[This new book assesses the current state of global capitalism and
the new social movements that have arisen in response to recent
transformations in the system.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE WAR UPON US  
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Jerry Harris
September 30, 2022
Against the Current
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_ This new book assesses the current state of global capitalism and
the new social movements that have arisen in response to recent
transformations in the system. _

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_Global Civil War: Capitalism Post-Pandemic_
William I. Robinson
PM Press/Kairos
ISBN: 9781629639383

William I. Robinson's _Global Civil War_ is a call to the left to get
ready for battle. This book follows Robinson’s _Police State,_
diving more deeply into the post-pandemic world, the fourth industrial
revolution, and what the left needs to do to meet the challenges
ahead.

More than in any of his previous works, Robinson devotes space to the
types of political organization, theory and practice needed to win
against authoritarian capitalism, a discussion that takes up most of
Chapter Three.

Robinson wants this work to be an intellectual weapon in the effort to
construct counter-hegemony, an analysis that can be understood and
used by activists to develop a systemic critique of global capitalism.

For Robinson, this is the role of “organic intellectuals in the
Gramscian sense, intellectuals who attach themselves to and serve the
emancipatory struggles of the popular classes…” (148)

A professor of sociology, global and Latin American studies at the
University of California-Santa Barbara, the author begins with a
description of the economic fundamentals at the foundation of the
world’s social and economic crisis. This is covered in the first
chapter “Global Capitalism Post-Pandemic.”

But where Robinson expands his previous work is in detailing how
advanced digitalization is transforming the world, presenting the
dangers of a technological dictatorship. This is the centerpiece of
the book, encompassing Chapter Two, “Digitalization and the
Transformation of Global Capitalism.”

Chapter Three is “Whither the Global Revolt,” which Robinson notes
“may be the most urgent for readers,” whereas the first two
chapters “lay the indispensable groundwork for this strategizing.”
(7)

Global Capital and Contradictions

Robinson and others have covered this economic and social analysis
before, but it’s a concise and necessary framing for the book. To
this is added the impact of COVID-19. As Robinson says, “The
pandemic left in its wake more inequality, more political tension,
more militarism, and more authoritarianism — or rather, there were
more of these things through the pandemic.” (33)

The first chapter starts with the crisis of overaccumulation and
stagnation. The fact that capitalism must always seek to increase
profits by lowering the cost of production, particularly labor costs.
The result is the working class can never buy all that it produces,
leading to stagnation and the need to find new markets.

Consequently, capitalism needs to ceaselessly expand, moving beyond
nationally bound economies. While this impulse was always part of
capitalism, the 1980s stagnation led to a much deeper, wider, and
connected system of global production and finance, a global system
constructed by the emergence of a transnational capitalist class
(TCC).

But this spatial expansion offered only temporary relief, as global
polarization and inequality reached levels without precedent. A new
structural crisis exploded in 2008, with all its contradictions
accentuated a few years later by the pandemic.

As joblessness and poverty rapidly increased, authoritarian capitalist
states heightened their repressive control and pushed forward the
global police state.

Robinson concludes that the global nature of the crisis results in an
“acute political contradiction.” (51) National states must retain
political legitimacy for the capitalist system. But the accumulation
process is largely out of their control.

The transnational capitalist class demands downward pressure on wages,
the deconstruction of the social contract, cuts in taxes,
privatization of state assets such as health and education, and
budgetary austerity.

That’s exactly what creates anger and alienation among broad
sections of the working and middle classes. Nationalist political
movements then direct this anger against other countries as well as
racial, religious, or ethnic minorities. Writing before the Russian
invasion of Ukraine, Robinson notes that “The drive by the
capitalist state to externalize the political fallout of the crisis
increases the danger that the international tensions will lead to
war.” (53)

The following chapter is devoted to an examination of the powerful
growth of tech companies, and their ties to finance and also
repressive accumulation.

Throughout the past 20 years Robinson has written on the importance of
computer and information technologies, and the power of digitalization
to synchronize, coordinate, transfer and integrate global production
and finance. But here, Chapter Two offers an extended investigation,
particularly the most recent developments concerned with artificial
intelligence, biotechnology and big data.

Tech and Capital’s New Bloc

Typical of Robinson’s methodology, he offers an abundant amount of
data and statistical evidence as to the growth and economic importance
of intellectual capital and its tools of production, and the giant
tech companies who dominate the field.

One interesting aspect is the separation of direct human labor from
the actual work process through robotization. Robinson notes how human
pilots can operate production robots, or military drones, from
anywhere on the planet. But we can take that example even further:
Consider the robots roaming the surface of Mars doing scientific
research directed and controlled from workers on Earth.

The transformation of the work process has been truly remarkable.
Robinson pursues the effects on labor in diverse areas including gig
workers, precariousness, working from home, and the diminished role of
living labor in the creation of wealth.

As he explains, the pandemic has increased the fragmentation of the
entire labor process, which in turn increases the physical isolation
of workers, undercutting solidarity and the ability to organize.

The fourth industrial revolution has brought capital closer than ever
to reducing labor costs, and the number of workers from direct labor.
But as pointed out in Chapter One, this only increases the crisis of
capitalism and all of its social contradictions.

Robinson uses his examination of tech to argue a new capitalist bloc
has been established. He writes, “The rise of the digital economy
involves a fusion of Silicon Valley with transnational finance
capital…and military-industrial-security complex giving rise to a
new bloc of capital that appears to be at the very core of the
emerging post-pandemic paradigm.” (87)

One important area that doesn’t gain Robinson’s attention is the
green ecomodernization of the means of production with its ties to the
tech industry, a development that has attracted significant
investments.

This field also offers expanding new opportunities for over
accumulated capital, and it would be interesting to see how Robinson
fits this sector into his analysis of the new capitalist bloc.

Social Explosions and Quandaries

Chapter Three turns attention to the social explosions breaking out in
numerous counties as the result of neoliberal policy, the pandemic,
and the structural crisis of capitalism. Robinson examines mass
upsurges in Sudan, Chile, Bolivia, France, China, India and the United
States as well as other countries. Unfortunately, the environmental
mass movement, particularly among youth, doesn’t find its way into
this list. But the author’s main focus here is to identify “four
quandaries” as to why these mass global rebellions have not led to
revolutionary alternatives to capitalism.

Robinson has little belief in any renewed capitalist stability
requiring large-scale state intervention, finding neither neoliberal
nor social-democratic elites up to the task.

The first quandary is the disconnect between popular uprisings and an
organized socialist left. Robinson sees the need for a revolutionary
political organization with a program of action and strategy that can
bring together social movements into an emancipatory anti-capitalist
project. One of the main barriers is the “stubborn identitarian
paradigm…resistant to political organization and to identifying
broader class interests beyond identity.” (118).

Without a socialist party with revolutionary conscious leadership, he
contends, building a sustained challenge to capitalism out of the
spontaneous upsurges becomes nearly impossible.

Quandary two is the failure of the left to respond to the nature of
transnational capitalism. As the author argues, national states are
unable to exercise real political power over a global system of
accumulation when the transnational capitalist class has tremendous
structural power when facing over 200 individually divided countries.
Since working classes can only seize power at the nation-state level,
they can be isolated and defeated.

For Robinson the answer lies in building “transnational
counter-hegemony…coordinated across borders and across regions.”
(120) He doesn’t articulate what the political program will be,
although in the book’s conclusion he briefly notes that the Green
New Deal as a sweeping reform movement can generate “favorable
conditions to struggle for a post-capitalist social order.” (148)

But under quandary two, Robinson’s real focus is the relationship of
the political to the economic, and the role of the state.

Describing liberal ideology, he illustrates how the capitalist
viewpoint separates the public political sphere, which encompasses the
state, from the private corporate sphere of economic expropriation.
Consequently, the widespread popular belief is that each has “its
own innate laws and dynamics, the first pursuing power and the second
wealth.” (122)

Since the state is the condensation of social and economic grievances,
social movements often turn their attention to political demands of
inclusion, without demanding democratizing economic relations using a
revolutionary class perspective.

Turning to Gramsci, the author explains that while the state has
autonomy from individual capitalists, it remains the guardian of
capitalist relations of production. Therefore, Robinson criticizes
“popular struggles that target the state (and) run the risk of
dissolving class-based demands of the proletariat and other exploited
classes into more abstract demands for democratization (which) can
strengthen the hegemony of dominant groups as these groups accommodate
liberal demands for equality or representation and inclusion in the
capitalist state.” (124)

Thus, his critic of identitarian politics ties into Gramsci’s
“passive revolution” in which the ruling class can encompass and
defuse mass movements. This is Robinson’s third quandary, the
“influence, even hegemony, over mass struggle of identitarian
paradigms that…eclipsed the language of class and the critique of
capital and political economy.” (127)

Here the author blames academics and intellectuals who have led the
assault on Marxian class analysis with postmodernism, replacing
collective action by the oppressed with demands for equitable
inclusion into global capitalism.

Bringing the point to the largest movement in recent U.S. history,
Robinson maintains that Black Lives Matter and the Defund Police
movements focused on reforming law enforcement, rather than speaking
to the “big picture,” the structural fact that the role of police
is to defend capitalist property rights and criminalize the poor —
an economic violence responsible for more Black deaths than police
brutality.

The Far Right’s Appeal

The final quandary is the far-right’s appeal to the same social base
that the left is attempting to organize.

Robinson makes the point that social decay, downward mobility,
xenophobia, and racial supremacy all add to the power of the
far-right’s appeal. But in describing the majority of those who
stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021 he ascribes their anger to
various economic troubles, blaming identitarians for writing them off
as racists.

Nevertheless, an important study done at the University of Chicago led
by Robert Pape found sixty-three percent of the would-be January 6
insurrectionists believe in the “Great Replacement” theory that
whites are being replaced culturally and economically by minorities.

Furthermore, Pape’s original hypothesis was that insurgents would
come from white households whose income was dropping. Instead, he
found the most meaningful correlation was that insurgents came from
counties in which the white population was in decline.

Indeed, for every one-point drop in the percent of whites, insurgents
coming from that county increased by 25 percent. This link held up in
every state, and attests to the powerful role that racism actually
plays in the neofascist threat, and the widespread effect of
Replacement Theory propaganda.

The task then for Robinson, and indeed the entire left, is how to
understand and organize around the core relationships among U.S.
capitalism, race, and class.

Robinson himself notes: “The problem here…is not a struggle
against racism, for that must be front and center of any emancipatory
project, rather, it is the separation of race from class, the
substitution of politics based on essentialized identities for
politics based on the working class.” (139).

The last point in Chapter Three turns to the relationship of the
transnational capitalist class and the authoritarian state and fascist
mobilization. Robinson argues that full-blown fascism requires three
elements: reactionary state power, fascist mobilization in civil
society, and support for the project by the majority fraction of the
Transnational Capitalist Class. But he observes, “It appears that
the major portion of the TCC is not prepared to support fascist
projects,” because reactionary nationalism calls for a withdrawal
from globalization. (140)

Instead, we see a TCC engaged in fierce competition, splits, and
infighting. This may help explain the war in Ukraine and efforts to
contain China.

In a future work we can hope that Robinson expands on this analysis.
What are the different strategic differences splitting the TCC, are
there different blocs contending for hegemony, and just how does
nationalist politics impinge on transnational economics?

Robinson’s latest book raises vitally important questions for
creating a viable and dynamic counter-hegemony. Robinson, as one of
our best revolutionary intellectuals, needs to be closely read, his
analysis followed, and we should all look to his further works as he
explores the path toward a socialist future.

Jerry Harris is national secretary of the Global Studies Association,
and on the international board of the Network for the Critical Studies
of Global Capitalism. His latest book was _Global Capitalism and the
Crisis of Democracy._

* Global Capitalism
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* resistance movements
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* the post-pandemic world
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