I think that education is missing, education as in communicating about the process. Sharing insights of how it is done. And by that generating awareness ans appreciation for it.
Not a weekly hour long class, but a more hack internet style presentation.
Short to the point topics, and every so often a deeper dive that strings everything together.
With a good sense of humor where it fits. But dead serious where it matters.
When I read your articles im usually blown away. I see what you do, but I can't figure out how you pack all of it in one massive article. Or a series of articles that feel like a small book.
Nel has a brain the size of a planet, as the expression goes, but it is tightly interwoven with her heart and conscience. That is what makes her so exceptional and so wonderful. Intelligence in the service of conscience is what the world needs a lot more of. Thanks, Nel, for sharing your insights and your journey with all of us.
Eexacy, we live in societies dominated by ruling classes and the nature of those ruling classes is central to domestic and international politics. The oligarchs in the West have been very good at stifling class analysis. Rockhill has done some excellent work on this in the academy.
"Fascism is just Imperialism trying to save itself"
"This methodology of justifying wars and exploitation abroad and dividing population at home is built into Imperialism, it's absolutely necessary to justify itself"
Nel Bonilla said: “The transnational capitalist class finances the imperial infrastructure to oppress the global working class, regardless of its national affiliation.”
I currently see no force, apart from the nation-states not yet subjugated, that could stand up to the global empire. Blindly relying on the working class here is pure dogmatism. For tactical reasons, alliances must be formed. For example, in China's liberation struggle, the communists also formed an alliance with the nationalists. And only after sovereignty had been won did the question of national class power arise.
Nel, this is a vital and piercing intervention. Your conceptualization of "elite-competitive multipolarity" is exactly the analytical scalpel needed to cut through the campist fog of alternative media. You are absolutely right to highlight the transnational capitalist class and to dismantle the "inevitability myth" that treats tactical friction as systemic collapse.
However, I want to build dialectically on your point about the extraterritorial elite, because I think it reveals a dynamic that actually bridges your financial critique with the physical materialism you critique. I’d like to offer three points of pushback/reframing:
You rightly point out that the global capitalist elite is extraterritorial and deeply integrated into the imperial architecture. But they are also highly rational actors seeking safety and yield. Because the U.S. hegemon has become increasingly erratic, weaponizing the dollar, freezing sovereign reserves, and using the financial system as a blunt instrument, this elite is actively trying to bypass it.
We are seeing this materialize not just in financial shuffling, but in a massive flight to hard physical assets. Over the last few years, GCC sovereign wealth funds have noticeably shifted their capital allocation. Rather than purely recycling petrodollars into U.S. Treasuries and Silicon Valley financial markets, they are aggressively acquiring physical infrastructure, ports, mining rights, and logistics hubs globally. This proves that while the elite funds the "Bunker State," they are simultaneously hedging against it by moving capital into tangible, physical control. The financial superstructure is being backed by a renewed scramble for physical material assets.
You warn against the "inevitability myth" because it breeds passivity. But I would argue that what looks like passivity from the outside is actually a highly disciplined, rational strategy of active strategic patience by the Global South.
The periphery is not sitting idle waiting for the U.S. to collapse; they are consciously aligning their forces while deliberately refusing the hegemon’s escalation traps. Iran absorbing a strike without triggering a full regional ground war, or China refusing to be baited into a premature kinetic clash in the Pacific, this is not passive waiting. It is a highly calculated material strategy to deny the hegemon the very friction it needs to justify its own military-industrial expansion. They are waiting it out, yes, but "waiting" here means maintaining discipline and not falling for the traps the hegemon is actively waging.
Finally, while I agree that the U.S. exercises power through financial and infrastructural chokeholds (SWIFT, insurance, clearing), we cannot dismiss the physical base. The reason the transnational elite is fleeing into physical infrastructure (as mentioned above) is because, at the end of the day, financial hegemony only works if it is backed by physical control over energy, chokepoints, and supply chains. The U.S. can weaponize the London insurance market, but it cannot do so if the physical barrels of oil are controlled by actors who simply opt out of that system. The financial rails are the mechanism of empire, but physical energy and geography remain the tracks they run on.
Ultimately, your essay is a brilliant corrective to the naive cheerleading of multipolarity. We must recognize that a shifting balance of capitalist power is not emancipation. But to be truly materialist, we must also recognize that the global elite's rational flight to physical assets, and the periphery's disciplined avoidance of kinetic traps, are actively, materially dismantling the hegemon's leverage.
Thank you for forcing this necessary reckoning. Looking forward to your next piece.
This piece provides clarification for something that should be obvious but apparently is not. I recently noted in my last piece that the American South miscalculated in its estimation of the importance of cotton when it fired on Fort Sumter in April of 1861. This mindset resulted in catastrophe, and that war was lost when the first shot was fired. I do not think that the U.S. is collapsing to use the single most employed description of what is not happening. Nor do I join the cheerleaders who praise Moscow which jumped on the neoliberal bandwagon long ago. The Russian oligarchy displays its brazen acceptance of bribery through Kirill Dmitriev. However could you make this up? What does continue in the U.S. (and Russia) is the grinding away of the middle class as an economically stable working class is no more. Wealth transfer continues and will for some time. The oligarchy and transnational capital rule.
Russia seems to be a mixed bag, economically. One could call it hedging bets, one could also see it as a strategy to avoid falling prey to any one dynamic. Core assets serve the people.
This is a masterful piece IMO. I'd select two quotes:
"... the US Navy was already studying the purposeful blockade of the Strait of Hormuz in 2016. The “Reverse Oil Weapon” was being discussed in Naval Postgraduate School seminars in 2015. The Brookings Institution was publishing papers on “mutually assured denial” in 2014".
Thanks a lot for this info, which is totally under the radar. It implies that the theory of the USA (and select imperial vassals) going to war vs Iran without a plan and just losing right away is nonsense: there is almost certainly a plan and that plan is the continuous blockade of Hormuz (imperfect as it may be) in order to force degrowth in terms very unequal (favorable for the USA) and that way increase the siege of China and (separatedly albeit relatedly) the global class war against the working masses, who are the ones to suffer the most.
Big question is how well can the Empire and in general the capitalist regimes control the resulting mass anger. I'm sure that the oligarchs believe that they can manage, I'm also quite sure that they are wrong in this regard, that this bet of "forced and unequal degrowth" is too much and will break the global capitalist system by all seams.
"The subject of history has become the nation‑state, and the working class has vanished from the [Chinese] frame".
That's indeed extremely sad and reminds all too much to what Mussolini argued back in the 1910s, when he was unchalantly expelled from the Socialist Party for that very reason: trying to replace class war logic by nation on nation conflict in an interclassit way.
Re "Mass Anger": I am sure that we are heading towards very undemocratic control systems, similar to ICE or policing during the Covid-19 protests. The militarisation of police forces, both in US and EU (apparently they work together on techniques - sorry, I would need to search for those sources, but could find them if requested) has been increasing since the 1980's. Along with neo-liberalism.
This is fascinating. Thank you. The No Kings rallies were criticized for being as you say, performative liberalism instead of solidarity and training for blocking infrastructure.
Thank you for posting. Is the underlying problem scale? In smaller units reciprocal feedback helps block power concentration. Scale decouples the reciprocal feed back loop of the few in power from the many. A more horizontal structure should be looked at. Admittedly I have just begun this journey and mainly have questions. Have we traded the benefits of Scale for some of our civil liberties? Can we have scaled systems that don’t erode into the few oppressing the many? Is it a fantasy that a truly decentralized society can exist in the world of today? Thanks again for posting.
That's a great question. My personal take is that pure Anarchism (or ideal Communism in which the state ceases to exist) can't work because we're facing way too large numbers of people for that. A democratic federal system (without wealthy people, i.e. communist, else it won't be truly democratic) is probably the best we can hope for. I sometimes call it "Cuba-Switzerland", understanding that the political frame would be closer to that of Switzerland and the socio-economic frame to that of Cuba.
Decentralization and plurality are necessary in order to allow for healthy competition, one in which different approaches to what I may call "eco-communism" are not hostile to each other in a sectarian way but complementary and can replace each other according to whatever works best and people democratically prefer. That's healthy.
Still Switzerland or Cuba are smallish countries, so how to extend that to large regional units like Europe, China, North America, Africa, India, etc., let alone the wole Earth (which will need some sort of shared governance in any case) is hard to fathom in advance. It lays the ground for a lot of debate but ultimately it can only be discerned with practical post-revolutionary actual implementation.
I don't quite see why one should call it "healthy competition" - it is simply a debate and the most accepted (not convincing) argument wins. Switzerland is being dismantled with NATO and EU agreements; sofar it is unclear to what extent the people will be able to exercise their much-loved "direct democracy" in deciding whether to accept EU norms.
The unitary theory of the state needs to be put under the microscope. It's a kindergarten fable, just like the social contract and 'the will of the people'. I've long been amazed at - and frustrated by -how many seemingly critical thinkers go along with such simplistic abstractions. But I sense a slight change in where the winds are blowing. Perhaps the time has come when analysts will lay these fables to one side and begin the serious business of analysing how power is really exercised, and by whom, in our troubled world. Thank you for you work to nudge the discourse in such a direction, Nel. It is much needed.
The current situation reminds me of WWI, where you had fascist imperialist nations fighting each other for control of resources and colonies. Lenin warned that socialists should not be fighting each other in imperialist wars.
Then like now, the socialists and social democrats, ignored that advice and joined the fight in support of their respective nations.
Then like now, there are no good guys, all the forces engaged in the fight are anti-worker fascist governments.
The junior fascists are trying to maintain a globalist neo-liberal economic order, where their leaderships, provide cheap human and natural resources to senior fascist nations, in exchange for a cut for themselves and their local oligarch managers. As part of that arrangement, the junior fascists were allowed to maintain local political control, to decide who gets which contracts, and to determine how the spoils are divvied up.
The conflict now is that the senior fascists are no longer interested in sharing power or money with the junior fascists. They want to maximize profit by cutting out the middle-men, obtaining total financial control of their economies, and by eliminating any competition to their corporations.
The junior fascists, instead of cooperating with each other to create an alternative system to protect their shared interests of maintaining sovereignty and control of their economies, have been busy backstabbing each other to try and cut individual deals with the senior fascists.
In plain English, they are all lying, cheating, thieving fascists scum, and no one should be rooting for any of them and definitely no one should be fighting and dying for them. No matter who wins you lose.
An impressive and passionate analysis, Nel, although your claim that it is short is a bit of an exaggeration! Your analysis is very clear and coherent. Thanks!
For almost anyone living in the so called west, who received an education in this century, class analysis is non existent in that education; it does not appear in the media; and everything in society ignores it away. Such people have grown in in an EU world when in fact concepts like the commons and public owership of public services are "haram" and come with a fine from the EU.
They see themselves not a citizens with a choice and a stake in society, but rather as "consumers". It cannot be any surprise that many of them, with Ph.Ds and professor titles even, don't even think about this.
To some extent it depends on how old you are. Europe in the 70s and 80s was fairly people oriented - the common weal. Thatcher and Reagan deleted it. TINA.
I never quite understood WHO had no alternatives ...
But it is 2025 and so you now have very highly placed people, in government, in NGOs, in business, and in academia, who are 35-40-45-50 years old and they have grown up a post-cold war world, a post-Deng world, where discussions and analysis of alternative economic and social systems did not really occur in their life, as a teenager or adult. Their education is lacking.
I think that education is missing, education as in communicating about the process. Sharing insights of how it is done. And by that generating awareness ans appreciation for it.
Not a weekly hour long class, but a more hack internet style presentation.
Short to the point topics, and every so often a deeper dive that strings everything together.
With a good sense of humor where it fits. But dead serious where it matters.
When I read your articles im usually blown away. I see what you do, but I can't figure out how you pack all of it in one massive article. Or a series of articles that feel like a small book.
Nel has a brain the size of a planet, as the expression goes, but it is tightly interwoven with her heart and conscience. That is what makes her so exceptional and so wonderful. Intelligence in the service of conscience is what the world needs a lot more of. Thanks, Nel, for sharing your insights and your journey with all of us.
Yeah she knows how to navigate all the signals.
Exceptional. :-)
Eexacy, we live in societies dominated by ruling classes and the nature of those ruling classes is central to domestic and international politics. The oligarchs in the West have been very good at stifling class analysis. Rockhill has done some excellent work on this in the academy.
"Fascism is just Imperialism trying to save itself"
"This methodology of justifying wars and exploitation abroad and dividing population at home is built into Imperialism, it's absolutely necessary to justify itself"
-Joti Brar
They are the same thing. Dominance, exploitation, inequality, slave cultures, ... totalitarianism in all of its brutality.
Nel Bonilla said: “The transnational capitalist class finances the imperial infrastructure to oppress the global working class, regardless of its national affiliation.”
I currently see no force, apart from the nation-states not yet subjugated, that could stand up to the global empire. Blindly relying on the working class here is pure dogmatism. For tactical reasons, alliances must be formed. For example, in China's liberation struggle, the communists also formed an alliance with the nationalists. And only after sovereignty had been won did the question of national class power arise.
Excellent piece
Nel, this is a vital and piercing intervention. Your conceptualization of "elite-competitive multipolarity" is exactly the analytical scalpel needed to cut through the campist fog of alternative media. You are absolutely right to highlight the transnational capitalist class and to dismantle the "inevitability myth" that treats tactical friction as systemic collapse.
However, I want to build dialectically on your point about the extraterritorial elite, because I think it reveals a dynamic that actually bridges your financial critique with the physical materialism you critique. I’d like to offer three points of pushback/reframing:
You rightly point out that the global capitalist elite is extraterritorial and deeply integrated into the imperial architecture. But they are also highly rational actors seeking safety and yield. Because the U.S. hegemon has become increasingly erratic, weaponizing the dollar, freezing sovereign reserves, and using the financial system as a blunt instrument, this elite is actively trying to bypass it.
We are seeing this materialize not just in financial shuffling, but in a massive flight to hard physical assets. Over the last few years, GCC sovereign wealth funds have noticeably shifted their capital allocation. Rather than purely recycling petrodollars into U.S. Treasuries and Silicon Valley financial markets, they are aggressively acquiring physical infrastructure, ports, mining rights, and logistics hubs globally. This proves that while the elite funds the "Bunker State," they are simultaneously hedging against it by moving capital into tangible, physical control. The financial superstructure is being backed by a renewed scramble for physical material assets.
You warn against the "inevitability myth" because it breeds passivity. But I would argue that what looks like passivity from the outside is actually a highly disciplined, rational strategy of active strategic patience by the Global South.
The periphery is not sitting idle waiting for the U.S. to collapse; they are consciously aligning their forces while deliberately refusing the hegemon’s escalation traps. Iran absorbing a strike without triggering a full regional ground war, or China refusing to be baited into a premature kinetic clash in the Pacific, this is not passive waiting. It is a highly calculated material strategy to deny the hegemon the very friction it needs to justify its own military-industrial expansion. They are waiting it out, yes, but "waiting" here means maintaining discipline and not falling for the traps the hegemon is actively waging.
Finally, while I agree that the U.S. exercises power through financial and infrastructural chokeholds (SWIFT, insurance, clearing), we cannot dismiss the physical base. The reason the transnational elite is fleeing into physical infrastructure (as mentioned above) is because, at the end of the day, financial hegemony only works if it is backed by physical control over energy, chokepoints, and supply chains. The U.S. can weaponize the London insurance market, but it cannot do so if the physical barrels of oil are controlled by actors who simply opt out of that system. The financial rails are the mechanism of empire, but physical energy and geography remain the tracks they run on.
Ultimately, your essay is a brilliant corrective to the naive cheerleading of multipolarity. We must recognize that a shifting balance of capitalist power is not emancipation. But to be truly materialist, we must also recognize that the global elite's rational flight to physical assets, and the periphery's disciplined avoidance of kinetic traps, are actively, materially dismantling the hegemon's leverage.
Thank you for forcing this necessary reckoning. Looking forward to your next piece.
This piece provides clarification for something that should be obvious but apparently is not. I recently noted in my last piece that the American South miscalculated in its estimation of the importance of cotton when it fired on Fort Sumter in April of 1861. This mindset resulted in catastrophe, and that war was lost when the first shot was fired. I do not think that the U.S. is collapsing to use the single most employed description of what is not happening. Nor do I join the cheerleaders who praise Moscow which jumped on the neoliberal bandwagon long ago. The Russian oligarchy displays its brazen acceptance of bribery through Kirill Dmitriev. However could you make this up? What does continue in the U.S. (and Russia) is the grinding away of the middle class as an economically stable working class is no more. Wealth transfer continues and will for some time. The oligarchy and transnational capital rule.
Russia seems to be a mixed bag, economically. One could call it hedging bets, one could also see it as a strategy to avoid falling prey to any one dynamic. Core assets serve the people.
This is a masterful piece IMO. I'd select two quotes:
"... the US Navy was already studying the purposeful blockade of the Strait of Hormuz in 2016. The “Reverse Oil Weapon” was being discussed in Naval Postgraduate School seminars in 2015. The Brookings Institution was publishing papers on “mutually assured denial” in 2014".
Thanks a lot for this info, which is totally under the radar. It implies that the theory of the USA (and select imperial vassals) going to war vs Iran without a plan and just losing right away is nonsense: there is almost certainly a plan and that plan is the continuous blockade of Hormuz (imperfect as it may be) in order to force degrowth in terms very unequal (favorable for the USA) and that way increase the siege of China and (separatedly albeit relatedly) the global class war against the working masses, who are the ones to suffer the most.
Big question is how well can the Empire and in general the capitalist regimes control the resulting mass anger. I'm sure that the oligarchs believe that they can manage, I'm also quite sure that they are wrong in this regard, that this bet of "forced and unequal degrowth" is too much and will break the global capitalist system by all seams.
"The subject of history has become the nation‑state, and the working class has vanished from the [Chinese] frame".
That's indeed extremely sad and reminds all too much to what Mussolini argued back in the 1910s, when he was unchalantly expelled from the Socialist Party for that very reason: trying to replace class war logic by nation on nation conflict in an interclassit way.
Re "Mass Anger": I am sure that we are heading towards very undemocratic control systems, similar to ICE or policing during the Covid-19 protests. The militarisation of police forces, both in US and EU (apparently they work together on techniques - sorry, I would need to search for those sources, but could find them if requested) has been increasing since the 1980's. Along with neo-liberalism.
This is fascinating. Thank you. The No Kings rallies were criticized for being as you say, performative liberalism instead of solidarity and training for blocking infrastructure.
Thank you for posting. Is the underlying problem scale? In smaller units reciprocal feedback helps block power concentration. Scale decouples the reciprocal feed back loop of the few in power from the many. A more horizontal structure should be looked at. Admittedly I have just begun this journey and mainly have questions. Have we traded the benefits of Scale for some of our civil liberties? Can we have scaled systems that don’t erode into the few oppressing the many? Is it a fantasy that a truly decentralized society can exist in the world of today? Thanks again for posting.
That's a great question. My personal take is that pure Anarchism (or ideal Communism in which the state ceases to exist) can't work because we're facing way too large numbers of people for that. A democratic federal system (without wealthy people, i.e. communist, else it won't be truly democratic) is probably the best we can hope for. I sometimes call it "Cuba-Switzerland", understanding that the political frame would be closer to that of Switzerland and the socio-economic frame to that of Cuba.
Decentralization and plurality are necessary in order to allow for healthy competition, one in which different approaches to what I may call "eco-communism" are not hostile to each other in a sectarian way but complementary and can replace each other according to whatever works best and people democratically prefer. That's healthy.
Still Switzerland or Cuba are smallish countries, so how to extend that to large regional units like Europe, China, North America, Africa, India, etc., let alone the wole Earth (which will need some sort of shared governance in any case) is hard to fathom in advance. It lays the ground for a lot of debate but ultimately it can only be discerned with practical post-revolutionary actual implementation.
I don't quite see why one should call it "healthy competition" - it is simply a debate and the most accepted (not convincing) argument wins. Switzerland is being dismantled with NATO and EU agreements; sofar it is unclear to what extent the people will be able to exercise their much-loved "direct democracy" in deciding whether to accept EU norms.
The unitary theory of the state needs to be put under the microscope. It's a kindergarten fable, just like the social contract and 'the will of the people'. I've long been amazed at - and frustrated by -how many seemingly critical thinkers go along with such simplistic abstractions. But I sense a slight change in where the winds are blowing. Perhaps the time has come when analysts will lay these fables to one side and begin the serious business of analysing how power is really exercised, and by whom, in our troubled world. Thank you for you work to nudge the discourse in such a direction, Nel. It is much needed.
Lovely work, thanks!
The current situation reminds me of WWI, where you had fascist imperialist nations fighting each other for control of resources and colonies. Lenin warned that socialists should not be fighting each other in imperialist wars.
Then like now, the socialists and social democrats, ignored that advice and joined the fight in support of their respective nations.
Then like now, there are no good guys, all the forces engaged in the fight are anti-worker fascist governments.
The junior fascists are trying to maintain a globalist neo-liberal economic order, where their leaderships, provide cheap human and natural resources to senior fascist nations, in exchange for a cut for themselves and their local oligarch managers. As part of that arrangement, the junior fascists were allowed to maintain local political control, to decide who gets which contracts, and to determine how the spoils are divvied up.
The conflict now is that the senior fascists are no longer interested in sharing power or money with the junior fascists. They want to maximize profit by cutting out the middle-men, obtaining total financial control of their economies, and by eliminating any competition to their corporations.
The junior fascists, instead of cooperating with each other to create an alternative system to protect their shared interests of maintaining sovereignty and control of their economies, have been busy backstabbing each other to try and cut individual deals with the senior fascists.
In plain English, they are all lying, cheating, thieving fascists scum, and no one should be rooting for any of them and definitely no one should be fighting and dying for them. No matter who wins you lose.
It's a Mafia Model ... no surprise there.
An impressive and passionate analysis, Nel, although your claim that it is short is a bit of an exaggeration! Your analysis is very clear and coherent. Thanks!
For almost anyone living in the so called west, who received an education in this century, class analysis is non existent in that education; it does not appear in the media; and everything in society ignores it away. Such people have grown in in an EU world when in fact concepts like the commons and public owership of public services are "haram" and come with a fine from the EU.
They see themselves not a citizens with a choice and a stake in society, but rather as "consumers". It cannot be any surprise that many of them, with Ph.Ds and professor titles even, don't even think about this.
To some extent it depends on how old you are. Europe in the 70s and 80s was fairly people oriented - the common weal. Thatcher and Reagan deleted it. TINA.
I never quite understood WHO had no alternatives ...
But it is 2025 and so you now have very highly placed people, in government, in NGOs, in business, and in academia, who are 35-40-45-50 years old and they have grown up a post-cold war world, a post-Deng world, where discussions and analysis of alternative economic and social systems did not really occur in their life, as a teenager or adult. Their education is lacking.
“Marxist analysis is non‑eschatological” The rest of what you say follows from this. (And how strange this needed saying, but it does)