The Contradiction Is the Compass: Empire, Multipolarity, and the Revolutionary Horizon

Mapping the Collapse of Empire, the Rise of Multipolar Resistance, and the Opening for Socialism

By Prince Kapone | Weaponized Information | July 4, 2025

Why the Empire Cannot Tolerate Sovereignty

The talk in the West is always about freedom—freedom of speech, freedom of markets, freedom of navigation. But what they cannot say, what they dare not say, is that the very foundation of their so-called freedom rests on someone else’s unfreedom. The wealth of the imperialist triad—the United States, Europe, and Japan—is not an internal miracle of innovation and discipline. It is an external fact of violence. Their affluence was built, and is still maintained, on the back of the Global South: through centuries of slavery, colonialism, war, and now the financialized bondage of debt, trade imbalance, and resource extraction without compensation. What they call the “international rules-based order” is just the latest euphemism for a centuries-old global protection racket.

If countries in Africa, Latin America, Asia—or even parts of Eastern Europe—were allowed to freely determine their own economic policies, control their own resources, trade in their own currencies, and refuse Western military occupation, the entire imperialist scaffolding would begin to buckle. Sovereign divergence doesn’t just threaten “U.S. leadership”—it threatens the dollar system, the monopoly pricing of Western tech, the strategic dominance of NATO, and the whole web of rentier flows that funnel surplus value out of the Global South into the capitals of empire. Let a dozen nations pull out of the IMF, let them repudiate illegitimate debt, let them nationalize lithium and nickel mines, and watch the West panic—not out of moral outrage, but because their banks, their militaries, and their comfortable middle classes would lose the stolen fuel that keeps the imperial engine running.

That’s why multipolarity is intolerable. It’s not just geopolitics—it’s the slow unraveling of the empire’s metabolic process. Multipolarity threatens the very blood circulation of the imperialist world economy. And so, the response from the empire is not measured diplomacy—it’s economic warfare, hybrid sabotage, and information terrorism. Sanctions are imposed like siege engines. Economies are strangled, populations are punished, medicines blocked, infrastructures shattered. This is not policy; it is class war by other means. Not against elites in the Global South, but against their people—the workers, farmers, mothers, youth—the very base upon which multipolar sovereignty would have to stand. The empire starves them, hoping they’ll turn against their governments, hoping they’ll welcome recolonization dressed up as “stabilization.”

So let’s be clear. The reason multipolar governments must build a mass base is not because they are saints or socialists by default. It is because without the organized, mobilized, materially sustained support of the people, they will not survive the storm the empire brings. The masses are not ornaments of statecraft—they are the only force that can hold the line when the empire comes knocking. And so, from Caracas to Tehran, from Havana to Harare, we find states that, in order to breathe, are forced to redistribute. Forced to subsidize. Forced to deliver. And in that forced delivery—under siege, under fire—they unintentionally open space for deeper forms of sovereignty, even socialism-in-motion. Not because the system allows it, but because the empire’s chokehold makes it necessary.

The Mass Base as Strategic Infrastructure

In the West, the masses are expendable. That’s not hyperbole—it’s policy. In Washington, London, or Brussels, governance doesn’t require popular legitimacy. It requires capital flows, monopoly advantage, and a compliant media apparatus. The masses are managed—by debt, distraction, and police. But in a multipolar world, where states are encircled, sanctioned, and sabotaged, the people are not an afterthought—they are the difference between collapse and continuity. In a siege economy, the loyalty and resilience of the working class, the peasants, and the poor are not just social assets. They are infrastructure. Strategic infrastructure. You can’t import that. You can’t 3D print it. You can’t borrow it from Goldman Sachs. You have to build it—through land reform, food distribution, free health care, cheap electricity, and dignity. Or you don’t govern for long.

The empire knows this. That’s why it targets the civilian population first. Not with bombs necessarily, but with shortages, inflation, and demoralization. It pressures governments by making life unbearable for the people—then blames those same governments for the suffering. It weaponizes suffering like it weaponizes currency. So the multipolar state, if it wants to endure, has no choice but to reverse the logic. It must deliver. Not just rhetoric, not just national pride. It must deliver food, medicine, jobs, and fuel. It must socialize survival. Otherwise, the empire walks through the cracks.

That’s what makes the current historical moment so volatile—and so pregnant with possibility. The imperial core is collapsing inward into technofascism, militarized austerity, and elite hoarding. The post-war consensus is dead, and the social contract has been shredded. But the multipolar periphery, even with all its contradictions and unevenness, is being forced to develop statecraft that relies on the masses. In Venezuela, it’s the communal councils and local food networks that keep the state grounded. In Iran, it’s the neighborhood cooperatives, religious charities, and public sector workers who endure sanctions and keep society intact. In Nicaragua, it’s the farmer brigades and rural clinics. These are not just welfare programs—they are defensive architecture. They are what keep the roof from collapsing.

Of course, there are contradictions. A mass base built for stability is not the same as a mass base ready for revolution. Popular support can harden into passive loyalty, or be managed through populist spectacle. Some multipolar governments still repress labor unions or suppress radical dissent. But the contradiction is alive—and that’s the key. The state needs the people. The people know they are needed. And in that knowledge, a new terrain of struggle opens. The task for revolutionaries is not to dismiss multipolarity for its imperfections, nor to romanticize it as an end goal. The task is to organize within the space it creates—to push from survival to sovereignty, from national dignity to class power. Because when the masses become infrastructure, they can also become the architects.

Contradictions at the Heart of Multipolar Governance

Nothing about the multipolar bloc is clean or ideologically pure. It is not a revolutionary formation, nor a unified front against capitalism. It is a contradictory and uneven coalition, made up of states with wildly different class compositions, political traditions, and levels of dependency on global capital. But that’s what makes it real. Multipolarity is not a fantasy of utopia. It’s the messy, blood-and-concrete process of historical forces rearranging themselves under pressure. Within that process, national bourgeoisies jockey for position, comprador classes try to sabotage reforms, and imperial agents lurk in boardrooms and border towns alike. Yet despite all that—despite corruption, bureaucracy, and the hangovers of neoliberalism—something is shifting. The empire is no longer the only game in town. And for those willing to struggle, that changes everything.

The contradiction at the core is this: multipolar states must rely on the masses to survive, but many of them are led by classes that fear those same masses. They need legitimacy, but fear autonomy. They want stability, but dread mobilization. And so, they walk a tightrope—distributing just enough to maintain loyalty, but not enough to empower transformation. That’s why we see community clinics without community control, food programs without agrarian reform, education without decolonization. These are the fault lines. And if left unresolved, they will snap.

Still, the pressure cooker conditions imposed by imperialism force certain states into doing things their ruling classes would otherwise avoid. Nationalize oil. Stabilize prices. Invest in cooperatives. Offer land titles. These are not always revolutionary choices. Sometimes they’re just survival tactics. But in their implementation, they change the terrain. They create institutions, expectations, and class alliances that can go further—if pushed. The contradiction becomes a doorway. And through that doorway, revolutionary movements can enter. The question is whether they’re organized enough, disciplined enough, and rooted enough to do it before the imperialist knives come back out.

We are living through the messy birth of a new world system. Not yet socialist. Not yet just. But no longer fully under the thumb of Western finance capital. It is a space of contestation, not conclusion. And within that space, the masses are not just recipients of policy—they are the decisive factor. Their militancy, their organization, and their clarity of vision will determine whether multipolarity becomes a stepping stone to liberation, or just another rerun of dependency in a different key.

But the crisis does not only unfold abroad. As the empire loses control of its periphery, it mutates at its core. The imperial recalibration outward—through sanctions, lawfare, and hybrid warfare—has its domestic corollary in a new mode of internal governance: technofascism.

Technofascism Is the Domestic Face of Empire in Crisis

The empire is not just collapsing abroad—it’s recalibrating at home. The imperialist triad—U.S., Europe, Japan—has entered a stage where it can no longer afford social democracy, settler comfort, or liberal mythologies. That’s not a glitch—it’s strategy. The external crisis of empire, the rise of multipolarity, the breakdown of dollar dominance, and the loss of control over the Global South’s labor and resources have triggered an internal restructuring. That restructuring has a name: technofascism.

Technofascism is the domestic corollary of imperialist recalibration. It is how the empire disciplines its internal masses after throwing them overboard. It’s what happens when a ruling class that can no longer rely on growth, social consensus, or settler unity turns instead to algorithmic containment, predictive policing, and digital enclosure. It is the software interface of a collapsing hardware system—masking austerity with UX, selling repression as innovation. And it is inseparable from what the Tricontinental has called hyper-imperialism: the militarization of global capital flows, the weaponization of debt, the hardening of borders and extractive logistics across the Global South. One is the outside; the other is the inside. The drone in Somalia, the AI cop in Chicago—they serve the same master.

The imperialist state used to offer wages and citizenship in exchange for loyalty and silence. Now it offers nothing but control. You don’t get a pension; you get a payment app. You don’t get housing; you get a credit check. You don’t get health care; you get a biometric profile sold to Pfizer and Palantir. And when you protest, you don’t face a cop—you face a data model that predicted your rebellion six weeks ago and flagged you for preemptive suppression. This is not dystopian fiction. This is how the empire governs its own periphery: Black neighborhoods, Indigenous territories, poor white towns, immigrant enclaves. It is counterinsurgency on the domestic front. It is the internal colony, digitized and automated.

And it doesn’t stop with the ghettos. As the capitalist core consumes itself, the working class of the Global North—especially its youth—is being inducted into a new kind of managed decline. Gig work, medical debt, algorithmic bosses, militarized campuses, and endless content pipelines to pacify political consciousness. Technofascism doesn’t just repress—it replaces. It replaces class struggle with personal branding. It replaces education with STEM job funnels. It replaces social life with platforms, unions with apps, politics with metrics. And all of it is enforced not just by the state, but by capital itself—tech capital, defense capital, and financial capital fused into a single command structure.

This is the domestic side of recalibration. It is not a break from empire; it is empire turned inward. It is the same boot that crushed Bandung, now standing on the throat of Detroit. It is the same logic that shattered Libya, now repackaged as AI job training and police “accountability tools.” The technofascist state is not liberalism in decay—it is liberalism’s logical endpoint under imperial decline. A data-driven caste system. A predictive counterinsurgency against the future. A corporate security grid where surplus humans are managed, not empowered.

But here, too, lies a contradiction. The masses in the Global North—disillusioned, immiserated, and digitally corralled—are beginning to stir. Many are seduced by fascism, nationalism, and fantasy. But others, thrown from the ship of empire, are waking up. They see that their fate is tied not to NATO, but to the Global Majority. That the same boots stomping Fallujah now patrol their streets. That the same capital that offshored their jobs now feeds on their despair. And that multipolarity, while no savior, opens a crack in the wall—a chance to defect, to realign, to rebel. But only if they organize. Only if they break with empire fully, and join the world in revolt.

The Masses Are the Strategy

While the empire corrals its own populations into data-driven austerity and algorithmic pacification, the states resisting imperialist domination face a very different imperative. They do not manage their masses with code and credit—they survive only by mobilizing them. In the multipolar periphery, besieged by sanctions and sabotage, the masses are not an internal threat to be neutralized. They are the foundation without which sovereignty collapses. That is why the mass base in the Global South—unlike its digitalized counterpart in the North—becomes strategic infrastructure. Not a liability, but a lifeline. In a world where empire starves the people into regime change, only the people can shield the state from collapse.

In every serious confrontation with imperialism, from the Haitian Revolution to the war on Vietnam, the lesson has always been the same: only the organized masses can defeat empire. Not NGOs. Not elite diplomats. Not clever reforms. And not rhetorical sovereignty. In the multipolar present, that lesson returns with sharpened urgency. The states that stand against unipolar tyranny—whether fully or partially, coherently or inconsistently—do so because they are forced to. But those that survive the counterattacks, the sanctions, the color revolutions, and the media psy-ops, survive because they built something real beneath them: the people. Not abstract citizens, not consumer markets, but workers, farmers, street vendors, mothers, students, and soldiers with a stake in sovereignty because it means food on the table and boots off their neck.

The West talks about “governance,” as if rule were a matter of technocratic metrics and policy dashboards. But for multipolar states under siege, governance is about whether the lights stay on when the IMF shuts off funding. Whether bread gets to the barrio when ports are blocked. Whether medicine still flows when Swift is cut. And the only way that happens is if the people themselves become infrastructure—builders, defenders, and beneficiaries of a national project that doesn’t treat them as burdens, but as the base. That is the real meaning of the mass line in a time of multipolar transition. Not romantic slogans, but practical survival rooted in popular strength.

And this is the dialectical reversal that imperialism fears most: that the very siege it imposes—meant to fragment and humiliate—ends up forcing a deeper bond between the people and the state. That sanctions forge solidarity. That sabotage births dual power. That hardship becomes the school of revolution. Of course, not all governments will allow that potential to flower. Some will cling to the capitalist core even as it collapses. Others will try to pacify the masses with minimal concessions. But history is not kind to half-measures. Either sovereignty deepens into socialism, or it gets strangled in its crib. That is the line we walk.

The multipolar moment is not a detour from class struggle—it is one of its highest expressions. In this moment, we do not simply choose sides between East and West. We organize. We educate. We mobilize. We agitate. We plant seeds in every crack of the collapsing imperial edifice and dare to imagine the commune that could rise from its rubble. Because the question is not whether the empire will fall—it’s whether we will be ready when it does. And if we are, it won’t just be a new world. It will be our world.

From Antithesis to Synthesis: The Revolutionary Horizon

Multipolarity, for all its potential, is not the endpoint. It is the antithesis—a rupture from imperial unipolarity, but not yet a resolution. The world it offers is still capitalist, still dominated by classes, still fractured by contradictions between labor and capital, rural and urban, formal and informal. What it does provide is time, space, and breathing room for a new political imagination to emerge—one that does not begin from the institutions of empire, but from the lived struggles of the Global Majority. If unipolarity is built on the extraction and subjugation of the many for the profit of the few, then multipolarity opens the door—however narrowly—for the many to assert themselves. But opening the door is not the same as walking through it. That task falls to the revolutionary forces of our time.

We cannot confuse the loosening of imperial control with liberation. A world with multiple capitalisms is not the same as a world without exploitation. If anything, the risks multiply. Multipolar capitalism may not be headquartered in Washington, but it can still reproduce the same hierarchies, the same wage theft, the same ecological destruction—just in a different accent. That’s why the role of revolutionaries is not to serve as cheerleaders for state realignment, but to push from below, using every crack in the imperial wall to deepen the struggle for socialism. Where imperialism is forced to retreat, we advance. Where sanctions force redistribution, we radicalize it. Where the state leans on the people for support, we demand power in return. Not just rice and electricity, but control—over land, production, schools, media, borders, and budgets.

This is the synthesis the world requires: not the merging of multipolar elites into a new capitalist balance, but the uprising of the colonized masses into history as its authors. From Jakarta to Johannesburg, São Paulo to Sana’a, people are watching the imperial order stutter and stall. They know what its decline looks like—wars without end, collapsing infrastructure, billionaire hoarding, climate catastrophe. But what comes next is still undecided. The socialist horizon is not guaranteed. It has to be built, brick by brick, slogan by slogan, commune by commune. Multipolarity gives us the scaffolding, the contradiction, the opening. But the content must come from us—from revolutionary workers, farmers, intellectuals, students, prisoners, and street vendors with nothing to lose but their chains.

So let us be clear-eyed. The empire is not gone. It is wounded, cornered, and increasingly dangerous. Multipolarity is not salvation, but a front in a wider war—a front that stretches across continents, currencies, and class lines. And in this war, the masses are not collateral—they are the decisive force. Their endurance built this moment. Their struggle will shape what follows. And their revolution is the only synthesis worth fighting for.

Conclusion: The Contradiction Is the Compass

We are not observers of history—we are caught in its teeth. The world system that has ruled for five hundred years is cracking under its own weight, convulsing in real time. The imperialist triad—bloated, brutal, and desperate—recalibrates through sanctions, surveillance, and technofascist control. The multipolar bloc—diverse, uneven, and contradictory—recalibrates in response, seeking autonomy, sovereignty, and survival. But between these forces, neither offers a final destination. What we have instead is a battlefield. And on that battlefield, the masses—the Global Majority—are not spectators. They are the terrain and the weapon. They are the reason multipolarity exists, and the only force that can turn its contradictions into revolutionary motion.

This is the dialectic that shapes our epoch. Imperialist recalibration tries to maintain power through contraction, retreating into authoritarianism and elite entrenchment. Multipolar recalibration emerges not from triumph, but necessity—driven by the refusal to die quietly under empire’s boot. But only socialist revolution—rooted in the self-activity of the poor, the colonized, the landless, the waged and unwaged—can resolve the contradictions sharpening all around us. Only the revolutionary masses can transform the world system, not just shift its centers of power.

The contradiction is the compass. It points us not toward easy answers or binary allegiances, but toward struggle—class struggle, ideological struggle, anti-imperialist struggle. It forces us to think historically, to act collectively, and to build materially. It reminds us that the state, if not seized or reshaped, will always bend back toward capital. That sovereignty without socialism is a castle on sand. That multipolarity without mass power is just another flag waving above a plantation.

But contradictions are motion. And motion, in the hands of the organized and the conscious, is revolution. The empire is trembling. The horizon is open. The masses are stirring. And our task, now as always, is not just to interpret this world in its unraveling—but to tear open its seams, and build something new with our own hands.