The Global Police State

by William I. Robinson

"Karl Marx aspired to a world in which our animal needs would be satisfied and our human needs could be addressed. It is a realistic possibility now, as William Robinson outlines—or the alternative that is taking shape before our a 'global police state' controlled by narrowly concentrated capital with 'surplus humanity' left to survive somehow on its own. The choice is in our hands."
—Noam Chomsky, author of Who Rules the World?
 
As the world becomes ever more unequal, people become ever more “disposable.” Today, governments systematically exclude sections of their populations from society through heavy-handed policing. But it doesn't always go to plan.
 
William I. Robinson exposes the nature and dynamics of this out-of-control system, arguing for the urgency of creating a movement capable of overthrowing it. The global police state uses a variety of ingenious methods of control, including mass incarceration, police violence, US-led wars, the persecution of immigrants and refugees, and the repression of environmental activists.
 
He writes in his Introduction, “I offer a ‘big picture” of the emerging global police state in a short book that is eminently readable. The pages to follow may startle many readers and make them angry. I trust the work will serve as a warning of the dystopic future that is upon us. More importantly, by exposing the nature and dynamic of this out-of-control system, I hope it will contribute to the struggles to bring about an alternative future based on human freedom and liberation.”
 
Movements have emerged to combat the increasing militarization, surveillance and social cleansing; however, many of them appeal to a moral sense of social justice rather than addressing its global capitalism.
 
Using shocking data which reveals how far capitalism has become a system of repression, Robinson argues that the emerging megacities of the world are becoming the battlegrounds where the excluded and the oppressed face off against the global police state.     

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Sociology, Political Science, History, Economics, Class

208 pages, Paperback

Published August 20, 2020

About the author

William I. Robinson is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Reviews

[Zach Watson · Rating 2 out of 5]

While this book is a good overview of what Robinson calls the transnational capitalist class and the ways in which is contains and controls the “surplus population,” as Robinson uses the term, I couldn’t help but feel that this book is mistitled. I expected to learn about the interconnectedness of policing from the perspective of protecting capital and containing the masses, but found almost none of this beyond a few anecdotes. This is essentially a very simplified version of Biopolitics, updated for the Trump era and with more acute analysis of capitalism’s role in the controlling of human lives.

[Reid tries to read · Rating 5 out of 5]

Savage global inequalities are politically explosive and to the extent that the system is simply unable to incorporate surplus humanity it turns to ever more violent forms of containment. The methods of control include sealing out the surplus population, through border and other containment walls, deportation regimes, systems of mass incarceration and spatial apartheid. They also include the deadly new modalities of policing and repression made possible by applications of digitalization and Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies.

This book really tied together a lot of strands of ideas I’ve been holding on to.

Essentially, the 1970s neoliberal turn combined with technologies like computing information technology (CIT), transportation improvements, and managerial innovations allowed capital to obtain global mobility in ways not seen before. Instead of an entire car being manufactured in a single country, for example, (besides obtaining the raw materials from the third world) it is now cheaper to manufacture each individual part all across the world coordinated by central computer systems. This has led to a rise in a Trans-national Capitalist Class (TCC) (defined as:“The leading sectors of national capitalist classes (which) have experienced integration with one another across borders in a process of transnational class formation. Its interests lie in promoting global rather than national markets and circuits of accumulation, in competition with local and national capitalist groups”(p. 3))which seeks to create Transnational institutions and State apparatuses (TNS) to organize conditions around the world with the goal of facilitating more plunder of resources and exploitation of labor for the TCC.

A contradiction arises as the TCC must rely on states to help accumulate capital, while at the same time nation-states need to promote transnational-capital accumulation within their territories in order to function. The state relies on capital setting up shop within the state’s domain in order for capital to invest in their economy, therefore generating revenue and employment. Without things conducive to capital accumulation (low taxes, deregulations, downward pressure on wages, and the crushing of organized labor) capital will seek other states to base their accumulation in. This will result in the nation state lacking money and therefore power to legitimate itself.

neoliberalism to today
The neoliberal revolution in the 1970s (what this author calls “globalization”) required a lot of dismantling and deregulation to make sure the flow of capital across the globe was completely unimpeded, that resources were extracted without restrictions, and that new markets from previously state-owned assets could be pried open. This involved the deregulation of markets, opening up capital to travel as freely as possible through a series of global free trade agreements, the privatization of public assets, and the rollback of state-sponsored welfare. All of this coincided with a mass wave of dispossession that displaced hundreds of millions of people in countrysides across the planet. Labor across the globe found it increasingly harder to defend their wages. States too found it nearly impossible to redistribute surpluses to pacify their citizens due to the privatization of their assets, tax systems that were now much less efficient, and the ease at which corporations could now evade taxes. This has led to staggering inequality where, according to an Oxfam report, in 2015 just 1% of humanity owned over half of the world’s wealth, and the top 20% of humanity owned 95% of the world’s wealth. Given these hard to fathom inequalities, corporations are finding it harder and harder to locate opportunities to invest their profits (known as overaccumulation).

One way to invest profits was through speculation made possible by deregulation. Some of this financial “innovation” involved the creation of asset-backed securities (ABS), which essentially was just the commodification of debt. Different kinds of debts - from mortgages to student loan debt to credit card debt - can then be packaged together into marketable securities called “packages” and sold around the world. In the long run the expansion and accumulation of this fictitious capital only exacerbates the problems of overaccumulation. Government bonds too are bought up by investors (the bond market doubled from 2003 to 2017), and these bonds plus interest are then paid back through extracting higher taxes from the working class. The increase in government, corporate, and consumer debt has driven most growth in recent decades as the gap between the “actual'' productive economy and the economy of fictitious capital grows wider.

In the 1980s a revolution in computing information technology allowed companies to outsource workers and communicate on a global scale. This revolution in CIT, combined with the technological innovations of things like containerized shipping and refrigeration, laid the foundational bedrock for the globalized economy. Today, a second revolution in digital technologies is taking place. The heart of this change is based on the collection, processing, and analysis of data about every aspect of society. Corporations are now almost entirely dependent on digital communication and data analysis for all aspects of their businesses. As the technology needed to turn simple activities into recorded data became cheaper and easier to produce, data became like oil: a material that can be extracted, refined, and used to fuel a variety of things. Data mining has both opened up an entirely new variety of markets and become a tool of mass surveillance in the development of a TNS policing apparatus; in the wake of the 2008 financial disaster the tech and data sectors became a major new outlet for surplus capital investment (in 2008 the tech sector accounted for 20% of all new investments across the entire U.S. economy). As every area of the economy becomes increasingly digitized, the corporations that control the digital infrastructure and intellectual property rights to digital production reap massive amounts of profits from rents on their “intellectual property”. At the same time digitalization exacerbates inequalities as it replaces labor with its technologies.

The result of labor markets worldwide being deregulated has been the creation of a subsection of the working class know as the precarious class who labor in unstable, contingent types of work (examples include: gig economy workers like Uber drivers, being an “associate” for walmart so they don’t have to pay certain employment benefits/can easier disrupt unionization, and non-unionized contract work). To the capitalist these workers are easily disposable. The precarious class not only lacks employment stability but also the social protections that were often associated with regulated labor, such as minimum wage guarantees, unemployment insurance, access to social welfare assistance, health insurance, paid holidays, and so on. On top of the existence of the precariat sub-class, the entirety of the global labor force itself has doubled from 1.5 billion in 1980 to 3 billion in 2006, then grew by another 500 million by 2018; thiswas thanks to new rounds of violent primitive accumulation (stripping a person from their land to force them to sell their labor power for wages) as well as the former socialist bloc + China entering into the global labor pool. The new rounds of primitive accumulation have been disguised through the “war on terror” and the “war on drugs''. Examples of this include: The hundreds of thousands farmers who have suicide in recent years in India after losing their land to creditors; In Mexico, several million families lost their land in the wake of the North American Free Trade Agreement signed with the United States and Canada in 1994; A similar story has taken place in sub-Saharan Africa and Central and South America. These uprooted people typically become migrant workers or live in shanty towns/slums on the edges of megacities (for more info read Mike Davis’ book “Planet of Slums”). Digitalization, in addition to facilitating the creation of many precarious forms of employment, will also exponentially increase the number of unemployed “surplus laborers” by replacing jobs with things like robotics and A.I. These chronically unemployed “surplus laborers/surplus humanity” consist of: people who must survive off of working in the informal economy taking place in the masses of slums across the globe, refugees displaced by wars/natural disasters/repression, and migrant workers unable to enter the formal labor market. Often these surplus laborers weave in and out of the precariat sub-class. Today more than 2 billion people can be categorized as working off the informal sector.

This mass of surplus humanity represents a challenge to the TCC. They must be controlled in some way to prevent class rebellion. Unlike formal wage workers, who the capitalists exploit by directly appropriating their surplus labor value, surplus humanity is not directly exploited for they do not labor for wages. The only use surplus humanity has to the TCC is through indirect exploitation, like paying rents to landlords or through repayment of debts; debts which they must take on in the first place simply to afford means of subsistence. At the same time, the millennial generation is being born into a fully digitized world where all they will know is the normalization of precarious work. Without any sort of class-conscious inducing movement, their revolutionary energy will be disbursed playing computer games, watching porn, gambling, scrolling social media, and anything else to take their minds off of the alienating nature of their work. The isolated nature of the modern world impedes class consciousness, along with global corporate media propaganda.

To boil it down simply: digitization plus coming climate change will add massive amounts of people to the ranks of surplus humanity as robots/A.I. take our jobs (“A 2017 United Nations report estimated that tens if not hundreds of millions of jobs will disappear in the coming years as a result of digitalization. As an example, the report estimated that more than 85 percent of retail workers in Indonesia and the Philippines were at risk” (p. 61)) and climate catastrophes create hundreds of millions of refugees (Pentagon planners call climate change a “threat multiplier” as extreme weather and water scarcity inflame existing social conflicts, leading to “militarized management of civilization’s violent disintegration.”). The question that the TCC is currently solving is: “how do we deal with possibly billions of desperate people who we simply don’t need?” The answer: Green Zoning

The Green Zone was a nearly impenetrable area in central Baghdad that U.S. occupation forces established in the wake of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Within it the command center of the occupation and select Iraqi elite were shielded from the violence, death, and chaos that was going on throughout the rest of the country. Right now, in urban areas across the planet, elites live in gated, gentrified communities protected by militarized police forces. Outside of these enclaves are permanent, low-intensity wars between the police-state and rebellious communities (which include oppressed racial minorities, the ethnically persecuted, and other vulnerable communities). Examples of Green Zoning: the settler apartheid wall, military checkpoints, and Israeli only-areas used in occupied Palestine; the Sante Fe district of Mexico City which can only be entered by helicopter or through gated private roads; the exclusive Sandon City area of Johannesburg, South Africa which has communities of militarized mansions surrounded by electrical/barbed wire fencing and guarded by armed towers; satellite cities in Cairo, Egypt where the country’s elite live in gated residences, complete with English-only schools, shopping malls, and a private security force; the Bay Area of California where newly built multi-million dollar mansions guarded by multi-million dollar security systems displace countless homeless people. In between these green zones and the war zones are grey zones where the majority of humanity live under the mass surveillance of the global police state, which implicitly threatens to lock them up into the growing prison-industrial-complex.

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jaw dropping gallop through all that is distorted and quite frankly fucked up in our dissolving world. This is a illuminating read, compelling indeed.

[Lorién Gómez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Creo que es un libro imprescindible para comprender las dinámicas que subyacen a la actualización autoritaria del Estado capitalista. Robinson explica con fundamento -y lo más importante, aporta muchos datos- sobre el nuevo modelo de acumulación militarizada o acumulación por represión. Del auge de las guerras privadas, del conglomerado tecnológico-militar ligado a las grandes finanzas y a la Clase Capitalista Transnacional, o de la securitizacion de las fronteras...

De ahí extrae algunos apuntes necesarios sobre el auge de la extrema derecha, aunque bajo un prisma a mi parecer errado. En cualquier caso, merece la pena leerlo.

[Arnau Fernández Pasalodos · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Dado que los organismos gubernamentales pagan un dinero por cada recluso a las empresas privadas, a estas empresas y sus inversores les interesa aumentar la población reclusa cuanto sea posible, mantenerla en la cárcel todo el tiempo que se pueda y, por extensión, ampliar los métodos de criminalización".

Es un librazo. Poco más que decir.

[Sue5901 · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit slow at times but definite explains part of why things simply do not improve in our counrty

[Joaquin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cómo la clase capitalista transnacional controla a través de los estados las economías nacionales en su provecho. Echo en falta el factor energético.