The global conjuncture we face may appear as mindboggling yet one way to piece together this “big picture” is to take a local starting point and build up to the global.  Let us hone in on and read between the lines of an underreported speech given on July 8 by U.S. secretary of agriculture Brooke Rollins.  Responding to concerns by agribusiness that the deportation campaign is undermining the labor supply and could lead to food shortages, Rollins warned that mass deportations will continue and there will be “no amnesty under any circumstances” for agricultural workers.  “Ultimately, the answer to this is automation, also some reform within the current government structure,” she said.  “And then also, when you think about, there are 34 million able-bodied adults in our Medicaid program.  There are plenty of workers in America.”

There is an underlying logic, despite the appearance of incoherence, to recent U.S. actions – the mass deportations, the tariff war, the budget bill passed by the Congress, interference in Brazil’s internal politics, a new round of intervention in the Middle East, brokering a “peace agreement” in the Congo, and so on.  It all has a unity of purpose, in a nutshell, to address the crisis of global capitalism by liberating transnational capital to pursue a new round of predatory expansion around the world through digitalization, extractivist seizure of resources, war and repression, the degradation of the working and popular classes, and the radical restructuring of the capitalist state towards authoritarian and neofascist forms.  The crisis of overaccumulation, chronic stagnation and a declining rate of profit can only be overcome by violently cracking open new spaces for accumulation, by transferring the cost of the crisis to the working and popular classes through wage compression and austerity, and by aligning states and political systems worldwide with this agenda.

Enter Rollins’s speech.  Transnational migrant workers are vulnerable and susceptible to super-exploitation by national borders and the division of the global working classes into citizen and immigrant labor.  Immigrant workers in the United States make up nearly 20 percent of the total labor force.  They are concentrated in the lowest-rungs of the economy, including construction, agriculture, natural resources, maintenance occupations, and transportation and manual services, where they can be super-exploited and super-controlled by the transnational capitalist class (TCC) in its drive to maximize the extraction of surplus value.

The goal of the capitalist state under the Trump administration is to impose the conditions in which immigrants toil on native workers as well.  This degradation of native labor can only be achieved if mass deportation is coordinated with the panoply of attacks on the multinational working class, from drastic cuts in social services, to union busting, the gutting health and safety protections, the dismissal of hundreds of thousands of civil servants, the weakening of federal labor laws, restricting access to unemployment benefits, and so on.

Native workers must be forced by deprivation and insecurity to take up the jobs abandoned by deported workers.  The recently passed budget bill will result in a lowering of income for the bottom 40 percent and a loss of healthcare and food assistance for millions.  The bill drastically cuts spending on Medicaid and at the same time makes public healthcare benefits contingent on recipients securing employment.  As Rollins made clear, millions of workers will lose their health benefits unless they are willing to replace immigrant workers in agricultural and other low-paid sectors under conditions of superexploitation.

Social spending on welfare, unemployment insurance, social security, food and medical assistance allow those in need to withdraw from the labor market, making them unavailable for exploitation and also strengthening the bargaining position of those in the labor market.  They are therefore not in the interests of capital, which needs a mass of insecure and unemployed workers, what Marx termed an “industrial reserve army,” to hold down wages and subject itself to super-exploitation in desperate bids to survive.  Mass struggles around the world in the twentieth century forced capitalist states to adopt New Deals and other social democratic welfare programs that linked social reproduction to capital accumulation.

Capital went global starting in the late twentieth century to escape from nation-state constraints to its freedom to exploit and accumulate.  For nearly half a century of globalization the ruling groups have fought to impose austerity on working and popular classes, to dismantle social welfare states and replace them with social control states.  Higher education, for instance, is hollowed out and public education decimated since mass education is less necessary or desirable when work is deskilled by artificial intelligence (AI) and less workers are needed, and when private corporations have taken over AI-driven research.  What remains of this link between social reproduction and accumulation, steadily eroded by the neoliberal counteroffensive that began at the end of century, is now being viciously severed at every level as those sectors of global labor that enjoyed some protection from the worst ravages of exploitation are subject to a process of “Thirdworldization.”

The Global War Economy: Accumulation by Militarization and Repression

One way to reverse the decline in the rate of profit is to cheapen labor and degrade working conditions so as to increase the rate of exploitation.  This is known as expanding absolute surplus value and explains the relocation of production and services to low wage zones over the past half century of globalization as well as the incessant attacks on workers’ rights and social programs.  The other way is to replace labor with technology through automation, as mentioned by Rollins, a process that expands what is known as relative surplus value, since more value is pumped out of less labor.

This process has been underway for several decades and is now being turbocharged through digital technologies driven by AI, resulting in a rapid expansion worldwide of surplus labor.  The ranks of surplus humanity, those structurally excluded and relegated to the margins of existence, now number in the billions as social disintegration spreads.  Whole countries and regions face collapse as competing warlords, political and economic mafias, paramilitary organizations, and criminal gangs fill power voids.  China now produces general purpose robots.  The  Xiaomi “lights-out” factory – the first but not the only one – operates round the clock producing for the global market one smart phone per second with zero humans employed.  New technologies based on automation and AI combined with displacement generated by conflict, economic collapse, and climate change are exponentially increasing the ranks of surplus humanity.

Digital industries, including ecommerce, AI software and services, cloud services, autonomous vehicles, cybersecurity, robotics, biotech, and others, have a vested interest in an increase in relative over absolute surplus value.  As these industries move to the very center of the global economy, the handful of corporations that develop and control digital technologies are accruing unprecedented power over states, political systems, commerce, and the military.  Tech billionaires, especially from the emerging sectors within tech capital that are coming to dominate surveillance and the global police state, such as Palantir and Accenture, are lodged deeply within the Trump regime, which has tapped Palantir to create and manage an AI driven centralized data depository, the first step in a more sweeping privatization and automation of the state itself.

Transnational investors desperate for new investment opportunities have poured billions of dollars into the tech and platform companies as an outlet for their surplus accumulated capital, inflating values and producing multiple speculative bubbles.  Global industry is underutilized.  Markets are saturated.  Automation as a strategy for weakening the working class also generates acute contradictions.  It is only the labor of workers that generates surplus value.  As the mass of surplus labor expands so too does the mass of surplus capital.  Unprecedented global inequalities aggravate the crisis of overaccumulation.  Mass markets shrink and consumer-driven growth stagnates.  Global markets cannot absorb the output of the global economy.  States must manage spiraling crises of legitimacy as the social fabric disintegrates.  An economic crash on the scale of or exceeding that of 2008 is all but inevitable.

When it hits there will be mass uprisings that further destabilize states and political systems and fan the flames of military conflict.  The ruling classes will double down on the global police state and authoritarian and neofascist modalities of domination. Silicon Valley titans such as Palantir and Accenture are at the epicenter of a new military-industrial complex involving the marriage of tech with the traditional military corporations and high finance as they employ AI and digital technologies to carry out warfare and repression, from AI-guided genocide in Palestine to automated drone warfare in Ukraine, biometric surveillance of migrants and refugees and tech-fortified borders.

An Anti-Capitalist Phoenix?

The fascist state must contain mass rebellion by attacking civil and political rights and instilling fear to impede the development of revolutionary subjects.  Whipping up nativism and nationalism and criminalizing immigrants and refugees is but one tactic to confuse, divide and disorganize the working classes.  The whole global economy is becoming organized around what I have termed militarized accumulation and accumulation by repression.  The global police state serves a dual purpose.  It is an instrument to surveil, control, and repress the global working and popular classes at a time of escalating class struggle.  At the same time, wars, state-sponsored violence and systems of transnational social control and repression, including border control and deportation regimes, are outsourced to transnational capital and are wildly profitable.  They provide an ever-expanding outlet for overaccumulated capital.

The world is now in a process of rapid remilitarization as the war and repression economy becomes embedded.  Global military spending reached an unprecedented $2.72 trillion in 2024, an increase of nearly 10 percent from the previous year, the steepest rise since the end of the Cold War, with over 100 countries raising their military budget.  The new Trump budget allocates an staggering $1 trillion for the Pentagon and $170 billion for border and immigration enforcement.  The NATO countries have committed to spending 5 percent of GDP on the military, up from the current 2 percent.  China, India, Russia, the Middle East, Japan and Mexico among others, have all announced steep increases in military spending for 2025.

As I showed in my 2020 book, The Global Police State, war, repression, surveillance and social control are woven into each and every circuit of global capital.  By way of example, back to Rollins and her promise to continue mass deportations, the “homeland security” market was worth $568 billion in 2023 and is forecast to reach $1 trillion by the 2030s.  The immigrant detention complex grew twentyfold from 1979 to 2024.  CoreCivic and Geogroup, the two leading private, for-profit immigrant detention centers, run the majority of  than 100 prisons throughout U.S. territory and also run electronic monitoring programs.  Transnational finance capital is heavily invested in both and in numerous other private “border security” companies.  Already monstrous, under the Trump regime the industry will experience an explosion of growth, including a doubling of detention space, 10,000 new ICE agents, and miles of new border wall and surveillance towers equipped with artificial intelligence.

The more global capitalism spirals into crisis the more bellicose it becomes as states attempt to externalize internal tensions and to target vulnerable groups as scapegoats.  The power blocs in states are being reconfigured amidst fierce infighting among competing elites who are deeply divided and increasingly fragmented as the post-WWII international order cracks up and as geopolitical confrontation escalates.  Democratic government, human rights, and international law are impediments.  From Orban in Hungary to Milei in Argentina. Erdogan in Turkey, Modi in India, Ruto in Kenya, and many others, Trumpism appears as the particular U.S. variant of a transnational model of twenty-first century authoritarianism, far-right populism, dictatorship and fascism that seeks to profoundly restructure state power into a more direct instrument of transnational capitalist domination.  The fascist elite is constructing ideologies and paradigms to legitimate the extermination impulse that has taken hold of global capitalism, symbolized above all by the genocide in Gaza.

This International of Fascism is on the offensive but faces intractable contradictions internal to global capitalism at its moment of decadence as well as roadblocks thrown up by mass resistance from below.  The wretched of the earth have taken the global stage by storm.  Class consciousness is on the rise.  A popular uprising from the barrios is pushing back against the ICE terrorism in Southern California, from where I write.  Milei has faced several general strikes and cannot subdue mass protest.  There has been no letup in Israel’s genocide but Palestine solidarity has ignited millions around the world.  Kenya’s youth refuses to submit.  In the last 12 months no less than 164 major protests have erupted in more than 73 countries in every continent, according to the Global Protest Tracker of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The global correlation of political and class forces hangs in the balance.  We may be able to – must – beat back fascism but behind the fascists stands the dictatorship of transnational capital.  The popular and working classes must move from the defense to the offense.  Our best defense, and the only one that can save us in the long run, is to link the struggle against state repression and the threat of fascism and ecological collapse to a transnational proletarian struggle against the TCC.  It has never been truer that for the working and popular classes anticapitalism is self-defense.

William I. Robinson is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Global and International Studies, Latin American and Iberian Studies, and Affiliated Faculty, Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He is the author of numerous works and his latest book is Epochal Crisis: The Exhaustion of Global Capitalism (2025).