From Military Deadlock to Economic War
Profit for Capital, War for Workers
The war has not ended; it has merely changed its clothes. Bombs give way to blockades, missiles to sanctions, and direct assault to organised starvation. The Trump administration speaks of “the toughest sanctions in history,” while the US Treasury Secretary declares that economic pressure may reduce the need for a larger military operation. The meaning is clear: what the US military failed to impose on the battlefield must now be extracted from society by cutting off oil, trade, medicine and bread. The war moves from the skies to people’s tables (Reuters, 2026a; 2026b).
The war has not ended; it has merely changed its clothes. Bombs give way to blockades, missiles to sanctions, and direct assault to organised starvation. The Trump administration speaks of “the toughest sanctions in history,” while the US Treasury Secretary declares that economic pressure may reduce the need for a larger military operation. The meaning is clear: what the US military failed to impose on the battlefield must now be extracted from society by cutting off oil, trade, medicine and bread. The war moves from the skies to people’s tables (Reuters, 2026a; 2026b).
On the other side, the Islamic Republic threatens a “devastating response,” carries out executions and commands society to remain silent. Israel pounds Gaza and Lebanon and accompanies every negotiation with further bombardment. Three states, occupying different positions and bearing different responsibilities, have found a common language: the language of war, emergency and the foreign enemy. All three seek to conceal their internal crises behind the smoke of explosions.
This is not merely a war over Iran, Gaza, Lebanon, oil or the Strait of Hormuz. It is the political face of the historic crisis in the total reproduction of capital. Capital can still produce missiles, drones, oil and profit, but it can no longer reproduce a liveable society, a legitimate order or a human future. The institutions that were supposed to represent law, security, science and reason have become producers of lawlessness, insecurity, organised ignorance and mass killing.
The state is transformed into the deal-making office of ruling circles, the court into an instrument for protecting the powerful, the media into a factory for normalising death, and science into a technology of surveillance and destruction. Corruption is not merely an envelope of money passed beneath a table. Political corruption begins where all public power is transformed into the private property of the ruling class; where hospitals and schools are starved of funds while arsenals are never full; where the profits of war go to corporations while debt, inflation, death and displacement are imposed on the people. War is the most concentrated form of this corruption: the privatisation of profit and the socialisation of devastation
Trumpism: The State in the Service of the War Market
Trumpism is not an accidental deviation within American democracy. It is the naked form of a state that has erased the boundaries between public office, family business, private capital, the arms lobby and foreign policy. “National security” is the official name of the war market. The Pentagon places the orders, Congress approves the money, military corporations collect the profits, and workers pay the bill through taxation, inflation and cuts to public services.
In July 2026, the US Secretary of Defense put the official cost of the war against Iran at $37.5 billion and requested another $67 billion to replenish weapons stockpiles. Researchers at Brown University’s Costs of War project have offered a far higher estimate of the real and long-term costs. They also point out that these wars are financed through debt: today’s profits for military contractors become tomorrow’s debts for society (PBS NewsHour, 2026; PBS, 2026).
Every missile fired is an order for the next missile. Every depleted weapons system generates a new contract for Boeing, Lockheed Martin and the other monopolies. Every threat opens a new market for drones, interceptors, military artificial intelligence and private security companies. PBS documentaries have also examined this very interweaving of political power, arms deals, Middle Eastern investments and private interests (PBS Frontline, 2026a; 2026b).
The same machinery has now turned to “economic warfare.” The blockade has reduced Iranian oil exports, disrupted the passage of oil through the Strait of Hormuz and driven up energy prices (Reuters, 2026c; 2026d). This policy is not intended to starve generals and capitalists. State networks, sanctions brokers and the owners of smuggling routes will find their way around it. Sanctions strike first at the worker’s wage, the patient’s medicine and the child’s food. A blockade is not a civilised form of warfare; it is a war whose victims die beyond the reach of the cameras.
Netanyahu: Government Under the Armour of War
In Israel, war has become Netanyahu’s personal and political shield. Since 2020, he has been on trial on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. He has not yet been convicted, but court hearings have repeatedly been postponed or shortened under the heading of “security conditions.” He applied for a pardon before the trial had concluded, and Trump stepped forward in his defence. The temporary halt in attacks in April made it possible for the trial to resume—as though, once the sirens fell silent, the case that the war had buried emerged once again from beneath the rubble (Reuters, 2026e).
The International Criminal Court, which has itself become an arena of conflict among the political factions of capital, has not convicted Netanyahu either. It has, however, issued a warrant for his arrest. The Court stated that there were reasonable grounds to believe that he may bear responsibility for using starvation as a method of warfare, directing attacks against civilians and committing crimes against humanity (ICC, 2024). Washington’s response was clear: not cooperation with the Court, but sanctions against its president and officials (Reuters, 2026f). This is the truth of the “rules-based order”: law for enemies, immunity for allies; the court is respected only so long as it obeys the commands of capital and power.
At the same time, Netanyahu faces a corruption trial, declining electoral support and divisions within Likud. Continuing the war, rejecting a ceasefire and preserving his coalition with the far right are not matters of foreign policy for him; they are a policy of survival (Reuters, 2026g). Israel did not stop bombing even during negotiations with Lebanon. The attacks on southern Lebanon on 15 August killed at least eleven people, including women and children (Associated Press, 2026). In the logic of the war state, negotiation is the continuation of bombing in diplomatic language, while bombing is the continuation of negotiation by explosive means.
Racism: Who Has the Right to Be Counted as a Victim?
Gaza has not been destroyed by bombs alone. Before its physical destruction, it was expelled—through the language of politics and the media—from the circle of those deemed entitled to equal human rights. Racism today does not need to proclaim biological superiority. It is enough for it to decide which victim is given a name, a face and a life, and which is reduced to an anonymous number; which refugee deserves protection and which migrant constitutes a threat; which occupation is treated as an attack on civilisation and which devastation is presented as “self-defence.”
A study of more than 90,000 posts published by 51 major media organisations in 24 European countries documented striking differences in both the volume and visual framing of coverage of Ukraine and Gaza (Dumitrescu, 2026). This difference is not merely media hypocrisy. Racism is a political mechanism for assigning unequal value to human lives. The Ukrainian victim becomes an individual with a past and a future; the Palestinian becomes part of a faceless population that must first prove its innocence.
It is this same logic that allows Western states to invoke international law in Ukraine while supplying weapons, money and political immunity for the destruction of Gaza. Sanctions against judges of the International Criminal Court are another link in the same chain. Law, the media and science have not merely failed to prevent the reproduction of racism; they have themselves become its organisers. These are the very institutions whose declared functions have turned into their opposite.
Eurocentrists treat the war in Ukraine as the moment that set a world war in motion. Yet the war involving the United States, Israel and Iran—a war in which dozens of countries have been subjected to devastation, killing and destruction—is relegated to the category of peripheral wars.
The Islamic Republic: The Foreign Enemy, the Gallows at Home
Opposition to US and Israeli aggression lends not the slightest legitimacy to the Islamic Republic. This regime is itself a state of capital, repression and exploitation. It uses the war to transform society’s anger into national silence. Protest against poverty and executions is labelled “collaboration with the enemy”; reporting becomes “espionage”; and the gallows are turned into a symbol of authority by a government that fears another mass uprising.
Amnesty International—an institution in capital’s rear guard—has reported that more than 6,000 people have been arbitrarily detained since the attacks of 28 February, including protesters, labour activists, journalists, lawyers and members of minorities. Accelerated trials, forced confessions, confiscation of property, political executions and an 88-day internet shutdown have all expanded under the cover of “wartime conditions” (Amnesty International, 2026).
This violence is not a sign of strength. It is the confession of a government that finds itself besieged by the anger of the people. But war does not only strengthen the repressive apparatus. Sanctions also create rents for networks connected to the Revolutionary Guards, state monopolies, holders of foreign currency and those who control smuggling routes. Workers lose bread and medicine while capital connected to power turns scarcity into wealth. Despite their political hostility, the US blockade and the corruption of the Islamic Republic converge at one point: both make the working class bear the cost.
No Choice Between States: Fight Their System
The United States, Israel and the Islamic Republic do not occupy the same position and do not bear equal responsibility. The United States is the imperialist power that initiated the attack and the blockade; Israel is the occupying power and a partner in the expansion of the war; and the Islamic Republic is a repressive state that uses the war to preserve itself. Yet all three follow the same class logic: profit for those above, death for those below; crisis at home, an enemy abroad; security for the state, terror for society.
This is the historic crisis in the total reproduction of capital. The system continues to accumulate, but it can no longer continue except through debt, war, the destruction of nature, racism and repression. The productive forces are transformed into forces of destruction. Law conceals the lawlessness of the powerful. Science makes the machinery of killing more intelligent. Elections turn war into a propaganda instrument for ruling circles. Society’s political and legal superstructure does not contain the crisis; it reproduces it.
No lasting peace can be expected from such a system. The peace of states—if their property, power and armies remain untouched—is merely an interval for rearmament and a new division of markets. The anti-war movement either becomes anticapitalist or degenerates into an appendage of the diplomacy of one of capital’s rival camps.
The force capable of ending the war is not located in presidential palaces. It is found in arms factories, ports, railways, airports, refineries and energy networks. Without workers’ labour, no missile can be manufactured, no ship loaded and no army supplied. The class that sets the war machine in motion is the only force capable of stopping it.
The struggle against the bombing of Iran must be united with the struggle against executions in Iran. The defence of the people of Palestine and Lebanon must be linked to the struggle against occupation, racism and the Israeli war state. The struggle of US workers against rising prices and cuts to social services must target the arms industry and the Trump administration. The working class is neither the Pentagon’s soldier, nor the Islamic Republic’s reserve force, nor cannon fodder for the Israeli state.
Workers’ revolution is not the moral conclusion of this argument; it is its material necessity. When the state, law, the media, science and the market have themselves become mechanisms for reproducing the crisis, repairing one cog cannot stop the machine. Ownership and the power to decide over production, technology, resources and relations among peoples must be taken out of the hands of capital and its states.
The American worker who pays for the war, the Iranian worker trapped between sanctions and repression, the Israeli worker whom the state turns into a soldier of occupation, and the Palestinian and Lebanese workers who live under bombardment are not one another’s enemies. Their common enemy is the system that turns their division, fear and blood into profit.
States begin wars. Capital profits from them. Only the organised working class can end them.
When the Law Rebels Against Its Own Claims
From Trump’s Department of Justice to the Swedish Courts
One stands at the head of the global imperialist order; the other has for decades been presented as a model of the welfare state, public trust and the rule of law. The United States and Sweden cannot be compared in terms of power, history or position in the world. Yet a common process is becoming visible in both countries: institutions intended to reproduce the order of capital under the guise of law, neutrality and legitimacy are themselves becoming arenas of power struggle, corruption, racism and police control.
The bourgeois media explains each case separately: a politically motivated prosecutor, a criminal judge, a corrupt lay judge, a racist party, an unlawful appointment or yet another “scandal”. Each event is presented as an isolated case so that the thread connecting them remains invisible. But what confronts us is not a random collection of abuses. These are symptoms of the historical crisis in the total reproduction of capital.
Capitalism must reproduce more than commodities, profit and labour-power. It must also reproduce obedience, trust, legitimacy, knowledge, the family, education, law and the belief in a shared future. When capital accumulation becomes bound up with recurring crises, debt, militarism, the destruction of public services and an expanding class divide, the crisis does not remain confined to the factory or the market. The political apparatus, the courts, universities, the media and scientific institutions are also corroded from within. Institutions entrusted with containing the contradictions of society become producers of those very contradictions.
The State Was Never Neutral; Now Its Mask Is Falling
The capitalist state has never been a neutral arbiter between classes. From the outset, the law has rested upon the protection of private property, contracts, the wage-labour order and the general conditions of accumulation. Yet the state cannot rule every day through force alone. It must present itself as the representative of the “public interest”. It must portray the courts as independent, the police as guardians of public security and elections as the expression of the popular will.
It is precisely this relative autonomy that enables the state to protect the general interests of the capitalist class—even against the short-term greed of individual capitalists. The historical crisis does not destroy this autonomy at a single stroke; it erodes and restricts it. Institutions meant to regulate conflicts among the ruling class’s factions become weapons in those conflicts. The law continues to exist, but each faction attempts to mobilise it against the other. Elections are held, but the loser declares the result a conspiracy. Courts issue rulings, but the government threatens, dismisses or sanctions undesirable judges and prosecutors.
The law has not disappeared. Its internal contradiction has been laid bare. Formal equality before the law collides with real inequality in power, property and access to the machinery of justice.
The United States: The Department of Justice as an Arena of Political Revenge
Not every legal case against Trump should be dismissed, without examination, as “lawfare”. Some concerned specific allegations of fraud, the retention of classified documents and attempts to overturn an election result. To deny such allegations in advance is simply to repeat the narrative of Trumpism. The central issue lies elsewhere: political conflict in the United States now runs directly through the courts, while the second Trump administration has openly attempted to turn the Department of Justice into an apparatus for pursuing its opponents.
Trump returned to power promising to end the “weaponisation” of the federal government. Instead, his administration created machinery for reviewing past investigations and pursuing those it identifies as enemies. Career prosecutors unwilling to bring charges without sufficient evidence were pushed aside and replaced by presidential loyalists. This is no longer merely a matter of indirect political influence over the judiciary. The personal will of the president seeks to transform itself directly into an indictment.
The case of Letitia James, the New York attorney general who had previously taken legal action against Trump and his companies, offers a clear example. The Department of Justice issued subpoenas targeting her office, but an appeals court blocked their enforcement because the Trump-appointed official responsible had been unlawfully installed as a federal prosecutor. This was the third time an appeals court had rejected a similar appointment by the Trump administration (Reuters, 2026a).
At the same time, the Department of Justice is investigating FBI officials connected to the search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence—a search that uncovered more than one hundred classified documents. The administration is now attempting to turn yesterday’s investigators into today’s defendants (Reuters, 2026b). When a single election can interchange the positions of accused, ruler and prosecutor, this is not evidence of the strength of the law. It shows that the judiciary has been drawn into the settlement of accounts among ruling-class factions.
International Law: Law for Enemies, Immunity for Allies
The crisis of the American legal apparatus does not stop at the country’s borders. When the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu over his alleged responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity, Washington did not limit itself to offering a legal defence of its ally. It imposed sanctions on the Court’s president, judges and officials.
The message was clear: international law is accepted for as long as it prosecutes the enemies of the United States. When the same rules are directed against Washington’s allies, the court itself becomes a “threat”. An institution meant to clothe the imperialist order in the universal language of law is met with economic punishment as soon as it approaches the centre of power.
A power that cannot tolerate even the rules it helped create no longer rules through consent; it demands obedience. International law is not abolished but selectively applied: for Palestine, law means prison and blockade; for Israel, immunity. For Russia, an arrest warrant; for an ally of the United States, sanctions against the judge who issued the warrant.
Sweden: Those Who Judged Others
In Sweden, the crisis takes a different form. Here, the head of government does not yet openly order the prosecution of political opponents. Nevertheless, the authority of the judicial apparatus is being eroded from within.
An investigation by Swedish Radio’s Kaliber revealed that, between 2021 and 2025, forty-three politically appointed lay judges and five professional judges committed and were convicted of crimes while serving in the courts. The offences ranged from drunk driving and fraud to possession of child sexual-abuse material, gross abuse of a woman’s integrity and rape. Some were convicted more than once. There were even individuals who already had criminal convictions before being nominated as lay judges, yet nevertheless passed through the screening procedures of both their parties and the courts (Sveriges Radio, 2026).
An order that demands discipline, “good conduct” and obedience from defendants, migrants, young people in poor neighbourhoods and social-assistance recipients has failed to enforce its most elementary standards upon those entrusted with the power to judge and condemn others.
Nor does responsibility rest solely with a few individuals. Lay judges are nominated by political parties and approved by municipal councils, while the courts are required to verify their law-abiding conduct. Almost every parliamentary party had convicted individuals among its nominees. The Sweden Democrats had the highest number, with twelve, followed by the Moderates with eight and the Social Democrats with seven. The issue is therefore not merely the penetration of a single party. It represents the shared failure of the party and judicial system to scrutinise those who exercise authority over society.
Corruption Is Not an Exception; It Becomes a Method of Infiltration
The situation has deteriorated so far that even the Swedish police—an institution of domestic repression and an instrument for criminalising non-white people and systematically pressuring peripheral and impoverished districts, where much of Sweden’s non-white population lives—presents a broader picture in its 2025 report on corruption.
According to the police, corruption in Sweden has become more professional, industrialised and systematic, while the number of registered cases fails to reflect its true extent. Forty per cent of the reports received by the National Anti-Corruption Unit concerned public procurement or the exercise of governmental authority. Organised crime uses corruption as a strategic instrument to penetrate sensitive institutions and activities vital to society (Polismyndigheten, 2025).
The problem, therefore, is not a handful of “rotten apples”. When public services are fragmented, privatised and transferred to contractors, a network of contracts, intermediaries and private interests grows inside the state. The same state that cuts social services on one side creates new markets for security companies, prisons, surveillance systems and military industries on the other. Corruption does not enter the state from outside. It is produced at the point where private capital meets public power.
From Iron Pipes to State Power
The Sweden Democrats are a concentrated expression of the transformation of Swedish politics. A party rooted in racist milieus, whose leading representatives became notorious for racist insults and the “iron-pipe scandal”—named after party activists armed themselves with iron bars during a street confrontation—is now one of the central pillars of state power, shaping policy on migration, punishment and public order.
The party’s rise cannot be explained merely by propaganda skills or the ignorance of voters. When capitalism can no longer provide job security, housing, healthcare or hope for an improved life, social anger must either turn against class relations or be diverted towards victims further down the social hierarchy. Racism is the mechanism of that diversion. Migrants, refugees, Muslims and residents of poor neighbourhoods are turned into the alleged causes of the crisis, while capital, property and political power disappear from view.
The party no longer shouts from outside the state. Through the Tidö Agreement, it writes policy from within. Residence regulations are tightened; “good conduct” becomes a condition for migrants’ right to remain; imprisonment replaces youth institutional care for fifteen- to seventeen-year-olds; and the indefinite sentence of “security detention” is introduced into the penal system (Regeringskansliet, 2026a; 2026b). A society that retreats from prevention, education and welfare expands prisons, policing and deportation.
Here, racism is not merely cultural hatred. It is a technology of government. It divides the workforce according to citizenship and residence status, makes one section cheaper and permanently vulnerable to deportation, places working-class neighbourhoods under police surveillance and fractures a class with common interests into “Swedes” and “migrants”.
The Face of Capital’s Welfare State Recedes; the Military and Repressive State Stands Exposed
Alongside the expansion of the punitive state, Sweden has launched its largest rearmament programme since the end of the Cold War. The parliamentary parties have agreed to raise core military spending to 3.5 per cent of GDP and allocate another 1.5 per cent to broader security-related expenditure. Up to 300 billion Swedish kronor in new debt may be raised to finance the programme (Government Offices of Sweden, 2025).
There are always “budgetary constraints” when hospitals, schools and elder care require resources. But when NATO demands rearmament, the fiscal rules are pushed aside and hundreds of billions in debt suddenly become possible. This contradiction is not an accounting error. The welfare state was tasked with reproducing labour-power and maintaining class compromise; the state of crisis must expand order, borders, prisons and preparations for war.
This shift is the material meaning of Sweden’s turn to the right: from welfare to security, from equality to “deservingness”, from prevention to punishment and from formal neutrality to active membership in NATO’s military bloc. The judicial apparatus does not decay in a vacuum. It is transformed within a society whose entire state orientation has shifted from social reproduction towards control, deportation and militarism.
A Crisis of Legitimacy, Not the Automatic End of Capitalism
The judicial scandals in Sweden and the political use of the Department of Justice in the United States are not identical phenomena. One occurs at the centre of an imperialist power amid direct conflict between ruling-class factions. The other appears in a smaller country in the form of weakened institutional oversight, expanding corruption and a turn towards the punitive state. Yet both demonstrate the growing difficulty of the bourgeois state in reproducing its image as a public, just and stable order.
The decay of institutions does not automatically bring about the fall of capitalism. A corrupt society can become more policed, more authoritarian and more violent. Distrust can lead to class organisation, but it can also produce conspiratorial thinking, racism and demands for a “strong leader”. Crisis merely opens a field of possibilities; the balance of class forces determines the outcome.
For that reason, the defence of legal rights, judicial independence from direct government commands, the right to protest and formal equality before the law remains necessary—but it is not sufficient. The working class must defend these rights without accepting the myth of the neutrality of the state and the law. The objective cannot be to turn the clock back to some imaginary era of “healthy capitalism”. Such an era never existed for everyone.
The working-class response cannot consist of replacing a few judges, adopting a new ethical code or handing power to another party within the existing apparatus. The network of interests connecting the state, capital, political parties, security companies and military industries must be exposed. The struggle against privatisation and the destruction of public services must be connected to the struggle against racism, the police state, prison expansion and militarism. Social control over institutions must be built from below—in workplaces and communities, through the independent organisation of workers.
When the law rebels against its own claims, the issue is not simply to rescue the reputation of the courts. The task is to put an end to an order that promises justice while guaranteeing the property and power of one class.
The law of capital cannot free itself from the corruption of capital. Only the organised power of the working class can open the way towards an order in which justice is not the legal form of inequality, but a real relationship among free and equal human beings.
References
All online sources were accessed on August 2026.
Government Offices of Sweden (2025) Cross-party agreement on historic rearmament, 19 June.
Polismyndigheten (2025) Korruptionen i Sverige mer professionell och systematisk, 9 December.
Regeringskansliet (2026a) Säkerhetsförvaring – en ny tidsobestämd frihetsberövande påföljd, 22 January.
Regeringskansliet (2026b) Frihetsberövande påföljder för barn och unga, 19 February.
Reuters (2026a) Court blocks subpoenas issued against New York Attorney General, 21 August.
Reuters (2026b) Justice Department investigates FBI officials linked to Mar-a-Lago search, 20 August.
Sveriges Radio (2026) 43 nämndemän begick brott – medan de dömde andra, 17 August.
SVT Nyheter (2022) Järnrörsskandalen, updated 5 October.
The Sword in Fagersta and the Racism Reproduced by Capital
From Örebro to Brinell School: Racism Changes Its Language but Retains Its Class Function
On the afternoon of 21 August 2026, Brinell School in Fagersta became the scene of a sword attack. One person was killed and three others were injured before police shot and arrested the masked assailant. Shortly before the attack, a photograph of a sword inside a school toilet was reportedly published through a TikTok account associated with the perpetrator.
The account had, over an extended period, circulated far-right material and glorified racist mass murderers. Its references reportedly included Anton Lundin Pettersson, who carried out the racist sword attack at Kronan School in Trollhättan in 2015; Anders Behring Breivik, responsible for the massacre in Norway in 2011; and the perpetrator of the mass shooting in Örebro.
These connections do not by themselves settle every legal question concerning motive, responsibility or the precise course of events. Those matters must be established through evidence. But the political meaning of an act is not determined solely by whether the police choose to classify it as racially motivated. When the weapon, the selected location, the digital references and the ideological environment reproduce an already recognisable pattern of far-right violence, refusing to examine that pattern is not neutrality. It is itself a political act.
The attack in Fagersta cannot be reduced to the inexplicable deed of an isolated individual. It belongs to a longer history in which racist ideology, social disintegration and digital cultures of violence converge. To understand it, we must look beyond the perpetrator and examine the society that repeatedly produces both the conditions for such violence and the institutional language through which its political content is obscured.
Police Silence Is Not Neutral
The police have not confirmed that the attack was racist. This absence of confirmation will predictably be treated by much of the media as proof that racism should not be discussed. The burden of proof is reversed: the racist dimension must remain invisible until the very institution responsible for defining the event permits it to become visible.
But the police do not stand outside society. They are part of the state apparatus through which the existing social order is maintained. Their categories are neither timeless nor neutral. They determine what counts as political violence, what is reduced to individual criminality, which populations are treated as potential threats and which perpetrators are granted the status of disturbed individuals without a collective political identity.
The same institution that routinely racialises crime in working-class districts can become remarkably cautious when a white perpetrator has circulated far-right material or invoked racist mass murderers. Migrants, Muslims and residents of impoverished suburbs are rapidly described through collective categories: “culture,” “clan,” “parallel society,” “failed integration” and “imported violence.” The white far-right attacker, by contrast, is often individualised. His actions become a personal tragedy, a psychiatric puzzle or an inexplicable eruption of evil.
This asymmetry is not accidental. It reflects a racialised division in the production of knowledge. Some crimes are used to indict an entire population; others are detached from the political environment that gave them meaning.
Örebro Was a General Rehearsal in Denial
The massacre in Örebro revealed this mechanism with particular clarity. When a white gunman attacked an adult education centre attended by many people with migrant backgrounds, the authorities were quick to caution against describing the act as racist. The absence of an immediately discovered manifesto was treated almost as evidence against a racist motive.
Yet racism does not require a written declaration. It may be expressed through the selection of a place, the social composition of the victims, the language surrounding the act, the hierarchies of human worth reproduced in society and the political climate that teaches people whose lives are to be regarded as disposable.
The earlier article “The Massacre in Örebro: Racism and Class Repression” argued that the refusal to identify this dimension was not a minor analytical mistake. It was part of the social organisation of denial. The state did not need to prove that racism was absent; it merely postponed, narrowed and depoliticised the question until the attack could be absorbed into the familiar categories of individual criminality and mental illness.
Fagersta must be understood against this background. The question is not whether the two attacks were identical. They were not. Nor is it necessary to claim that every unanswered question has already been resolved. The point is that they enter the same political field: schools marked by class divisions and migration, perpetrators formed within violent digital environments, and institutions reluctant to recognise racism unless it appears in the exact language of nineteenth-century racial biology.
Violence with a History, a Pattern and a Network
The Fagersta attack stands within a long and well-documented sequence of racist and far-right violence in Sweden.
The “Laser Man,” John Ausonius, shot people he perceived as immigrants in Stockholm and Uppsala in 1991 and 1992. Peter Mangs carried out shootings in Malmö between 2003 and 2010, targeting people with migrant backgrounds. In Trollhättan in 2015, Anton Lundin Pettersson entered Kronan School armed with a sword and murdered three people. The police investigation concluded that he had selected victims on the basis of skin colour.
The school attacks in Eslöv in 2021 and Kristianstad in 2022 involved young perpetrators influenced by far-right ideology, violent online communities and manifestos circulating across national borders. These events demonstrate that the perpetrators are not simply isolated individuals discovering identical symbols, targets and methods independently of one another. They inhabit a transnational digital milieu in which earlier killers are transformed into icons, violence into spectacle and murder into a form of political communication.
Such networks do not necessarily possess formal membership lists, central leaderships or coherent programmes. Their organisational form is often dispersed: video clips, memes, manifestos, encrypted groups, algorithms and repeated visual symbols. But decentralisation does not make them politically meaningless. Capital itself increasingly organises production, circulation and control through networks. There is no reason to assume that reactionary violence must resemble an old party organisation before it can be understood as a social force.
Modern Racism Does Not Need Skull Measurements
Racism today rarely presents itself in the vocabulary of classical racial biology. It does not always speak openly of blood, genes or biological superiority. The old categories have been discredited, but the social function they performed has not disappeared. Racism has changed language.
Contemporary racism speaks instead of culture, values, civilisation, integration, security, criminality and national belonging. It claims that inequality arises not from exploitation, segregation or political decisions, but from the supposed characteristics of particular populations. It divides society between those considered capable of belonging and those permanently suspected of failing to belong.
The racialised person is not necessarily declared biologically inferior. It is enough to portray them as culturally incompatible, socially burdensome, potentially criminal, insufficiently loyal or impossible to integrate. The vocabulary is modernised while the hierarchy remains.
This is why racism must not be understood primarily as a collection of prejudiced opinions inside individual minds. It is a social relationship reproduced through the labour market, housing, schools, migration law, policing, media and technology. It determines who receives permanent security and who lives under the threat of deportation; who is offered stable employment and who is confined to precarious labour; whose neighbourhood is treated as a community and whose is designated a “vulnerable area.”
Racism is therefore not a residue from an otherwise enlightened society. It is continually reproduced within modern capitalism because it continues to perform necessary political and economic functions.
Racism Is Capital’s Weapon Against the Working Class
Within the framework of the theory of capital’s total reproduction crisis, racism must be understood through its role in preserving capitalist social relations.
Capitalism must reproduce more than commodities and profits. It must reproduce labour power, political obedience, institutional legitimacy, social hierarchy and the belief that the existing order has a future. When the system can no longer guarantee rising living standards, secure employment, affordable housing, functioning welfare or confidence in tomorrow, discontent grows.
That discontent contains a danger for capital: it can develop into class consciousness. Workers may begin to recognise that deteriorating schools, understaffed hospitals, insecure employment, rising rents and collapsing public services have common causes. They may direct their anger against ownership, profit and the political power of capital.
Racism intervenes to prevent this recognition. It translates a vertical conflict between classes into a horizontal conflict within the working class. The migrant is blamed for the housing shortage rather than the property owner, construction capital or decades of privatisation. The refugee is blamed for deteriorating welfare rather than tax cuts, austerity and militarisation. The racialised young person is presented as the source of insecurity while the economic system that produces exclusion, poverty and social disintegration disappears from view.
Racism makes sections of the working class more exploitable by weakening their rights and making their residence conditional. At the same time, it offers other workers an imaginary privilege: the belief that national or racial belonging can compensate for declining material conditions. Both groups lose. One is pushed downward through direct discrimination; the other is bound more firmly to the state and prevented from recognising its common interests with those below.
Racism is therefore not merely hatred directed at minorities. It is a political technology for dividing labour, disciplining the working class and suppressing the possibility of a united movement against capital.
The Crisis of Capital’s Reproduction Enters the School
The school is one of the central institutions of social reproduction. It does not only transmit knowledge. It prepares new generations for working life, produces social norms, distributes expectations and helps maintain the belief that effort will lead to a better future.
But when capitalism enters a prolonged reproduction crisis, the school is transformed. Resources decline while control expands. Teachers and other staff are burdened with impossible responsibilities. Segregation deepens. Private actors extract profit from public funding. Students encounter a society that promises opportunity while materially narrowing their futures.
This contradiction creates neither automatic class consciousness nor automatic solidarity. It can also produce despair, isolation and nihilism. Young people who experience society as meaningless may seek identity in digital communities that transform humiliation into fantasies of power. Far-right environments offer them enemies, heroes and a narrative in which personal failure becomes racial or civilisational warfare.
The attacker is responsible for his actions. A structural analysis does not abolish individual responsibility. It explains why similar individuals, symbols and attacks continue to emerge from the same social conditions.
When schools, care services, youth centres and stable local communities are dismantled, the resulting vacuum is not empty. It is occupied by commercial platforms whose profit depends on attention, conflict and emotional escalation. Hatred becomes content. Mass murderers become brands. Previous attacks become templates for the next one.
The sword in Fagersta was wielded by an individual, but the social forces that placed it within a recognisable political mythology were collective.
Media, Search Engines and Artificial Intelligence: The Technical Reproduction of Racism
The institutions that classify and circulate knowledge are also part of this process. Newspapers, television, search engines, social-media platforms and artificial-intelligence systems do not merely reflect society from outside. They organise visibility. They decide which associations appear natural, which facts are foregrounded, which contexts are omitted and which interpretations are treated as legitimate.
Digital systems are trained on material produced by societies already structured by colonial histories, class power and racial hierarchy. Their categories often reproduce the language of states, police authorities and dominant media. A claim made by an institution is classified as verified; the experience of those subjected to that institution is downgraded as opinion, allegation or activism.
This does not mean that every technical system or every output is consciously racist. The problem is deeper. Technical systems can reproduce racism without possessing racist intention because the data, institutional authorities and standards of credibility on which they rely are themselves socially structured.
When artificial intelligence repeats that an attack cannot be discussed as racist because the police have not confirmed a racist motive, it converts institutional caution into epistemological truth. When a search engine elevates police statements above the historical pattern of racialised violence, it helps reproduce the state’s monopoly over interpretation. Technology then becomes part of racism’s infrastructure—not necessarily by openly preaching racial supremacy, but by systematically narrowing what can be recognised as racism.
For that reason, criticism must also be directed at the technical organisation of knowledge. Algorithms, platforms and artificial intelligence are not neutral instruments floating above class society. They are developed, owned and governed within capitalist relations and generally reproduce the priorities of those relations unless consciously contested.
Psychologisation Is a Political Operation
Mental illness may be relevant to understanding an individual perpetrator. But when psychological explanations are used to replace political analysis, they perform an ideological function.
The opposition between mental illness and racism is false. A person may suffer from psychological problems and simultaneously act through a racist worldview. Ideology does not require a healthy or internally consistent mind. On the contrary, far-right environments often recruit personal despair and redirect it toward collective enemies.
Psychologisation isolates the perpetrator from history. It turns a patterned event into a unique pathology. The repeated references, copied methods and selected targets disappear, leaving only the incomprehensible individual.
This reduction is applied selectively. When violence is associated with Muslims or migrants, political and cultural explanations are often introduced immediately. Entire communities are asked to explain themselves. When the perpetrator is white and shaped by far-right material, society suddenly discovers the need for restraint, complexity and individualisation.
To reject this double standard is not to abandon evidentiary discipline. It is to apply the same analytical principles to all forms of political violence.
The State Condemns Violence While Normalising Its Language
Far-right violence does not develop separately from parliamentary politics. The individual attacker and the state are not identical, but they act within a shared ideological environment.
For years, politicians across much of the parliamentary spectrum have described migration as a burden, racialised neighbourhoods as internal threats and non-white populations as problems to be managed. The Sweden Democrats have played a central role in shifting this language into the heart of state policy, but other parties have increasingly adopted the same categories.
Residence rights are made more insecure. Deportations expand. Police powers and surveillance increase. Collective suspicion is directed at entire neighbourhoods. Social problems created by class inequality are redefined as problems of culture and national identity.
The state may condemn a far-right attack while continuing to reproduce the distinctions on which far-right ideology feeds: deserving and undeserving, Swedish and foreign, integrated and dangerous, civilised and incompatible.
This does not mean that government policy mechanically orders individual acts of terror. It means that institutional racism and street-level racist violence belong to the same social totality. One operates through laws, budgets, borders and police practices; the other through harassment, assault and murder. Their methods differ, but both help deepen divisions within the working class.
The Struggle Against Racism Must Return to Class Struggle
Liberal anti-racism often reduces the problem to language, representation and individual attitudes. These matters are not irrelevant, but they are insufficient. A society can celebrate diversity while maintaining a racialised labour market. A company can adopt inclusive advertising while exploiting migrant workers under worse conditions. A state can condemn hate speech while expanding deportations and police control.
An effective struggle against racism must therefore confront its material foundations. It must defend equal political and social rights regardless of citizenship or origin. It must oppose deportability as a method of labour discipline. It must fight segegation not by criminalising neighbourhoods but by challenging housing capital, privatisation and class inequality. It must connect the defence of racialised communities with struggles over wages, working conditions, schools, healthcare and public services.
Above all, it must reject the idea that workers born in Sweden and workers who have migrated to Sweden possess opposing interests. They are placed in competition by capital, but competition is not destiny. It is an organised relationship that can be broken through common struggle.
The history of the workers’ movement demonstrates that racism advances when working-class organisation retreats. Where collective institutions weaken, the nation, ethnicity and religion are offered as substitutes for class solidarity. Where workers organise across those divisions, racism loses part of its material power.
The Working-Class Response: Breaking the Division Capital Needs
The response to the attack in Fagersta cannot be limited to increased policing, more surveillance and harder punishment. These measures strengthen the same repressive state that already treats racialised working-class communities as objects of suspicion. Nor is it enough to demand that social-media corporations remove a few accounts after violence has already occurred.
Racism will not disappear because the state finds a better definition for it. Nor will it be overcome by returning to an imagined period of healthy Swedish capitalism. The welfare state itself was structured by class compromise, national borders and unequal inclusion. Today, as that compromise disintegrates, the coercive and racialising functions of the state become increasingly visible.
The alternative is not silence, denial or a more efficient police apparatus. It is the independent organisation of the working class across every division created by capital.
The sword was raised in Fagersta, but the social force that can stop the next attack must be built in workplaces, schools and neighbourhoods. Against racist fragmentation, class solidarity. Against the reproduction of crisis, the conscious organisation of those whose labour reproduces society.
Sources
Diskrimineringsombudsmannen (DO), material on discrimination and structural racism in Sweden: https://www.do.se/
Expo, documentation and analysis of the Swedish far right and ideologically motivated violence: https://expo.se/
Internationalist Workers’ Organisation (IWO), “The Massacre in Örebro: Racism and Class Repression”.
Proletären, reporting and commentary on racist and far-right violence in Sweden: https://proletaren.se/
Reuters, reporting on the attack at Brinell School in Fagersta, 21 August 2026: https://www.reuters.com/
Sveriges Radio, reporting on the Fagersta attack and the police investigation: https://www.sverigesradio.se/
SVT Nyheter, reporting on the attack at Brinell School and its aftermath: https://www.svt.se/nyheter
Rebuilding Internationalism:
Theory, Science and Organisation Within the Movement
Opening remarks
In the previous issue, we showed how programme and organisation, when detached from the real movement of the working class, can become brands in the political marketplace: each current preserves its “own” name, history and programme as political capital, replacing the expansion of class power with the survival of the organisation. At the opposite pole, theory acquires autonomy from struggle and organisation within academia and becomes a profession devoted to producing interpretations, articles and intellectual prestige. One reproduces organisation without the living production of theory; the other reproduces theory without any need for organisation and class action.
The target of this article is not theory, programme, organisation or centralisation. A class confronting the concentrated power of capital and the state will be defeated without knowledge, political theory, programme, organisation and the concentration of its forces. Our target is a communism that transforms Marxism from the living science of class struggle into a completed body of doctrines; treats the programme as the organisation’s title deed; regards the organisation as the exclusive bearer of consciousness; and reduces the movement to raw material for implementing the “correct line”.
The question is not centralisation versus dispersion. It is a conflict between two forms of centralisation: movement-centred centralisation and doctrinal centralisation. In the first, the scattered experiences of struggle are concentrated in knowledge, political theory, programme and organisation, while the results of action once again expose all of them to criticism. In the second, this circulation is broken: theory and organisation place themselves above the movement, attribute defeats to the ignorance of the masses and reproduce themselves without submitting to correction.
Fron Confession to Manifesto
In June 1847, as the League of the Just was about to become the Communist League, Engels wrote a draft entitled Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith. The text took the form of questions and answers: the answers were known in advance, and the member’s task was to learn and repeat them. This form corresponded to the tradition of secret societies and doctrinal sects; by questioning a member’s beliefs, the organisation fixed the boundary between insider and outsider.
A few months later, Engels proposed abandoning this form and calling the text a “Communist Manifesto”, because it needed to contain some history (Engels, 1847). This was more than a change of title. A confession asks the individual which principles they believe in; a manifesto declares before society which force has arisen from its real contradictions and in which direction it is moving. The starting point of the first is belief; that of the second is history and class struggle.
The Manifesto made this break explicit: Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties, have no interests separate from those of the proletariat as a whole and establish no sectarian principles of their own by which to shape the proletarian movement. Their theoretical conclusions express in general terms the actual relations arising from the existing class struggle (Marx and Engels, 1848, ch. II). This did not mean dissolving Communists into spontaneity. The same text described them as the most resolute section of the movement in practice and as possessing, in theory, a broader understanding of its course and results. But this theoretical advantage was neither ownership of the truth nor a right to rule over the class. The validity of theory depended on its ability to explain the movement, expand the horizons of struggle and correct itself through historical testing. That is why the Manifesto ended not with the command “believe”, but with the call “unite”.
The Fist International: The Centre as a Means of Connection
The First International was not created in 1864 by a circle that had decided to build a “world party”. After the defeat of the revolutions of 1848, the European workers’ movement had risen again through strikes, trade unions, the struggle to reduce working hours and cross-border solidarity. The new organisation arose from the need of these existing forces for communication and cooperation.
The General Rules of the International began with the principle that the emancipation of the working class must be conquered by the working class itself. The Association was established to create “a central medium of communication and co-operation” among workers’ organisations in different countries; the annual congress elected the General Council, and the Council was required to report to the congress (IWMA, 1864/1871). The centre was not a brain installed above a passive body. Its task was to transmit information, connect struggles, counter the transfer of strike-breakers, organise solidarity and generalise experience.
In his instructions to the delegates of the General Council for the Geneva Congress, Marx defined the International’s function as the “combination and generalisation” of the working class’s hitherto disconnected efforts. At the same time, he proposed an inquiry into the condition of the working class in different countries, to be conducted by the workers themselves (Marx, 1866). Here, organisation and science are not separate. The organisational network is not merely the executor of research produced elsewhere; it gathers data, records and compares experience, formulates new questions and produces the material for common knowledge.
Value, Price and Profit demonstrates this relationship. The discussion began with a living dispute in the General Council over the value of the struggle for wages. To answer it, Marx had to analyse the relation between wages, value and profit. His conclusion neither rejected strikes nor sanctified them: trade unions are necessary centres of resistance against capital, but if they remain confined to fighting the effects of the system and fail to use their organised forces for the abolition of the wages system, they remain within the limits of capital (Marx, 1865). The struggle raised the question; the organisation made it a common problem; scientific inquiry reconstructed its inner relations; and the result returned to political theory and the guidance of action.
Political Theory, Scence and Orgnisation
The relation between political theory and science is not one of command and obedience. Political theory raises problems, horizons and hypotheses from within the struggle. Scientific inquiry reconstructs real inner relations and tendencies, even when its conclusions conflict with the movement’s immediate hopes or the organisation’s official position. These results return to political theory and refine or transform programme and strategy. Organisation, in turn, concentrates this process and carries its conclusions into common action.
The Paris Commune was a decisive example. In their 1872 preface to the Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote that its general principles remained valid, but the experience of the Commune had rendered part of its earlier programme obsolete: the working class could not simply take possession of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes (Marx and Engels, 1872). The movement did not merely “confirm” theory; it corrected it. Accepting that correction was not a sign of theoretical weakness but a condition of theory’s scientific character.
The science of class struggle is neither a collection of beliefs belonging to an organisation nor autonomous knowledge produced inside the university. Science must be capable of moving beyond immediate consciousness, constructing models and producing unwelcome conclusions; yet it derives its subject matter, its problems and the possibility of historical testing from its relationship with the real movement. Organisation without science becomes blind. Science separated from the movement becomes expertise without a historical subject. Political theory without either collapses into rhetoric and voluntarism.
This relationship can be condensed as follows:
The experience and struggle of the class ←→ problems and collective consciousness ←→ scientific inquiry ←→ political theory and programme ←→ organisation and common action ←→ new experiences and problems
The two-way arrows are essential. No centre, party, scientific institution or intellectual group has the right to determine the conclusion in advance and then gather experience merely to prove it.
Sectarianism and the Transformation of Marxism into Doctrine
Marx did not define a sect by its small size or the militancy of its slogans. A sect emerges when a current locates its reason for existence not in what it shares with the class movement, but in a special sign, programme or doctrine that distinguishes it from the movement. It then demands that the class subordinate itself to the organisation’s “particular movement” (Marx, 1868; 1871).
In this sense, a current may be large and wealthy, with newspapers, trade unions and parliamentary representatives, yet continue to operate according to a sectarian logic: it treats its separate existence as an end; regards the programme as its property title; recognises the movement’s experience only when it confirms the official line; and turns theory into a test of members’ loyalty. Sectarianism is the organisational form of the closure of knowledge; dogmatism is its epistemological form.
The Second International reproduced this contradiction on a vast scale. Its parties organised millions of workers, expanded the workers’ press and workers’ education, and advanced the struggle for suffrage, the eight-hour day and social protection. But the same concentration of forces built an apparatus of representatives, professional cadres, party schools and theoretical specialists. The programme became an official party document, while members increasingly became the recipients and executors of knowledge produced above them.
Within such a structure, Marxism could be transformed from a method of criticism and discovery into a complete worldview and then into a doctrine: a ready-made collection of “laws of history” guaranteeing the victory of socialism. The growth of electoral votes, membership and party property was treated as evidence of history’s necessary progress. The final goal remained in the programme; the apparatus acquired a different material existence in parliament, the trade unions and the national state. A theory that should have criticised the organisation became its symbolic capital and a means of legitimising it.
1914: A Programme That Could Not Guide the Organisation
The Basel Congress of the Second International in November 1912 called upon the workers of the world to oppose imperialist war. Less than two years later, on 4 August 1914, the German Social Democratic parliamentary group voted for the Kaiser’s war credits, while the other major parties—with significant exceptions and resistance—also aligned themselves with their national states (Second International, 1912; SPD Reichstag Fraction, 1914).
This collapse cannot be explained solely by the betrayal of a few leaders. If millions of members, powerful trade unions, an extensive press and a Marxist programme could not prevent workers’ organisations from becoming instruments of military mobilisation, we must ask where real power had been concentrated. Internationalism existed in resolutions, but the apparatus’s daily life was organised within the national state, elections, collective bargaining and legal status. At the moment of crisis, the programme could not guide the organisation because the organisation had long been living according to a different material logic.
The Fourth of August 1914 revealed the separation of science, political theory, organisation and movement. The organisation was immense, but its centralisation no longer transformed the global experience of the class into independent power; it defended its property and position within the national order. The doctrine remained in books and resolutions, while the apparatus acted according to the requirements of its own reproduction.
Rebuilding Internationalism
The rebuilding of proletarian internationalism does not begin by gathering existing organisations under a new flag, name or committee. If the old relationship between theory, organisation and movement remains intact, the new centre will merely become a common market for political brands or a larger sect. The first task is to reconstruct a relationship in which the working class is not the audience for a programme but the subject that produces knowledge and power.
This does not mean celebrating dispersion, rejecting leadership or passively awaiting spontaneity. Movement-centred centralisation must be capable of decision, coordination, research and common execution. But its authority derives from its capacity to generalise experience, preserve the memory of struggle, organise the collective production of knowledge and remain accountable to the movement. Doctrinal centralisation, by contrast, filters experience, conceals failure, shields the programme from testing and makes the survival of the organisation the measure of the class’s advance.
Rebuilding internationalism means returning Marxism from the vaults of parties and the autonomy of academia to the terrain of production, strikes, war, migration and organisation—not so that theory dissolves into immediate experience, but so that experience becomes a problem, the problem becomes science, science becomes political theory, theory becomes programme, and programme becomes organisation and common action. The results of action must, in turn, be able to transform every link in this process.
A communism that does not learn from the movement is not the science of class struggle, even if it has memorised the works of Marx. An organisation that recognises the class only when it carries out its line is not the centre of the movement. A programme that cannot be changed by defeats and new discoveries is not a guide to action; it is a confession of faith that has once again taken the place of a manifesto.
The proletariat does not need another sect to speak in its name. It needs a global power that arises from within its own struggle: a power capable of transforming its experience into knowledge, its knowledge into theory and programme, and its programme into an organisation for the transformation of the world.
Selected References
Engels, F. (1847) ‘Letter to Karl Marx’, 23–24 November, MECW, vol. 38, p. 149.
International Working Men’s Association (IWMA) (1864/1871) ‘General Rules’. Text
Marx, K. (1865) Value, Price and Profit. Text
Marx, K. (1866) ‘Instructions for the Delegates of the Provisional General Council’. Text
Marx, K. (1868) ‘Letter to Johann Baptist von Schweitzer’, 13 October. Text
Marx, K. (1871) ‘Letter to Friedrich Bolte’, 23 November. Text
Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1848) Manifesto of the Communist Party. Text
Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1872) ‘Preface to the German Edition of the Communist Manifesto’. Text
Second International (1912) ‘Manifesto of the International Socialist Congress at Basel’. Text
SPD Reichstag Fraction (1914) ‘The Socialists Support the War’, 4 August. Text
