Defeating Jim Crow 2.0

League Committee of Basic Needs Electoral Committee (BNEC)

As we approach to 2026 midterm elections, a chilling fusion of state power and corporate technology is forging a new form of fascism – one rooted, not in 20th-century industrial capitalism, but in the marriage of A.I. with out of control political police and blatant racialized exclusion. This threat is the sharp downside of the economic revolution. It is driven by the replacement of human workers by automation, A.I. and other forms of digital technology.

The Trump-Epstein billionaire regime has unleashed a fascist hybrid of anti-Black Jim Crow politics and anti-immigrant repression that we call Jim Crow 2.0. This new form of corporate dictatorship combines the worst aspects of historic racial subjugation with modern digital technology and state power. It is a grave danger to Black and immigrant communities as well as to all working people.

One example is the silent “corporate colonization” of land through A.I. infrastructure. A.I. data centers are projected to provide few jobs while consuming vast amounts of water and global energy and spewing air, water and noise pollution into marginalized communities. Today’s capitalism does not aim to create broad prosperity, but to extract and concentrate value in fewer hands at the expense of workers and the environment.

POLITICAL BREAKDOWN

Since the 1970s and ’80s, automation and robots have displaced millions of U.S. industrial workers. Digital technologies enabled producers to offshore millions more jobs to global supply chains. This tectonic shift severed billions of people from stable work and from any meaningful connection to the capitalist class, whose profits depended on their labor. It was the owning class, not workers, that exported the jobs resulting in deindustrialization.

The result was a rupture in the social safety net. Along with the vanished jobs and wages, public education, healthcare, housing and democratic participation were hollowed out. The production-centered economy was replaced by an economy of speculative wealth – hedge funds trading cryptocurrencies and other investment vehicles untethered from productive labor – while millions of workers were left to fend for themselves. Private equity firms profited by buying up slum housing, neglecting maintenance and raising rents.

By destroying the social contract, the state is transforming government from a body that at least serves the public in some ways into one that openly prioritizes managing market states and protecting privilege.

RACISM AS STATE STRATEGY

The original Jim Crow laws passed by Southern states rolled back many of the gains that Black people made during federal Reconstruction. These laws disenfranchised Blacks, entrenched segregation, terrorized and upheld economic exploitation under the veneer of “law and order.” The Jim Crow system was an instrument of 19th century capitalism, which employed racial terror and division in order to subjugate the working class in the South. Then, with the South acting as a low-wage drag on the whole country’s workers, the capitalist class could control workers in the North and West. 

Today’s racial attacks on migrants echo the Exclusion Acts and pass laws of the past. They dredge up the most deranged racial stereotypes from our darkest past to try to turn America’s workers against each other. Trump prepared the ICE and Border Patrol invasion of Minnesota by calling Somali immigrants “garbage.”

ICE violence against protesters of all colors was designed to suppress and terrorize all opposition, but the opposite happened. When the videotaped shootings of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti were seen, the entire city of Minneapolis rose in a general strike on January 23 and massive protests and school walkouts erupted all across the country on July 30. As Adam Serwer pointed out, “the fact that the two people who were killed in Minnesota were white Americans illustrates the extent to which Stephen Miller’s war on ‘illegal immigration’ is actually a war on the American people.” Trump was forced to end the “Metro Surge” and the Democratic Party even voted to cut off funding to the Department of Homeland Security.

WHITE SUPREMACY OR NEW SOCIETY?

Nevertheless, the administration still plans to expand ICE from 10,000 to over 22,000 agents and still plans for construction of massive “detention megacenters.” The infrastructure of mass incarceration they are building is ultimately aimed at jailing immigrant and working-class communities, with legal status or not.

Instruments of repression are not separate from economic transformation. White supremacy is indispensable to the ruling class pursuit of maximum profit. By stoking racial divisions, Jim Crow 2.0 tries to discourage] white workers from recognizing their shared interests with Black and immigrant workers. That division used to successfully disarm working people as a collective social force, making it easier for powerful elites to entrench economic systems that exploit and discard us. But today’s working class fighters are challenging that way of being ruled. 

Fascism is the downside of the digital revolution, but economics and history teach us that fascism is not inevitable and not even likely to win. While technology has unquestionably magnified the horrors of modern warfare and genocide, it has also led to virtually all the progress in social well-being we have experienced over the years. Industrial technology led to the Civil War and abolition of slavery in the United States. The mechanical cotton-picker led to the end of sharecropping and the 1960s civil rights movement. New technology creates the conditions for social revolution. But it takes the thinking, teaching and organization of human beings to carry it through to victory.

Defeating a fascist consolidation of power in the 2026 midterm elections matters. But this moment calls for more than reactive policy adjustments. It requires a profound shift in our collective consciousness. The time has come to make solidarity, not division, the foundation of our politics and make cooperation, not competition and commodification, the foundation of our economy.

Reforms within a violent system can reduce harm in some cases, but as new technology undermines the old economy and pushes the ruling class toward fascism no reforms can dismantle the underlying structures that produce terror and inequality. As long as the state serves power, wealth and capital – at the expense of ordinary people – peace will remain distant and justice incomplete.

The transformation we need must unite the employed and unemployed, irrespective of race, nationality, gender or background, in a shared fight for dignity, rights and for life itself. By building multiracial, class-conscious movements that defend our neighbors, protect the environment and reclaim our institutions, we can roll back Jim Crow 2.0 and refuse the slide into A.I.-driven state fascism.

America’s unfinished revolution is not behind us. It is here. And it will be won not by retreat, but by rising together to fight for the needs of our people.

Published on March 2, 2026 This article originated in Rally!
P.O. Box 408002 Chicago, IL 60640 rally@lrna.org