Tuesday, October 01, 2024

 

Gaza genocide: A glimpse into global capitalism’s extermination impulse

By William I Robinson
Published 

Global Capitalism’s Extermination Impulse

First published at The Philosophical Salon.

The unspeakable savagery of the unfolding genocide in Gaza and the absolute impunity of the Israeli genocidists and their Western sponsors have sent shock waves around the world and sparked a global intifada of solidarity with Palestine. Palestinians are struggling against 75-plus years of settler colonialism, occupation, and apartheid, to be sure. But there is more to the genocide than meets the eye. It shows us both the past and the future, a redux of the dark history of European colonialism that reached its zenith in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and also a ghastly glimpse into the future of a global capitalism whose extermination impulse is rising to the surface in the face of unprecedented crisis. Let us step back momentarily from the horror of Gaza and recall that the hallmark of radical social science is to distinguish surface appearance from underlying essence in the events we seek to understand. This involves placing the “noisy abode” of headlines and the swirl of current events in a larger historical and structural context that give them deeper meaning.

Structurally, the crisis of global capitalism is one of overaccumulation. Chronic stagnation places mounting pressure on the political and military agents of transnational capital to crack open new spaces for accumulation. But the crisis is as much political as it is economic. Rising inequality, impoverishment, and insecurity for working and popular classes after decades of social decay wrought by neoliberalism undermine state legitimacy, destabilize national political systems, jeopardize elite control, and given impetus to the rise of a neofascist Right. The Ukraine and Gaza wars along with the New Cold War between Washington and Beijing are accelerating the violent crackup of the post-WWII international system and escalating the dangers of world war. The planetary ecosystem on which human civilization is based is breaking down under the impact of unrestrained global capital accumulation.

At the heart of this epochal crisis is the most fundamental contradiction internal to capitalism, the overproduction of capital. Over the past couple of decades surplus capital has reached extraordinary levels. The leading transnational corporations and financial conglomerates have registered record profits at the same time that the rate of profit has fallen and corporate investment has declined.1 A sign of capitalist breakdown is precisely this decrease in the rate of profit simultaneous to an increase in the mass of profit.2 The total cash held in reserves of the world’s 2,000 biggest non-financial corporations sharply increased, from $6.6 trillion in 2010 to $14.2 trillion in 2020 as the global economy stagnated and companies retained rather than reinvested their profits.3 Since 1980 corporate cash holdings have ballooned to 10 percent of GDP in the United States, 22 percent in Western Europe, 34 percent in South Korea, and 47 percent in Japan.4 Money that remains idle is not capital as its value does not expand. Capitalism that is not expanding is capitalism that is stagnant. Stasis is a state of crisis.

The transnational capitalist class (TCC), hence, has accumulated more wealth than it can possibly spend, much less reinvest. Markets have become saturated given unprecedented levels of inequality worldwide. In 2018, one percent of humanity controlled 52 percent of the world’s wealth and 20 percent of humanity controlled 95 percent while the remaining 80 percent has to make do with just five percent of that wealth.5 Since then global inequality has only gotten worse. In the first 18 months after the Covid pandemic, from 2022 to mid-2023, the 148 largest corporate conglomerates in the world increased their total net profits by $1.8 trillion, a 52 percent jump, while workers lost a combined $1.5 trillion in income.6 Financial speculation, debt-driven growth, and the plunder of public finance are reaching their limits as temporary fixes in the face of chronic stagnation.7 The TCC and its agents in states must undertake incessant and increasingly desperate searches for new outlets to unload overaccumulated capital. This leads the system to become every more violent, predatory, and reckless.

As global corporate and political elites woke up from a drunkard’s hangover after the capitalist globalization boom of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, they have had to acknowledge that the crisis is out of control. In its 2023 Global Risk Report, the World Economic Forum warned that the world confronts a “polycrisis” involving escalating economic, political, social, and climactic impacts that “are converging to shape a unique, uncertain and turbulent decade to come.”8 Yet the drive to expand at all costs the endless accumulation of capital makes it impossible for the global ruling class to offer viable solutions to this epochal crisis of global capitalism. The Davos elite may be clueless as to how to resolve the crisis but other factions of the ruling groups are experimenting with how to mold interminable political chaos and financial instability into a new and more deadly phase of global capitalism. Consensual mechanisms of domination are breaking down as the ruling groups turn towards authoritarianism, dictatorship and fascism.

Surplus capital’s alter-ego and the crisis of social reproduction

Surplus capital finds its alter ego in surplus labor as crises of overaccumulation expand the two antagonistic poles of this dialectical unity, a process that Marx referred to as “the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation.” The past half century of capitalist globalization has involved vast new rounds of primitive accumulation and expulsions around the world.9 Hundreds of millions of people have been displaced from the countryside of the former Third World and by deindustrialization in the former First World. The ranks of surplus labor, of those structurally excluded and relegated to the margins of existence, now number in the billions as social disintegration spreads and as whole regions and countries are collapsing.10 In the coming years new technologies based on automation, machine learning and artificial intelligence combined with displacement generated by conflict, economic collapse, and climate change will exponentially increase the ranks of surplus humanity.11 In this age of global capitalism the system produces an historically unprecedented multiplication of surplus humanity; people who are proletarianized to be sure, but too numerous to be useful to capital as a reserve army, unable to consume, restless and on the move. They must be contained through the global police state whose contingent end game is extermination.

The phrase “surplus humanity” does nothing to capture the depths of misery that billions of people go through daily: poverty, disease, unemployment, homelessness, malnutrition, social exclusion, racism, xenophobia, forced migration, incarceration, state violence and other forms of social violence and humiliation. Those expelled must scramble to find ways to assure the reproduction of their own lives in an environment that is extremely hostile and restrictive, in which they are criminalized de jure or de facto. The march of appropriation continuously closes off more and more spaces for reproduction. Those desperate to survival at all cost will turn in their anguish to dangerous and often deadly treks to find employment in other countries, to surrogate pregnancy, to trafficking themselves sexually (while many are also forcibly trafficked) and to petty crime and social violence as those preyed upon by capital in turn prey upon other victims around them.

The ruling classes face an intractable problem: how to contain the actual and potential rebellion of surplus humanity? They fear mass uprisings in the face of ongoing and growing popular protest around the world. When the mass of surplus humanity reaches billions of people a certain threshold has been reached. The system can and does simply discard them wholesale and turn to strategies of containment and extermination as imperatives of capitalist reproduction. This is the larger backdrop to the genocide in Gaza. The Palestinian proletariat in Gaza ceased serving as cheap labor for the Israeli economy when the blockade was imposed in 2007 and the territory became a vast, open-air concentration camp. Of no use to Israeli and transnational capital, Gazans stand in the way of global capitalist expansion in the Middle East and are entirely disposable. The October 7, 2023, Palestinian resistance attack came just as Israel and Saudi Arabia were to normalize relations, which in turn was supposed to stabilize the Middle East, deepen the Israeli-Arab regional economic integration that has taken off in recent years, and pave the way for a new round of transnational corporate and financial investment throughout the region. In the larger picture, the siege of Gaza appears as a form of primitive accumulation through genocide.12

The unfolding genocide has touched a raw nerve throughout the world precisely because it brings home the high stakes involved as the dynamics of global capitalist crisis plays out. Gaza is a microcosm and extreme manifestation of the fate that awaits the working classes and surplus humanity as global order hardens into ever more virulent and violent forms of domination, symbolizing a radical new stage in ruling class modalities of control, the creation of new geographies of containment and butchery.

The geographies of extermination

Gaza as a giant open-air concentration camp locking up the disposable Palestinian proletariat may be an extreme case of managing surplus humanity yet such mega-prison geographies are spreading around the world. In 2023, the Salvadoran government inaugurated its draconian mega-prison, Center for the Confinement of Terrorism, the largest in the world, locking up 40,000 prisoners, virtually all of them young unemployed and impoverished. Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele enjoyed overwhelming popular support for this “get tough” program of mega-imprisonment without trial. If Gaza shows us the extermination option, El Salvador provided a model of control over surplus labor based on manipulating insecurity and inducing fear in the face of crime and social violence, themselves the consequence of chronic poverty, unemployment and deprivation.

Mega prisons as a method of containing surplus humanity has spread very rapidly around the world. After the Salvadoran prison was opened, Brazil, China, Turkey, Thailand, the Philippines, and India, among other countries announced similar plans for prisons holding tens of thousands of people. Between 2016 and 2021 construction began in Turkey on no less than 121 new prisons. In Sri Lanka the government announced in 2021 plans to build a 200-acre prison complex that would allow 100,000 people to be detained across the country – more than three times the prison population in that year. Egypt announced that year it would soon open a new prison to lock up 30,000 people. Prisons are increasing not just in scale but in geographic remoteness – the better to keep surplus labor far away from the centers of power and wealth. While there were already some 200 private for-profit prisons around the world, many of those under construction were to be “public-private partnerships,” with corporations contracted to build and run prisons – for a handsome profit, of course. In Kazakhstan the government entered into such private corporate deals to build no less than 40 new prisons by 2025.13 Virtual cities warehousing surplus labor point to new forms of spatial control over a mass of dispossessed humanity, part of a larger movement towards authoritarian, dictatorial, and even fascist systems to legitimate and develop the global police state.

Paramilitary insurgencies and multinational military deployments have displaced upwards of seven million people in the Congo in recent years, most of them in the Eastern provinces, with the aim of further opening up access to the country’s vast mineral resources, including abundant deposits of gold, diamonds, silver, cobalt, coltan, tin, oil, gas and more.14 Often reported as ethnic conflict or struggles among local factions for political control, these are proximate causes of transnational wars by capitalists and states to seize recourses in which twin dimensions of the global police state merge: militarized accumulation, or accumulating capital and seizing resources through war and conquest, and accumulation by repression, or accumulating capital by mass repression of the working and popular classes.15 In some of these cases the playbook comes from the colonial era. Ethnic differences are fanned or simply created, so as to divide the victims of conquest and expulsion. Favored factions are given weapons and allowed to commandeer the crumbs that fall from capital’s banquet table. The better to distribute weapons and let the oppressed cannibalize one another, allowing capital to seize resources in the stampede of confusion and proximate conjunctural explanations for humanitarian crises.

Borders become less physical markets of territory than axes around which intensive control over those expelled is organized. They are ever more militarized. In the half century of capitalist globalization, no less than 63 border walls have been built worldwide to lock in or keep out surplus humanity.16 Along with repression meted out by states, transnational migrants are subject to the predation of human traffickers, slavers, drug cartels and other criminal gangs. Borders between national jurisdictions become war zones and zones of death. Palestine is one such death zone, the most egregious perhaps, because it is tied to occupation, apartheid and ethnic cleansing. Yet tens of thousands have died along the U.S.-Mexico border and North Africa-Middle East-Europe corridors and in other borderlands between surplus humanity and zones of intense accumulation in the global economy. The US border patrol reported more than 7000 deaths at the Mexico/US border from 1998 to 2023, likely a great underestimate since it does not take into account those whose bodies were not recovered or the many who have died making the long journey through Central America and Mexico. The figures for deaths in the Mediterranean are shocking – more than 20,000 drowned or disappeared from 2014 to 2023.17 Just two months before the October 7, 2023 Palestinian resistance attack that sparked the Israeli genocide, it was reported that Saudi border guards opened fire without warning and in cold blood killed hundreds of Ethiopian migrants trying to join 750,000 of their countrymen already working in the Kingdom.18

The British government has taken the lead in introducing draconian new forms of surplus labor management. In 2023 it began to lock up asylum seekers on floating prisons off the country’s coast, retrofitting a barge with cabins the size of prison cells.19 The next year it began to deport refugees thousands of miles away, to the Central African country of Rwanda, known for its widespread human rights abuses, for the processing of asylum requests. Although the Labor government elected in July 2024 announced that it would end the program, other EU countries, once the precedent was set, announced they would follow suit and establish their own systems for the banishment of asylum applicants to distant lands where they can be removed from the public eye and silenced, in the process generating handsome profit for the private corporations involved in transporting and processing the deportees. The price tag to deport the first 300 asylum seekers from Britain was an astounding $665 million, or $2.2 million per person, a small fortune explainable only by the profit to be made by the private corporations contracted.20 With millions fleeing conflicts around the world, noted the 2024 annual report of Amnesty International, migration management and border enforcement relied on the proliferation of abusive technologies, including digital alternatives to detention, border externalization technologies, data software, biometrics and algorithmic decision-making systems.21

Gaza, the Congo, and other hellscapes are real-time alarm bells that genocide may become a powerful tool in the decades to come for resolving capital’s intractable contradiction between surplus capital and surplus humanity. Political chaos and chronic instability can create conditions quite favorable for capital. It is difficult not to heed the wakeup call as communities populations abandoned by parties that once represented them turn to ethnonationalist ideologies and charismatic politicians, as the global police state ratchets up surveillance and repression, and as communities continue to be pillaged, their environments poised and ravaged, rendering the planet increasingly uninhabitable for vast swathes of the world’s population. The 2024 Amnesty International report warned of an unprecedented collapse of human rights, “a harvest of terrifying consequences from escalating conflict and the near breakdown of international law, a dismal picture of alarming human rights repression and prolific international rule-breaking, all in the midst of deepening global inequality, superpowers vying for supremacy and an escalating climate crisis.”22

Death and destruction “fit quite nicely with our portfolio”

Historically wars have provided critical economic stimulus and pulled the capitalist system out of accumulation crises while they serve to deflect attention from political tensions and problems of legitimacy. But there is something qualitatively new going on now with the rise of the global police state. The limits to growth must be overcome with new technologies of death and destruction. Each new conflict around the world opens up fresh profit-making possibilities to counteract stagnation. Endless round of destruction followed by reconstruction have ripple effects. They fuel profit-making not just for the arms industry, but for engineering, construction, and related supply firms, high-tech, energy, and numerous other sectors, all integrated with the transnational financial and investment management conglomerates at the center of the global economy. These are the gales of creative destruction, to be followed by booms of reconstruction.

Death, destruction and mayhem, even genocide, hence, provide perverse lifelines for a transnational capitalism in crisis to the extent that they are inextricably linked to opening up new opportunities for accumulation through violence. The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza launched the following year paved the way for a more sweeping militarization of what was already a global war economy. U.S. officials were keenly aware that the drive to expand NATO to Russian borders would eventually push Moscow into a military conflict. The RAND corporation, a Pentagon-affiliated think tank, explained U.S. goals in a 2019 study: “We examine a wide range of nonviolent measures that could exploit Russia’s actual vulnerabilities and anxieties as a way of stressing Russia’s military and economy and the regime’s political standing at home and abroad.”23

Beyond the United States, war stocks around the world, in Europe, India, China, and elsewhere experienced surges following the Russian invasion in expectation of an exponential rise in global military spending.24 As one giddy consultant to Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon Technologies explained: “For the defense industry, happy days are here again.”25 A year later, the Gaza war provided fresh stimulus for militarized accumulation with billions flowing to Israel from the U.S. and other Western governments and international arms dealers. Orders at many of the world’s biggest arms companies were near record highs within weeks of the October 7, 2023 attack.26 The siege of Gaza, as one Morgan Stanley executive put it, “seems to fit quite nicely with [our] portfolio.”27

Such bursts of militarized accumulation help offset the overaccumulation crisis further into the future. It took World War II to finally lift world capitalism out of the Great Depression. The Cold War legitimated a half century of expanding military budgets, followed by the so-called “war on terror” that helped keep the economy sputtering along in the face of chronic stagnation in the first two decades of the century. It is estimated that from 2001 to 2021 the “war on terror” cost $21 trillion.28 The Russian invasion of Ukraine accelerated but did not originate the ongoing surge in military spending around the world. It is notable that state military spending worldwide skyrocketed in the wake of the 2008 global financial collapse even beyond the post-September 11, 2001 spending hike, rising from about $1.5 trillion in 2008 to over $2.3 trillion in 2023 – coinciding perfectly with continued stagnation in the global economy following the Great Recession, and suggesting that the heightened militarization of the global economy is as much or more a response to this chronic stagnation than to perceived security threats.29 If bursts of militarized accumulation help offset the overaccumulation crisis further into the future, they are also high-risk bets that heighten worldwide tensions and push the world dangerously towards all-out international conflagration.

As states turn towards coercive and authoritarian forms of social control, many are also doubling down with a radically conservative social retrenchment, often veiled in religious mysticism. In the US, abortion and other reproductive rights have been rolled back. In December 2022 the Indonesian government passed a new criminal code that outlawed sex outside of marriage, imposing severe jail terms for violators, and also made it illegal for Indonesians to abandon their religion or to persuade anyone else to be a non-believer.30 In that same month, the Afghan government resumed public executions, ordered judges to adhere closely to sharia law, the interpretation of which included stoning adulterers. In Iran those who peacefully protested against the government during the 2022-2023 popular uprising in the wake of a Kurdish woman killed by police after being arrested for not wearing her veil properly were declared by the government to be committing an “act against God” punishable by death.31 

We are in the midst of a global civil war, not in the sense that there are two opposed armies in combat but, rather, the global proletariat and popular classes are everywhere facing off against the ruling groups and the states that they control, from Kenya to Argentine, France to the United States, and Bangledesh to Nigeria. What are the possibilities now of a radical reform of global capitalism that could attenuate the crisis? Could resistance and struggle from below force the system into a substantial restructuring premised on a redistribution of wealth downward and some modicum of popular control over or at least constraint on the the implacable process of capital accumulation? Far-right populism and the fascist threat will remain insurgent in the absence of such reform. Fascism is always founded on militaristic, racist and chauvinistic nationalism in response to capitalist crisis. The future is indeterminate because outcomes will depend on the struggles among antagonistic social and class forces, the politics that come out of these struggles, and on contingent circumstances that present themselves in ways often hard to anticipate. There is little doubt, however, that cataclysmic upheavals are on the horizon.

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