The Israeli genocide in Gaza is a response to the crisis of global capitalism where extermination becomes an option for the system. Lighting the fuse of mass disaffection with the status quo, our protests are a direct threat to the transnational capitalist class.
May 24, 2024
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.
Image by Roscoe Myrick/Flickr
The following is the English version of an interview that the Turkish online newspaper Artı Gerçek, conducted with William I. Robinson, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Artı Gerçek: As you know, the genocide perpetrated by Israel in the war after October 7 has caused intense reactions all over the world. While states have mostly sided with Israel, social movements have sided with Palestine. What do you think about the contrast?
Robinson: I don’t think most states around the world have sided with Israel. The majority of governments represented in the United Nations General Assembly have voted in favor of resolutions since October 2023 calling for Palestine to have full membership in the UN, for a ceasefire in Gaza, and urging states to prevent the forcible transfer of Palestinians. Many governments around the world have condemned the genocide and at last count there were several dozen governments that have joined the South African lawsuit at the International Court of Justice charging Israel with genocide. Even Egypt, which normalized relations with Israel in 1980 and is no friend of the Palestinian freedom struggle has declared its intention to back the South African suit. But governments around the world could and must do much more. Only a few states have cut their diplomatic relations with Israel. China is not supporting the genocide but neither is it doing very much to challenge Israel and help the Palestinians. India of course supports the genocide because its government is also based on proto-fascist repression and the persecution of the Muslim minority, so for it the Israeli model is attractive.
What is entirely true is that the Western states, led by the United States, along with Germany and the UK, have provided steadfast support for Israel. They are complicit in the genocide. Really, we have to consider this an Israeli-US genocide. This is not surprising. The United States is the principal sponsor of the Israeli regime. For decades it has provided a ceaseless flood of military and economic aid to the Zionist regime along with steadfast political and diplomatic backing. The Zionist project is fully dependent on this US sponsorship.
The larger story here is that Israel was created by Western capitalism, literally. The UK colonized Palestine from 1916-1920 as the Ottoman empire crumbled and then in 1948 turned it over to the Zionists. It did this as a strategy for establishing a platform and outpost for world capitalist penetration and control over the Middle East at a time when the region was experiencing decolonization and Arab nationalism and socialism were on the rise. One part of Western strategy for the post-WWII Middle East was backing Israel and the other part was propping up conservative Arab regimes that would have a stake in, and defend, international capitalist economic and geopolitical interests in the region and maintain tight control over the Arab masses.
The Israeli genocide has shocked and outraged the world community. It has touched a raw nerve. There is a global intifada of solidarity with Palestine. This is an historic turning point. The world now sees the Zionist project for what it is, a project that can only culminate in fascism and genocide if it is not defeated. But the outrage worldwide among social movements and publics points to something bigger, an acceleration of the contradictions of a global capitalism sinking into deeper crisis. We see our own plight in the plight of the Palestinians, our own fate bound up with that of the Palestinians. Mass disaffection with the status quo around the world has been simmering and is now reaching a boiling point. The Israeli genocide lit the fuse.
In the larger picture the genocide is a response to the crisis of global capitalism. The ruling groups fear mass uprisings. They have been preparing for them. The criminalization of Palestine solidarity in the Western countries is a dress rehearsal for mass repression. Here in the United States some 300 laws have been taken up by local and state governments throughout the country that would make such protest actions as damaging property, blocking streets or occupying public lands an act of terrorism. This is an extreme level of criminalizing peaceful dissent and it is in direct response to the outpouring of solidarity with Palestine and also to mounting popular protest against a wide range of social and economic injustices and other capitalist pathologies, such as the climate emergency, racism, and the persecution of immigrants.
Artı Gerçek: On October 7, the footage recorded during Operation Aqsa Flood against Israeli settlements, organized by Palestinian groups (in particular Hamas) caused controversy. While some were horrified by the violence, others saw the Palestinian action against Israel’s apartheid walls as a legitimate act of violence by an oppressed nation. What do you say about this topic?
Robinson: In the first place, there needs to be an impartial international investigation into the events of October 7. We may never know all of the details. But what we do know is that the Israeli government launched a well-planned propaganda campaign – backed systematically by the United States and the other Western backers of Israel – almost immediately after the Hamas attack in which it put forward a torrent of lies and of claims that have not been corroborated, including the lie that 40 babies had been beheaded by Hamas. It was really disgusting to see President Biden declare before the world on October 7 that he had personally seen photos of babies with their heads chopped off. The US president lied before the cameras of the world because there were no such photos. Israel’s claim that there had been mass rapes of women has now been debunked. Israel presented the attack as an act of anti-Semitism but the attack was not carried out because the people who were the victims were Jewish but because Israel is the colonial occupation power that has imprisoned the people of Gaza in a massive open-air concentration camp.
We can condemn the fact that civilians were targeted in the Al Aqsa Flood operation. That is a war crime in accordance with international law on the conduct of warfare. We can condemn a specific war crime and the atrocities it involved and still recognize the right of Palestinians to defend themselves, including the right to armed defense. Israel and the United States have a propaganda slogan, which is “Israel has the right to defend itself.” But this is false for two reasons. First, Israel is an illegal racist apartheid state. We would not have said that the South African apartheid state had a right to defend itself. Israel, by “defending itself,” is defending apartheid, colonialism, occupation, oppression, ethnic cleansing and massive, permanent violations of the human rights of Palestinians. Israel is an outlaw state. An outlaw state cannot claim the right to defend itself. But more importantly, international law acknowledges the right of states to defend themselves from external aggression. Yet the Palestinians are not external aggressors. They are in their own homeland! This is not a case of aggression by one state against another and so international law on the right of states to defend themselves does not apply.
Artı Gerçek: As a result of the US support for Israel, the protests that started at Columbia University spread to almost all colleges, where many protesters were detained. In your article published on Truthout, you mentioned that as an American academic you have been persecuted by Israel in the past. In the aftermath of October 7, how has the pro-Israel pressure, especially in the US and Europe, affected the right to protest and freedom of expression?
Robinson: The wave of repression against Palestine solidarity in the US and Europe is simply unprecedented, and it is a direct response to the unprecedented wave of solidarity with Palestine. The hegemony of Zionism – which, we must be very clear, is a racist, colonial, and proto-fascist political project – is beginning to crack. At this time one-third of Jewish Americans oppose the genocide and do not identify with Zionism and that percentage is growing, especially among young Jews.
Israel controls the military battlefield. It is impossible for the Palestinians to achieve an armed victory over Israel. However, Israel has already lost the global battle for political legitimacy. This is why the repression has been so fierce. Here in the US we have seen the suspension of the US constitution on our university campuses and in the larger society. We have a constitutional right to free speech and the right to peacefully assemble but those rights have been ripped up by repression. Peaceful student protesters have been met with savage state political and military repression.
But there is a larger story here. Why is the repression on and off our campuses so intense? Because our protests are a direct threat to the interests of the transnational capitalist class, to the military-industrial-security-intelligence complex, and to US foreign policy. We are seeing the rise of the capitalist university-industrial complex. Our universities are increasingly extensions of the capitalist state. The US government and military have an ever-greater presence at research universities. The universities now serve as a brain trust for transnational corporate capital. Corporations outsource their research and development to the universities. Pharmaceutical corporations finance chemistry and biology departments to do the research that is then used to produce and market drugs. The giant technology corporations do the same for computer engineering and physics departments.
The military-industrial-security-intelligence complex is tied to all of it. Many universities have simply been absorbed by agencies of the state, including the military, security, and intelligence agencies. There is a three-way fusion involving the capitalist state, the corporations, and the universities. My own campus, the University of California at Santa Barbara, receives multimillion dollar funding from Northup Grumman, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Caterpillar, and so on. These are the same corporations that work with US policy in sponsoring the genocide. They invest heavily in Israel and supply the Israeli army.
Over the past few decades of neoliberalism our public universities have been defunded. Instead of public funding the universities are funded by the tuition that students pay, which has skyrocketed and throws these students into a debt trap that lasts for decades after they graduate. But perhaps more importantly, the universities are funded by corporate and individual donors. It has now been shown that many of the multimillionaire and billionaire donors are Zionists and sympathizers of Israel. They threaten to withdraw their donations if university administrators do not crack down on the protests. So the administrators are doing the bidding of the corporations and the capitalist state.
We face the authoritarian university. We are experiencing the corporate colonization of our universities. It is no longer an autonomous space. It is now a space of capital and of the capitalist state. The student and faculty protests are demanding that our universities divest from the corporations that do business with Israel. We are calling for Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (known as the BDS movement). This demand is a direct threat to the interests of the transnational capitalist state and the US military, security and foreign policy apparatus. That is why the repression is so fierce.
To give you one example, Palantir is a multi-billion-dollar high technology corporation based in Silicon Valley, in California. In January it signed an agreement with the Israeli Ministry of Defense to supply the IDF with artificial intelligence and other digital technologies. As we know, the genocide is being waged through this technology. This company is making multimillion dollar profits off of the genocide. Its CEO, Alex Karp, explained early in May in an interview: “College campus protests are not a side show. They are the show. If we lose the intellectual battle, we will not be able to deploy any army in the West, ever.” When we understand these connections, we begin to understand why our universities are calling in the militarized police to carry out mass repression.
Artı Gerçek: There are comments that the genocide in Gaza signals a new process in terms of global politics. Do you think we have entered an era of genocide? What kind of future do you envision for the global capitalist system?
Robinson: The past half century of capitalist globalization has involved a very profound and ongoing restructuring and transformation of world capitalism. The ranks of surplus humanity, of those expelled, marginalized, and made redundant, have swelled and now number some two billion people. Capital has no use for this mass of humanity. Moreover, those among the global working classes that have employment are increasingly facing precariousness, new forms of unstable and precarious work at the same time that they face neoliberal austerity. The level of inequality worldwide is simply unprecedented. One percent of humanity now controls 52 percent of the world’s wealth and 20 percent of humanity controls 95 percent of that wealth. This means that 80 percent of humanity has to make do with just five percent of the world’s wealth.
Surplus humanity and even those who are able to find employment face a crisis of survival, of social disintegration. Whole regions and even whole countries are collapsing and people are on the move. This scares the ruling classes. They fear the actual and potential rebellion of surplus humanity. The ruling classes faces the urgent need to develop and extend new systems of mass social control and repression. The Palestinian population is surplus humanity, especially the Gaza population. Even putting aside the Zionist project of ethnic cleansing to “resolve” the problem of Palestinians that they want to get rid of, Palestinian surplus humanity is of no use to transnational capital. The Gazans stand in the way of transnational capitalist access to the natural gas and oil wealth in Gaza and the Mediterranean shoreline. Gaza is prime beachfront real estate for transnational investors. The “Gaza option” of outright genocide is a nightmarish experiment in how the ruling groups may choose to resolve the problem of surplus humanity.
We are seeing a radical new stage in ruling class modalities of control. Worldwide we are seeing the creation of what we can call super-max prison geographies. Gaza is the model. It is a giant open-air concentration camp locking up the surplus and disposable Palestinian proletariat. However, this is taking place around the world. Last year, El Salvador opened a super-max prison that holds 40,000 prisoners, virtually all of them young unemployed and impoverished surplus people. After that prison was opened, Brazil, China, Thailand and other countries announced similar plans. The one in Thailand will allegedly house 60, 000 people. So we are seeing new forms of spatial control and super-max imprisonment over the mass of dispossessed humanity and the rise of authorities, dictatorial, and even fascist systems to legitimate and develop this global police state. As the crisis of global capitalism deepens, extermination becomes an option for the system. This is what is at stake in Palestine.
But there is something else I must point out. Global capitalism faces a structural crisis of overaccumulation. The transnational capitalist class has accumulated obscene amounts of wealth and are running out of outlets to profitably reinvest their capital. They increasingly rely on what I have termed militarized accumulation and accumulation by repression. Transnational systems of mass social control, repression, and warfare becomes very profitable outlets for investing the surplus and making huge profits. The global police state is very lucrative. The Russia-Ukraine war is a tragedy for the people of Ukraine. It is a tragedy for the people of Russia. It is a tragedy for the world’s people. However, for the transnational capitalist class it is a godsend, a wonderful bonanza. This is why one consultant for the principle military corporations in the US declared after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 that “happy days are here again,” and why after Israel launched its genocide against Gaza that one executive of Goldman Sachs, a global financial conglomerate that invests heavily in Israel, declared that “this is great for our portfolio.”
Artı Gerçek: As a Middle Eastern country, Turkey is one of the countries directly affected by the post-October 7 situation. President Erdoğan has criticized Israel at the highest level, on the other hand, it has been revealed that trade between Turkey and Israel has actually continued uninterruptedly (via greatjournalistic work). How do you evaluate these contradictory positions of Turkey, which is ruled by people from the Islamist tradition?
Robinson: These contradictory positions of Turkey are also present through the other countries in the Middle East. The Turkish capitalist class and the ruling political elite share common class interests with the Israeli rulers and with the ruling classes of the Gulf and the other capitalist states. As Turkey and the Middle East globalized starting in the 1990s there was a very significant integration of capitals across the region, including between Israeli and Arab capital, and with extra-regional transnational capital. The political and the economic are out of sync here. The economic interests of the Turkish rulers, the Israeli rulers, the Gulf rulers are the same. They have common class interests that trump any political differences over Palestine. The Israeli oppression of the Palestinians is simply an embarrassment to them.
Remember, that Israel and Saudi Arabia were supposed to normalize relations this past fall. They would have done so except that the Hamas attack and now the genocide got in the way of these plans. The Israeli-Saudi normalization was supposed to have been the clincher that opened up the wider Middle Eastern region to a massive new round of investment and transnational capital accumulation – in finance and banking, tourism, energy, construction, industry, high technology, luxury consumption and so on.
The problem that the Arab regimes face is that the masses of Arab workers and poor people are also restless and see themselves in the Palestinian struggle. These states have to sustain legitimacy among their own populations so they have to pretend that they care about the Palestinians. In the particular case of Turkey, the legitimating discourse of the Erdogan regime has been a turn to Islamicism. Erdogan must walk a tight-rope between the economic and class interests that are met by expanding trade and cross-investment with Israel, and his political legitimacy at home among the masses of people. And remember, in the last elections Erdogan lost significant political capital and influence. His regime faces an erosion of its legitimacy and its grip on power. So criticizing Israel is a political necessity to retain legitimacy. This is the same with Egypt. Both those states fear that if they do not criticize Israel, the mass popular solidarity with Palestine will also contribute to a mass movement against those regimes.
Artı Gerçek: Your books, The Global Police State and Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity, have recently been translated into Turkish. Especially in the last 10 years, the Turkish state has been dominating all areas of socio-political struggle, especially the Kurdish movement, by force. What message would you like to give to your Turkish readers and those who oppose the government?
Robinson: I don’t want to get you in trouble because I know you face censorship and repression. But in Turkiye and also many other countries around the world mechanisms of consensual domination are breaking down. We are moving more and more towards coercive systems of social control, whether authoritarianism, dictatorship, and even outright fascism, although we are talking about 21st century fascism, which is different than 20th century fascism. The extension of the Turkish state into civil society and the escalation of repression, which includes also new forms of political and cultural legitimation that manipulate mass insecurity and anxiety, reflects the larger situation worldwide, as I have been discussing. The global police state is becoming consolidated in Turkiye.
But there is also the particular Turkish characteristics, including the curious contradictions between an economic program that seeks to deepen neoliberalism and the liberation of capital from restraints, including the transnationalization of Turkish-based capital, which requires the assistance of the Turkish state and its foreign policy – along with a mystifying and conservative Islamicist political and ideological program. There is also the important matter of geopolitics that I cannot get into here.
With regard to the Kurdish movement, we know that the Kurds, together with many of the Syrian and other refugees that have poured into Turkiye in recent years, occupy the lowest and most marginalized rungs of the Turkism political economy. The Kurdish struggle – objectively speaking, if not necessarily subjectively – is really a struggle of all the Turkish proletariat and popular classes. The democratization of Turkey passes through the liberation of the Kurds from the oppression that they have historically faced. Abdullah Ocalan must be freed. He ideas and his political leadership are important for all of Turkish poor and working people not just for the Kurds.
William I. Robinson is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. His latest book is Can Global Capitalism Endure?
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.
Image by Roscoe Myrick/Flickr
The following is the English version of an interview that the Turkish online newspaper Artı Gerçek, conducted with William I. Robinson, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Artı Gerçek: As you know, the genocide perpetrated by Israel in the war after October 7 has caused intense reactions all over the world. While states have mostly sided with Israel, social movements have sided with Palestine. What do you think about the contrast?
Robinson: I don’t think most states around the world have sided with Israel. The majority of governments represented in the United Nations General Assembly have voted in favor of resolutions since October 2023 calling for Palestine to have full membership in the UN, for a ceasefire in Gaza, and urging states to prevent the forcible transfer of Palestinians. Many governments around the world have condemned the genocide and at last count there were several dozen governments that have joined the South African lawsuit at the International Court of Justice charging Israel with genocide. Even Egypt, which normalized relations with Israel in 1980 and is no friend of the Palestinian freedom struggle has declared its intention to back the South African suit. But governments around the world could and must do much more. Only a few states have cut their diplomatic relations with Israel. China is not supporting the genocide but neither is it doing very much to challenge Israel and help the Palestinians. India of course supports the genocide because its government is also based on proto-fascist repression and the persecution of the Muslim minority, so for it the Israeli model is attractive.
What is entirely true is that the Western states, led by the United States, along with Germany and the UK, have provided steadfast support for Israel. They are complicit in the genocide. Really, we have to consider this an Israeli-US genocide. This is not surprising. The United States is the principal sponsor of the Israeli regime. For decades it has provided a ceaseless flood of military and economic aid to the Zionist regime along with steadfast political and diplomatic backing. The Zionist project is fully dependent on this US sponsorship.
The larger story here is that Israel was created by Western capitalism, literally. The UK colonized Palestine from 1916-1920 as the Ottoman empire crumbled and then in 1948 turned it over to the Zionists. It did this as a strategy for establishing a platform and outpost for world capitalist penetration and control over the Middle East at a time when the region was experiencing decolonization and Arab nationalism and socialism were on the rise. One part of Western strategy for the post-WWII Middle East was backing Israel and the other part was propping up conservative Arab regimes that would have a stake in, and defend, international capitalist economic and geopolitical interests in the region and maintain tight control over the Arab masses.
The Israeli genocide has shocked and outraged the world community. It has touched a raw nerve. There is a global intifada of solidarity with Palestine. This is an historic turning point. The world now sees the Zionist project for what it is, a project that can only culminate in fascism and genocide if it is not defeated. But the outrage worldwide among social movements and publics points to something bigger, an acceleration of the contradictions of a global capitalism sinking into deeper crisis. We see our own plight in the plight of the Palestinians, our own fate bound up with that of the Palestinians. Mass disaffection with the status quo around the world has been simmering and is now reaching a boiling point. The Israeli genocide lit the fuse.
In the larger picture the genocide is a response to the crisis of global capitalism. The ruling groups fear mass uprisings. They have been preparing for them. The criminalization of Palestine solidarity in the Western countries is a dress rehearsal for mass repression. Here in the United States some 300 laws have been taken up by local and state governments throughout the country that would make such protest actions as damaging property, blocking streets or occupying public lands an act of terrorism. This is an extreme level of criminalizing peaceful dissent and it is in direct response to the outpouring of solidarity with Palestine and also to mounting popular protest against a wide range of social and economic injustices and other capitalist pathologies, such as the climate emergency, racism, and the persecution of immigrants.
Artı Gerçek: On October 7, the footage recorded during Operation Aqsa Flood against Israeli settlements, organized by Palestinian groups (in particular Hamas) caused controversy. While some were horrified by the violence, others saw the Palestinian action against Israel’s apartheid walls as a legitimate act of violence by an oppressed nation. What do you say about this topic?
Robinson: In the first place, there needs to be an impartial international investigation into the events of October 7. We may never know all of the details. But what we do know is that the Israeli government launched a well-planned propaganda campaign – backed systematically by the United States and the other Western backers of Israel – almost immediately after the Hamas attack in which it put forward a torrent of lies and of claims that have not been corroborated, including the lie that 40 babies had been beheaded by Hamas. It was really disgusting to see President Biden declare before the world on October 7 that he had personally seen photos of babies with their heads chopped off. The US president lied before the cameras of the world because there were no such photos. Israel’s claim that there had been mass rapes of women has now been debunked. Israel presented the attack as an act of anti-Semitism but the attack was not carried out because the people who were the victims were Jewish but because Israel is the colonial occupation power that has imprisoned the people of Gaza in a massive open-air concentration camp.
We can condemn the fact that civilians were targeted in the Al Aqsa Flood operation. That is a war crime in accordance with international law on the conduct of warfare. We can condemn a specific war crime and the atrocities it involved and still recognize the right of Palestinians to defend themselves, including the right to armed defense. Israel and the United States have a propaganda slogan, which is “Israel has the right to defend itself.” But this is false for two reasons. First, Israel is an illegal racist apartheid state. We would not have said that the South African apartheid state had a right to defend itself. Israel, by “defending itself,” is defending apartheid, colonialism, occupation, oppression, ethnic cleansing and massive, permanent violations of the human rights of Palestinians. Israel is an outlaw state. An outlaw state cannot claim the right to defend itself. But more importantly, international law acknowledges the right of states to defend themselves from external aggression. Yet the Palestinians are not external aggressors. They are in their own homeland! This is not a case of aggression by one state against another and so international law on the right of states to defend themselves does not apply.
Artı Gerçek: As a result of the US support for Israel, the protests that started at Columbia University spread to almost all colleges, where many protesters were detained. In your article published on Truthout, you mentioned that as an American academic you have been persecuted by Israel in the past. In the aftermath of October 7, how has the pro-Israel pressure, especially in the US and Europe, affected the right to protest and freedom of expression?
Robinson: The wave of repression against Palestine solidarity in the US and Europe is simply unprecedented, and it is a direct response to the unprecedented wave of solidarity with Palestine. The hegemony of Zionism – which, we must be very clear, is a racist, colonial, and proto-fascist political project – is beginning to crack. At this time one-third of Jewish Americans oppose the genocide and do not identify with Zionism and that percentage is growing, especially among young Jews.
Israel controls the military battlefield. It is impossible for the Palestinians to achieve an armed victory over Israel. However, Israel has already lost the global battle for political legitimacy. This is why the repression has been so fierce. Here in the US we have seen the suspension of the US constitution on our university campuses and in the larger society. We have a constitutional right to free speech and the right to peacefully assemble but those rights have been ripped up by repression. Peaceful student protesters have been met with savage state political and military repression.
But there is a larger story here. Why is the repression on and off our campuses so intense? Because our protests are a direct threat to the interests of the transnational capitalist class, to the military-industrial-security-intelligence complex, and to US foreign policy. We are seeing the rise of the capitalist university-industrial complex. Our universities are increasingly extensions of the capitalist state. The US government and military have an ever-greater presence at research universities. The universities now serve as a brain trust for transnational corporate capital. Corporations outsource their research and development to the universities. Pharmaceutical corporations finance chemistry and biology departments to do the research that is then used to produce and market drugs. The giant technology corporations do the same for computer engineering and physics departments.
The military-industrial-security-intelligence complex is tied to all of it. Many universities have simply been absorbed by agencies of the state, including the military, security, and intelligence agencies. There is a three-way fusion involving the capitalist state, the corporations, and the universities. My own campus, the University of California at Santa Barbara, receives multimillion dollar funding from Northup Grumman, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Caterpillar, and so on. These are the same corporations that work with US policy in sponsoring the genocide. They invest heavily in Israel and supply the Israeli army.
Over the past few decades of neoliberalism our public universities have been defunded. Instead of public funding the universities are funded by the tuition that students pay, which has skyrocketed and throws these students into a debt trap that lasts for decades after they graduate. But perhaps more importantly, the universities are funded by corporate and individual donors. It has now been shown that many of the multimillionaire and billionaire donors are Zionists and sympathizers of Israel. They threaten to withdraw their donations if university administrators do not crack down on the protests. So the administrators are doing the bidding of the corporations and the capitalist state.
We face the authoritarian university. We are experiencing the corporate colonization of our universities. It is no longer an autonomous space. It is now a space of capital and of the capitalist state. The student and faculty protests are demanding that our universities divest from the corporations that do business with Israel. We are calling for Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (known as the BDS movement). This demand is a direct threat to the interests of the transnational capitalist state and the US military, security and foreign policy apparatus. That is why the repression is so fierce.
To give you one example, Palantir is a multi-billion-dollar high technology corporation based in Silicon Valley, in California. In January it signed an agreement with the Israeli Ministry of Defense to supply the IDF with artificial intelligence and other digital technologies. As we know, the genocide is being waged through this technology. This company is making multimillion dollar profits off of the genocide. Its CEO, Alex Karp, explained early in May in an interview: “College campus protests are not a side show. They are the show. If we lose the intellectual battle, we will not be able to deploy any army in the West, ever.” When we understand these connections, we begin to understand why our universities are calling in the militarized police to carry out mass repression.
Artı Gerçek: There are comments that the genocide in Gaza signals a new process in terms of global politics. Do you think we have entered an era of genocide? What kind of future do you envision for the global capitalist system?
Robinson: The past half century of capitalist globalization has involved a very profound and ongoing restructuring and transformation of world capitalism. The ranks of surplus humanity, of those expelled, marginalized, and made redundant, have swelled and now number some two billion people. Capital has no use for this mass of humanity. Moreover, those among the global working classes that have employment are increasingly facing precariousness, new forms of unstable and precarious work at the same time that they face neoliberal austerity. The level of inequality worldwide is simply unprecedented. One percent of humanity now controls 52 percent of the world’s wealth and 20 percent of humanity controls 95 percent of that wealth. This means that 80 percent of humanity has to make do with just five percent of the world’s wealth.
Surplus humanity and even those who are able to find employment face a crisis of survival, of social disintegration. Whole regions and even whole countries are collapsing and people are on the move. This scares the ruling classes. They fear the actual and potential rebellion of surplus humanity. The ruling classes faces the urgent need to develop and extend new systems of mass social control and repression. The Palestinian population is surplus humanity, especially the Gaza population. Even putting aside the Zionist project of ethnic cleansing to “resolve” the problem of Palestinians that they want to get rid of, Palestinian surplus humanity is of no use to transnational capital. The Gazans stand in the way of transnational capitalist access to the natural gas and oil wealth in Gaza and the Mediterranean shoreline. Gaza is prime beachfront real estate for transnational investors. The “Gaza option” of outright genocide is a nightmarish experiment in how the ruling groups may choose to resolve the problem of surplus humanity.
We are seeing a radical new stage in ruling class modalities of control. Worldwide we are seeing the creation of what we can call super-max prison geographies. Gaza is the model. It is a giant open-air concentration camp locking up the surplus and disposable Palestinian proletariat. However, this is taking place around the world. Last year, El Salvador opened a super-max prison that holds 40,000 prisoners, virtually all of them young unemployed and impoverished surplus people. After that prison was opened, Brazil, China, Thailand and other countries announced similar plans. The one in Thailand will allegedly house 60, 000 people. So we are seeing new forms of spatial control and super-max imprisonment over the mass of dispossessed humanity and the rise of authorities, dictatorial, and even fascist systems to legitimate and develop this global police state. As the crisis of global capitalism deepens, extermination becomes an option for the system. This is what is at stake in Palestine.
But there is something else I must point out. Global capitalism faces a structural crisis of overaccumulation. The transnational capitalist class has accumulated obscene amounts of wealth and are running out of outlets to profitably reinvest their capital. They increasingly rely on what I have termed militarized accumulation and accumulation by repression. Transnational systems of mass social control, repression, and warfare becomes very profitable outlets for investing the surplus and making huge profits. The global police state is very lucrative. The Russia-Ukraine war is a tragedy for the people of Ukraine. It is a tragedy for the people of Russia. It is a tragedy for the world’s people. However, for the transnational capitalist class it is a godsend, a wonderful bonanza. This is why one consultant for the principle military corporations in the US declared after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 that “happy days are here again,” and why after Israel launched its genocide against Gaza that one executive of Goldman Sachs, a global financial conglomerate that invests heavily in Israel, declared that “this is great for our portfolio.”
Artı Gerçek: As a Middle Eastern country, Turkey is one of the countries directly affected by the post-October 7 situation. President Erdoğan has criticized Israel at the highest level, on the other hand, it has been revealed that trade between Turkey and Israel has actually continued uninterruptedly (via greatjournalistic work). How do you evaluate these contradictory positions of Turkey, which is ruled by people from the Islamist tradition?
Robinson: These contradictory positions of Turkey are also present through the other countries in the Middle East. The Turkish capitalist class and the ruling political elite share common class interests with the Israeli rulers and with the ruling classes of the Gulf and the other capitalist states. As Turkey and the Middle East globalized starting in the 1990s there was a very significant integration of capitals across the region, including between Israeli and Arab capital, and with extra-regional transnational capital. The political and the economic are out of sync here. The economic interests of the Turkish rulers, the Israeli rulers, the Gulf rulers are the same. They have common class interests that trump any political differences over Palestine. The Israeli oppression of the Palestinians is simply an embarrassment to them.
Remember, that Israel and Saudi Arabia were supposed to normalize relations this past fall. They would have done so except that the Hamas attack and now the genocide got in the way of these plans. The Israeli-Saudi normalization was supposed to have been the clincher that opened up the wider Middle Eastern region to a massive new round of investment and transnational capital accumulation – in finance and banking, tourism, energy, construction, industry, high technology, luxury consumption and so on.
The problem that the Arab regimes face is that the masses of Arab workers and poor people are also restless and see themselves in the Palestinian struggle. These states have to sustain legitimacy among their own populations so they have to pretend that they care about the Palestinians. In the particular case of Turkey, the legitimating discourse of the Erdogan regime has been a turn to Islamicism. Erdogan must walk a tight-rope between the economic and class interests that are met by expanding trade and cross-investment with Israel, and his political legitimacy at home among the masses of people. And remember, in the last elections Erdogan lost significant political capital and influence. His regime faces an erosion of its legitimacy and its grip on power. So criticizing Israel is a political necessity to retain legitimacy. This is the same with Egypt. Both those states fear that if they do not criticize Israel, the mass popular solidarity with Palestine will also contribute to a mass movement against those regimes.
Artı Gerçek: Your books, The Global Police State and Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity, have recently been translated into Turkish. Especially in the last 10 years, the Turkish state has been dominating all areas of socio-political struggle, especially the Kurdish movement, by force. What message would you like to give to your Turkish readers and those who oppose the government?
Robinson: I don’t want to get you in trouble because I know you face censorship and repression. But in Turkiye and also many other countries around the world mechanisms of consensual domination are breaking down. We are moving more and more towards coercive systems of social control, whether authoritarianism, dictatorship, and even outright fascism, although we are talking about 21st century fascism, which is different than 20th century fascism. The extension of the Turkish state into civil society and the escalation of repression, which includes also new forms of political and cultural legitimation that manipulate mass insecurity and anxiety, reflects the larger situation worldwide, as I have been discussing. The global police state is becoming consolidated in Turkiye.
But there is also the particular Turkish characteristics, including the curious contradictions between an economic program that seeks to deepen neoliberalism and the liberation of capital from restraints, including the transnationalization of Turkish-based capital, which requires the assistance of the Turkish state and its foreign policy – along with a mystifying and conservative Islamicist political and ideological program. There is also the important matter of geopolitics that I cannot get into here.
With regard to the Kurdish movement, we know that the Kurds, together with many of the Syrian and other refugees that have poured into Turkiye in recent years, occupy the lowest and most marginalized rungs of the Turkism political economy. The Kurdish struggle – objectively speaking, if not necessarily subjectively – is really a struggle of all the Turkish proletariat and popular classes. The democratization of Turkey passes through the liberation of the Kurds from the oppression that they have historically faced. Abdullah Ocalan must be freed. He ideas and his political leadership are important for all of Turkish poor and working people not just for the Kurds.
William I. Robinson is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. His latest book is Can Global Capitalism Endure?
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