The Global Police State

William I Robinson

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781786806666
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Criminologie

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. 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 root - 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.

1

Global Capitalism and its Crisis

“The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from the old ones.”

John Maynard Keynes

All social orders exist in a perpetual state of development, transformation, and eventual demise. Capitalism is no exception. It is the most dynamic system that humanity has ever seen, and also the most destructive. Certainly, the inner workings of the capitalist system have remained constant over the centuries. These include the relentless drives to endlessly accumulate capital (to maximize profit) and to expand outwardly. These drives led over the centuries to ongoing waves of colonialism and imperialism as the system expanded out of its original heartland in Western Europe and came to engulf the entire planet. What has continuously changed over the centuries are the social formations and technologies through which capitalism operates and the institutions and sets of class relations that organize the system. But now world capitalism is in the midst of a severe crisis. Will the system survive? Will humanity survive the ravages of this crisis? Capitalism has proved remarkably resilient even as it has faced one crisis after another in its centuries-long existence, defying predictions of its imminent demise and emerging renewed after each major crisis. Indeed, in response to global crisis, the system is at this time undergoing a new round of transformations, involving the construction of a global police state. At a time when both fascism and socialism have reappeared on the global agenda, it is urgent that we study these transformations.

World capitalism has gone through several historical stages, or epochs, in its ongoing and open-ended evolution. Constructing what social scientists refer to as a “periodization” allows us to make sense out of the process of historic development and transformation of a system; it means not that earlier stages disappear but that they become superseded by transformation from within. The first stage in world capitalism, symbolized by the bloody conquest of the Americas starting in 1492, is known as the epoch of mercantilism and primitive accumulation, what Marx referred to as the “rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.” It was marked by the creation of a world market, the colonial system, the emergence of a trans-Atlantic economy, and the intensification of trade between West and East. The second, competitive or classical capitalism, was marked by the Industrial Revolution, the rise of the bourgeoisie, and the forging of the modern nation-state, keynoted by the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789. The mercantile epoch ran from the symbolic dates of 1492 to 1789, while the age of classical capitalism gave way in the late nineteenth century to the third stage, that of national corporate (“monopoly”) capitalism. This stage brought a new wave of imperialist conquest, the consolidation of the world market, and the rise of powerful national financial and industrial corporations.

Globalization marks a shift towards a qualitatively new epoch in world capitalism, that of global capitalism. Let us here review my theory of global capitalism as I have laid it out elsewhere.¹ The turning point in the epochal shift came during the world crisis of the 1970s, about which I will have more to say below. Capitalism was able to transcend that crisis by “going global,” leveraging globalization processes into a vast new restructuring and integration of the world economy. This new transnational phase is marked by a number of qualitative shifts in the system and by novel articulations of social power worldwide. The hallmark of the new epoch is the rise of truly transnational capital and a new globally integrated production and financial system into which all nations and much of humanity have been integrated. To be sure, capitalism has always been a world system—it was never simply national or regional. It expanded from the onset, ultimately engulfing the entire world, and depending throughout its existence on a web of worldwide trade relations. National development has always been conditioned by the larger worldwide system of trade and finance and on the international division of labor that colonialism brought about.

But this began to change in the latter decades of the twentieth century. Surveying the world economy at century’s end, the British historian Eric Hobsbawm observed:

The world economy in the Golden Age [1945–73] remained international rather than transnational. Countries traded with each other to an ever greater extent … [T]hough the industrial economies increasingly bought and sold each others’ production, the bulk of their economic activity remained home-centered. Nevertheless, an increasingly transnational economy began to emerge, especially from the 1960s on, that is to say, a system of economic activity for which state territories and state frontiers are not the basic framework, but merely complicating factors … and which sets limits to what even the economies of the very large and powerful states can do. Some time in the early 1970s such a transnational economy became an effective global force.²

This new transnational phase entails a shift from a world economy to a global economy. In the world economy, countries and regions were linked to each other via trade and financial flows in an integrated international market. In the new global economy, nations are linked to each more organically through the transnationalization of the production process, of finance, and of the circuits of capital accumulation. By circuit of accumulation I mean the process by which the production of a good or a service is first planned and financed (by capitalists), followed by attaining and then mixing together the component parts (labor, land, raw materials, buildings and machinery, etc.) in production sequences, and then by the marketing of the final product. At the end of this process, the capitalist recovers his initial capital outlay as well as profit and has thus “accumulated” capital. This is what Karl Marx referred to as the “circuit of capital.” In earlier epochs much of the circuit was “self-contained” within a single country.

Technological developments, above all the introduction of computer and information technologies (CIT), alongside the revolution in transportation and novel organizational and managerial strategies, allowed capital to achieve global mobility. Capitalists set about in the late twentieth century to reorganize production worldwide in order to maximize profit-making opportunities and to gain further advance over the global working and popular classes. Having achieved this newfound global reach, capitalists could now freely search for the cheapest labor, lowest taxes, and laxest regulatory environments as they forged a new global economy. They put in place a globally integrated yet spatially fragmented production and financial system organized through vast networks of subcontracting and outsourcing that span the planet. As national production systems fragmented, they became integrated externally into the new globalized circuits of accumulation.

Previously, to take an oft-cited example, auto companies in the United States produced cars from start to finish, with the exception of the procurement abroad of some raw materials, and then exported them to other countries. The circuit of accumulation was national, save for the final export and foreign payment. Now, instead, the process of producing a car has been decentralized and fragmented into dozens of different phases that are scattered across many countries around the world. Often individual parts are manufactured in several different countries, assembly may be stretched out over others, and management may be coordinated from a central computer terminal unconnected to actual production sites or to the corporation’s country of domicile.³

The global economy that emerged out of this restructuring is epitomized by the rise of the global assembly line and the spread of modern-day sweatshops in free-trade zones around the world, as well as a digitalized global financial system through which money moves seamlessly and instantaneously across the globe, and by a global capitalist culture of corporate brands, consumerism, and a narcissistic individualism. More recently, services have also experienced transnationalization involving the decentralized provision across borders of services, including digital services and ecommerce, along with the further privatization of health care, telecommunications, and other service industries. With this globally integrated economy comes a more organic integration of social life worldwide. Even the most remote communities are now linked into the new circuits of global economy and society through vast decentralized networks of production and distribution, as well as by global communications and other integrative technologies and cultural flows increasingly fostering these networks.

The Transnational Capitalist Class and
Transnational State Apparatuses

But global capitalism is not faceless. A transnational capitalist class (henceforth, TCC) emerged as the manifest agent of global capitalism, about which much has been written in recent years.⁴ The leading sectors of national capitalist classes 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 whose fate is more closely bound up with their particular nation-states. This TCC is the hegemonic fraction of capital on a world scale. It is made up of the owners and managers of the giant transnational corporations, or TNCs, and the financial institutions that drive the global economy.

These transnational corporate conglomerates have ceased to be corporations of a particular country and have increasingly come to represent transnational capital. The TNCs have internalized markets within their networks across national and regional frontiers, making themselves independent of their states of origin and their territories. The TCC may have originally emerged out of the “Atlantic ruling class,” or among North American and European capitalists. But by the second decade of the twenty-first century, it had become a truly global ruling class, with contingents from most countries and every continent, even if still skewed disproportionately towards the traditional Western core of world capitalism and now China.⁵ As we shall see, the TCC and the global corporate conglomerates they control have become progressively invested in a global police state.

How does the TCC organize itself to pursue its interests around the world? How do the class and social relations of global capitalism become institutionalized? What is the system’s political authority structure? Despite the rhetoric of market fundamentalism, the capitalist system cannot be sustained through market relations alone. Capitalism requires the state in order to function. There emerged two broad approaches to understanding the capitalist state in the 1960s and 1970s, the heyday of theorizing on exactly how the capitalist class is able to assure that the state represents its interests and reproduces capitalism. One approach held that the state was “instrumentalized” directly by the dominant groups in order to shape policies in their interests, for instance, by placing their agents in government positions, by lobbying, or by financing election campaigns. The other held that dominant groups did not necessarily instrumentalize the state directly but rather the very structure of capitalist society forced the state to implement policies that advanced the interests of these dominant groups.

In this latter view, the state is structurally dependent on capital; for instance, it requires capital to invest in the economy in order to generate employment and revenue and must therefore implement policies that assure a favorable investment climate for capitalists. It is clear that both these processes are at play in global capitalism. The TCC directly instrumentalizes states around the world and at the same time every country and the whole global economy is structurally dependent on transnational capital. States have to generate the conditions for transnational capital accumulation, and this means not only assuring a favorable climate for making profit but also repressing any threat to the rule of capital. It is important to see this relationship of the state to transnational capital. Many resistance and social justice movements target governments as the visible heads of the global police state yet fail to see transnational capital behind the state, entrenched in civil society, which, as we shall see, is the most potent site of the global police state.

But it is clear that in this age of globalization national governments do not exercise the transnational political authority that global capitalism requires. The TCC has attempted to convert the structural power of the global economy into supranational political authority and to exercise its class power around the world through transnational state (TNS) apparatuses. TNS apparatuses should not be confused with a global government, which does not and may never exist. Methodologically speaking, the TNS is not a thing; it is an analytical abstraction that helps us make sense of contemporary developments. This TNS is constituted as a loose network made up of trans- and supranational organizations together with national states that have been captured by transnationally oriented policy makers and state managers. TNS apparatuses function to organize the conditions around the world for transnational accumulation—that is, to open up resources and labor around the world to transnational corporate plunder. They form an institutional network around the world through which the TCC and its political agents attempt to create and reproduce the conditions for global capital accumulation. But this does not mean that the nation-state disappears. To the contrary, as I will discuss later, one of the most explosive contradictions of global capitalism is the contradictory mandate that national governments have. They must promote the conditions for global capital accumulation in their territories and at the same time they must secure their legitimation through “the nation.”

It is difficult to understate the extent to which capital has become transnationally integrated, concentrated, and centralized in the TCC. One oft-cited 2011 report by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology undertook an analysis of the share ownerships of 43,000 transnational corporations. It identified among these a core of 1,318 TNCs with interlocking ownerships. Each of these core TNCs, in turn, had ties to two or more other companies and on average they were connected to 20. Although they represented only 20 percent of global operating revenues, these 1,318 TNCs appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world’s largest blue chip and manufacturing firms, representing a further 60 percent of global revenues—for a total of 80 percent of the world’s revenue.⁶ But when the research team dug further they found that these 1,318 TNCs tracked back to a “super entity” of 147 even more tightly knit companies, representing just 1 percent of the global corporate stock, that controlled 40 percent of the total wealth of the network. Not surprisingly, the top 50 of these corporations were global financial institutions. If the TCC is the hegemonic fraction of capital on a world scale, it is clear that transnational finance capital is hegemonic within the TCC. The worldwide mesh of transnational finance capital has its tentacles in every nook and cranny of the global economy and shapes the lives of every person on the planet. As we shall see, it is deeply enmeshed with the global police state.

In his masterful 2018 study Giants: The Global Power Elite, sociologist Peter Phillips provides a stunning portrait of the extent to which the TCC has centralized and concentrated global economic control worldwide. In the tradition of power elite studies, he exposes an inner core of 389 individuals drawn from the upper echelons of the TCC who stand at the very apex of the global power structure and who have brought about the transnational inter-penetration of what were in an earlier era national power networks. We see a cementing now at the global level of political and economic power in this transnational elite through an unprecedented concentration of financial capital and through the political influence that this economic control wields over states and TNS institutions. In short, in 2018 just 17 global financial conglomerates collectively managed $41.1 trillion dolla...