Cover: A building not hit by a plane on September 11, 2001, though it was on fire like Grenfell Tower in London which, you know, didn’t collapse. Does a regular fire burn hot enough to melt support structures? Who knew. Definitely not drumming up business for the global imperialist protection racket, definitely not looking for ways to rationalise aggression purposed to maintain control over resources. Did that happen all over again two decades, two failed wars and USD$3 trillion, later?
Dylan Evans || In constant 2023 dollars, world defence spending shows a clear and steady long-term escalation from 2000 to 2024, rising from roughly $1.9 trillion at the turn of the millennium to around $2.7 trillion today. The early 2000s saw rapid real increases driven by the post-9/11 wars and massive US-led military mobilisation, pushing global spending toward the high $2.2 to $2.4 trillion range by the early 2010s.
After a brief plateau from about 2012 to 2016 — reflecting austerity in parts of the West but offset by rising Chinese, Russian, Middle Eastern, and South Asian budgets — the trend shifted decisively upward, accelerating again after 2018 and surging further with the Ukraine war. By 2023–24, global military expenditure reached its highest real level ever recorded, with the world devoting nearly $2.7 trillion (in today’s dollars) to defence — almost a trillion more, in real terms, than at the dawn of the century.
A similar pattern can be seen in global spending on security — both public and private — which has expanded dramatically over the same period, reshaping the balance between the state’s monopoly on force and the booming market for protection. In constant dollars, governments around the world were already spending roughly half a trillion to three-quarters of a trillion on policing, courts, and prisons around 2000, but this figure has grown steadily with urbanisation, rising crime anxieties, counter-terrorism, and the securitisation of migration, reaching something close to a trillion today.
Alongside it, the private-security sector — once a marginal adornment to state authority — has grown even faster, fuelled by gated communities, corporate risk management, critical-infrastructure protection, and the explosive proliferation of surveillance and security technologies. What was perhaps an eighty- to one-hundred-billion-dollar global industry at the turn of the millennium has become a quarter-trillion-dollar sector today, larger than the military budgets of most nations. The result is a world in which “security” is no longer primarily a public good but a mixed ecosystem of public agencies, private firms, and hybrid actors, expanding in lockstep with rising geopolitical, economic, and social insecurity.
Accumulation by repression
This enormous growth in defence spending and private security makes perfect sense from a Marxist perspective. Marx believed crisis is endemic to capitalism because the system contains inner contradictions that cannot be reconciled without periodically destroying part of itself. Capitalists, driven by competition, continually reinvest in labour-saving technologies to raise productivity and cut costs. This increases the mass of commodities produced faster than workers’ wages rise, creating a chronic tendency toward overproduction: goods pile up that workers cannot afford to buy.
Meanwhile, mechanisation reduces the share of living labour — the only source of surplus value for Marx — so the rate of profit tends to fall, pushing capitalists to speculate wildly, cut labour costs, expand into new markets, or attempt to squeeze more surplus from the global periphery. These pressures interact with the chaos of production — firms plan only for themselves, not for society — so investment cycles become uncoordinated, amplifying booms and busts. For Marx, capitalism does not gravitate toward equilibrium, as classical economists imagined, but toward periodic breakdowns in which excess capital and labour are violently purged before accumulation can resume. Instability is not a deviation from the system but its central rhythm.
From this angle, the vast expansion of defence and security expenditure since the late 1990s appears as a functional response to capitalism’s chronic problem of overaccumulation — an immense reservoir of surplus capital and labour that the system struggles to reinvest profitably in productive activity. Military Keynesianism has long served as a release valve: defence spending absorbs surplus capital through procurement, infrastructure, and research while mobilising labour in ways that do not intensify competition in consumer markets.
The ballooning private-security sector plays a parallel role, transforming insecurity into a commodified field where capital can find new outlets and workers can be absorbed into labour-intensive, low-productivity services. Neither sector produces consumer goods at risk of saturating markets, and both generate steady, state-backed demand insulated from competition and downturns. In this sense, the global turn to militarisation and securitisation can be read as capitalism’s way of burning through excess capital and labour — an enormous ongoing purge that stabilises accumulation not by resolving its contradictions but by displacing them into ever-expanding apparatuses of coercion and control.
From this perspective, 9/11 inaugurated an era in which the structural needs of global capitalism fused with a political project of permanent war, giving rise to a transnational security–industrial complex that now permeates every layer of economic life. The attacks provided the ideological pretext for an open-ended mobilisation of resources into defence, intelligence, surveillance, logistics, and counterterrorism — sectors uniquely suited to absorb surplus capital on a vast scale while remaining shielded from competitive pressures and market saturation.
At the same time, these functions were increasingly outsourced to private contractors — from Blackwater and Halliburton to Palantir and a sprawling ecosystem of data brokers, drone manufacturers, cybersecurity giants, and mercenary firms — effectively turning war-making and security provision into profit-generating circuits of transnational capital. In this sense, the post-9/11 “forever war” is not merely a geopolitical condition but an economic strategy: a stable demand sink that channels overaccumulated capital into militarised infrastructures and transforms coercion, surveillance, and conflict into enduring sites of accumulation, blurring the line between state power and private enterprise.
Taken together, these trends suggest that contemporary capitalism is becoming structurally dependent on the continuous expansion of militarised and securitised systems simply to sustain itself. As productive investment yields diminishing returns and traditional markets stagnate, the infrastructures of warfare, policing, border control, intelligence, and digital surveillance have become among the few reliable frontiers of accumulation. Profit now increasingly depends on the reproduction of insecurity — geopolitical, social, economic, and environmental.
What emerges is a political economy in which capital accumulation is not merely compatible with violence and repression but increasingly requires them. The global architecture of control grows not only because states demand security but because capital demands profitable outlets. In this light, the militarised world of the early twenty-first century is not an aberration but a logical outcome of capitalism’s inner dynamics: a system that survives its crises by investing ever more heavily in the machinery that manages, contains, and — when necessary — produces crisis itself.
New forms of resistance
While such crises generally provide capitalists with opportunities to restructure the system, restore profitability, and thereby push forward accumulation once more, they also open up new opportunities for counterhegemonic projects from below. Periods of heightened militarisation and securitisation invariably expose the fragility of the social order they are meant to stabilise, revealing that the state’s escalating reliance on coercion is a sign not of confidence but of weakness. As resources are diverted into defence budgets, surveillance architectures, and private-security apparatuses, public goods deteriorate, living standards stagnate, and the legitimacy of existing institutions is slowly eroded.
These pressures can activate new forms of resistance, from anti-war movements and labour militancy to struggles over policing, borders, digital surveillance, and the tightening web of corporate–state control. Crises open political space by breaking the ideological spell that markets are self-regulating or that the existing order is inevitable; they produce moments in which alternative visions — of democratic planning, social ownership, abolitionist politics, or ecological reconstruction — can gain traction precisely because the system appears unable to resolve its contradictions without resorting to violence and repression.
At the same time, the deepening entanglement of capital with the security state creates vulnerabilities that counterhegemonic movements may exploit. Militarised accumulation depends on vast supply chains, complex technologies, and enormous fiscal transfers that are politically contentious and practically fragile. Wars are expensive; surveillance infrastructures demand constant maintenance; private-security markets rely on fear, inequality, and legal permissiveness. Any disruption — economic, political, or ecological — can upset these circuits of accumulation, creating openings for alternative priorities to be articulated and pursued.
Moreover, as the security sector grows, it recruits ever larger segments of the global working class into roles directly linked to coercion and surveillance, raising profound questions about the political loyalties and material interests of these workers. Will they remain the foot soldiers of an increasingly authoritarian capitalist order, or could they, under the right conditions, defect from the system they uphold?
The future hinges on these contradictions. The same crises that allow capital to reinvent itself through militarisation also create opportunities for the emergence of new political subjects and new configurations of solidarity that might, in time, challenge the logic of a system that survives by treating insecurity not as a problem to be solved but as a resource to be endlessly mined.
