Ajamu Baraka, BAR Editor and Columnist, gave this presentation at the U.S. Peace Council Webinar on Iran.
Comrades, friends, colleagues—
We are living through a decisive historical rupture.
This is not a moment of policy disagreement. It is not a moment of partisan confusion among anti-imperialists or even simply a crisis of democracy. We are in the midst of a deepening capitalist crisis so profound that capital has abandoned even the performance
of its commitment to liberal enlightenment values.
The institutions it created—
the United Nations system,
the so-called rules-based international order,
the human rights regime—
have been stripped of their moral veneer.
What remains is naked power.
The doctrine now is simple: Full spectrum dominance — by any means necessary.
And when empire adopts that posture, clarity becomes a revolutionary obligation. It is imperative—especially for those of us operating in the imperial core—that we understand something fundamental.
At moments like this,
positions that appear nuanced, balanced, moderate—
positions that seek compromise with reaction,
that dilute anti-imperialism in the name of complexity—
do not remain neutral.
They objectively amplify the forces of reaction. They legitimize the structures of domination. They align, whether consciously or not, with Western and U.S. imperialism. Intentions do not negate political effect. In periods of fascist consolidation, confusion is not accidental.
It is produced.
As one left formation in Iran and its diaspora has correctly stated:
At this stage of Western imperialist domination, the global contradiction between labor and capital is embodied in the contradiction between the masses of the world and imperialism. The main axis of struggle today is the defense of nations and peoples against imperialism’s political, economic, and military domination.
That does not erase secondary contradictions. But determining which contradiction is primary—
which contradiction must define the agenda of struggle— is a matter of political life and death. This requires dialectical clarity. It requires precision. It requires the ability to analyze the totality
and not be trapped in fragments. Because imperialism thrives on fragmentation.
Imperialism advances a fatal illusion. It tells the oppressed:
You can achieve social justice
within the framework of imperial domination.
You can secure democratic freedoms
while remaining subordinate to empire.
You can fight for human rights
without confronting the global system that negates them.
And perhaps most dangerously—
It tells us that struggle can remain purely national.
That what happens domestically is separable from the global architecture of domination. This is ideological mystification. The domestic and the global are fused.
Look at the United States.
What we are witnessing is not random authoritarianism. It is the maturation of a coherent architecture of repression. A national security state that fuses: Intelligence agencies.
Militarized policing, surveillance systems, and ideological discipline into a single integrated mechanism of control.
This system is not reactive. It is proactive. It does not wait for crisis. It anticipates it. It prepares for it. It disciplines populations in advance of rupture.
This is not about safety. It is about managing dissent. It is about stabilizing imperial order
in a moment when consent is no longer sufficient. Because a system built on exploitation, extraction, and endless expansion cannot govern through consent when its contradictions sharpen, it must govern through coercion.
Consider immigration enforcement in the United States.
ICE raids in cities, mass arrests, workplace sweeps, collaboration between federal agents and local police. This is not merely about deportation. It is about terror. It is about deterrence. It is about instilling fear so pervasive that communities retreat into silence.
Migrant communities become laboratories of repression. Spaces where techniques are tested. Where methods of fragmentation are refined. And once perfected— those techniques do not remain confined, they are generalized, expanded, normalized.
Now consider the training relationships between U.S. police forces and Israeli security forces.
This is not symbolic. Israeli policing is shaped by occupation. By counterinsurgency, by the management of a population defined as a permanent threat. It is not designed to serve a public. It is designed to dominate an enemy.
When U.S. police import these models, they import more than tactics. They import a political logic, a logic that declares:
Certain populations are not citizens.
They are risks.
They are problems.
They are enemies to be contained.
This is the fusion of foreign and domestic repression.
The techniques used to occupy abroad are now fully integrated into governance at home. Sanctions logic becomes economic discipline, counterinsurgency logic becomes urban policing and military doctrine becomes domestic policy.
The empire has come home. Not because it prefers to— But because it must.
And this is what we must understand. We are not facing isolated authoritarian tendencies. We are confronting the consolidation of globalized fascism. A system in which:
International gangsterism is normalized.
State terror is justified.
Genocide is rationalized.
Sanctions are weaponized starvation.
And all of it is framed as defense of democracy.
When barbarism becomes normalized at the global level, it will not remain external. It returns inward. It reshapes the domestic terrain. It produces a Hobbesian international order— where the most powerful impose medieval forms of domination to preserve their interests. And once that normalization is complete— The descent accelerates.
Beyond Iran we have Venezuela, we have Cuba, occupation in Haiti, continued colonization in Puerto Rico, and increasing domestic terror within the imperialist core of the U.S.
So what is the task before us?
It is not reform within this globalized architecture of repression. It is not pleading with multilateral institutions that have already revealed their impotence or complicity. It is not technocratic adjustment. The task is confrontation - political confrontation, ideological confrontation and organizational confrontation.
Because only organized resistance can disrupt a system that has abandoned pretense. Anti-imperialism is not optional in this moment. It is not one tendency among many. It is the central organizing principle of the conjuncture. To misidentify the primary contradiction
is to disarm the masses. To equivocate in the face of imperial consolidation
is to assist its stabilization.
We must say clearly:
There can be no authentic struggle for human rights
that does not confront imperial domination. There can be no democratic renewal
that leaves the imperial war machine intact. There can be no social justice
inside a global order structured by extraction and control.
The choice before us is stark. Either we align our analysis with the realities of global power, or we retreat into comforting illusions.
History will not reward ambiguity. It will not excuse hesitation. The imperative is clear:
Confront imperialism.
Expose the unity of global and domestic repression.
Build movements that understand
that the fight for national liberation,
the fight against sanctions and militarization, the fight against racialized policing and migrant terror— Are not separate fights. They are one struggle. And only by confronting the totality
can we begin to dismantle it.
And for this programmatic imperative at this historical moment - there must be:
No Compromise, No Retreat!
All Power to the people!
Thank you.
Ajamu Baraka is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. He is the Director of the North-South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights and serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the U.S.-based United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC).
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