The Global Police State

William I Robinson

Description

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.

A Brief Acknowledgment of Collective Authorship

List of Acronyms

Introduction: “George Orwell Got It Wrong”

1. Global Capitalism and its Crisis

2. Savage Inequalities: The Imperative of Social Control

3. Militarized Accumulation and Accumulation by Repression

4. The Battle for the Future

Notes

Index

Sujets

• Violence in Society
• Political Advocacy
• Political Process
• Human Rights
• Social Science
• HISTORY
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Penology
• General officer
• Military
• War crime
• Activism
• General

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 août 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786806666
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Global Police State
Karl Marx aspired to a world in which our animal needs would be satisfied and our human needs could be addressed. It is a realistic possibility now, as William Robinson outlines - or the alternative that is taking shape before our eyes: a global police state controlled by narrowly concentrated capital with surplus humanity left to survive somehow on its own. The choice is in our hands. There could hardly be a more compelling one.
Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and author of Who Rules the World?
Robinson gives powerful theoretical coherence to everyone s fear that fascism is being reborn, but adds the important twist that repression itself has grown into an essential engine of accumulation.
Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums and co-author of Set the Night on Fire: Los Angeles in the Sixties
For the last twenty years, William Robinson has been one of the most important analysts of global capitalism and the dynamics of globalization. In this new work, Robinson turns his attention to the emergence of a 21st century global police state that has developed as a corollary to growing inequality, climate collapse, and intensifying migration movements of the dispossessed. As Robinson warns, with great deprivation comes great repression, policing and potentially war. Robinson writes pointedly and with urgency for a broad audience with an interest in mobilizing for a just world.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and author of From BlackLives Matter to Black Liberation
The Global Police State
William I. Robinson
First published 2020 by Pluto Press
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Copyright William I. Robinson 2020
The right of William I. Robinson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 4163 7 Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7453 4164 4 Paperback
ISBN 978 1 7868 0665 9 PDF eBook
ISBN 978 1 7868 0667 3 Kindle eBook
ISBN 978 1 7868 0666 6 EPUB eBook



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Contents
A Brief Acknowledgment of Collective Authorship
List of Acronyms
Introduction: George Orwell Got It Wrong
1 Global Capitalism and its Crisis
2 Savage Inequalities: The Imperative of Social Control
3 Militarized Accumulation and Accumulation by Repression
4 The Battle for the Future
Notes
Index
A Brief Acknowledgment of Collective Authorship
An acknowledgment is a recognition of the collective nature of creative works. Intellectual labor is no different than any other form of work: it is collective, part of the social labor process. A proper acknowledgment here would involve three levels in reference to the more immediate collective labor behind this study. First and foremost are those who have contributed directly by providing feedback and other forms of encouragement. Second are those who have contributed to my ideas or helped in one way or another in recent years during which I have been researching and writing on the themes taken up in the present work, in particular, on capitalist crisis and global police state. Third are the many people who over the decades have contributed to my own intellectual and political development and to the output of my publications. This latter category involves literally hundreds of people, a list too vast to take up here. Many among these friends, comrades, and colleagues have been mentioned in the acknowledgements sections of previous books and articles. At present, all I can do is mention some of the people who either contributed more immediately to the current work through support and comments or whom I may have inadvertently left out in earlier acknowledgements. In alphabetical order, these are: Victor Acu a, Paul Almeida, Myrna Alonso, Yousef Baker, Mario Barrera, Patrick Bond, Chris Chase-Dunn, Wilma Dunaway, Bill Fletcher Jr., Nathan Garrido, Felipe Gonzalez, the Great Transition Initiative and its director, Paul Raskin, Jerry Harris, Hiroko Inoue, Rosemary Lee, Peter McLaren, Steven Miller, Marcela Orozco, Peter Phillips, Salvador Rangel, Juan Manuel Sandoval, Xuan Santos, Oscar Soto, Martin Vega, and the late Immanuel Wallerstein. Apologies for anyone I may have inadvertently left out. A very special thanks to my wife, Venus Leung, who read over and commented on the entire manuscript, and who has supported me throughout the project, to two anonymous reviewers at Pluto Press, to my publisher at Pluto, David Castle, and to my copy-editor, Jeanne Brady.
Acronyms
ABS
Asset-Backed Securities
ALEC
American Legislative Exchange Council
CCA
Corrections Corporation of America
CIA
Central Intelligence Agency
CIT
Computer and Information Technology
DHS
Department of Homeland Security
GDP
Gross Domestic Product
ICE
Immigration and Customs Enforcement
ILO
International Labor Organization
IMF
International Monetary Fund
MDG
Millennial Development Goals
MENA
Middle East and North Africa
NSA
National Security Agency
NATO
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
OECD
Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development
PMF
Private Military Firm
RMA
Revolution in Military Affairs
TCC
Transnational Capitalist Class
TNC
Transnational Corporation
TNS
Transnational State
WEF
World Economic Forum
WSF
World Social Forum
Introduction
George Orwell Got It Wrong
In her novel Everything is Known , Liza Elliott describes a future dystopia where five global mega-corporations, dubbed Affiliations, rule the planet. Infested with the inescapable surveillance industry, the five global Affiliations manipulated Big Data to commodify and commercialize all human activity for profit. The Affiliations had subordinated states to their domination: George Orwell got it wrong. Big Brother did not come from a totalitarian state, but from a totalitarian non-state. Big Data was a relentless cybernetic grandmaster who with sneaky eyes and listening ears spied on everything: your clothes, your friends, recording every word you spoke or wrote. It kept account of all this and more to amass the info power it needed to control the market, the heartbeat of the money economy. The world s population had become divided into three segregated social clusters: the members of the Core, the Peripherals, and the Outliers who comprised a majority of humanity:
Outliers were the discarded people. If they could not function in the Affiliation run world, they were cast off. Their lives, such as they happened, were their own fault. There would never be sympathy. They scrounged out a life with the dregs, the overruns, and the un-sellable excesses from the opulent Core and stark Periphery. Some worked unpredictable marginal field-labor jobs while others scrounged in the leftovers, the scraps, and the trash. 1
The world Elliott describes could well be, with not much of a stretch, a portrait of the one we live in. The unprecedented concentration of capital at the global level has cemented the financial power of a transnational corporate elite that uses its economic power to wield political influence and control states. In 2018, just 17 global financial conglomerates collectively managed 41.1 trillion, more than half the GDP of the entire planet. That same year, the richest 1 percent of humanity, led by 36 million millionaires and 2,400 billionaires, controlled more than half of the world s wealth while the bottom 80 percent had to make do with just 4.5 percent of this wealth. It is this mass of downcast humanity that make up Elliott s Peripherals and Outliers, what in the pages to follow are referred to as surplus humanity.
Yet the technical infrastructure of the twenty-first century is producing the resources in which a political and economic system very different from the global capitalism in which we live could be achieved. Through popular political control of the new technologies, as Srnicek and Williams remind us, we could collectively transform our world for the better:
Machines are accomplishing tasks that were unimaginable a decade ago. The internet and social media are giving a voice to billions who previously went unheard, bringing global participative democracy closer than ever to existence. Open-source designs, copyleft creativity, and 3D printing all portend a world where the scarcity of many products might be overcome. New forms of computer simulation could rejuvenate economic planning and give us the ability to direct economies rationally in unprecedented ways. The newest wave of automation is creating the possibility for huge swathes of boring and demeaning work to be permanently eliminated. Clean energy technologies make possible virtually limitless and environmentally sustainable forms of power production. And new medical technologies not only enable a longer, healthier life, but also make possible new experiments with gender and sexual identity. Many of the classic demands of the left-for less work, for an end to scarcity, for economic democracy, for the production of socially useful goods, and for the liberation of humanity-are materially more achievable than at any other point in history. 2
If we are to free ourselves through these new technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, however, we would first need to overthrow the oppressive and archaic social relations of global capitalism. At a time when both fascism and socialism again appear to be on the agenda around the world, it behooves us study the system of global capitalism, less as an intellectual exercise in itself than in order to struggle against its depredations with a view towards replacing it with one that can avert catastrophe and meet the material and spiritual needs of humanity. Rather than servin