Given the repeated disasters that fill our informed-misinformed daily news, it is impossible, even if one is distracted, not to notice that capitalism in its current globalized neoliberal stage, and the states that serve it, are now engaged in a kind of frantic headlong rush toward what the American sociologist William I. Robinson [1] calls “a permanent global war economy [which relies] increasingly on investment in transnational systems of social control, repression, and war to continue to make profits in a context of chronic stagnation and declining profit rates” [2]. Reading him, we learn, for example, that this significant trend gained momentum after September 11, 2001, when the Pentagon’s budget increased by 91% between 2001 and 2011 and the profits of the arms industry almost doubled. This exponential growth in the arms industry has only increased with Putin’s war of annexation of Ukraine and the West’s decision to rearm Zelensky, but also—and how! – the unconditional decision to support, in the aftermath of the massacre of October 7, 2023, Israel’s insane warlike aspirations for a final settlement of the Palestinian question and a little more.
But there is more, says William I. Robinson. All over the world, we are witnessing an accumulation of militias, police forces and private armies dependent on companies but controlled by states, which, according to rough estimates, means that there are now 15 million mercenary soldiers working for the so-called private sector (the Russian Wagner group, the US Academi, formerly Blackwater, the British G4S and many others). There are also said to be 20 million private police officers, who answer to no law other than that of supply and demand. The market for so-called “riot control” systems is estimated to be worth $500 billion, designed to quell civil protests against poverty and hunger. In short, a disaster industry has emerged that bets on disaster by creating it in order to accumulate capital. Indecency in all its glory in a world wallowing in a “Viva la muerte!” that could be an advertising slogan after having been a fascist rallying cry in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War.
Indeed, it does not take a genius to predict that, regardless of the geopolitical imperatives that underpin and justify them, wars, as William I. Robinson says, are “a tremendous opportunity for the transnational (capitalist) accumulation circuits of multinational corporations.” This is because they endlessly destroy what will have to be rebuilt ad infinitum. One need only be in the world and of this world, like the US military consultant quoted by William I. Robinson, who, shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, declared that “the happy days are back,” or like this Goldman Sachs consultant who, in the early days of the Israeli army’s offensive on Gaza, spoke from his armored heart: “What’s happening is good for our wallet.”
There was a time, distant but not yet erased from all militant memories, when a revolutionary pacifism hostile to the war of the “gun merchants” was capable of thinking about the world in political terms. This did not exclude morality; it structured and strengthened it. That was before campism and its deleterious effects on reason. Starting from there, it is not a risky bet to suggest that, in the context of Russia’s war of annexation of Ukraine, sympathy for the besieged would have gained by not omitting to recall, as William I. Robinson points out, that “the expansion of NATO led by the United States to Russia’s doorstep, its rejection of Moscow’s attempt to forge an alliance between itself and the West, and the US’s refusal to recognize the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, are all part of a broader strategy of encirclement and containment of Russia.” And yet, a report published in 2019 by the Rand Corporation’s Center for the United States and International Progress indicated that the US objective should be to provoke Russia into making a mistake by “deploying troops and military assets in Ukraine and in the Baltic states, as well as in the Russian-controlled Donbas region.” Furthermore, a report published in 2019 by the Rand Corporation think tank indicated that the US objective should be to provoke Russia into making a mistake by “deploying excessive military and economic efforts.” In other words, to destabilize it by pushing it into crime. This has been accomplished. And too bad for the Ukrainian and Russian civilian populations who are suffering.
Regarding Israel’s devastating offensive against the Palestinians, William I. Robinson does not hesitate for a moment to describe it as “genocidal,” but helpfully points out that without the active support of the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, and more generally the European Union, which sponsor it, the crime could not have taken place. Where his analysis is particularly interesting is when he links the fate of the ” Palestinian proletariat,” particularly in Gaza, to that of the displaced, expelled, and excluded throughout the world, those populations that globalized capitalism considers surplus, excess, their existence hindering, here, the clear Israeli colonial project—as evidenced by what is happening in the West Bank—and, everywhere else, the infinite need for capital expansion.
Without being furiously Marxist, it seems obvious, given what financial domination has become on a global scale, that the globalization of capital was indeed conceived as an organized war machine aimed at extracting infinite surplus value and subjugating, through exhaustion, the still-organized working classes and, beyond them, the peoples. The result is obvious if we look at a few global statistics. According to a 2023 Oxfam report, 1% of the population controls more than half of the world’s wealth, and over the past ten years, billionaires have doubled their wealth, which is nearly six times more than the increase in wealth of the poorest 50%. Warren Buffet was therefore right when he said on CNN in 2005: “There is a class war, of course, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s waging war. And we’re winning.” War is as accurate a word as the observation itself. But if this sinister and cynical class wins, it will be in a world where billions of people are constantly struggling to survive, where social insecurity and anxiety are becoming structural, where established states are constantly confronted with crises of legitimacy, where the constant search for scapegoats is part of the same moral filth that legitimizes, for the sake of capitalist accumulation, the rise to power of a far right that will not only never stand in its way, but will also know how to get rid of the surplus, as it has already proven throughout history. And amply so.
In this regard, the war of mass destruction waged by the far right in power in Israel against Palestinian civilians in Gaza will remain tangible proof that where there is a will, there is a way. All you need is the credit of your arms suppliers, i.e., complicit states without which nothing would be possible. Beyond the irreparable tragedy experienced by the families of those massacred, when there are any left, the weight of the crime is all the heavier because it will leave an indelible stain on the human conscience of a Jewish people who did not ask for so much and whom the fascist Netanyahu and his killers have done the irreparable outrage of placing in the ranks of the executioners when they came from the ranks of the victims of cannibalistic history. This is a change from which it is difficult to recover.
When asked about the oppressive climate that this conflict is creating at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he teaches [3], William I. Robinson says that “the Constitution [has been] suspended” and that many of his colleagues have been punished “for denouncing genocide on social media or signing a petition.” “We are witnessing,” he adds, “the rise of the authoritarian university. Our institutions are increasingly an extension of the capitalist state. Companies are outsourcing research and development to universities. […] In addition, the US government’s military and security apparatus is increasingly present in research universities.” He continues: “The student camps aim to pressure universities to divest from companies that do business with Israel and profit from the occupation and genocide. It is truly deplorable and criminal that university administrations have militarized and called in the police. But once you see the link between the university-corporate complex and the repression of Palestinians, the reasons become clearer.”
As for whether these “student encampments” could, in any way, be accused of spreading anti-Semitism, William I. Robinson’s response to Il Fatto quotidiano is clear: “Anti-Semitism is historically understood as discrimination, hatred, or prejudice against Jews. This is not the case in the protests on university campuses. In fact, American Jews, young and old, are at the forefront of this mobilization to defend Palestinian lives. Israel has sought to change the definition of anti-Semitism by broadening it to include criticism of Zionism, apartheid, and Israeli racism. The US government, Israel’s main sponsor, has adopted this definition to combat growing opposition to its policy. It is ironic, moreover, that the real anti-Semites are members of the American far right, who also support Zionism.”
There you have it… This ethical, cultural, emotional, economic, ecological, and political collapse that characterizes this dark age is turning the world into an increasingly uncontrollable powder keg because it is managed—and that is the right word—by the Dr. Strangeloves of the economy of accumulation and by proven or potential war criminals. Without risk of error, we can therefore say, paraphrasing the old Jaurès, that capitalism in its current stage of globalisation still carries war within it like a cloud carries a storm.
Best wishes for survival to all, until better times come.
Because the world must change fundamentally. Radically.
And many thanks to William I. Robinson for his insights.
Freddy GOMEZ
Notes
[1] Professor of Sociology and International Studies at the University of California, William I. Robinson is the author of several books, including Global Capitalism Endure? (2022), Global Civil War: Capitalism Post Pandemic (2022) and The Global Police State (2020).
[2] See the interview in Italian, which can be translated into French, given by sociologist William I. Robinson to the online daily newspaper Il Fatto quotidiano. We draw heavily on this interview here.
[3] A campus which, like many others in the United States, has declared its active solidarity with the civilian population of Gaza.
Source: Article posted online by A contretemps on December 30, 2024
Translated by TerKo using a free translation tool
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