Global BattleSpace

 “The Global Police State,” by William I Robinson, 2020

The key thesis of this book is that the transnational capitalist class has over-accumulated assets and cash. They no longer put it into low-earning production facilities or the industrial economy – they use it in other, less useful ways.  Gambling on the stock markets, mergers, buying real estate, stock buybacks - and investing in the military-industrial-security complex.  Robinson’s definition of this expands beyond Eisenhower’s limited conception – it includes the massive privatized security guard businesses, the growing mercenary sector, public and private prisons, the migrant detention camps, outsourced intelligence tasks, Silicon Valley data and surveillance technologies.  These forms of privatized and sub-contracted capitalist assets join standard U.S. war industries – the massive arms industry led by Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed-Martin and Northrup-Grumman; the large military construction contractors like the Carlyle Group, CACI International and Haliburton; the nuclear weapons’ manufacturers; private equity firms like KKR.

Robinson’s beginning touchstones are Peter Phillip’s work on global elites, (‘Giants’ – reviewed below) which identified the individuals, finance firms, corporations and non-governmental policy groups that constitute the transnational capitalist class (TCC) as the ultimate power center in the world.  Secondarily, Robinson draws from Baran and Sweezey’s work on ‘overaccumulation.’  Overaccumulation is the result of falling profits in the industrial sector, which lead capitalists to invest in non-productive sectors, including the military and policing segments of the economy.  This has been christened ‘military Keynesianism’ and has been active since WWII, but has grown exponentially.  And yes, that means the biggest capitalists now have a large financial interest in promoting war overseas and security services at home and worldwide. 

Domestically this leads to efforts at criminalizing the population in various ways, or segments of it, gaining intelligence on the population through digitalization and manipulating the population through culture.  Right now many countries have more private guards than members of their own armed forces.  The incarceration state in the U.S. is famous, but it is spreading to other countries.  The privatization of the war in Afghanistan is another example.  These are all forms of unproductive investment.

A third leg of this police state stool is the accelerated functioning of the world capitalist economy.  Continuing enclosures of rural land and ‘primitive accumulation’ have forced millions into the cities, as well as industrialization in China and India.  At the same time AI, robotization, mechanization and digitalization are being pursued, meaning that many humans are no longer needed for work as more money is put into fixed capital to get rid of labor.  Robinson calls this ‘surplus’ population the ‘lumpen-precariat,’ which I think is an inaccurate name, but it means those multi-millions who are left out of capitalist modernism.  Marx talked about the ‘lumpen-proletariat’ as poverty-stricken Europeans living off various forms of grifts and crimes. Presently it is taken to mean people who actually live off and prey on the proletariat through crime. 

All these ‘excess’ humans have to be controlled – by force or propaganda or persuasion or debt.  This results in states and the large capitalist and imperialist concerns wedded at the hip on a global scale, for this one goal, led by the U.S.  As part of this fusion governments are privatizing many police and military responsibilities, or off-loading public roles to private entities. Technology is their hand-maiden - able to span the world’s supply chains, move money instantaneously, communicate immediately, provide data constantly, create military efficiency and new robotic weapons – supporting the TCC as no other technology has done before.  This is all somewhat new, based on the development of neo-liberalism in the late 1970s and the computer revolution.

Global Battlespace for the TCC

So Robinson argues, the economic, technical and political basis has been laid for a ‘global police state’ in reality – neo-liberal capitalist authoritarianism so to speak.  Not far off from some high-tech dystopia. 

The above-outline of militarized accumulation is general and theoretical, and Robinson discusses how it affects nearly everything:  the bail-bond industry; private contractors on the Mexican border dealing with migrants and refugees; the endless wars; the vast military budget; Julian Assange and other whistle-blowers; CIA and military involvement in Hollywood; the drug war and criminalization; militarized policing; unemployment and precarity; NSA spying with Silicon Valley; financialization;  privatization of public work.  There is no end to it. 

Some random facts on internal security or as he calls it, “accumulation by repression”:

·        Israel is one of the leading military and police software contractors in the world, where the Gaza Strip is used as a test ground. (NSO Group / Pegasus!)

·        In 2011 China spent more on internal security than defense, with a projected increase to 626 million security cameras in 2020.

·        The DAPL pipeline was protected by Tiger Swan, a Pentagon contractor in Iraq bankrolled by Wall Street.

·        The southern U.S. border is one of the most highly militarized borders in the world, with drones, planes and technology supplied by U.S. firms.  Even the rendition flights back to some countries are carried out by charter carriers.

·        The U.S. military and intelligence services were involved in 1,000 television programs and 800 movies between 2005 and 2016.

*    Nearly all of the firms involved in war and security are listed on one of the securities Exchanges.  You too can invest!

All of this suggests capital is expecting a general breakdown of its rule.  Rising authoritarian governments and fascist groupings illustrate this. Based on the insights of Antonio Gramsci, Robinson’s sees the TCC is making a ‘preemptive strike’ on a global scale against the left and labor, given the latter’s present weakness. He thinks that privileged workers in the global ‘North’ are now a mass base for neo-fascism, not just the petit-bourgeois, and he thinks this is being organized internationally by trans-national capital, not nationally, as in the 20^th Century.  The TCC attempts to use the nationalist/ ethnic/ racist verbiage of the authoritarian right while still pursuing a global project, so there is a contradiction presently.  Robinson quotes Trump as saying at Davos:  “America is Open for Business” in this context.  

In the process Robinson explains the distinction between the authoritarian right (Trump) and the truly fascist right, (Nazis, Proud Boys, etc.) who sometimes work together but think separately.  As Gramsci pointed out, when the state and the fascist movements ‘fuse’ that is true fascism, whether of the 20^th or 21^st Century variety. A ‘global police state’ reflects the rightist authoritarian response, with, at present, political and street support from local fascist sympathizers as a prop.

Robinson discusses a ‘reform’ faction within the ICC camp, like George Soros, who coined the phrase ‘market fundamentalism.’ They seek to preserve the overall stability of the capitalist system by mitigating the lust for profits a bit, to buy off some of the population.  Lawrence Summers, Joseph Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs, Robert Reich and others are also in this faction. Another factional issue within the capitalists is the attitude towards promoting ‘green capitalism’ as opposed to continued carbon capitalism, with the ‘reform’ group supporting the former.   

Robinson comes out against a continued ‘popular front’ approach that allies with the ‘reform’ bourgeoisie, instead supporting a united front against the police state and neo-fascism.  He supports eco-socialism and notes the weakness of the ‘pink tide’ in Latin America, as it was blunted by the continual power of the TCC and their state and non-state actors. He hints that the problem with parts of the left in some countries is either collaboration with capital, transient anarchism or how ‘capitalism’ became just another identity issue. He urges a revitalization of the Marxist critique, which is enhanced by the global scope of nearly all problems.   He suggests a new International based on world social movements and world parties with a minimum program of eco-socialism, as the caricature of ‘vanguardism’ has failed.  He supports electoralism, but an ‘electoralism’ that merely puts the ‘left’ in charge of capitalist functioning won’t work anymore. Instead a revolutionary tack has to be taken during the next global breakdown, to win over working-class elements that might be tempted to join with neo-fascism. 

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left to investigate our 14 year archive:  “Giants – The Global Power Elite,” “Monopoly Capital” (Baran and Sweezy); “Capital in the 21^st Century” (Piketty); "Value Chains," "The Necessity of Social Control" (Meszaros); "The Long Revolution of the Global South" (Amin); "Southern Insurgency," "New Dark Age," "Fully Automated Luxury Communism," "Bit Tyrants," "The New Jim Crow" (Alexander); "Rise of the Warrior Cop" "Saudi Arabia Uncovered" or the word 'fascism.'  

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

August 17, 2021