Empires and Boomerangs

State-sanctioned violence from the corporate-government subdues the working populations at home and abroad. Call it the imperial model of society under capitalism’s grow or die drive. Americans do not receive formal education about this basic building block of empires, now or before.

Instead, Americans receive indoctrination about Uncle Sam spreading democracy and freedom around the world, a distraction from the corporate-state using violence to grab land, labor and natural resources, and to pound consent into domestic populations.

President Donald J. Trump merely says the quiet part out loud, with the recent military intervention in Venezuela to seize its elected president and capture the nation’s oil reserves a case in point.

Current events stateside involving Border Patrol/Immigration and Customs agents brutalizing, maiming and murdering citizens and immigrants alike bring the concept of an imperial boomerang into sharper focus. The concept in brief connects the imperial mistreatment of people in the Global South, past and present, with similar fates befalling the domestic populations in the countries of the Global North. Below I will flesh out some characteristics of an imperial boomerang.

A little known fact linked to the imperial boomerang is this. U.S. law enforcement has been training with the Israel Defense Forces for years. The IDF controls Palestinians with a shoot-first-and-ask-last approach. The IDF uses AI to surveil and dominate an occupied population. There are parallels to the punishment system stateside.

On U.S. soil, Big Tech and state-sanctioned violence is a daily reality for non-white Americans going about their lives. For instance, there is a prison-industrial-complex that arrests, prosecutes and imprisons African Americans well out of proportion to their numbers in the general population. Living while black is a carceral cross to bear for working class African Americans, a corporate-state “solution” to U.S. deindustrialization and a population whose labor services are unneeded, while functioning economically as a cash cow for politically connected companies aligned with this modern-day color line.

I link U.S. Border Patrol/Immigration and Customs agents using the shoot-first-and-ask-last tactics that the IDF uses in the Palestinian occupied territories and law enforcement stateside against working-class minorities to shoot dead Caucasian American protesters in Minneapolis standing up for immigrants. The world sees both examples of state-sanctioned violence online. What unites the victims of all backgrounds, now coming into view, is their positions as members of the working class.

Theorist and writer Aimé Césaire termed the imperial boomerang a process by which violent tactics of European and American powers to subdue foreign populations to steal their labor and land boomerangs back home. These tactics of the corporate-government state didn’t fall from the sky, nor did they begin in 2026. The corporate-government state propelled the African slave trade, India’s fall to British conquest and America’s rise from a British colony to the sole superpower, economically and politically, after World War II.

Every dog has its day, and every empire has its rise and fall. China’s status as a world leader, industrially and technologically, supplanting the U.S. is proof of that. The U.S. corporate-state turning its lethal forces on American citizens backing the human rights of immigrants as the demonized cause of the nation’s economic decline is a current case of the boomerang’s application.

An example of imperial boomerang from the 20th century is the rise of European fascism, the corporate-government state’s militarized drive to control territory and populations by force. The Nazi holocaust of Jews, gypsies and other minority peoples on European soil occurred after the German Empire conquered East Africa, violently, in competition with the British Empire. The genocide of the indigenous populations of the Americas from the voyages of Columbus launched successive campaigns of land theft and murder. The Massachusetts Bay Company that King Charles I of England chartered also perpetrated genocide against the native population, confining them to concentration camps located in Boston Harbor in 1675. The roots of the corporate state have a bloody history.The European conquests of the Global South and North America over the past 500 years required a corporate-government state, which the Trump administration is unleashing against protesters for immigrant rights now.

I grew up in Northern California and received a public school education during the 1960s and 1970s. It was an era of strong social movements, popular dissent to the Vietnam War, Jim Crow’s color line and male supremacy generally. These examples of movement politics influenced millions of people’s lives, including me.

Eventually the hard and soft power of the U.S. corporate-government state co-opted and oppressed all three social movements. In the meantime, the economic basis of U.S. military power reached its limits, ending the gold standard, e.g., the price of gold tied to the greenback in the early 1970s. That feature of the postwar global economy had ensured financial stability. The demise of the postwar economy launched an era of financial instability, social spending austerity and working class precarity.

As the supreme military power in the world during the postwar era, the U.S. corporate state ruled the global order via its military might, with hundreds of bases around the planet. Foreign populations suffered accordingly, as U.S. monopoly corporations dominated the weaker nations emerging from European colonialism. U.S. military interventions, directly and by proxy, accelerated, with Guatemala in 1953 opening the door to counterinsurgency operations to strengthen the U.S. corporate bottom line in the Congo, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Colombia, Chile, El Salvador, Grenada, Honduras, Afghanistan and Iraq, a partial list.

Washington’s bipartisan funding of Israel’s genocidal campaign to slaughter and starve Palestinian liberation movements to overthrow colonial rule in a strategically critical region of oil resources is simply unacceptable to the corporate state. The lives of subjugated people is secondary to maintaining the status quo for reasons of profits and market share. The human pain and suffering this causes is staggering. Researchers at Brown University’s Costs of War project have documented the deaths and displacement of tens of millions of foreign peoples at the hands of the U.S. corporate-state from 2001-2023.

American taxpayers foot the bill for state-sanctioned violence that the corporate-government wields under a bipartisan political order. The American working class is receiving an informal education about this basic feature of an empire losing economic primacy to China. How to replace this social order that puts corporate rule before the lives of human beings is the question of the day. Movement politics, with Minnesota showing the way, is teaching in real time how to spread democracy and freedom from the ground up versus from the top down.

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