William I. Robinson is Professor of Sociology, University of California at Santa Barbara. His most recent books are Into the Tempest: Essays on the New Global Capitalism (Haymarket, 2018) and The Global Police State (Pluto Press, 2020).
If there’s one thing the coronavirus has made clear it is that, if we are to have any hope of resolving the dire problems that plague humanity, from ecological collapse, to war, poverty, inequality and disease, we have to collectively confront across borders the powers that be in the world capitalist system and their control over the means of our existence. From U.S. President Donald Trump’s criminal ineptitude in addressing the pandemic, to the multi-trillion-dollar bailouts for capital, the threat to survival that billions of precarious workers face as the global economy has plunged, and the overwhelming of woefully underfunded and collapsing public health systems, the pandemic has laid bare how it cannot be left to our rulers to resolve the crisis of humanity.
The pandemic has brought home the extent to which the fate of any one community on the planet is now bound up inextricably with that of humanity as a whole. What appeared as a localised virus in Wuhan has quickly spread to just about every country and community in the world, leading to the lockdown of several billion people and prompting what some have called the greatest crisis since World War II. The economic meltdown triggered by the virus has underscored how dependent we all are now on the globally integrated production, financial, and service system, controlled as it is by the transnational capitalist class (TCC) and its political agents in capitalist states around the world.
These agents were quick to blame the meltdown on the virus as stock markets and global commerce have gone into free fall starting in March 2020. But the economic calamity the pandemic has unleashed is a chronicle foretold. The underlying structural causes of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC), far from being resolved, have become steadily aggravated. Frenzied financial speculation, unsustainable debt, the plunder of public finance, an overinflated tech sector, and state-organised militarised accumulation have kept the global economy sputtering along in recent years in the face of chronic stagnation and concealed its underlying instability. The pandemic will pass but the crisis of global capitalism is here to stay and will become more acute in the wake of COVID-19.
The TCC has wasted no time in endeavouring to shift the burden of the crisis and the sacrifice that the pandemic imposes onto the working and popular classes. For this purpose, it has relied on the backing of capitalist state power. Many governments have turned to massive new bailouts of capital with only very modest relief, if any at all, for the working classes. The United States government have injected an initial $1.5 trillion into Wall Street banks, with the White House promising that its response to the pandemic is ‘centered fully on unleashing the power of the private sector’, meaning that capitalist profit comes first, shaping the response to the emergency. The US have since passed a $2 trillion stimulus package, the single biggest component of which was a giveaway to corporations, along with smaller amounts for relief to the unemployed and poor families. In Europe, the EU and member governments have approved similar stimulus packages, as did the Chinese government. Most governments around the world have approved packages that involved the same combination of fiscal stimulus, corporate bailout, and modest public relief, if it was provided at all.
The International Labor Organization has predicted, in early April, that some 200 million people worldwide would lose their jobs as a result of the virus. Some one billion children worldwide have been affected by school closures. Hundreds of millions of transnational migrants and refugees face the virus with no access to health infrastructure. Prisoners in overcrowded jails the world over, the homeless, and those in war zones are sitting ducks for the virus. The capitalist crisis unleashed by the coronavirus, it would seem, may be even more deadly for impoverished workers than the virus itself.
Global Capitalism’s Structural Crisis
All the tell-tale signs of what political economists refer to as an overaccumulation crisis have been present for some time. Capitalist globalisation and neoliberal austerity since the late 1970s has pushed the global working and popular classes onto the defensive and shifted the global balance of class forces in favour of transnational capital, following the period of mass struggles in the 1960s and 1970s. But globalisation also aggravated capitalism’s most fundamental contradiction, overaccumulation. This refers to a situation in which enormous amounts of capital are built up but without productive outlets for reinvestment. This capital then becomes stagnant. By liberating emergent transnational capital from national constraints, globalisation has undermined redistributive programs that once attenuated capitalism’s inherent tendency towards social polarisation. The result has been an unprecedented sharpening of inequality that has fuelled overaccumulation.
The level of global social polarisation and inequality now experienced is unprecedented. In 2018, the richest one per cent of humanity controlled more than half of the world’s wealth while the bottom 80 per cent had to make do with just 4.5 per cent. Such inequalities end up undermining the stability of the system as the gap grows between what is (or could be) produced and what the market can absorb. The extreme concentration of the planet’s wealth in the hands of the few and the accelerated impoverishment and dispossession of the majority means that transnational capital has increasing difficulty in finding productive outlets to unload enormous amounts of surplus capital. If left unchecked, the expanding social polarisation results in crisis—in stagnation, recessions, depressions, social upheavals and war.
Overaccumulation originates in the circuit of capitalist production, yet it becomes manifest in the sphere of circulation, that is, in the market, as a crisis of overproduction or underconsumption. Over the past few years there has been a rise in underutilised capacity and a slowdown in industrial production around the world. As the productive economy stagnates, capitalists have turned to financial speculation. This surplus of accumulated capital with nowhere to go is without precedent. Transnational corporations recorded record profits during the 2010s; in the same period corporate investment declined. Worldwide corporate cash reserves topped $12 trillion in 2017, more than the foreign exchange reserves of the world’s central governments.
In the wake of the Great Recession of 2008, the US Federal Reserve injected a whopping $16 trillion in secret bailouts to banks and corporations from around the world. But then the banks and institutional investors simply recycled the trillions of dollars it received into new speculative activities in various derivatives and global commodities markets, in cryptocurrencies, and in land around the world, fuelling a new global land grab. As opportunities have dried up for speculative investment in one sector the TCC simply turns to another sector to unload its surplus. As a result, the gap between the productive economy and fictitious capital grew into an enormous chasm. In 2018, for example, the gross world product (or the total value of goods and services) stood at some $75 trillion, whereas the global derivatives market was estimated at a mind-boggling $1.2 quadrillion. This accumulation of fictitious capital gave the appearance of recovery. But it only offset the crisis temporally, while in the long run exacerbating the underlying problem.
In addition to speculation, growth has been driven by mounting government, corporate, and consumer debt. Consumer credit has served the dual purpose of class pacification and of generating demand even as real incomes have dropped for the immiserated majority, who have been subjected to austerity and ever more precarious forms of employment. In countries around the world, consumer debt was higher on the eve of the pandemic that it has been for all of post-war history. State and corporate debt is also at a breaking point. The global bond market—an indicator of total government debt worldwide—surpassed $100 trillion in 2017, while total global debt reached a staggering $215 trillion in 2016. Worldwide corporate debt has soared to $75 trillion, up from $32 trillion in 2005, while corporations have issued $13 trillion in bonds, more than twice the bond debt on the eve of the 2008 collapse. As depression sets in, a default on consumer, state, or corporate debt will set off a further chain reaction in the downward plunge of the global economy. In sum, financial speculation, pillaging the state, and debt-driven growth were ‘fixes’ that could not address the underlying structural conditions that triggered the 2008 financial collapse. The global economy was a ticking time bomb. All that was needed was something to light the fuse. That has arrived in the form of the coronavirus.
Militarised accumulation: the global war economy
Beyond financial speculation, debt-driven growth, and pillaging state finances, the transnational capitalist class (TCC) turned to another mechanism to sustain accumulation in the face of stagnation, what I have termed militarised accumulation. Savage global inequalities are politically explosive and to the extent that the system is simply unable to reverse them or to incorporate surplus humanity it turns to ever more violent forms of containment to manage immiserated populations. As popular discontent has spread in recent years, the dominant groups have imposed systems of mass social control, repression and warfare—from mass incarceration to deadly new modalities of policing and omnipresent systems of state and private surveillance—to contain the actual and the potential rebellion of the global working class and surplus humanity.
Militarised accumulation refers to how the global economy is becoming ever more dependent on the development and deployment of systems of warfare, social control and repression, apart from political considerations, simply as a means of making profit and continuing to accumulate capital in the face of stagnation. As the crisis intensifies, militarised accumulation may take over as prime driver of the global economy. The so-called wars on drugs and terrorism, the undeclared wars on immigrants, refugees and gangs (and poor, dark-skinned and working-class youth more generally), the construction of border walls, immigration detention centres, prison-industrial complexes and systems of mass surveillance, and the spread of private security-guard and mercenary companies have all become major sources of profit-making and they will become more important to the system as economic depression sets in.
The events of September 11, 2001, marked the start of an era of permanent global war in which logistics, warfare, intelligence, repression, surveillance and even military personnel are more and more the privatised domain of transnational capital. Criminalisation of surplus humanity activates state-sanctioned repression, opening up new profit-making opportunities for the TCC. The Pentagon budget increased 91 per cent in real terms between 1998 and 2011, while worldwide, total defence outlays grew by 50 per cent from 2006 to 2015, from $1.4 trillion to $2.03 trillion, some 3 per cent of gross world product, although this figure does not take into account hundreds of billions of dollars in ‘homeland security’ spending. In the decade from 2001 to 2011 military-industry profits nearly quadrupled. Led by the United States as the predominant world power, military expansion in different countries has taken place through parallel, and often conflictive, processes, yet all show the same relationship between state militarisation and global capital accumulation.
But militarised accumulation involves vastly more than activities generated by state military budgets. There are immense sums involved in state spending and private corporate accumulation through militarisation and other forms of generating profit through repressive social control that do not involve militarisation per se. The various wars, conflicts, and campaigns of social control and repression around the world involve the fusion of private accumulation with state militarisation. In this relationship, the state facilitates the expansion of opportunities for private capital to accumulate through militarisation, such as by facilitating global weapons sales by military-industrial-security firms, the amounts of which have reached unprecedented levels. Global weapons sales by the top 100 weapons manufacturers and military service companies increased by 38 per cent between 2002 and 2016.
Private military and security firms have proliferated worldwide and their deployment is not limited to the major conflict zones in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa. In his study Corporate Warriors, P. W. Singer documents how private military forces (PMFs) have come to play an ever more central role in military conflicts and wars. Beyond the many based in the United States, PMFs come from numerous countries around the world, including Russia, South Africa, Colombia, Mexico, India, the EU countries and Israel. PMF clients include states, corporations, landowners, non-governmental organisations, and even the Colombian and Mexican drug cartels. By 2018, private military companies employed some 15 million people around the world, deploying forces to guard corporate property, provide personal security for TCC executives and their families, collect data, conduct police, paramilitary, counterinsurgency and surveillance operations, carry out mass crowd control and repression of protesters, manage prisons, run private detention and interrogation facilities, and participate in outright warfare. In addition, there were an outstanding 20 million private security workers worldwide in 2017, and the industry was expected to be worth over $220 billion by 2020. In half of the world’s countries, private security agents outnumber police officers.
Meanwhile, criminalisation of the poor, the racially oppressed, immigrants, refugees and other vulnerable communities activates ‘legitimate’ state repression to enforce the accumulation of capital, whereby the state turns to private capital to carry out the repression of those criminalised. There has been a rapid increase in imprisonment in countries around the world, led by the United States, which has been exporting its own system of mass incarceration. The global prison population grew by 24 per cent from 2000 to 2018. This carceral state opens up enormous opportunities at multiple levels for militarised accumulation. Worldwide there were in the early twenty-first century some 200 privately operated prisons on all continents and many more ‘public–private partnerships’ that involved privatised prison services and other forms of for-profit custodial services such as privatised electronic-monitoring programs. The countries that were developing private prisons ranged from most member states of the EU to Israel, Russia, Thailand, Hong Kong, South Africa, New Zealand, Ecuador, Australia, Costa Rica, Chile, Peru, Brazil and Canada.
Every phase in the war on migrants and refugees has become a wellspring of profit-making, from private, for-profit detention centres and the provision of services inside public detention centres such as healthcare, food and phone systems to other ancillary activities of the deportation regime, such as government contracting of private charter flights to ferry deportees back home and the equipping of armies of border agents. In the United States, the border-security industry was set to double in value, from $305 billion in 2011 to some $740 billion in 2023. In Europe, the budget for the EU public–private border-security agency, Frontex, increased a whopping 3688 per cent between 2005 and 2016, while the European border-security market was expected to nearly double, from some $18 billion in 2015 to approximately $34 billion in 2022.
When the health emergency comes to an end we may be left with a global economy even more dependent on this militarised accumulation than before the virus hit, and with the threat that the ruling groups will turn to war. Historically, wars have pulled the capitalist system out of crisis and have also served to deflect attention from political tensions and problems of legitimacy.
The coming upheavals: popular classes confront global police state
The crisis triggered by the pandemic will leave in its wake more inequality, more political tension, more militarism and more authoritarianism. Social upheaval, civil strife and mass popular struggles will escalate. The ruling groups will intensify their class warfare from above by extending the global police state to contain mass discontent from below as capitalist hegemony breaks down. The global police state refers to three interrelated developments. First, as I discussed in part II of this essay, it refers to militarised accumulation as a means of accumulating capital in the face of stagnation. Second, it refers to the systems of mass social control and repression to contain the oppressed. And, third, it refers to the increasing move towards political systems that can be characterised as twenty-first-century fascism and even as totalitarianism.
Governments around the world have centralised the response to the pandemic and many have declared states of emergency. Such centralised coordination may be urgent to confront the health crisis. But centralisation of emergency powers in authoritarian capitalist states will be used after the virus has been brought under control to contain discontent, heighten surveillance and impose repressive social control—that is, to expand the global police state. Military and police forces were deployed by governments around the world in response to the pandemic. Let us recall that these same governments passed draconian anti-terrorism legislation in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks that were used to suppress civil liberties and clamp down on political dissent.
In the United States the national guard was activated in all fifty states and the US Department of Justice secretly asked Congress to suspend constitutional rights during the public-health crisis, including the suspension of habeas corpus. Several states enacted laws to criminalise protest against fossil fuels by designating them ‘critical infrastructure’. Throughout Europe, thousands of soldiers have been deployed to quarantined cities to patrol streets and enforce lockdowns. Most EU governments declared states of emergency. In Hungary the far-right authoritarian prime minister Viktor Orbán sought an open-ended state of emergency that would give him powers to bypass parliament and rule by decree.
From Russia to Singapore to South Korea, governments around the world stepped up surveillance of their populations. The Russian government demanded that the media stop publishing information on the virus that the Kremlin declared to be false. The governments of Turkey, Montenegro and Serbia carried out arrests and fined people who published information on social media that ‘provokes panic and jeopardises public security’. The virus became a test bed for surveillance capitalism. The Italian, German, Chinese and Austrian governments, among others, put systems in place in coordination with the giant tech corporations to analyse smartphone data so as to determine to what extent populations were complying with the lockdown. The Tunisian government deployed robocops to patrol streets. In the Philippines, the authoritarian president Rodrigo Duterte issued shoot-to-kill orders for anyone defying the stay-at-home lockdown.
In India, the government declared a state of emergency and enforced mandatory confinement to home. But hundreds of millions of precarious and informal workers who would starve if they did not leave home to scrape by were met with brutal and humiliating police violence, scenes of which were caught on television cameras and social-media recordings and aired around the world. Tens of millions more migrant workers were caught by the lockdown far away from their villages. With public transportation shut down, they were forced to endure pitiless state repression as they marched hundreds of kilometres to get home.Honduras provided a case study in how the ruling groups used the health emergency to legitimate an escalation of state repression. The dictatorial regime, in power by means of a US-backed coup in 2009, ordered a nationwide lockdown enforced by the Honduran military and police. The lockdown included the suspension of numerous constitutional guarantees, including freedom of expression, freedom of movement and freedom from arbitrary detention. Hundreds of arrests, some of them of known political dissidents, were carried out in the first few days of the order. Emblematic of what has been taking place throughout the Global South, a life-and-death situation spread across Honduras with the closure of street markets and roadside vendors. Some 60 per cent of all Hondurans live in poverty, and a full 70 per cent are employed in the informal sector. Just as in other countries around the world, confinement at home was simply not possible for this impoverished majority. The repressive lockdown meant that millions faced starvation, unable to go out in search of food, to seek assistance or for other survival activities without risking state military and police repression. In several municipalities, residents who took to the streets to demand relief were met by bullets, tear gas and arrests.
Conclusion: no return to normalcy
The class character of the crisis could not be clearer. The virus may not care about the class, ethnicity or nationality of the human hosts it seeks to infect, but it is the poor and working classes who are unable to protect themselves from contagion. In the teeming slums of the world’s megacities social distancing is a privilege that is out of reach. Millions will die, especially in the Global South, not so much from the viral infection as from lack of access to life-sustaining services and resources.
The ruling classes will push policies to exploit every aspect of the pandemic for private profit. Even if deficit spending and Keynesian stimulus remain in place for the duration of a depression, the experience of 2008 showed that governments recovered the costs of bailouts by deepening social austerity, even as banks and corporations used bailout money to buy back stock and engage in new rounds of predatory activities. Yet neoliberalism simply does not have any more reserves with which to contain financial chaos and economic implosion. The implacable drive to accumulate will impede solutions to the crisis. Renewed capitalist stability, if it can even be achieved, would require a more profound restructuring—including the rebuilding of public sectors devastated by forty years of neoliberalism—than the agents of financial and corporate interests, along with the liberal and social-democratic elite around the world, could possibly accomplish, or would even want to.
Short of overthrowing the system, the only way out of the crisis is a reversal of escalating inequalities through a redistribution of wealth and power downward. That will not come without a fight. In the United States, as elsewhere, as the virus spread workers undertook a wave of strikes and protests to demand their safety, while tenants called for rent strikes, immigrant-justice activists surrounded detention centres and demanded the release of prisoners, auto workers went out on wildcat strikes to force factories to shut down, homeless people took over homes, and healthcare workers on the front lines demanded the supplies they need to do their jobs and stay safe. The crisis has the potential to awaken millions from political apathy. The ruling groups cannot but be frightened by the rumbling from below.
The COVID-19 pandemic marks a before-and-after turning point. We have entered into a period of mounting chaos in the world capitalist system. Short of revolution, we must struggle now to prevent our rulers from turning the crisis into an opportunity for them to resuscitate and deepen the neoliberal order once the dust settles. Our struggle is to push for something along the lines of a global Green New Deal as an interim program alongside an accumulation of forces for more radical system change. Left and progressive forces must position themselves now to beat back the threat of war and the global police state and to push the coming upheavals in a direction that empowers the global working and popular classes.
