CHAPTER THREE

Whither the Global Revolt?

“We are now in the phase of the ‘autumn of capitalism’ without this being strengthened by the emergence of ‘the people’s spring’ and a socialist perspective.”

—Samir Amin¹

“There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen.”

—Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin

Times of crisis are times of rapid social change that open up the possibility of pushing society in many different directions, depending on the outcome of battles among contending social and class forces. In these times, prevailing ideologies break down, established ways of thinking lose their grip, new visions of what is possible come into view, and prospects for discontinuity and rupture capture the imagination. Instability generates insecurity and social anxiety, as fear and hope spread. But it also inspires people to think in new ways about the possibilities of radical change that are hard to imagine in times of stability and continuity. As the crisis of capitalist hegemony has deepened, socialism and even communism are back in the public discourse, especially among those born after the Cold War anti-communism and the collapse of the Soviet system. Marxism, so maligned not only by the ruling class but by the postmodernists and identitarian worldviews and politics, has drawn renewed interest, especially among young people. Sales of Marx’s masterpiece of political economy, Capital, soared in the wake of the 2008 global financial collapse, as did sales of The Communist Manifesto.² Even mainstream pundits turned to Marx to help understand the Great Recession. In 2013, Time magazine ranked Karl Marx the fourteenth most influential figure in all of human history. That same year the prestigious science journal Nature reported that Marx is, by far, the world’s most influential scholar of all time.³

The Pew Research Center has been conducting ongoing polls in the United States on views toward capitalism and socialism (of course, what people understand to be capitalism and socialism is not clear). According to its 2019 poll, a full 42 percent of US respondents had a favorable view of socialism, although the Pew poll did not break down responses by age groups. But a 2018 Gallup poll found that 51 percent of those aged eighteen to twenty-nine had a favorable view of socialism. Seen in historical context, another Gallup poll found that support for socialism stood at 25 percent in 1942 among the US population overall, and this increased to 43 percent in 2019. Revealingly, another poll found that support for socialism in the United States jumped by nearly 10 percent among young people during the 2020 pandemic.⁴ This poll found that a full 60 percent of millennials and 57 percent of Generation Z supported a “complete change of our economic system away from capitalism.” Worldwide, a 2020 poll found that a majority of people around the world (56 percent) believe capitalism is doing more harm than good. On a national level, according to the poll, lack of trust in capitalism was highest in Thailand and India (75 percent and 74 percent, respectively), with France close behind (69 percent). Majorities rejected capitalism in many Asian, European, Gulf, African, and Latin American countries. In fact, only in Australia, Canada, the United States, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Japan did majorities disagree with the assertion that capitalism currently did more harm than good.

The pandemic roused popular struggles from below as workers and the poor, after a brief pause in the global revolt as the world went into lockdown, engaged in new waves of strikes and protests as the contagion progressed. Prior to the outbreak, in fall 2019, the global revolt that broke out in the wake of the 2008 crisis reached a crescendo. From Chile to Lebanon, Iraq to India, France to the United States, Haiti to Nigeria, and South Africa to Colombia, mass struggles appeared in many instances to be acquiring a radical anti-capitalist character before the lockdown pushed protesters off the streets. But the lull was momentary. Within weeks of the lockdown protesters were out in force again despite the lockdown and the dangers of public congregation. There was a palpable radicalization taking place among workers and the poor, a heightened sense of solidarity within and across borders. In the United States, for instance, no fewer than one thousand strikes ripped across the country in the first six months of the pandemic. Workers mounted protests to demand their safety as the virus spread, while tenants called for rent strikes, immigrant justice activists surrounded detention centers and demanded the release of prisoners, auto, fast-food, and meat processing workers went out on wildcat stoppages to force factories to shut down, homeless people took over empty houses, and health care workers on the front lines demanded the personal protective equipment they needed to do their jobs and stay safe. For the most part, wildcat strikes were organized not by union leadership but from the grassroots.⁵

The ruling groups cannot but be frightened by the rumbling from below. Whether mass mobilization from below effects a fundamental change in the system of global capitalism, runs out of steam, is co-opted from above enough for the system to restabilize, or results, in the words of The Communist Manifesto, in “the common ruin of the contending classes” depends on a host of political and subjective factors than cannot be predicted beforehand. What is clear is that mass popular struggles against the depredations of global capitalism are now conjoined with those around the fallout from the pandemic. We have entered into a period of mounting chaos in the world capitalist system. Capitalist crises are times of rapid social change precisely because they generate intense social and class conflict from below and from above.

Nonetheless, it is difficult to imagine that neoliberalism as the predominant variant of world capitalism in the wake of late twentieth-century capitalist globalization can be resuscitated for long enough to allow for restabilization under the pre-pandemic status quo. Neoliberalism simply does not have any more reserves with which to contain financial chaos and economic implosion.⁶ The implacable drive to accumulation will impede solutions to the crisis. Any economic recovery will require more active state intervention in the economy and regulation of the market. Renewed capitalist stability, if it can even be achieved, would require a more profound restructuring—including the rebuilding of public sectors devastated by forty years of neoliberalism—than the agents of financial and corporate interests, along with the liberal and social democratic elite around the world, could possibly accomplish or would even want to. Short of overthrowing the system, the only way out of the crisis is a reversal of escalating inequalities through a redistribution of wealth and power downward. That will not come without a fight. The challenge for emancipatory struggles is how to translate mass revolt into a project that can challenge the power of global capital.

In chapter one, I analyzed how prior to the health emergency the global system was already headed toward a general crisis of capitalist rule. Is it possible that we are entering a prerevolutionary situation? The Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, whom I cited previously, described the symptoms of what he called a revolutionary situation: 1) when there is a crisis in the prevailing system, and it is impossible for the ruling classes to rule in the old way; 2) when the want and suffering of the oppressed classes have grown more acute than usual; 3) when, as a consequence, the masses increase their historical action. These symptoms are clearly upon us. Will their revolt develop into a struggle to overthrow the system once and for all? Masses of people engaged in now open, now veiled revolt are for the most part struggling not in pursuit of a larger political agenda of transformation, much less one that is guided by a theoretical understanding of capitalism and its crisis, but to resolve their most pressing problems of survival. The jump from a “revolutionary situation” to a revolutionary process requires other conditions not yet present, including a widespread belief that system change is attainable and worth fighting for, a revolutionary ideology and program, and organizations capable of leading the struggle for such change.

THE GLOBAL REVOLT I: SPRING AND BEYOND

In the months prior to the pandemic (and subsequent to Samir Amin’s lamentation over the absence of a “people’s spring”), a “global spring” broke out all around the world.⁷ However, the 2019 spring was but a peak moment in popular insurgencies that spread in the wake of the 2008 Great Recession; a veritable tsunami of mass rebellion not seen since at least 1968. Social movements mounted sustained fightbacks against austerity, endemic corruption, authoritarianism and dictatorship, police violence, inequality, unemployment, corporate abuse, environmental degradation, and so on. The uprising had a truly global character. In Bangkok, a million people from the Red Shirts movement—so-named because the participants in the movement wear red shirts—took to the streets on March 14, 2010, against a state controlled by the military, the monarchy, and the moneyed elite. The Arab spring of 2011 set the Middle East and North Africa afire, resulting, among other things, in the overthrow of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak in early 2011, in the face of an unremitting national insurrection. The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement that rallied under the now famous banner “We Are the 99 Percent!” started with the occupation of Zuccotti Park across the street from the New York Stock Exchange in September 2011 and spread to most major cities across the United States, before being violently suppressed in 2012. In Spain, in 2011, the Indignado (the indignant or the enraged) movement carried out similar occupations of public spaces and held no less than twenty-one thousand protests around the country against austerity and corruption, culminating in a march through Madrid on October 15 by half a million indignados.⁸ The mass movements in Spain and Greece led to the creation of new left parties, Podemos and SYRIZA, respectively, which burst onto the political scene and contested power.

The Financial Times captured the mood in 2011 in a widely cited article penned by its lead commentator calling it “the year of global indignation”:

Is there such a thing as a global mood? It certainly feels like it. I cannot remember a time when so many different countries, all over the world, were gripped by some form of street protest or popular revolt. 2011 is turning into the year of global indignation. … popular revolt [is] breaking out across the globe. Europe has experienced political riots in Athens, sit-ins in Madrid and looting in London. In India, thousands of demonstrators turned out across the country to support Anna Hazare, a social activist and hunger striker, who has panicked the Indian government into agreeing to new anti-corruption measures. China has seen public demonstrations and online protests sparked by a factory accident and a high-speed train crash. In Chile, the past two months have seen huge marches by students and trade unions demanding higher social spending. In Israel, the main boulevards of Tel Aviv have been occupied by ordinary people protesting against the cost of living.⁹

In all of their diversity, these fights had—and have—a common underlying denominator: an aggressive global capitalism in crisis that is pushing to expand on the backs of masses who can tolerate no more hardship and deprivation. They also had demonstration effects on each other in this age of the internet and social media. The movements faced sustained state repression and a number of tragic reversals, epitomized by the seizure of power by a new dictatorship in Egypt that is perhaps even more repressive and totalitarian than its predecessor. After the initial worldwide wave, the protests ebbed and flowed but did not die out, with a fresh wave breaking out in 2017. In the two years leading up to the pandemic more than a hundred major anti-government protests swept the world, in rich and poor countries alike, toppling some thirty governments or leaders and sparking an escalation of state violence against protesters.¹⁰ These protests involved students, prisoners and activists against mass incarceration, workers, often migrant workers, farmers, indigenous communities, democracy and anti-corruption activists, anti-racists, those struggling for autonomy or independence, anti-austerity campaigners, environmental advocates, and so on. What follows is an overview of some of the most notable protest movements that took place around the world in these two years.

Among the popular upheavals that garnered worldwide attention, the Sudanese revolution stands out. Protests began in December 2018 against the entrenched dictatorship of President Omar al-Bashir, who had been in power for thirty years, and continued with sustained civil disobedience for eight months. The protests started in response to the government’s decision to end subsidies on essential food items but quickly evolved into a full-scale civil assault on the regime involving millions throughout the country. Fearful that the ruling groups would lose control, the military overthrew al-Bashir in a coup d’état in April 2019 and at the same time stepped up repression of the mass movement. On June 3, the military unleashed heavy gunfire and tear gas on peaceful protesters staging a sit-in in the nation’s capital city, Khartoum, killing more than one hundred people, injuring hundreds more, and carrying out mass rape. In the aftermath of the massacre hundreds, perhaps thousands, were arrested. Yet the civil insurrection continued undeterred, with women playing a remarkable leadership role, giving the revolution an explicit feminist character. Crowds as large as half a million flooded the streets of the capital, with many camping outside of military headquarters. In poor neighborhoods, popular committees organized feverishly as dual power developed. By the end of the year, the military regime was forced to hand power over to a mixed military-civilian authority and promised elections within three years. It is far from clear if some form of democracy will actually be achieved—and how popular its content will be—or if the country will go the way of Egypt, but whatever the outcome the Sudanese people are unlikely to be pacified.¹¹

In Latin America, Chile led the way in waves of popular mobilizations that reached a crescendo throughout the region in fall 2019. Known in Chile as the estallido social (social uprising), massive demonstrations, some of them a million strong, rocked the country that year and into 2020—right up until the outbreak of Covid-19. The triggering event for the civic uprising was the government’s decision to increase subway fares in the capital city of Santiago. It came in the wake of nationwide student strikes from 2011 to 2013 demanding an end to privatized education and unequal access. The student movement quickly developed into a larger assault on the entire edifice of neoliberal capitalism, as workers and the popular classes engaged in the following years in ongoing strikes and protests. Chile has a vibrant and militant feminist movement, and, as in the Sudan, women were at the forefront of these struggles. The protests against the subway fare hike quickly snowballed into a sustained nationwide insurrection in the face of fierce police, army, and paramilitary repression that left several dozen dead, thousands injured, and thousands more arrested. The mass mobilization shifted the correlation of social and political forces against the neoliberal regime and forced the government to reverse the fare hike and promise reforms. It was forced to hold a referendum in the midst of the pandemic in October 2020 to convene a constitutional assembly to draft a new constitution—approved by an overwhelming majority. The historical and symbolic significance of the Chilean uprising did not go unnoticed by activists and protesters around the world. The 1973 coup d’état that overthrew the democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende and brought to power the fascist dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet ushered in the world’s first experiment in neoliberalism and turned the country into perhaps the most “neoliberalized” in the world.

In France, what became known as the mouvement des gilets jaunes (yellow vest movement) for social and economic justice stormed the country starting in October 2018, coming as it did on the heels of years of mass mobilization against escalating inequality and austerity, and continued until the Covid-19 outbreak forced people off the streets. The most massive popular mobilization since 1968, already by the end of 2018 over 1,800 protesters and 1,000 police had been injured and the political climate irreversibly altered.¹² As elsewhere, where triggering events were often a government decision to raise the price of some essential item for populations already reeling from austerity and hardship, in France, the movement took off after the government decreed a rise in fuel prices. The yellow vest protesters—so named because the protesters wear the yellow vests that according to French law all motorists are required to keep in their vehicles in case of emergencies—moved beyond the immediate call for a rescinding of the fuel tax as the protests continued throughout 2019. They put forth a wide-ranging list of forty-two demands, among them a minimum wage increase, lower taxes on workers and pensioners, higher pensions, higher taxes on the rich, more social spending, cuts in politicians’ salaries, environmental action, a plan for ordinary citizens to introduce referendums, and the nationalization of French corporations. On numerous occasions, strikes, marches, and roadblocks paralyzed Paris and other urban, suburban, and rural areas (the mobilizations were more territorial than workplace-based). One poll found that 80 percent of French people supported the movement, although not everyone agreed on all the demands, and as the movement became more militant some participating organizations dropped out. Nonetheless, after a brief lull during the lockdown, protesters were back on the streets in fall 2020.¹³

In China, labor resistance grew explosively during and after the 2008–2009 economic crisis. Prior to 2008, workers had waged spontaneous resistance, including petitions, roadblocks, and wildcat walkouts. These actions, in the words of one local labor organizer, “impacted both ‘production discipline’ and ‘social order,’ and made it difficult for capitalists to maintain an environment conducive for exploiting workers,” in the wake of which the government implemented a series of labor control laws.¹⁴ By the second decade of the century, students, intellectuals, and other allies of the labor movement had become involved in workers struggles. As elsewhere around the world, 2017–2019 become the flash point, with a fresh wave of nationwide actions in factories, services, construction, utilities, mines, and quarries, as workers protested backbreaking schedules, low pay, unpaid wages, and poor working conditions. In 2018, there were at least 1,700 recorded labor disputes on the mainland, up from 1,200 the prior year.¹⁵ In Hong Kong, mass student-led protests throughout 2019 against China’s authoritarian control captured world attention, before they died down in the face of repression and a centrifugal splintering of the movement (there appeared to be a hodgepodge of political and ideological orientations as well, with the US government financing the “pro-democracy” organizations leading the protests). International news media lost interest and largely ignored a more significant development in 2020 and onward, the rise of a new grassroots union movement and the forging of a more explicit working-class identity, as the unions targeted the housing shortage, high rents, inequality, low pay, and workplace health and safety.¹⁶

Meanwhile, back on the Chinese mainland, tech workers are becoming the new frontier or labor organizing. “A campaign-style, decentralized tech worker organizing, coordinated by workers and regions, indicates the potential of a new type of labor organizing,” wrote one labor activist. As China became the “workshop of the world” in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the workers movement became grounded in export-oriented industry, based on a model of workers centers, or labor non-governmental organizations, that provided political support and organizational assistance to industrial workers. Industrial strike activity escalated and so too did state repression of the burgeoning workers movement. “As the worker central organizing model, which is adapted to organizing industrial workers, becomes increasingly unsustainable due to state repression, the tech worker organizing provides clues to a new model for worker mobilization that may hold particular advantages under the current political environment,” observed Kevin Lin, referencing a March 2019 “virtual uprising” of tech workers.¹⁷ While Lin was referring to China, the lessons hold true for other countries as millions join the ranks of degraded tech work under the precarious work conditions discussed in the previous chapter.

In India, in 2019 and 2020, hundreds of millions of workers, peasant farmers, and poor people participated in the two largest strikes in the world to date (as of this writing in early 2021), coming as they did on the heels of rolling mass protests in the preceding years, and upping the ante in the global class war unleashed by the TCC. At least 150 million workers took part in a January 2019 strike, under the umbrella of a joint committee of ten different trade union federations, a number of them under left-wing leadership. Leading the way were workers from transport, banks, financial services, public enterprises, power, steel, auto, and other industries, who were joined by student and farmer organizations. The twelve-point charter of demands included a national minimum wage, abolition of the contract labor system, trade union rights, social security coverage for all workers, and a halt to privatizations and to the anti-labor codes introduced by the government. To put the 150 million figure in perspective, about one in every fifty people on the planet participated in the strike!

Then, just two years later, on November 26, 2020, an even larger general strike paralyzed the country. An estimated 250 million workers and farmers joined together in a in a united front of over 250 organizations. To again put the 250 million number in perspective, if those who struck formed a country, it would be the fifth largest in the world after China, India, the United States, and Indonesia. Industrial belts across India came to a halt, and workers in the country’s principal ports stopped work, joined by those from health care, services, telecommunications, mining, and transportation. They reiterated the twelve-point charter put forth by the trade unions two years earlier, called for a withdrawal of labor laws that extend the working day to twelve hours and that eliminate labor protections for unorganized workers, immediate relief for those suffering hardships due to the pandemic, and a reversal of privatizations and neoliberal policies. They also demanded the withdrawal of an agricultural bill introduced by the government that would open the floodgates to transnational agribusiness and devastate millions of farmers.¹⁸ All this in the midst of the pandemic and in the face of fierce state repression, including the deployment of water cannons, tear gas, police and army barricades, and even live gunfire.

In the United States, in addition to the OWS movement mentioned above, some of the largest popular mobilizations in US history took place between 2008 and 2019, including: the 2017 Women’s March that involved anywhere from three to five million people in numerous cities; the high school student–led March for Our Lives in 2018, which drew upward to two million people into the streets calling for gun control; the People’s Climate March in New York City in 2014 and other environmental actions that drew in millions of people. Strike activity surged in 2018 and 2019 despite massive deunionization in recent decades (in 2019, some 10 percent of the workforce was unionized, down from 27 percent at the start of the neoliberal era in 1979). In those two years some one million workers engaged in major work stoppages—a nearly twenty-fold increase from the years immediately prior. Public school teachers led the way in a series of widely publicized strikes, followed by workers in the health care and auto industries, fast-food workers, and grocery store cashiers. It must be stressed, however, that these US government Bureau of Labor Statistics data include only information on work stoppages involving one thousand or more workers and at least one full shift, whereas 59.4 percent of private sector workers are employed by firms with fewer than one thousand employees.¹⁹ Unregistered in official data were labor actions like the 2018 Google walkouts in protest over the company’s handling of sexual harassment, involving thousands of workers, which did not last for one full shift, pickets by fast-food workers lasting a few hours, or the 2019 work stoppage by Uber drivers (part of a global day of action by ride-hailing workers), who are considered “independent contractors.”

The anti-racist uprising in the United States sparked by the May 25, 2020, police murder in the city of Minneapolis of an unarmed black man, George Floyd, was possibly the largest and broadest mass action in US history, indicative of both the promise and the challenges of the global revolt. Bystanders recorded on their cell phones the brutal and callous murder, in which a police officer who had already restrained Floyd, placed him in handcuffs and laid him face down on the concrete, then proceeded to place his knee on the man’s neck until the life was choked out of him, even as he cried out that he could not breath. Over the next several months an estimated twenty-five to thirty million people acting loosely under the banner of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) civil rights movement joined nationwide streets protests in some two thousand cities, large and small, in all fifty states, even in the midst of the pandemic. The uprising brought out people from all ethnicities and walks of life, indeed, many, perhaps a majority, of them white. The murder became a lightning rod for pent-up rage and despair over the mounting social crisis. Fearful of losing control, the ruling groups left no holds barred in unleashing the state’s repressive apparatus against the largely peaceful protesters.

I participated in some of the marches in my city of residence, Los Angeles, and witnessed the use by militarized police and national guard units of tear gas, stun grenades, taser guns, pepper spray, rubber bullets, and batons against protesters. Curfews were imposed in dozens of cities, armored vehicles patrolled streets, and in at least one city, Atlanta, the armed forces deployed a column of tanks. At least ten thousand protesters were arrested, many kept for prolonged periods in indefinite detention, with three hundred charged with federal crimes, and at least thousand complaints lodged against instances of police brutality, excessive use of force, and rioting.²⁰ The uprising elicited a shift in the attitude of white workers toward police repression and racism, the historic scourge of working-class unity in the United States, as the percentage of white voters opposed to police racism climbed from 40 to 70 percent.²¹ Solidarity actions and parallel anti-racist protests spread to over sixty countries around the world, including Nigeria, where demonstrators expanded their protests into a larger movement targeting police and military repression, endemic corruption, and capitalist exploitation.

Significant New Anti-government Protests in 2019 and 2020

Source: Global Protest Tracker, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, accessed December 11, 2020

In all, it seemed like there were few countries not touched by the 2017–2019 tsunami, but evidence suggests that the rebellion escalated during the pandemic itself. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s “global protest tracker” recorded “significant antigovernment protests” in more than 110 countries from 2018 to 2020, involving over 230 major actions.²² Given that the tracker recorded “over 100” such actions for the 2018–2019 two-year period, this would mean that 130 actions were recorded in 2020 alone (if, that is, the Endowment actually managed to accurately collect and record actions worldwide in the midst of the pandemic turmoil), or roughly a 160 percent increase during the first year of the pandemic over the average for the preceding two years. Covid-19 was, indeed, the lightning bolt before the thunder. “Just a few weeks after lockdowns were widely imposed, protests began to reemerge,” noted the Endowment. “[A]lready in April [2020], the number of new protests rose to a high level; approximately one new significant anti-government protest every four days.”²³ It is crucial to recognize, however, that radicalization and mass mobilization have gone in both directions—left and right. The global backlash against capitalist globalization, as I will discuss below, has also fueled rising nationalism, much of it right-wing and regressive, including twenty-first-century fascist movements.

GLOBAL REVOLT II: QUANDARIES OF POPULAR STRUGGLES

“On July 24, 2020, Tesla’s Elon Musk wrote on Twitter that a second US ‘government stimulus package is not in the best interests of the people.’ Someone responded to Musk soon after, ‘You know what wasn’t in the best interest of people? The U.S. government organizing a coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia so you could obtain the lithium there. Musk then wrote: We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.’”

—Twitter exchange, as recounted by Vijay Prashad and Alejandro Bejarano²⁴

The admonition issued by the US billionaire Elon Musk that “we” will overthrow any government that stands in the way of transnational corporate plunder brings home all of the sociopathy of a global capitalism in crisis that is pushing the world toward civil war. Musk was referring to an October 2019 coup d’état in Bolivia that overthrew the elected government of President Evo Morales. For five centuries the Andean nation has been a treasure trove for local and transnational elites, providing an endless stream of vital minerals for an expanding world capitalist system—first silver during the colonial era and in subsequent centuries tin, zinc, bismuth, antimony, tungsten, and petroleum gases, among others. The impoverished indigenous and mestizo masses waged decades-long—nay, centuries-long—struggles against the plunder and depredations of local and foreign capitalists and elites. These struggles came to a head in the so-called gas war early in the new century, sparked by the government’s decision to privatize the national hydrocarbon company in a massive giveaway to transnational corporate investors. Strikes and blockades escalated in 2003, forcing the president to resign and flee the country. The victory only emboldened the mass movement, which three years later brought to power Evo Morales, the country’s first indigenous president, and his Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement Toward Socialism: MAS) party. In response to the demands of the highly organized and mobilized population, the MAS nationalized hydrocarbon resources. It boosted public investment, redirected state revenues toward social programs, increased wages, and passed a new constitution that expanded autonomy and political participation for the country’s indigenous majority.

The MAS came to power just as massive lithium reserves were discovered in the country. Until a few decades ago, lithium was a minor ingredient in lubricants and was also optionally alloyed with other minerals to make high performance alloys. With the digital revolution, however, lithium became a crucial resource for the global economy. Lithium is essential for electronic devices associated with computer and related technologies, such as smartphones, tablets, PCs, and laptops. As the key mineral used in electronic batteries it is at the very heart of the electronic-vehicle revolution and a critical resource for Musk’s battery-driven Tesla car.²⁵ The demand for lithium was expected to double from 2020 to 2024, and Bolivia is estimated to have the world’s largest known reserves.²⁶ As it set about to exploit the country’s reserves, the Morales government welcomed transnational corporate investment in the industry but, nonetheless, set limits, all too unpleasing to the TCC, on foreign investment in the extraction and processing of the white metal. It was this concern over access to Bolivia’s lithium that motivated Musk to embrace the US-backed coup d’état that ousted Morales.

To be sure, Morales’s radical discourse disguised a more reformist program compatible with global capitalism. The MAS reached an accommodation with the country’s landed elite and private sector in 2008—the same year as the Great Recession hit the global economy—in the face of a US-backed right-wing insurrection against its original radical impulse. As with other progressive governments that came to power in South America in the early twenty-first century, the MAS promoted a vast expansion of raw material production, agribusiness, and mega-infrastructure projects in partnership with foreign and local contingents of the TCC. It then taxed these operations to finance an expansion of social assistance programs, rather than pursuing a more fundamental transformation of property and class relations or a more direct challenge to the prerogatives of transnational capital. When commodities markets collapsed in the face of the global downturn, the contradictions of the model came home to roost, as progressive governments in the region lost power to a resurgent far right. In Bolivia, the MAS government faced mounting popular mobilization from below and from the left as discontent grew over the limits of its program and the giveaways to transnational capital, as well as over its clientelism and its moves to undercut popular control and autonomy at the grassroots level. In this context, local and transnational elites, backed by the United States, saw an opportunity to recover direct control of the state and unrestricted access to the country’s labor and natural resources.

As the Bolivian case highlights, global capitalism is caught up in a new wave of predatory expansion. In particular, it underscores the predation of the new bloc of capital discussed in the previous chapter, as the TCC must seize resources to feed digitally driven expansion. On the one hand, transnational capital exercises enormous structural power over poor majorities. Even in instances such as South America, where the masses were politicized and well-organized, this structural power undercut efforts by states and social movements to undertake transformations that threatened the fundamental interests of the TCC. On the other hand, however, the Bolivian case highlights the difficulties that the ruling groups face in their effort to maintain control in the face of the global revolt that took off in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse. In fact, the far-right coup government was unable to hold on to power despite widespread repression and US support. It had to return governmental power to the MAS after mass protest forced it to hold elections in 2020.

Bolivia underscores the conundrum of the working and popular classes around the world as they struggle against the domination of the TCC and its political agents. How to translate mass revolt into a project that can challenge the power of global capital? Similar to the Latin American case, left-wing parties that contested state power on the heels of the Indignado movement in Spain and the anti-austerity uprising in Greece, where the SYRIZA party actually won government but found itself so constrained by the structural power of transnational capital and its local political agents that it was unable to make headway in its progressive agenda. In part, these reversals were (are) part of the dynamic of advances and reversals as struggles unfold between the masses from below and their rulers. But they also pointed to the quandaries of the left and the popular classes: underlying weaknesses and limitations that threaten to limit if not undermine the new round of mass rebellion unleashed in the wake of the pandemic.

In broad strokes, and with the usual precautions about generalizing (and as a further caveat, the following is but an overview of matters whose elaboration is best left for elsewhere), we can identify four quandaries that, far from mutually exclusive, are interwoven and synergistic. They must be seen as forming a larger unity in relation to global class struggle and civil war. First, there is an evident disjuncture between the proliferation of mass movements and popular uprisings around the world, on the one hand, and an organized and socialist-oriented left that could serve as a rudder to help steer these struggles into a larger transformative project, on the other hand. The institutional and party left has steadily lost power and influence in recent decades, as capitalist globalization and resistance to it has advanced, in part due to its own internal weaknesses and historic shortcomings and in part due to the centrifugal forces of capitalist globalization itself, insofar as it disaggregates and atomizes the exploited classes and their social and political spaces. The existing fragmentation and sectarianism that all too often pervades the left debilitates popular struggles at a time of planetary crisis. If the left is to be in a position to intervene effectively in the upheavals that are upon us, it must undertake the task of criticism and must urgently renovate a revolutionary project and a plan for refounding the state. At the same time as the socialist left is very weak, global union membership has steadily declined, so that even as working people everywhere rise up the majority of workers remain largely unorganized.

Everywhere, masses are feverishly challenging the powers that be in thousands of different social movements of every sort and under the most varied of circumstances. Any number of particular demands are put forward by these social movements and the popular sectors that become involved in them, but in order to fight back against global capitalism as the ultimate cause of the problems they seek to address, they must be aggregated into a larger emancipatory project, a program of action, and a strategy to push such a project forward. This requires political organizations that are able to articulate such a project in a double sense: articulate, as in link together and as in give voice to it. To take the case of the BLM-led civic uprising in the United States that took off in spring and summer 2020, millions of mostly young people yearning for radical change risked life and limb to participate, yet the protests showed a very low level of political development, with an organized left that could give it a more coherent anti-capitalist direction virtually nowhere to be seen and the politics of the youth lacking clarity, cohesion, and direction. There will be new mass uprising as surely as I write these lines in early 2021, yet the BLM movement became easy—and, for middle-class elements among it, willing—prey for co-optation by the powers that be, as I will discuss below. In the absence of a larger critique of the capitalist state, a left, and an alternative project, the movement died down as repression, co-optation, and fatigue took their toll.

As we saw, the crisis pushes the masses toward a radicalization, and many are coming to embrace the critique of capitalism and are open to the idea of socialism. At the same time, however, the stubborn identitarian paradigm that I discuss below has made many resistant to political organization and to identifying broader class interests beyond identity. We are missing what Gramsci referred to as a “Modern Prince”—a revolutionary political organization that can capture the imagination and build a counterhegemony to the capitalist state. Without political organizations and a program—without the unity of the spontaneous with organization—movements and mass actions over specific demands cannot be sustained and cannot mount a challenge to the system itself. In many places around the world the global spring and ongoing rebellions are semi-spontaneous outbursts that have found no left leadership that could guide them, no program that could sustain resistance and push it toward a more comprehensive project of change. “Neglecting, or worse still despising, so-called ‘spontaneous’ movements, i.e., failing to give them a conscious leadership or to raise them to a higher plane by inserting them into politics, may often have extremely serious consequences,” warned Gramsci. “It is almost always the case that a spontaneous movement of the subaltern classes is accompanied by a reactionary movement of the right-wing of the dominant class, for concomitant reasons.” Indeed, this is precisely what appears to be playing out, as we will discuss below; the far right is gaining ground rapidly.

Second, as I noted in chapter one, economic globalization takes place within a nation-state-based system of political authority. Capitalist state power is scattered into some two hundred nation-states, and transnational state apparatuses are unable to exercise any real political authority over the global system as a whole. This gives transnational capital enormous structural power over individual nation-states and over the global economy. Capitalism was from its inception a world system. If socialism in one country was impossible in the twentieth century, it is even more so impossible in this age of capitalist globalization. The space for alternative projects at the national level has dramatically constricted over the past half-century. Social democracy sought to regulate the capitalist economy in order to capture and redistribute some surplus into social programs and guide capital accumulation toward some broader social aim besides profit-making, but social democracy exists now little more than in name. François Mitterrand, a left-leaning social democrat, was elected to the French presidency in 1981 with a program to greatly expand the public sector, raise wages, extend social spending, raise taxes on capital, and nationalize the banks and several major industrial groups. But the corporate elite launched a capital strike and withdrew billions of dollars from the country, resulting in a rapid deterioration of the economic situation. Mitterrand was forced to do an about-turn and by 1983 had embraced monetarism, neoliberalism, and austerity.²⁷

That the social democratic project in France, one of the most developed countries in the world, was brought down early on in the neoliberal era by the TCC brings home the point that projects of radical redistribution, not to speak of socialism, are increasingly impossible in a single country, much less in small, vulnerable countries like Bolivia or Greece. Struggles at the nation-state level are far from futile. Moreover, mass struggles unfold at the level of each nation-state; the only state power the masses can seize is that of the nation-state. As the Greek socialist theoretician Nicos Poulantzas noted, the state—in this case, specifically the national state—is the point of condensation for tensions in the social order and the political system (in Poulantzas’s own words, the state “is the specific material condensation of a relationship of force among classes and class fractions”).²⁸ Yet the national state is unable to meet both the demands of popular sectors from below and the imperative of assuring the accumulation of capital.

This contradiction, as I discussed earlier, throws national states into spiraling crises of legitimacy. As capitalist globalization deepens, the state cannot resolve this contradiction and must step up its repressive control over the working and popular classes, which includes efforts at co-optation and passive revolution (see below). For these classes, struggles at the level of the nation-state must be part of a more expansive transnational counterhegemonic project, including transnational trade unionism, transnational social movements, and transnational political organizations that put forth a transnational transformative project—a unified minimal program coordinated across borders and across regions. This holds true as much for a global Keynesianism, that is, a project of transnational redistribution and regulation of the global economy—or, if you will, a global social democracy—as it does for a global socialism. In sum, emancipatory struggles in the age of global capitalism must be simultaneously national and transnational—must identify and prioritize the class antagonisms within and across countries and regions

There have been important attempts in recent years to establish transnational forums of struggle beyond nineteenth-and twentieth-century internationals of left political parties. Delegates from some 150 countries representing several thousand social movements and radical organizations came together in early 2001 under the banner “another world is possible” to form the World Social Forum (WSF) as an umbrella “movement of movements,” representing an important milestone in the construction of a global popular counterhegemony. But the WSF lacked a coherent strategy for challenging global capitalism. The multitude of forces that made up the forum were divided over numerous issues: between those calling for reform of the system and those searching for ways to replace it altogether; between those emphasizing negotiation with global elites and those seeking mass mobilization and confrontation. Moreover, the WSF explicitly rejected the idea of a united political program across borders to which all would commit—in fact, it rejected outright the idea of political programs—and also explicitly prohibited political parties from being a part of the Forum, thus contributing to the separation of left political parties from mass social movements. It also rejected “violence,” so organizations like the Zapatistas in Mexico were excluded.

In early 2019, leftists and activists from around the world took an important step forward in the transnationalization of popular struggles, launching the Progressive International, in what could arguably be considered the successor to the WSF. The new organization set up a more formal structure for individuals and organizations—including political parties—to become members, set about drafting a blueprint for a common platform of struggle across borders, and committed to participating across borders in social justice campaigns around the world.²⁹ There are other signs of growing transnational coordination of popular and working-class struggles, including transnationally coordinated strikes by Uber drivers in 2019 and Amazon workers in 2020 that spanned dozens of countries.³⁰

However, the national state as a point of condensation, or a lightning rod, for tensions and contradictions in the social order and the political economy presents the left and popular forces with other problematic implications for transformative and emancipatory projects. A brief theoretical excursion is useful. As I mentioned in chapter one, the problem of the relationship between capital and the state is rooted in a more expansive theoretical matter, that of the relationship of the political to the economic in the capitalist system. Unlike earlier class societies, the separation of the political from the economic under capitalism is formal insofar as capitalists, as the economically dominant class, are not necessarily in direct control of the state machinery, and we have numerous instances around the world in recent years of progressive and even anti-capitalist forces winning national state power, from Salvador Allende in Chile from 1970–1973 to the more recent cases of Bolivia and Greece. As I mentioned above, these forces come under pressure to conform to the interests of transnational capital. These pressures are applied especially through global financial markets, although we must also not forget direct coercive pressure applied by the political and state agents of global capitalism, such as with the 2019 coup d’état in Bolivia or campaigns of destabilization against Venezuela and Cuba. This separation is taken as natural or organic in liberal ideology and in Weberian sociology; political and economic structures are seen as separate spheres, each with its own innate laws and dynamics, the first pursuing power and the second wealth.

In historical materialist approaches, this formal or apparent separation of the political and the economic spheres of a larger social totality under capitalism is not real; it is illusory. Expanding our theoretical excursion, throughout the history of class societies going back some eight thousand years, the economically dominant classes exercised direct control of the state in pursuit of their class interests. Slave-owning and feudal aristocracies directly controlled the slave and feudal states. In capitalism, however, there is a formal separation of economic control from political power. The analytical distinction between political and economic structures or spheres corresponds to their institutional separation under capitalism. The economy becomes a “private” sphere in which the power to expropriate the social product, to extract surplus value, has been privatized, and people are decidedly unequal and subordinated to the market. This economic sphere is removed from the “public” or governmental sphere and appears to relate externally rather than internally to the “public” sphere of the state, in which people are equal juridical citizens, and in which leftists can run for and even win office. One does not vote under capitalism for who will own property or for how property is distributed; such material (economic) relations are removed from the public sphere. Moreover, this public sphere is not directly implicated in the private appropriation of the surplus product, that is, in capitalist profit-making. Yet the state is charged with organizing the general conditions of accumulation, for its existence and its legitimacy is dependent upon a vibrant economy, that is, upon the reproduction of capitalist production relations, or the capital-labor relation. The state exercises its autonomy from the directives of capitalists as individuals, as groups, or as fractions, but it is not autonomous from those relations. Herein lies the underlying unity of politics and economics, as well as the institutional separation of the political and the economic spheres—that separation being a very consequence of the establishment of capitalist production relations.³¹

This separation takes the expression of the separation of the “public” from the “private,” the former seen as the state proper, or what Gramsci referred to as “political society,” and the latter as what Gramsci referred to as “civil society.” In his essay, “State and Civil Society,” Gramsci critiques the conception of the state developed by ideologues of capitalist society as derived from the separation of politics and economics and “conceived as a thing in itself, as a rational absolute.”³² This results, in Gramsci’s view, in a reified or fetishistic view, in which individuals “are led to think that in actual fact there exists above them a phantom entity, the abstraction of the collective organism, a species of autonomous divinity that thinks, not with the head of a specific being, yet nevertheless thinks, that moves, not with the real legs of a person, yet still moves.” Gramsci criticized this view of the state as a “thing-in-itself,” as an entity unto itself in political society and above the social and power relations in civil society and the economy, as “statolatry.” Instead, the state is “the entire complex of practical and theoretical activities with which the ruling class not only justifies and maintains its dominance, but manages to win the active consent of those over whom it rules.”³³ Here the state becomes the “integral” or “extended” state, in Gramsci’s formula, encompassing political plus civil society, a conception aimed at overcoming the illusory dualism of the political and the economic.

Now, we can link this theoretical excursion to the problem at hand, the second of the four quandaries I am discussing here. Popular struggles that target the state as the point of condensation for tensions and contradictions that originate in the political economy of capitalism run the risk of dissolving class-based demands of the proletariat and other exploited classes into more abstract demands for democratization of the state, often merely representation in public institutions, along with an end to corruption.³⁴ Radical mobilization from below runs the risk of being channeled into the state’s institutional processes, co-opted into an agenda of liberal reform that does little to challenge the social order. Indeed, they can strengthen the hegemony of dominant groups as these groups accommodate liberal demands for equality of representation and inclusion in the capitalist state and its institutions. In these circumstances the class identity of movements of the working and popular classes becomes an abstract designation as “people” or “citizens,” as under capitalism citizens enjoy political equality even as they experience explicit inequality in the economy. The paradox of the capitalist system under formally democratic arrangements is just that: political equality before the state, on the one hand, and socioeconomic dictatorship in the economy, on the other. Yet masses of people are able to see the state more easily than they see capital, as the state becomes the point of condensation for social and economic grievances, at a time when the capitalist state has a radically diminished capacity to meet the demands from below in the face of the crisis.

The case of the 2020 anti-racist uprising in United States is illustrative of the dilemma. The movement targeted the police as the visible front line of the capitalist state. It is the police who carried out the extrajudicial execution of George Floyd. It is the police who come into direct contact with the dispossessed and the marginalized and are responsible for controlling them. Capitalists and elites whose wealth and power are protected by the police do not go into the streets to confront poor black people and workers; they command quietly from corporate boardrooms, banking and financial houses, foundations, and government offices. We cannot do away with police violence and mass incarceration in the United States without doing away with surplus labor, that is, doing away with the system that relegates tens of millions in the United States (and several billion worldwide) to the margins as surplus humanity. As we saw previously, the top 1 percent of humanity owns over half of the world’s wealth, and the top 20 percent own 94.5 of that wealth, while the remaining 80 percent have to make do with just 5.5 percent. Such savage social inequalities are politically explosive, and to the extent that the system is unable to reverse them it turns to ever more violent forms of containment to manage immiserated populations. The police are a coercive instrument of the capitalist state to control surplus labor, the poor, and the working class. In the United States, workers from racially oppressed groups disproportionately swell the ranks of surplus labor and the immiserated population.

In the United States, workers and poor people escalated their struggles at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. As I noted above, in Amazon warehouses, meatpacking and auto plants, supermarkets, hospitals and nursing homes, they undertook a wave of strikes and protests as the coronavirus spread to demand safe working conditions and hazard pay (note that these frontline and essential workers come disproportionally from racially oppressed communities), while tenants called for rent strikes, immigrant justice activists surrounded detention centers and demanded the release of prisoners, and homeless people took over homes. Yet there was a debilitating disconnect between these worker-led struggles in the capitalist economy and the black youth–led anti-racist uprising. The secret to moving forward the mass anti-racist struggle was to link it with the mass working-class struggles that were simultaneously breaking out in 2020, and in this way to have targeted the roots of racism in capitalist exploitation, or at least to link this anti-racist struggle with those worker struggles, but this did not happen, at least not in the 2020 conjuncture. The anti-racist uprising surged for several intense weeks as the major urban centers became battlegrounds between protesters and the police state, but the protests fizzled out as repression, co-optation, and fatigue took their toll, and as the dominant groups turned to incorporating the BLM movement into the hegemonic order.

The two quandaries we have discussed so far form a unity. Mass movements generated by the very contradictions and deprivations of the capitalist system target the state as the point of condensation. The absence of radical political organizations and a socialist left makes it difficult for these movements to move from a struggle for democratization (especially equality of representation and inclusion) and demands for redistribution to a larger attack on the economic system and capitalist relations of production. But there was more at work here. Why was (is) the language of class so absent? The two quandaries in their unity cannot be separated from the third, the influence, even hegemony, over mass struggles of identitarian paradigms that, rather than enhance, have eclipsed the language of class and the critique of capital and political economy.³⁵ These paradigms did not develop in a vacuum. They emerged in the late twentieth century out of the collapse of the old Soviet bloc, the defeat of the left, the demise of Third World nationalist and revolutionary projects, and the repression of radical working-class struggles. The triumph of neoliberalism found its philosophical alter ego in a postmodernism that undermined ideas of broad solidarity, working-class struggle, and socialist projects.³⁶

A key part of the story here, in my view, is the betrayal of the intellectuals, for no struggle of the oppressed can be without its organic intellectuals, and the battles to come are as much theoretical and ideological as they are political. Many intellectuals who previously identified with anti-capitalist movements and emancipatory projects withdrew into an identitarian politics of reform and inclusion, a set of political and cultural practices, radical only in language, that are at best liberal and that end up shoring up the hegemony of capital. It was the mass struggles of the 1960s and 1970s themselves that helped representatives from the oppressed groups to join the ranks of the professional strata and of the elite. In academia, it opened up space for a new intellectual petty bourgeoisie whose class aspirations became expressed in postmodern narratives and identitarian politics, while in the larger society it found resonance among aspiring middle-class and professional/managerial elements that sprung from the mass movements. If radical ideas only become a historical force when they are channeled into political organization, into a vision of a new world and a revolutionary project to bring it about, the same is true for all ideas, revolutionary or otherwise; they become a material forces when they influence mass consciousness and action. To Marx’s observation that “theory itself becomes a material force when it has seized the masses,” political scientist Adolph Reed has added: “Ideology is the mechanism that harmonizes the principles that you want to believe with what advances your material interests.”³⁷

As post-modern narratives became hegemonic in the academy and in the broader society they shaped the common sense understanding of racial, gender, and other forms of oppression. Identitarian politics should not be confused with struggles against particular forms of exploitation and oppression that different groups face. Ethnic, racial, gender, and sexual oppression are not tangential but constitutive of capitalism. There can be no general emancipation without liberation from these forms of oppression. But the inverse is just as critical: all the particular forms of oppression are grounded in the larger social order of global capitalism that perpetually regenerates these oppressions. The anti-Marxism of identitarianism is alienating a generation of young people from embracing a desperately needed Marxist critique of capitalism at the moment of its globalization. In these narratives, Marxism became a “Eurocentric/Western-centric ideology.” The claim that the European origin of Marxism makes it “Eurocentric” and inherently limited involved a rejection of any universalism. In its place was a universe of particulars and the celebration of “differences” and fragmentation (into essentialized identities and single-issue social movements), so that there is no underlying principle of human social existence, no collective subject capable of social transformation, indeed no emancipatory project that could unite a majority of humanity. All forms of “resistance” to oppression were celebrated but exploitation was banished from the popular vocabulary. Any understanding of exploitation requires the tools of Marxist political economy, yet this was maligned a “class reductionism,” a “metanarrative” of (white, male) Westerners, and “economism,” such that any underlying structural causes of oppression could not be identified.

Notwithstanding its often radical-sounding language, as the identitarian approach eschews class and the critique of capitalism at the level of theory and analysis, it advances the class politics of the petty bourgeoisie. The most such a politics can aspire to is symbolic vindication, diversity (often meaning diversity in the ruling bloc), nondiscrimination in the dominant social institutions, and equitable inclusion and representation within global capitalism. It is no wonder that alongside the economic restructuring of capitalist globalization since the 1980s, the emerging TCC responded at the cultural level to the popular and revolutionary uprisings of the 1960s and the 1970s by embracing as its own “diversity” and “multiculturalism” as a strategy to channel the struggle for social justice and anti-capitalist transformation into nonthreatening demands for inclusion, if not outright co-optation, and in this way to reconstruct capitalist hegemony. The strategy served to derail ongoing revolts from below. The ruling classes managed to accommodate what contentious politics flowed from the identitarian paradigm. The strategy aimed to neuter through co-optation the demands for social justice and anti-capitalist transformation. Dominant groups would now welcome representation in the institutions of capital and power but would suppress, violently if necessary, struggles to overthrow capital or simply curb its prerogatives. Some among the historically oppressed groups gained representation in the institutions of power; others aspired to do so.

To return to the matter of anti-racism in the United States, there was a felicitous meeting of aspiring professional/managerial and middle-class elements from below with the ruling groups from above around the new “racial justice” agenda. The dominant groups now funded and championed the conception of racism put forth by a new “anti-racist” politics as bias, personal aggression, racial disproportionality in the distribution of rewards and penalties, and a lack of inclusion and representation.³⁸ Opposition to racism as personal injury and “micro-aggressions” eclipsed any critique of the macro-aggressions of capitalism and the link between class exploitation and racial, gender, and other forms of oppression. As one report put it:

The contemporary period, marked by rising racism and widespread political disarray, has also seen the emergence of jargon and terms that place individual racism and antiracist strategies at the center, developed and promoted by a cottage industry of professional anti-racist outfits, media platforms, and academics. Whether “racial awareness” or “unconscious bias,” “white privilege,” “white fragility” or “micro-aggressions,” each concept is premised on an individualized form of racism that is cut off from any structure of power, framing it as a nebulous, free-floating form of oppression that can be diagnosed and treated by individualist interventions.³⁹

The 2020 anti-racist uprising discussed above evidenced the result of such a politics and consciousness. Devoid of any critique of capitalist exploitation that linked race to class, it was swiftly co-opted from above and from within. The protesters focused on disproportionate police violence against racially oppressed communities and called for defunding police departments. Yet racist police are an extension of the capitalist state. They exist to defend property from the propertyless, to enforce the power of capital and the rich over the poor and dispossessed majority who, in the United States, come disproportionately from racially oppressed communities. In the big picture, the solution was (is) not to reform law enforcement, since law enforcement means enforcing a legal system that under capitalism is intended to protect the rich and the powerful from the poor and the dispossessed through criminalization of the latter or simply through enforcement of property rights. From 2015 to 2019, a total of 4,885 people in the United States were shot and killed by the police, 1,295 of those black, compared to 2,471 white.⁴⁰ The rate that blacks were killed by police is more than twice the rate for whites, since blacks constitute 13 percent of the US population but account for over 26 percent of those killed, and this disproportionality became the focus of the “racial justice” agenda with regard to police violence. Yet the greatest danger to black lives comes from the economic violence of capitalism, which takes hundreds of thousands of black (and other) victims of unemployment, occupational hazards, malnutrition, substandard housing, homelessness, lack of access to health care, exposure to toxic wastes, and so on. More than five thousand workers die on the job every year as a result of work injuries, the majority of them preventable, and another fifty to sixty thousand die each year due to occupational diseases (worldwide nearly three million workers die on the job every year).⁴¹ Predictably, blacks are overrepresented in this group,⁴² not because of racial discrimination per se, but because they are overrepresented in the most hazardous (and least remunerated) occupations.

Beyond the demand for police reform, young people in the streets came to center their protagonism on little else than eradicating the symbols of racism and oppression. They upturned statues and monuments of historical figures and cultural icons associated with the history of racism. Upturning monuments is an act of symbolic or discursive justice that by itself is not a fundamental threat to the system, so long as these acts can be isolated from demands for more fundamental social and economic transformation, which is why they were quickly embraced by many political and corporate elites. Changing the names of military bases that are often named after racist historical figures, as the protesters demanded, may have been satisfying in terms of symbolic justice, yet it did not change the fact that these bases housed military forces that exist to intervene around the world on behalf of capital and empire, and that blacks are overrepresented in the military, because they are overrepresented in the ranks of surplus labor and enjoy the least opportunity for satisfying employment in the civilian economy.

The powers that be embraced the language of struggle against “systemic racism” as the phrase became emptied of any real meaning. Political and economic elites touted their commitment to “racial justice.” CEOs of major global banks and corporations whose policies perpetuate racial inequality “took the knee” and declared their “solidarity” with aggrieved communities, as did Democratic and Republican Party stalwarts, as they attempted to commodify and convert “black lives matter” into a corporate logo.⁴³ “Racial justice” became big business and a purse string for the aspiring black middle class and elite toward whom flowed millions of dollars from corporations and the foundations they fund. In the wake of the mass uprising state, corporate, and foundation donors and rich individuals committed a mind-boggling $10 billion to BLM-related causes, according to the Economist.⁴⁴ The campaign from above and from within aimed to marginalize the radical anti-capitalist impulse and to promote black capitalism and professional development, to channel the uprising away from working-class struggle and into lobbying, electoral demands, professional development, and inclusion.⁴⁵

The theme of co-optation by capitalist philanthropy was first raised by Marx and Engels, who wrote in The Communist Manifesto that a sector of the capitalist class is “desirous of redressing social grievances in order to secure the continued existence” of its rule.⁴⁶ In his study Under the Mask of Philanthropy, Michael Barker shows how the politics of capitalist philanthropy is aimed at deflecting challenges to the system:

Reform or revolution? This is a question that is central to effective progressive social change. From many people’s point of view there is little doubt that capitalism must be eradicated, so the only question that remains is “how might this revolutionary process proceed? Revolutionary action does not negate reform, as radical reforms are a critical part of any socialist praxis of change. On the other hand, liberal reforms without revolutionary direction are unlikely to build the momentum that will be necessary to oust capitalism. Thus understanding how leading activists and intellectuals who were formerly committed to revolutionary social change give up on such principles and dedicate their lives to moderating capitalist oppression is critical for social and political movements seeking to resist such challenges.⁴⁷

In the larger analysis, the ruling groups attempt what the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci referred to as passive revolution: efforts by dominant groups to bring about mild change from above in order to defuse mobilization from below for more far-reaching transformation. Integral to passive revolution is the co-optation of leadership from below and the integration of that leadership into the dominant project. Gramsci also referred to this process as transformismo, in which rule by the dominant groups is dependent on the ongoing absorption of intellectual, political, and cultural leaders of the subordinate majority into the ruling bloc and the resulting decapitation and disorganization of resistance from below.⁴⁸ “The more a dominant class is able to absorb the best people from the dominated classes,” Marx noted, “the more solid and dangerous is its rule.” Passive revolution comes into play at times when the system faces an impending crisis of hegemony. Whenever the hegemony of the bourgeoisie begins to disintegrate and a period of organic crisis develops, the process of reform or reorganization that is needed to reestablish its hegemony will to some extent have these characteristics of passive revolution.

If identitarianism leads to a dead end, so too does its close cousin nationalism, which obliterates class by establishing a unified identity for citizens of a particular country. In the core countries of world capitalism there has been a resurgent nationalism that is often racist, chauvinistic, and xenophobic and ends up serving far-right agendas. Elsewhere around the world, a revolutionary nationalism that was a central part of anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggles in the preceding two centuries has become a conservative force in the age of globalized capitalism. “There is no compelling evidence that nationalists are the natural allies of the working class, regardless of the objective class position of any nationalist,” notes international relations scholar Hilbourne Watson. “Nationalists do not see a problem with local capitalists exploiting workers; however, they seldom recoil from decrying exploitation by foreign capitalists, in effect making the nationality of capital, rather than the exploitation of man by man, the real problem. The fact that capital accumulation is a global process makes the nationality of capital secondary.”⁴⁹ Watson notes that liberation from the exclusionary loyalties of collective identities “is precisely what makes progress possible in history.” What is possible is “an open-ended political project as part of a continuous process from which we are inclined to recoil because it beckons us to part with certain illusions that make us fearful of ‘falling off the cultural edge of one’s world and its self-understanding.’”⁵⁰

THE THREAT OF FASCISM AND A GLOBAL POLICE STATE

The fourth quandary that mass struggles from below face is the threat presented by far-right strongmen and authoritarian and fascist projects that, animated by the ongoing crisis, compete for support among the popular and working classes. There has been a rapid political polarization in global society since 2008 between this insurgent far right and an insurgent left. Both far-right and left forces appeal to the same social base of those millions who have been devastated by neoliberal austerity, impoverishment, precarious employment, and relegation to the ranks of surplus labor, all greatly aggravated by the pandemic. Yet the far right has often been more effective in recent years than the left in mobilizing disaffected populations and has made significant political and institutional inroads. There is a paradox here in need of explanation. Many of the strongmen and fascist-leaning leaders, such as Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte or Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, enjoyed high approval ratings at the same time as they pushed forward policies that hurt workers and the poor and unleashed repression against opposition forces. Charismatic fascists such as former US president Donald Trump and Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro garnered genuine mass support. Duterte’s approval rating soared to some 90 percent in late 2020, even as the economy contracted sharply, while Modi enjoyed an overall 55 percent approval rating in the midst of national crisis and mass strikes involving hundreds of millions of people.⁵¹ Trump’s approval ratings never surpassed the 50 percent mark, and although he failed in his 2020 bid for reelection, he nonetheless won 74 million votes—this despite his government’s all-out attack on workers and utter disregard for the poor.

This paradox reflects, in part, the polarization between left and right that I observed. But there is a larger story that requires, first, an excursion into the nature of this authoritarianism and fascism. Although we cannot collapse authoritarianism and fascism into one despite their affinity, both must be explained by the crisis of global capitalism. I have been writing about the rise of twenty-first-century fascist projects around the world since 2008.⁵² In the broader picture, fascism is a particular response to capitalist crisis, such as that of the 1930s and the neofascist movements that took off in the aftermath of the 2008 financial meltdown. Trumpism in the United States, BREXIT in the United Kingdom, the increasing influence of neofascist and authoritarian parties and movements throughout Europe (including Poland, Germany, Hungary, Austria, Italy, Holland, Spain, Great Britain, Denmark, France, Belgium, and Greece)⁵³ and around the world, such as in Israel, Turkey, Colombia, the Philippines, Brazil, and India, as distinct as they may be from one another, have in common that they represent far-right responses to the crisis of global capitalist hegemony. The social bases of fascism and strongman rule are made up of masses who face destabilization and insecurity in the face of capitalist globalization, and who have been mobilized from above by the manipulation of fear and the promise to alleviate rising social anxiety and restore stability. The key to the neofascist appeal is this promise to avert or reverse downward mobility and social decay and to restore some sense of stability and security. As popular discontent has spread, far-right and neofascist mobilizations have played a critical role in the effort by dominant groups to channel mass discontent away from a critique of global capitalism and toward support for the TCC agenda dressed in populist rhetoric.

Fascism seeks to rescue capitalism from its organic crisis, that is, to violently restore capital accumulation, establish new forms of state legitimacy, and suppress threats from below unencumbered by democratic constraints. As with its twentieth-century predecessor, the project hinges on the psychosocial mechanism of displacing mass fear and anxiety at a time of acute capitalist crisis toward scapegoated communities, whether Jews in Nazi Germany, immigrants in the United States, Muslims and lower castes in India, Palestinians in Palestine/Israel, Rohingya in Burma/Myanmar, or the darker-skinned and disproportionately impoverished population in Brazil, and also onto an external enemy, such as communism during the Cold War or China and Russia currently. The project involves a fusion of repressive and reactionary state power with a fascist mobilization in civil society. Twenty-first-century fascism, like its twentieth-century predecessor, is a violently toxic mix of reactionary nationalism and racism. Its discursive and ideological repertoire involves extreme nationalism and the promise of national regeneration, xenophobia, and doctrines of racial/cultural supremacy, alongside a violent racist or ethnic mobilization, martial masculinity, millennialism, militarization of civic and political life, and the normalization, even glorification, of war, social violence, and domination.

The appeal to fascism offers workers from the dominant racial, ethnic, or national group an imaginary solution to real contradictions: recognition of the existence of suffering and oppression, even though its solution is a false one. Yet in this age of globalized capitalism there is little possibility of providing such benefits, so that the “wages of fascism” appear to be entirely psychological. The ideology of twenty-first-century fascism rests on irrationality—a promise to deliver security and restore stability that is emotive, not rational. It is a project that does not and need not distinguish between the truth and the lie, which helps us understand the explosion of “fake news” and wild far-right conspiracy theories. More generally, the destabilization of those sectors of the working class that had previously enjoyed some stability but have since been abandoned by capital and the precarious condition that a majority of workers now share, especially young workers, as I discussed in the previous chapter, is a powerful structural shift brought about capitalist globalization and crisis that exercises a newfound centripetal pull on working-class unity that cuts across racial, ethnic, and national divisions. However, the centrifugal forces militating against that unity are numerous, including racist and national chauvinist manipulation from above of fear and insecurity, the relative absence of a socialist left that could provide an alternative appeal, and liberal identitarian politics that eschews the language of class and the critique of capital.

The United States provides a case study in these contradictory dynamics. The conditions of unemployment, deteriorating living standards, and social decay generate anger and despair and have helped fuel fascist politics. It is telling that in the areas abandoned by capitalist investment, especially the agricultural breadbaskets and the deindustrialized Rust Belt of the Midwest, many counties switched from Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016, as the Democrats relentlessly pursued neoliberal policies at home and wars abroad, with the result that despair and immiseration spread and social polarization escalated. It is similarly unsurprising that the presidential campaigns of both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, the one with a left interpretation of the crisis and the other with a far-right populist and openly racist interpretation, won broad support among disaffected workers who later came to embrace Trumpism.⁵⁴ In October 2020, the government broke up a conspiracy by the far-right militia organization the Wolverine Watchmen to kidnap and possibly kill the governor of the US state of Michigan. It is revealing that the leader of the plot, Adam Fox, a poor white man, lost his job during the pandemic yet was not eligible for unemployment benefits and received no public assistance, even as trillions went to bail out the banks and corporations. Thrust into destitution, he lost his dwelling and was forced to move into the basement of a friend’s house.⁵⁵ The majority of those who stormed the US Capitol building three months later faced serious financial troubles, including bankruptcies, notices of eviction or foreclosure, precarious employment, and mounting debt.⁵⁶

Both of the parties that rotate in and out of power in the United States offer nothing more than more hardship and abandonment to these sectors of the working class. It is these conditions of despair and contempt for the political and economic elite that make the mass of working-class whites in the United States so susceptible to the fascist appeal. The appeal expresses in distorted form this despair and contempt, and although it offers false promises and illusory solutions it touches a raw nerve among these sectors by acknowledging and validating their fear and despair. Yet neither does the identitarian “left” offer anything to these sectors. To the contrary, they are written off and maligned as racists who are simply lashing out to defend their “white privilege” or, in the now infamous words of the 2016 Democratic candidate for the presidency Hillary Clinton, as “baskets of deplorables.” The anomie and nihilism of capitalist culture adds a rich fertilizer to the mix. In the larger picture, the global social order generates all kinds of pathologies, but the identitarian “left” also ends up providing oxygen to the far-right and fascist appeal. It encourages these sectors to identify as whites with their own white identity interests rather than as workers, and, thus, ends up stoking the white nationalism that has swept through the ranks of these sectors and made them more susceptible to the appeal. The problem here, as a matter of course, 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, with everyone belonging to one or another identity group, and with all members of the group assumed to share the same interests. Yet the only chance that popular resistance forces have to beat back the threat of fascism is to put forward an alternative interpretation of the crisis based on working-class politics that can win over the would-be social base of fascism.

Fascist projects can only forge a social base at the expense of the repressive super-exploitation and/or exclusion of sectors of the population. Ideologically, these sectors are turned into “Others,” so that social anxiety is externally sublimated. “The loss of privileges or their threatened loss will not necessarily provide a spontaneous abandonment of opportunism within the upper strata of the working class,” wrote Lenin, in discussing what he termed the labor aristocracy, “On the contrary, it can fuel a powerful reaction within these sectors to ‘blame’ the workers in the lower strata or in other counties for the loss or threatened loss of these privileges.”⁵⁷ But this “powerful reaction” is not automatic. Key to it is a particular interpretation of the crisis put forth by organic intellectuals of both liberalism and neofascism that exteriorizes the internal contradictions of capitalism in crisis and by fascist organizers that exteriorize these contradictions onto subordinate racial, ethnic, or national groups. While some right-wing populist and neofascist movements in Europe do promise a restoration of the social contract between the state and the working class, this promise is founded on a racist xenophobia and nationalism that excludes large swaths of the population cast out as “Others.” Moreover, it is difficult to see how much of the TCC would support a project that proposes a withdrawal from globalization processes and a material rather than a mere psychological wage of fascism, as these would undermine the prerogatives of transnational accumulation.

Authoritarian state power and a fascist mobilization in civil society will not, in my view, be enough to bring about full-blown fascist systems. This is because fascism involves a triangulation of reactionary and repressive power in the state (including the state’s armed bodies) and a fascist mobilization in civil society with predatory transnational capital. For the moment, it appears that the major portion of the TCC is not prepared to support fascist projects. In the United States, for instance, the TCC was delighted with Trump’s economic policies—deregulation, privatizations, anti-worker measures, regressive tax reform, and so on, but the corporate elite and their leading business association came out firmly against Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 elections in what amounted to an attempted coup d’état. In Europe, much of the TCC campaigned against BREXIT and has pushed back against far-right and neofascist parties that call for rolling back globalization. I have long argued that, far from being monolithic, any real internal unity of the global ruling class is impossible. The TCC is wracked by fierce competition, conflicting pressures, and differences over the tactics and strategy of maintaining class domination and addressing the crises and contradictions of global capitalism. But it is united in its shared interest in an open global economy and in suppressing challenges to its rule from below. Mounting crises of state legitimacy have heightened the splits and infighting within the ruling groups (in part, the strongmen and fascists have won popularity because their populist discourse has resonated with masses of people in the face of the legitimacy crisis). Should the global revolt reach a point where it comes to threaten the very rule of capital, the TCC may be more willing to turn to fascism to maintain control.

Yet, short of fascism, the TCC has already turned to extending the global police. Savage global inequalities are politically explosive, and to the extent that the system is simply unable to reverse them it turns to ever more violent forms of containment to manage immiserated populations as balance between consent and coercion shifts toward the latter. As I discussed at length in my earlier study The Global Police State, well before the pandemic, the agents of the emerging global police state had been developing new modalities of state-organized violence, warfare, and social control made possible by applications of digitalization and fourth industrial revolution technologies examined in chapter two. These include artificial intelligence–powered autonomous weaponry, such as unmanned attack and transportation vehicles, robot soldiers, a new generation of superdrones and flybots, hypersonic weapons, microwave guns that immobilize, cyber-attack and information warfare, biometric identification, state data mining, and global electronic surveillance that allows for eavesdropping on virtually all communications and the tracking and control of every movement. State data mining and global electronic surveillance are now expanding the theater of conflict from active war zones to militarized cities and rural localities around the world, as data and surveillance become totalizing. These combine with a restructuring of space that allows for new forms of spatial containment and control of the marginalized. In fact, by 2018, there were no less than sixty-three physical walls built by states worldwide to keep in or lock out unwanted or rebellious populations.⁵⁸

We saw in chapter one that the pandemic allowed ruling groups to ratchet up the global police state, indeed, how they utilized the health emergency to achieve a greater level of police state normalization. The global police state has been centrally aimed at the coercive exclusion of surplus humanity, who are disproportionately drawn from the racially oppressed, the ethnically persecuted, religious and national minorities, migrants and refugees, and other vulnerable communities. But its ultimate target is the global working class in its entirety, especially as the new round of digitally driven restructuring throws ever more people into the ranks of the surplus labor and the precariat. The result is permanent low-intensity warfare meant to disarticulate popular insurgency from below. The TCC and its state agents are acutely aware that humanity is now entering a state of de facto civil war. “The convergence of more information and more people with fewer state resources will constrain governments’ efforts to address rampant poverty, violence, and pollution, and create a breeding ground for dissatisfaction among increasingly aware, yet still disempowered populations,” stated a 2019 US Army report. “A global populace that is increasingly attuned and sensitive to disparities in economic resources and the diffusion of social influence will lead to further challenges to the status quo and lead to system rattling events.” These “system rattling events,” include “the Arab Spring, the Color Revolutions of Eastern Europe, the Greek monetary crisis, BREXIT, and the mass migrations to Europe from the Middle East and North Africa.”⁵⁹ A year earlier, a Pentagon war game envisioned a “Zbellion” that would take place in the year 2025.” According to the imagined scenario, a cadre of disaffected “Zoomers” launch a protest movement in the United States that begins in “parks, rallies, protests, and coffee shops” and also involves a “global cyber campaign to expose injustice and corruption and to support causes it deem[s] beneficial,” as the rebellion spreads to Europe and cities throughout the world.⁶⁰