achieving this objective. They

8
selectively give it to other agencies such as the CIA, FBI, and a few foreign apparatuses such as
their British counterpart, GCHQ. That information allows the US military to, among other
things, target individuals for assassinations by drones. It would, of course, allow for attacks on
larger targets using more powerful weapons such as cruise missiles. In addition, the Empire is
trying to control information, including and especially information about their information
control. This explains the US government’s keen desire to arrest Julian Assange, Edward
Snowden, and its sentencing of Chelsea (Bradley) Manning to prison.
It does not stop there. As the program by GCHQ showed, information dominance also
includes the creation and shaping of beliefs and opinions about reality and what should be done.
The US and its allied military and intelligence apparatuses aim at, and to a remarkable degree
have achieved, total ideological control. A principal target of that ideological control revolves
around identification of enemies, the reputed threats they pose, and the measures to oppose the
enemies and protect the public. An important first step in the ideological program includes the
inculcation of the belief that surveillance can be harmless to those who have done nothing wrong
—that is, those who are not threats and not the enemy. Another step is the ability to construct
popular consensus on the identity of the enemy and the ability to change the enemy’s identity in
a short space of time so allies can be made into enemies and vice versa according to the needs of
the ruling class.
Not only does ideological warfare create fear and provide enemies and allies, it also
mystifies, diverts, and distracts. It encourages complacency and complicities among the masses.
It covers over real dangers even as it creates false ones. A main area in which real threats are
minimized pertains to environmental degradation. Of the three elements capitalism brings
together, nature is the one not dependent on human action. Nature is, however, vulnerable to
human action. The capitalist system uses up natural resources, and it puts back its products into
nature. Unfortunately, some of those products pollute it. Wastes from industrial production
toxify air and water such as the production of excessive carbon dioxide which causes global
warming or spent nuclear fuel that contains dangerous radiation. Capitalist production uses
commodities that lower production costs but degrade the environment.
Insecticides are one such commodity used in agricultural industries. Ill effects of
insecticide use are covered over and generally removed from public attention through a variety
of public relations techniques. They pose an extreme threat. Research in 2014 showed that
insecticides have entered the air, water, and soil. They are responsible for the extinction of some
animal species, and of course introduce poisons into the human consumers of agricultural
products. Even more threatening, they may be destroying insects and other organisms necessary
for the production of food. The following quotes a news item.
The world’s most widely used insecticides have contaminated the
environment across the planet so pervasively that global food production is at risk
. . . . The researchers compare their impact with that reported in Rachel Carson’s
Silent Spring (1962) that revealed the decimation of birds and insects by the

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 blanket use of DDT and other pesticides and led to the modern environmental
movement. . . . The new assessment analysed the risks associated with
neonicotinoids, a class of insecticides on which farmers spend $2.6bn (£1.53bn) a
year. Neonicotinoids are applied routinely rather than in response to pest attacks
but the scientists highlight the “striking” lack of evidence that this leads to
increased crop yields. “The evidence is very clear. We are witnessing a threat to
the productivity of our natural and farmed environment equivalent to that posed
by organophosphates or DDT,” said Jean-Marc Bonmatin, of the National Centre
for Scientific Research (CNRS) in France, one of the 29 international researchers
who conducted the four-year assessment. “Far from protecting food production,
the use of neonicotinoid insecticides is threatening the very infrastructure which
enables it.” He said the chemicals imperilled food supplies by harming bees and
other pollinators, which fertilise about three-quarters of the world’s crops, and the
organisms that create the healthy soils which the world’s food requires in order to
grow. Professor Dave Goulson, at the University of Sussex, another member of
the team, said: “It is astonishing we have learned so little. After Silent Spring
revealed the unfortunate side-effects of those chemicals, there was a big backlash.
But we seem to have gone back to exactly what we were doing in the 1950s. It is
just history repeating itself. The pervasive nature of these chemicals mean they
are found everywhere now. “If all our soils are toxic, that should really worry us,
as soil is crucial to food production." The new report, called the Worldwide
Integrated Assessment on Systemic Pesticides, analysed every peer-reviewed
scientific paper on neonicotinoids and another insecticide called fipronil since
they were first used in the mid-1990s. These chemicals are different from other
pesticides because, instead of being sprayed over crops, they are usually used to
treat seeds. This means they are taken up by every part of the growing plant,
including roots, leaves, pollen and nectar, providing multiple ways for other
creatures to be exposed. The scientists found that the use of the insecticides shows
a “rapid increase” over the past decade and that the slow breakdown of the
compounds and their ability to be washed off fields in water has led to “large-
scale contamination”. The team states that current rules on use have failed to
prevent dangerous levels building up in the environment. (Carrington 2014, Task
Force 2014)
According to this report, the manufacturers of the pesticides have created a market. The
commodity they sell is supposed to reduce agricultural production costs. Their use does not
increase production of food, but it does destroy the natural preconditions for food production
such as pollinating insects like bees. Therefore the production process itself destroys the
capability of production. It is a basic contradiction, which is intrinsic to the capitalist system. It
illustrates that contradictions of capital are not only embedded in the purely economic processes,
but in every aspect of the system. These revelations about insecticides and pesticides also show
the ideological apparatuses at work.
June 23, 2014 the Syrian government handed over the last of its chemical weapons to the
international non-governmental organization, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical
Weapons (BBC 2014). The chemical weapons include Sarin and VX, both organophosphates

10
chemically similar to organophosphate insecticides. The commodities might have been the casus
belli for a US/UK attack on Syria. The news media were filled with reports about the chemicals
accompanied by descriptions about their dire, poisonous properties. Reports on the fact that
similar substances permeate the world’s food supply are hard to find. On the one hand fear is
promoted. On the other, the information is sequestered or neutralized. Fear of enemies is
promoted for the immediate ends of Empire while real threats to food production require
informed digging. That is the way ideology functions. It elevates some information to salience
while submerging other ideas.
The Ideology of Everyday Life
“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas. . . . The ruling ideas are
nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relations” (Marx and Engels
1846, 64). That the ruling ideology represents the ideas of the ruling class is only part of the
story, albeit one neglected until Marx and Engels pointed it out. Ideologies are class bound. They
are also culture bound and time bound. Ruling ideologies have the hegemonic position with
respect to other ideologies, because they determine the grounds for truth. They are the networks
of ideas against which other ideas are tested for their truth value. For instance, one would expect
ideas about the observation that smoke rises whereas rocks fall to be judged differently according
to whether the observer were in medieval Europe, eighteenth century Europe, or twentieth
century Europe. The medieval observer would look to theology, s/he of the eighteenth century to
Newton, and the twentieth century denizen might be informed by General Relativity; because
they lived in different truth regimes and different ruling ideologies. Ideologies are exoteric
within cultures and subcultures, although sometimes they are esoteric to outsiders. Science is
supposed to be exoteric and transparent even if it occasionally requires a great deal of
foundational knowledge to comprehend. The ideology of the Masons is meant to be esoteric.
Exoteric ideologies cannot be separated from social struggle. Every society has an ideology that
forms the basis of common sense, a basis that usually remains invisible to most people within the
society. This dominant ideology appears as neutral, holding to assumptions that are largely
unchallenged. Meanwhile, all other ideologies that differ from the dominant ideology are seen as
radical, no matter what the content of their actual vision may be. Ideology forms a field of
struggle in which the dominant ideology controls the field. Its power comes from its apparent
neutrality. It dominates, but does not completely exclude or control. There are competing
ideologies, but the dominant one enjoys what Antonio Gramsci called hegemony.
In his letter to his wife, Tatania, May 2, 1932 Gramsci said that the concept of hegemony
was “the essential ingredient of the most modern philosophy of praxis is the historic-political
concept of ‘hegemony’” (Gramsci 1973, 235). As he elaborated in his prison notebooks, the state
is composed of those apparatuses that coordinate hegemonic control. The state regulates the
praxis of power and the practices of people in everyday life (Gramsci 1972). For Gramsci, the
state was more than Weber’s (1919, 310) concept of the social organization claiming a monopoly
of force in a territory. The Gramscian state is the social form of a central control function. It
controls through hegemony, because the state sets rules and boundaries. “[I]ts most recent phase
of development consists precisely in the vindication of the moment of hegemony as essential to
its conception of the State and in the ‘exploitation of the cultural factor, of cultural activity, of a
cultural front which is as necessary as the merely economic and political ones” (Sassoon 1987,
111 citing Gramsci 1975, 1224). The cultural front is where a certain kind of class struggle is

11
carried on by the chief antagonists, capital and labor. The cultural front provides observable
phenomena of that struggle on a continual and daily basis. It includes mass media, of course, but
it also includes everyday interaction among people. The relations of production are recreated in
everyday interactions, and so it is misleading to think of the cultural front as superstructure if
superstructure is conceived as somehow separated by a clear boundary between it and the
underlying relations of production. In the first volume of his Critique of Everyday Life, Henri
Lefebvre explained it this way.
Is it truly a question of the superstructures? Is it the superstructures
alone that matter? No: it is a question of superstructures only in so far as they are
created at each instant of everyday life and social practice—in so far as they are
constantly coming down to penetrate these realms from above. And also only in
so far as the superstructures are linked to society as a whole, although everyday
practice is dispersed, fragmented—be it in terms of an individual or a specific and
determined social activity: in them the whole is represented by the part, and vice
versa. (Lefebvre 1947, 79)
Two examples from everyday life in the United States illustrate the operation of
ideological apparatuses and the central, coordinating activities of the state in ensuring the
reproduction of the prevailing social structure and therefore the underlying relations of
production. One is the policing of airline passengers, and the other is the behavior of spectators
at major league baseball games. Jet airline travel was commonplace by 1960. Although many
travelers made reservations, they could also present themselves at the airline’s counter, buy a
ticket, and simply walk onto the plane. They need show no personal identification, they could
use cash for the fare, and there was no screening of any kind. After a spate of airline hijackings
in the 1970s, passengers had to go through metal detectors. After 9/11 passengers must book
well in advance with personal identification, which they have to show to various guards as they
prepare to board. Their persons are searched, along with luggage, and carryon bags. With some
exceptions, non-passengers cannot enter boarding areas. In sum, travelers are now subjected to
complete, invasive surveillance. Not insignificantly, the whole process is backed by physical
force, even if it is seldom used. Tellingly, many, if not most, passengers happily comply, because
they say it keeps them safe.
Beginning after 9/11 and pervasive by 2014, baseball fan behavior has become hyper
patriotic and militarized. Baseball clubs and the corporate entity of Major League Baseball have
promoted these cultural developments. On Memorial Day 2014, a national holiday originally
established to decorate the graves of soldiers who died fighting against slavery in the Civil War,
team uniforms displayed military camouflage imagery. In the past few years, the traditional
seventh inning stretch has included the singing of “God Bless America,” during which many
spectators remove hats and hold their hands over the hearts; these latter gestures previously had
been reserved for the national anthem. The song, written by Irving Berlin in 1918 in connection
with US entry into the First World War, reinforces the historical bond between religion and
empire with its implied approval by deities for war and empire.
Participation in hyper patriotic activities and celebration of militarism at leisure time
activities like baseball, and willing compliance with invasive surveillance and Gestapo-like
control of travel, are the kinds of everyday practices that enact ideological hegemony. In both
cases the mass behavior was designed, promoted, and channeled by state apparatuses. In the case

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of baseball, business entities carried out the ideological imposition, but in the twenty-first
century Empire, business and state are closely blended. These everyday public practices recreate
the culture of fear. As Lefebvre observed, the superstructural apparatuses penetrate from above.
They perpetuate the theme of security and securitization of everyday life. The militarism and
hyper patriotism celebrate control. Louis Althusser summarized, “the state apparatus secures by
repression (from the most brutal physical force, to mere administrative commands and
interdiction . . .) the political conditions for the action of the Ideological State Apparatuses. In
fact it is the latter [ideological apparatuses] which largely secure the reproduction specifically of
the relations of production, behind a ‘shield’ provided by the Repressive State Apparatus”
(Althusser 1995, 247-8). And in dialectical fashion, the repressive apparatuses are rationalized
by the ideological apparatuses. The culture of fear legitimizes violent repression, and violent
repression potentiates the culture of fear.
Globalizing the American Fear Culture: The Theoretical Foundation
“Capitalism has grown into a world system of colonial oppression and of the financial
strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the people of the world by a handful of
‘advanced’ countries. And this ‘booty’ is shared between two or three powerful world marauders
armed to the teeth (America, Great Britain, Japan), who involved the whole world in their war
over the sharing of their booty” so Lenin wrote in his preface to the French and German editions
of Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Lenin 1920, 10-11). He had written the
pamphlet in Zurich, spring 1916. About a century later, the several countries Lenin mentioned
have consolidated under a single national banner, that of the United States. The consolidation
should be likened to a century-long series of mergers of business firms. In his preface of 1920—
aftr the conclusion of the First World War, the successful Bolshevik revolution in Russia and the
failure of communist revolutions in Germany and elsewhere—Lenin highlighted the betrayal of
by the leaders of the world socialist movement organized in the Second International. The
betrayal was especially significant in Germany which had the largest socialist party in the world,
and whose leaders supported the war by having their Reichstag deputies vote for war credits to
the imperial German government. Lenin found it incomprehensible as should any student of
history. It was that betrayal in August 1914 that led Lenin to reform his theoretical
understandings by going back to study Hegel. It was that return that Raya Dunayevskaya stressed
as a turning point, and it is from her analysis, especially in her Marxism and Freedom (1975) and
the third chapter of Philosophy and Revolution (1973), that the following discussion proceeds.
According to Dunayevskaya, what Lenin discovered in his study of Hegel, which he
undertook in his Swiss exile, was an appreciation of the dialectic. Lenin’s appreciation was not
limited to the theoretical and philosophical. Lenin found in Hegel’s dialectic an explanation, and
therefore a theoretical understanding, of why the socialist leadership had betrayed the working
class. His most basic discovery was that the world consolidation of capital by its formation of
monopoly capitalism coupled with the practice of a new imperialism by the states housing and
coordinating monopoly capitalism yielded two salient conditions for socialism. The first was the
split within the socialist movement where monopolization and imperialism yielded “enormous
super-profits (since they are obtained over and above the profits which capitalists squeeze out of
the workers of their ‘home’ country) [and therefore] it is quite possible to bribe the labour
leaders and the upper stratum of the labour aristocracy. . . . And the capitalists of the ‘advanced
countries are bribing them; they bribe them in a thousand different ways, direct and indirect,

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overt and covert. This stratum of bourgeoisified workers, or the ‘labour aristocracy,’ who are
quite philistine in their mode of life, in the size of their earnings and in their outlook serves as the
principal prop of the Second International, and, in our days, the principal social (not military)
prop of the bourgeoisie” (Lenin 1920, 13-14). The reader cannot be but struck by the historical
parallel a century later.
As Dunayevska points out, “Lenin held that just when capitalism had reached this high
stage of ‘organization,’ monopoly (which extended itself into imperialism), was the time to see
new, national revolutionary forces that would act as ‘bacilli’ for proletarian revolution
(Dunayevska 1973, 108). That is, just as the socialist movement seemed defeated through
betrayal, it contained within it new forces and forms for revolutionary liberation. Of course,
Dunayevskaya was writing when the National Liberation Front in Vietnam was reaching its
inevitable victory over US imperialism, and the uprisings of 1968 still seemed to offer the
beginnings of wider revolutionary movements.
To get back to Lenin’s insight that the highest stage of capitalism held within it the germs
of revolution, he saw it because capitalism had reached its highest stage, not in spite of its
complete development. Reading Lenin today reveals both his prescience and his failure to
appreciate how much exploitation was yet to come, for in the ensuing hundred years capital has
increased its exploitive capacity geometrically, and it has penetrated every corner of the earth
from rain forests, to deserts, to mountain tops, and ocean depths. The same goes for monopoly.
Capital is far more centralized in the twenty-first century than it was in the twentieth.
Nonetheless, his basic insight and theoretical analysis has been validated: the more capital
develops, the more points of resistance arise. The question, then, becomes whether capital has
indeed reached its highest stage. In other words, Lenin’s correct theoretical analysis turns into a
historical question.
Lenin wrote his analysis of imperialism in the midst of the First World War, and gave a
capsule history to that point. He noted that competitive capitalism reached its apex in the decade
1860-70, followed by several decades of the Long Depression 1873 to 1879 and arguably until
1896 (Capie and Wood 1997). It was during the Long Depression that capital increasingly
consolidated into monopolies and the central capitalist states in Western Europe, the United
States, and Japan began their imperialist neo-colonial expansion in which they took control of
territories in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. By 1900-1903 “[C]apitalism has been transformed
into imperialism” (Lenin 1920, 22). During the latter years of the nineteenth century monopoly
capitalism and imperialism became established. Banks, understood in the broadest terms as
financial apparatuses, coordinated the economic side, and states coordinated the political side.
World wars and anti-colonial struggles ensued. They resulted in changes in form but not
substance. Neocolonialism of the late nineteenth century gave way to decolonization after the
Second World War. The latter reached its apex in the 1960s to the early 1970s, which is when
Dunayevskaya made her observation about the many foci of anti-colonial resistance. Looking at
the condition of world capitalism in the twenty-first century, the forms have changed again. The
Empire pursues its imperial regime, not by nineteenth century methods of annexing possessions,
but by placing centers of military power (bases) and the leverage of finance capital through
central banks and international apparatuses like the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The
“‘domination’ of capitalist monopolies inevitably becomes the domination of a financial
oligarchy” (Lenin 1920, 47). The nineteenth century techniques of neocolonialism even then

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were only employed in those geographic regions where capital had at that time barely penetrated.
In more developed regions it took the form it does today. In an almost eerie statement, a German
economist wrote “South America and especially Argentina is so dependent financially on
London that it ought to be described as almost a British colony” (Lenin 1920, 85 citing Schulze-
Gävernitz 1907, 318). It is eerie, because June 16, 2014, the Wall Street Journal reported that the
US Supreme Court had ordered Argentina to pay in full its debt to a vulture fund holder, Milton
Singer, which would deal a crushing blow to Argentine fiscal health and therefore to the
Argentine people (Parks, Hong, and Kendall 2014, Portes 2014). London has shifted to New
York and Washington DC. In the developed world, places like Argentina, colonization relies on
the governments of the colonies. In the less developed world, like much of Africa, it uses
military force.
Twenty-First Century Imperialism
The United States and its Anglophone allies—Britain and the other English settler
countries of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand—have prosecuted a global war on terror, as
they call it, since 9/11. Analyses of this war reveal multiple levels of reality. It seems centered in
and around oil producing regions in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia. It also has a
strong religious color, as the Anglophone colonial regimes comport themselves as nominally
Christian with varying degrees of popular adherence to that faith. The United States is the most
rabidly Christian. At the phenomenal level then, the struggle appears to be about the control of
raw material, mainly oil, and at the same time a religious war. The latter seems especially
anachronous, but it is what one sees nonetheless. A bit of historical depth highlights the role of
British imperialism, especially as established in the nineteenth century, now with the settler
states led by the United States rather than the English metropole. By targeting the oil producing
and largely Muslim region, the global war on terror encourages multiple centers, groups, and
movements of resistance which can rely on religion to mobilize fighters. As any number of
contemporary commentators have noted, the global war on terror produces perpetual war, as the
more it is prosecuted, the more it spawns resistance. This serves the interests of those in the
global ruling class who want increasing militarization of the planet.
At another level, or in another theater, another imperial struggle is fought. This one too,
like the extension of nineteenth century British imperialism in Muslim regions, has nineteenth
century roots. The targets in this second theater are China and Russia. In this theater, the US
military, aided by its Pacific partners and soon to be joined by Japan, is bent on encircling China
and Russia and making them economically dependent on the Empire’s control. Beginning in late
2013 and continuing into the next year, the Ukraine was at center stage. Again, this locale in
imperial struggles goes back to the nineteenth century. In the First World War, Ukrainians fought
on both sides, some with Russia and others with Austria-Hungary (Subtelny 2000, 340-44). The
same occurred in the Second World War when some Ukrainians fought in the Red Army while
others fought with the Nazi Wehrmacht. A century later, US diplomatic (the term should be used
guardedly when applied as here to the US State Department) and intelligence apparatuses helped
organize and stir up old pro-Nazi elements in the Ukrainian population. These neo-Nazis were
the shock troops for ousting the Ukrainian government, at which point a US puppet regime was
installed in the capital of Kiev.
Meanwhile, the Empire over the last decade has pursued a policy of encirclement of
China, and control of China’s access to energy resources. Coincident with the invasion of

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Afghanistan in 2003, US military bases began appearing in the other ‘stans: Kyrgyzstan,
Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, which were formerly part of the Soviet Union. Not
only do they border China to the southwest, but they either contain or control overland access to
oil and gas reserves. In the Pacific, US war ships patrol the waters around China to the east, and
bases for air power are reconstructed to accommodate twenty-first century weapons delivery
systems such as jet aircraft (Carras 2014, Hallinan 2014, Reed 2013). The remilitarization of
Japan is part of this same strategy.
Unfortunately, much commentary and analysis of these developments in imperialism deal
with them phenomenally; that is, they treat them as geopolitics. By doing so, they neglect, either
intentionally or unintentionally, the underlying global class struggle that drives imperial
hegemony. This is especially prominent in treatment of relations between the Empire and Russia
and China. Relations among the Empire and Russia and China can more profitably be considered
as rival firms or maybe corporate conglomerates, something like Dow and Monsanto. Of course,
this was true during the Cold War years, even though Russia (or the Soviet Union at the time)
and China claimed to be socialist countries ruled by communist parties. They were more
accurately denoted as state capitalist societies (Debord 1967, Dunayevskaya 1975). Cold War
propaganda depicted these rivalries as profound ideological differences, but that picture was
itself ideology as many people discovered after the Cold War ended. During the Cold War years,
it was only in the so-called non-aligned nations, or Third World that were any possibilities for
alternatives, but by the time of the Soviet Union’s demise, these had largely disappeared.
Monopoly capitalism means that Dow and Monsanto do not really compete, although at times
there may arise disputes about particular market niches. In the era of monopoly capitalism and
imperialism, states engage in a degree of jockeying, but overall strategic conditions change little.
The real struggle remains between those who own capital and those who must labor for the
owners. For instance, the much vaunted decolonization of Africa in the 1960s, by 2014 has
merely yielded exploitation by slightly changed configurations of capital’s actors. Instead of
British, French and other colonial offices, the continent now sees war lords and comprador
regimes answering to China, the United States, and even more revealingly, corporations’ offices
directly. Central Africa—Burundi, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic
of the Congo, and Rwanda—is the showcase for these kinds of arrangements. What appears to be
geopolitics of the leading states has more to do with Google and Baidu working out the terms of
market distribution.
Fear and the Class Struggle
Fear or terror like many other aspects of human relationships is a matter of class. When it
comes to fear, the important question is who fears whom. The French Revolution provides an
illuminating example. ‘Terrorism’ first entered the English lexicon with Edmund Burke’s anti-
democratic fears of the French Revolution. Burke (1790, 1791) characterized the Jacobin
ascendancy as a reign of terror. The origin of the word reveals its affinity with a fear of popular
uprisings and revolutionary governments. Historical and contemporary surveys of terrorism
emphasize its political character. ‘Terrorism’ and ‘terrorists’ were and are value laden epithets
used by established elites. Only when the political right, the Girondins, gained control of the
revolutionary French government July 27, 1794 (Thermidor) did the democratic leaders, Louis

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Saint-Just and Maximilien Robespierre find themselves criminalized and executed by a second,
reactionary terror.
It began with the treason of the king and queen, along with their closest, aristocratic
supporters. They conspired with European monarchies to invade France and restore them to the
throne. Invaded, the people of France made a fateful decision. They constituted themselves as a
nation, and as a nation, they declared themselves in danger. Defense of the nation meant that the
treasonous conspirators were not criminalized. They became enemies, and not enemies of the
state, but enemies of the people. An outcome of the French Revolution, possibly the most
important, was the identification of the populace as the nation, with the state merely as a tool or
apparatus for executing the will of the nation—hence the modern nation-state. The Terror, la
Terreur also called “the Reign of Terror” by Anglophones, is a mirror image of the elimination
of traitors to the people and counter-revolutionaries. Executing Louis Bourbon, his queen, Marie
Antoinette, and later, myriad aristocrats and their minions did not parallel what the monarchical
state did to those who challenged its sovereign power. Consider for instance Michel Foucault’s
memorable opening description in Discipline and Punish (1975) in which he recounts the
lengthy execution and torture of Damians, the regicide March 2, 1757. Those who dared to
challenge the throne suffered horribly. In contrast, the revolutionary tribunal dispatched enemies
of the people by the most humane method available, the guillotine. The latter seemed necessary.
What else could one do with treasonous nobility? They could not be left to stir up counter
revolution either inside or outside the country.
Although criminal punishment always contains a degree of vengeance, the removal of
French aristocrats was not vengeance but war.
The revolutionary tribunal no longer obeyed rules of vengeance, but rather
those of war. In this logic, the person judged was no longer assumed to belong to
a common social group, he was no longer an adversary to convince or re-educate,
but rather an irreconcilable enemy to be struck down rather than banished. The
suspect’s alterity had become radical. (Wahnich 2003, 70)
Moreover, the revolutionary tribunal acted to preserve the people’s virtue.: “the exercise of terror
cannot be dissociated from ‘morality in action’” (73). Refer to Robespierre’s address to the
Convention.
Since the soul of the Republic is virtue, equality, . . . the first rule of your
political conduct must be to relate all your operations to the maintenance of
equality and the development of virtue. With virtue and equality, therefore, you
have a compass that can guide you in the midst of the storms of all passions and
the whirlpool of intrigues that surround you. (73)
Wahnich calls on Walter Benjamin’s 1921 essay, “Critique of Violence” where he contrasts
mythical violence with divine violence. “[T]he Terror sought to give the anger of the people, as

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divine anger, forms that were neither discretionary nor arbitrary” (74). They were, instead,
necessary.
The virtue sought in the terror was revolutionary virtue. It was the enactment of
democracy, since the French Revolution, especially during the ascendancy of the Jacobins, was
the first democratic revolution. The American, of course, was a bourgeois revolution. Among
other things, indeed, preeminently, revolutions must establish a new symbolic order, because
people move by symbols.
The construction of revolutionary values could thus merge . . . with
wellsprings of the citizens as political actors. These wellsprings were no longer to
be individual private virtue, but rather public virtue as socially manufactured for
each person in a society finally constituted. (76)
The French Revolution had to employ the Terror for the people to achieve virtue
collectively. This is where this first democratic revolution departs from the classical idea of
virtue first espoused by Plato and Aristotle, who not coincidentally, were both anti-democrats.
They saw only individual virtue, which the polis should nurture and provide a suitable venue for
its individual development. Once established as revolutionary democracy, not to employ the
Terror would betray humanity. Again, Robespierre spoke in the constitutional debates of spring
1793.
The men of all countries are brothers, and must help one another as
citizens of a single state. Whoever oppresses one nation declares himself the
enemy of all. Those who wage war on a people, in order to halt the progress of
liberty and destroy the rights of man, must be pursued everywhere not as ordinary
enemies, but as assassins and rebel brigands. (87)
As Luke Howie (2012) has pointed out, there is no terror without fear. What always
remains at issue is who fears whom. The French Terror made the ruling class afraid. This same
ruling class had oppressed the people for twelve centuries. Today, Robespierre’s adjuration of
1793 is even more apposite. Global humanity exists in the twenty-first century in a sense far
more concretely than it could in the eighteenth century. The ruling class always fears the masses,
and so it takes enormous measures to surveille them, distract them, and control them. The ruling
class uses various apparatuses to make the people afraid.

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