Introduction
1 See Alex Ferrer, Terra Graziani, and Jacob Woocher, “Nearly 1,000 Homeless People Died in LA in 2020 as 93,000 Homes Sit Vacant,” Truthout, October, 23 2020, accessed October 14, 2021, https://truthout.org/articles/nearly-1000-homeless-people-died-in-lain-2020-as-93000-homes-sit-vacant.
2 See Elizabeth Chou, “Families Occupying Caltrans-Owned Homes in El Sereno Forcibly Removed by CHP,” Los Angeles Daily News, November 27, 2020, accessed on October, 14 2021, https://tinyurl.com/36zmsrum.
3 William I. Robinson, A Theory of Global Capitalism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); William I. Robinson, Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); William I. Robinson, The Global Police State (London: Pluto, 2020). I also published two lengthy case studies that applied my theory of global capitalism: William I. Robinson, Transnational Conflicts: Central America, Social Change, and Globalization (London: Verso, 2003); William I. Robinson, Latin America and Global Capitalism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
Chapter 1
1 Bank of America, “Covid-19 Investment Implications Series: The World after Covid Primer,” May 5, 2020, accessed on 8 November 2020, unavailable October 14, 2021, https://www.bofaml.com/content/dam/boamlimages/documents/articles/ID20_0467/the_world_after_covid.pdf.
2 Jack Rasmus, “Does Worldwide Economic Depression Lie Ahead?” in Cynthia McKinney, ed., When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Implications (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2020).
3 World Bank, Global Economic Prospects (Washington, DC: World Bank, June 2020), xiii. The Bank estimated a year-end drop of 7 percent in the United States, 6.1 percent in the euro area, 9.1 percent in Japan, 7.2 percent for Latin America and the Caribbean, 4.2 percent for the Middle East and North Africa, 2.7 percent for South Asia, and 2.8 for sub-Saharan Africa. Moreover, growth in China nearly ground to a halt (the Bank estimated 1 percent growth), meaning that unlike 2008, growth in China (and other “emerging markets”) would not establish a floor for the decline in the rest of the world (table 1.1, p. 4). The US economy shrank by an annual rate of 33 percent in the second quarter of 2020, the single worst GDP slump in US history; see Carmen Reinicke, “US GDP Plunged by a Record 33% Annual Rate in the 2nd Quarter as Coronavirus Lockdowns Raged,” Business Insider, July 30, 2020, accessed on October 14, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/yjw8tyr7. The data Reinicke cites is from the US Commerce Department.
4 Cited in Joseph Choonara, Unravelling Capitalism (London: Bookmarks Publications, 2009), 66.
5 Karl Marx, “Wage Labor and Capital,” in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978), 214.
6 Joseph Choona, Unravelling Capitalism (London: Bookmarks, 2009), 120; citing data from the Financial Times.
7 See, inter alia, Ronald W. Cox, “The Crisis of Capitalism through Global Value Chains,” Class, Race and Corporate Power, 7, no. 1 (2019); Eric Toussaint, “No, the Coronavirus Is Not Responsible for the Fall in Stock Prices,” Monthly Review, March 4, 2020, accessed October 14, 2021, https://mronline.org/2020/03/04/no-the-coronavirus-is-not-responsible-for-the-fall-of-stock-prices.
8 “The Problem with Profits,” Economist, May 26, 2016, accessed October 14, 2021, https://www.economist.com/leaders/2016/03/26/the-problem-with-profits.
9 “Hanging Together, Economist, May 16, 2020, 60, accessed October 14, 2021, https://www.economist.com/news/2013/11/18/hanging-together.
10 See William I. Robinson: Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, U.S. Intervention, and Hegemony (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); William I. Robinson, Latin America and Global Capitalism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
11 For my latest summary iteration on the TCC, see William I. Robinson, The Global Police State (London: Pluto Press, 2020). For a concise summary of the development of this concept and a review of the scholarship, see William I. Robinson and Jeb Sprague, “The Transnational Capitalist Class,” in Mark Juergensmeyer, Saskia Sassen, and Manfred Steger, eds., Oxford Handbook of Global Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
12 On the TCC and the new global economy, see in particular William I. Robinson, A Theory of Global Capitalism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); William I. Robinson, Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
13 Singaporean academic Kishore Mahbubani noted in 2010, a decade before the outbreak: “The seven billion people who inhabit the planet earth no longer live in more than one hundred separate boats [countries]. Instead, they all live in 193 separate cabins on the same boat. If we are stuck together on a virus-infected ship, does it make sense to clean and scrub only our personal cabins while ignoring the corridors and air wells outside through which the virus travels? The answer is clearly no”; cited in Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret, Covid-19: The Great Reset (Geneva: Forum Publishing, 2020), 22.
14 “Wealth: Having It All and Wanting More,” Oxfam: Policy and Practice, January 19, 2015, accessed October 14, 2021, http://policy-practice.oxfam.org.uk/publications/wealth-having-it-all-and-wanting-more-338125.
15 “To the possessor of money capital the process of production appears merely as an unavoidable intermediate link, as a necessary evil for the sake of money-making. All nations with a capitalist mode of production are therefore seized periodically by a feverish attempt to make money without the intervention of the process of production”; Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 2 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971 [1893]), 58.
16 General Accounting Office (GAO), “Federal Reserve System: Opportunities Exist to Strengthen Policies and Processes for Managing Emergency Assistance,” July 2011, accessed October 18, 2021, https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-11-696.
17 On fictitious capital and more generally on the financialization, see, inter alia, Cedric Durand, Fictitious Capital: How Finance Is Appropriating Our Future (London: Verso, 2017).
18 J.B. Maverick, “How Big Is the Derivatives Market,” Investopedia, January 22, 2018, accessed October 14, 2021, https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/052715/how-big-derivativesmarket.asp. On total global debt, see Andrea Shalal, “Global Debt Reaches Record High of 331% of GDP in First Quarter: IIF,” Reuters, July 16, 2020, accessed October 14, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/5a2y3xp6.
19 Shalal, “Global Debt Reaches Record High of 331% of GDP in First Quarter: IIF.”
20 Paul Wiseman, Bernard Condon, and Cathy Bussewitz, AP News, “Corporate Debt Loads a Rising Risk as Virus Hits Economy,” March 11, 2020, accessed October 14, 2021, https://apnews.com/7cd0108d79c6b4f1ee2e6ec5fc3a2275.
21 See William I. Robinson, “Global Capitalist Crisis and Trump’s War Drive,” Truthout, April 19, 2017, accessed October 14, 2021, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/40266-global-capitalist-crisisand-trump-s-war-drive; “Global Homeland Security and Public Safety Market Report 2019—Market Is Expected to Grow from $431 Billion in 2018 to $606 Billion in 2024,” CISION PR Newswire, February 6, 2019, accessed October 14, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/ejucmprn.
22 Aude Fleurant, Alexandra Kuimova, Nan Tian, Pieter D. Wezeman, and Seimon T. Wezeman, “The SIPRI Top 100 Arms-Producing and Military Services Companies, 2016,” Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), December 2017, accessed October 14, 2021, https://www.sipri.org/sites/default/files/2017-12/fs_arms_industry_2016.pdf.
23 William Langewiesche, “The Chaos Company,” Vanity Fair, April 2004, accessed October 14, 2021, https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/2014/4/the-chaos-company.
24 Niall McCarthy, “Private Security Outnumbers the Police in Most Countries Worldwide,” Forbes, August 31, 2017, accessed October 14, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/4ru5ucb7.
25 For extended discussion, see various chapters in Cynthia McKinney, ed., When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Implications (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2020). The US government does not deny that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and several other agencies conduct bioweapon research. In 2017, the US government lifted its ban on gain of function research; also see Kees van der Pijl, “Health Emergency or Seizure of Power? The political Economy of COVID19,” New Cold War, April 27, 2020, accessed October 14, 2021, https://www.newcoldwar.org/health-emergency-or-seizure-of-powerthe-political-economy-of-covid-19, and the numerous sources he references. It should be noted that the US bioweapons program far outstrips those of other countries; see van der Pijl for the figure of Pentagon labs in twenty-five countries.
26 “French Nobel Prize Winner: ‘Covid-19 Made in Lab,’” Connexion, March 3, 2021, accessed October 14, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/u6eb68.
27 Cited in Laurie Garrett, “Biology’s Brave New World: The Promise and Perils of the Synbio Revolution,” in The Fourth Industrial Revolution: A Davos Reader (Washington, DC: Council on Foreign Affairs, 2016), 68.
28 Van der Pijl, “Health Emergency or Seizure of Power?”
29 See Daniel C. Hellinger, Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theory in the Age of Trump (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
30 More recently there are also absurd conspiracy theories that spread on social media in which people simply hear wild claims and believe them in the context of what are often right-wing agendas, in what Rosenblum and Muirhead refer to as “the new conspiracism”; Nancy L. Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead, A Lot of People are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020). On a related note, Timothy Erik Strom has pointed out that some conspiratorial thinking with regard to vaccines and medicine has been grounded in legitimate critique: “Distrust in scientific medicine increased across the 1970s. … Much of this drew on the very real abuse of research subjects, the mass marketing of dubious drugs, an increasing awareness of ecological degradation and toxification, the medicalization of childbirth, and the corruption of GPs and university researchers by corporate powers”; Timothy Erik Ström, “Antennas Aflame: Cybernetics, Conspiracies, and 5G,” Arena Quarterly no. 4, December 2020, accessed October 14, 2021, https://arena.org.au/antennas-aflame-cybernetics-conspiracies-and-5g.
31 See Steven Lee Myers, “China Spins Tale That the U.S. Army Started the Coronavirus,” New York Times, March 13, 2020, accessed October 14, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/world/asia/coronavirus-china-conspiracy-theory.html.
32 Jeff J. Brown, “Everything You Wanted to Know About Coronaviruses,” in McKinney, When China Sneezes; the figures for the vaccine market are on p. 28.
33 The two companies that stand out are Inovio Pharmaceuticals and Moderna; see inter alia, Paul Sonne, “How a Secretive Pentagon Agency Seeded the Ground for a Rapid Coronavirus Cure,” Washington Post, July 30, 2020, accessed October 14, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/ufwka9mz; Witnew Webb, “Bats, Gene Editing and Bioweapons: Recent DARPA Experiments Raise Concerns amid Coronavirus Outbreak,” in McKinney, When China Sneezes.
34 On the Gates Foundation agenda, see Vandanna Shiva, et al., Gates to a Global Empire: Over Seed, Food, Health, Knowledge … and the Earth (Florence, IT: Navdanya International, 2020), accessed October 14, 2021, https://navdanyainternational.org/publications/gates-to-a-global-empire; also see Mark Curtis, Gated Development: Is the Gates Foundation Always a Force for Good? (London: Global Justice Now, 2016), accessed October 14, 2021, https://www.globaljustice.org.uk/sites/default/files/gated_development_final_version.pdf; Jan Urhahn, “Bill Gate’s Foundation Is Leading a Green Counterrevolution in Africa,” Jacobin, December 27, 2020, accessed October 14, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/z9f934z5.
35 Cited in Strom, “Antennas Aflame,” 6.
36 See, inter alia, Jenni Spinner, “Gates Foundation Enlists Novartis, GSK, Others in COVID-19 Fight,” Outsourcing-Pharma, March 27, 2020, accessed October 14, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/svdswe8; KP Narayana Kumar, “Controversial Vaccine Studies: Why Is Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Under Fire from Critics in India?” Economic Times, August 31, 2014, accessed October 14, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/3z3p845a.
37 Van der Pijl, “Health Emergency or Seizure of Power?”
38 Helen Buyniski, “The Post-COVID-19 World: A Permanent Dystopia?” in McKinney, When China Sneezes, 291.
39 Ibid.
40 On public sourcing versus corporate control of vaccines, see Alexander Zaitchik, “How to Break a Big Pharma Monopoly on a COVID-19 Vaccine,” New Republic, August 24, 2020, accessed October 14, 2021, https://newrepublic.com/article/159019/breakbig-pharma-monopoly-covid-19-vaccine; Amnesty International, “Wealthy Countries Already Hoarding Breakthrough Vaccines” (press release), November 9, 2020, accessed October 14, 2021, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/11/wealthy-countries-alreadyhoarding-breakthrough-vaccines. A group of international social justice organizations that included Amnesty International, Oxfam, Global Justice Now, and Frontline AIDS formed the People’s Vaccine Alliance, which charged that a handful of rich countries were hoarding vaccines and undermining access by poor countries; see Amnesty International, “Campaigners Warn That 9 out of 10 People in Poor Countries Are Set to Miss Out on COVID-19 Vaccine Next Year,” December 9, 2020, accessed October 14, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/tenvyf4.
41 See, e.g., van der Pijl, “Health Emergency or Seizure of Power?”; Piers Robinson, “The Propaganda of Terror and Fear: A Lesson from Recent History,” Guardian, March 28, 2020, accessed October 14, 2021, https://off-guardian.org/2020/03/28/the-propaganda-of-terror-and-fear-a-lesson-from-recent-history.
42 Van der Pijl, “Health Emergency or Seizure of Power?”
43 Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development (Albany, NY: Rockefeller Institute/Global Business Network, 2010), 19, accessed on October 14, 2021, http://www.nommeraadio.ee/meedia/pdf/RRS/Rockefeller%20Foundation.pdf.
44 See Event 201, accessed October 14, 2021, https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/about; also see Event 201, “Public-Private Cooperation for Pandemic Preparedness and Response,” accessed October 14, 2021, https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/recommendations.html.
45 Robinson, “The Propaganda of Terror and Fear.”
46 In the United States, the mass media, the mainstream, and the left fell into a reification with regard to documented racial disparities in coronavirus deaths that would be comical if it weren’t a topic of such tragedy. The racial disparities in the impact of coronavirus, of course, are accounted for by the racial disparities in access to adequate health care, diet, and housing, as well as hazardous employment and so on. In other words, “race” was a proxy for these conditions. Studies showed that once class was factored in (itself measured by proxy as an income category), it was socioeconomic conditions that determined the likelihood of death; see, inter alia, the excellent article by Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed, Jr., “The Trouble with Disparity,” Nonsite.org, September 10, 2020, accessed October 14, 2021, https://nonsite.org/the-trouble-with-disparity. Race, as we know, is a fictitious category of nineteenth-century pseudoscience that cannot “cause” anything whatsoever. But this did not stop the popularization of a narrative in which some genetic or biological factor attributed to “race” was purported to explain the disproportionate impact of the disease. In one broadcast, CNN’s chief medical correspondent would declare in all seriousness that there are “biological factors” associated with “being a person of color—Black, Latino Latinx or Native American” that cause the disparity; see Michaels and Reed, Jr., “The Trouble with Disparity,” 7.
47 FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO, The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World: Transforming Food Systems for Affordable Healthy Diets (Rome: FAO, 2020), xvi, 3, accessed October 14, 2021, https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/SOFI2020_EN_web.pdf.
48 “Half a Billion People Could be Pushed into Poverty by Coronavirus, Warns Oxfam” (press release), Oxfam International, April 9, 2020, accessed October 14, 2021, https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/half-billion-people-could-be-pushed-poverty-coronavirus-warns-oxfam.
49 “COVID-19 and Europe’s Environment: Impacts of a Global Pandemic,” European Environmental Agency, November 5, 2020, updated March 25, 2021, accessed October 14, 2021, https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/covid-19-and-europe-s.
50 In particular, see Rob Wallace, Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Influenza, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016).
51 Ibid.
52 “COVID-19 and Europe’s Environment.”
53 Schwab and Malleret, Covid-19: The Great Reset, 138.
54 “Remarks by President Trump, Vice President Pence, and Members of the Coronavirus Task Force in Press Conference,” White House Archive, March 13, 2020, accessed October 14, 2021 https://tinyurl.com/kp8utyzy.
55 “Covid-19 Investment Implications Series.”
56 See, e.g., “How Major Economies Are Trying to Mitigate the Coronavirus Shock,” Financial Times, March 30, 2020, accessed October 14, 2021, https://www.ft.com/content/26af5520-6793-11ea-800d-da70cff6e4d3.
57 “China Signals Ramped-Up Stimulus as Coronavirus Impact Widens,” Bloomberg, March 27, 2020, accessed October 14, 2021, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-27/china-pledges-to-raise-fiscal-deficit-ratio-sell-special-debt.
58 “Corporate Bail-Outs: Bottomless Pit, Inc.,” Economist, April 4, 2020, 8, accessed October 14, 2021, https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/04/04/bail-outs-are-inevitable-and-toxic.
59 The most comprehensive country-by-country summary was provided by the International Monetary Fund, “Policy Responses to COVID-19,” accessed October 14, 2021, https://www.imf.org/en/Topics/imf-and-covid19/Policy-Responses-to-COVID-19.
60 “2.7 Billion People Have Had No Social Protection to Cope with Covid-19 Economic Crisis” (press release), Oxfam International, December 15, 2020, accessed October 14, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/swrv7k54.
61 “Billionaires: Since Pandemic Began U.S. Billionaires’ Net Worths [sic] Jump $931 Billion, Or Nearly One-Third, as Working Families Suffer,” Americans for Tax Fairness/Institute for Policy Studies, October 20, 2020, accessed October 14, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/xkhhstce.
62 Rupert Neate, “Billionaires’ Wealth Rises to $10.2 Trillion amid Covid Crisis,” Guardian, October 6, 2020, accessed October 14, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/oct/07/covid-19-crisis-boosts-the-fortunes-of-worlds-billionaires.
63 For extended discussion of the increasingly gangster character of global capitalism, see Michael Woodiwiss, Gangster Capitalism: The United States and the Global Rise of Organized Crime (New York: Carol and Graf Publishers, 2005).
64 Tom Warren et al., “Billions in Dirty Money Rolled through Deutsche Bank,” BuzzFeed News, September 20, 2020, accessed October 14, 2021, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tomwarren/deutsche-bank-money-laundering-mirror-trades.
65 Fleecing Patients: Hospitals Charge Patients More Than Four Times the Cost of Care (Oakland: National Nurses United, 2020), accessed October 14, 2021, https://act.nationalnursesunited.org/page/-/files/graphics/1120_CostChargeRatios_Report_FINAL_PP.pdf.
66 “Almost 25 Million Jobs Could Be Lost Worldwide as a Result of COVID-19” (press release), International Labour Organization, March 18, 2020, accessed October 14, 2021, https://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/newsroom/news/WCMS_738742/lang–en/index.htm.
67 “ILO: As Job Losses Escalate, Nearly Half of Global Workforce at Risk of Losing Livelihoods” (press release), International Labour Organization, April 29, 2020, accessed October 14, 2021, https://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/newsroom/news/WCMS_743036/lang–en/index.htm.
68 “ILO: 34 Million Jobs Lost by the COVID-19 Crisis in Latin America and the Caribbean” (press release), International Labour Organization, October 1, 2020, accessed October 14, 2021, http://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/newsroom/news/WCMS_756771/lang--en/index.htm.
69 Alexander Weber, “Global Crisis Damage from Covid-19 Is Now About 255 Million Jobs,” Bloomberg, January 25, 2021, accessed October 14, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/k9df5hfv.
70 “The 90% Economy,” Economist, April 30, 2020, 7, accessed October 14, 2021, https://www.economist.com/weeklyedition/2020-05-02.
71 My most complete exposition of the concept of transnational state apparatuses is Robinson, Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity, chapter two, “Notes on Transnational State Apparatuses.”
72 Cited in Phil Hearse and Neil Faulkner, “The Coming Social Collapse,” Mutiny, April 2020, accessed October 15, 2021, https://www.timetomutiny.org/post/the-coming-social-collapse.
73 See, inter alia, “The IMF’s Response to COVID-19,” International Monetary Fund, October 28, 2020, updated April 8, 2021, accessed October 15, 2021, https://www.imf.org/en/About/FAQ/imf-response-to-covid-19#Q1; G20: Italia 2021, accessed October 15, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/3cz4358f.
74 “Covid-19 Investment Implications Series.”
75 “Global: 140 Countries Pass Counterterror Laws Since 9/11,” Human Rights Watch, June 29, 2012, accessed October 15, 2021, https://www.hrw.org/news/2012/06/29/global-140-countries-pass-counterterror-laws-9/11.
76 Natasha Singer and Choe Sang-Hun, “As Coronavirus Surveillance Escalates, Personal Privacy Plummets,” New York Times, April 17, 2020, accessed October 15, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/23/technology/coronavirus-surveillance-tracking-privacy.html.
77 See, inter alia, “No Vaccine for Cruelty,” Economist, October 17, 2020, 50–52.
78 Maria R. Sahuquillo, Silvia Blanco, and Macarena Vidal Liy, “Democracia en Cuarentena por Coronavirus,” El Pais (Spain), March 30, 2020, accessed October 15, 2021, https://elpais.com/internacional/2020-03-30/democracia-en-cuarentena-por-coronavirus.html.
79 “Armies Are Mobilizing against the Coronavirus,” Economist, March 23, 2020, accessed October 15, 2021, https://www.economist.com/international/2020/03/23/armies-are-mobilising-against-the-coronavirus.
80 Shaun Walker and Jennifer Rankin, “Hungary Passes Law That Will Let Orban Rule by Decree,” Guardian, March 30, 2020, accessed October 15, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/30/hungary-jail-for-coronavirus-misinformation-viktor-orban.
81 Paul Hockenos, “Coronavirus and the Dawn of Post-Democratic Europe,” Foreign Policy, March 31, 2020, accessed October 15, 2021, https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/03/31/hungary-orban-coronavirus-europe-democracy.
82 Selam Gebrekidan, “For Autocrats, Coronavirus Is a Chance to Grab Even More Power,” New York Times, March 30, 2020, accessed October 15, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/world/europe/coronavirus-governments-power.html.
83 Peter Wade, “DOJ Wants to Suspend Certain Constitutional Rights during Coronavirus Emergency,” Rolling Stone, March 21, 2020, accessed October 15, 2021, https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/doj-suspend-constitutional-rights-coronavirus-970935.
84 Natasha Singer and Choe Sang-Hun, “As Coronavirus Surveillance Escalates, Personal Privacy Plummets,” New York Times, April 17, 2020, accessed October 15, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/23/technology/coronavirus-surveillance-tracking-privacy.html.
85 Tal Axelrod, “Three States Push Criminal Penalties for Fossil Fuel Protests amid Coronavirus,” Hill, March 27, 2020, accessed October 15, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/unbpwukh.
86 “Tyson Food Managers Bet on Workers Getting Covid-19, Lawsuit Says,” BBC News, November 19, 2020, accessed October 15, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55009228.
87 Simon Chandler, “Coronavirus Could Infect Privacy and Civil Liberties Forever,” Forbes, March 23, 2020, accessed October 15, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/4ah7ka6z.
88 See Buyniski, “The Post-COVID-19 World,” 287.
89 Ibid.,” 287–88; also see Emil Protalinsky, “How Draganfly Brought a ‘Pandemic Drone’ to the U.S.,” Machine, April 30, 2020, accessed October 15, 2021, https://venturebeat.com/2020/04/30/draganfly-pandemic-drone-united-states-pilots.
90 Buyniski, “The Post-COVID-19 World,” 287–88.
91 Natasha Singer and Choe Sang-Hun, “As Coronavirus Surveillance Escalates, Personal Privacy Plummets,” New York Times, April 17, 2020, accessed October 15, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/23/technology/coronavirus-surveillance-tracking-privacy.html.
92 Kenneth Good, “Escalating State Repression and COVID-19: Their Impact on the Poor in Kenya,” Australian Outlook, August 10, 2020, accessed October 15, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/3m98r6ka; also see “https://tinyurl.com/3m98r6ka; also see “Kenya: Police Brutality during Curfew,” Human Rights Watch, April 22, 2020, accessed October 15, 2021, https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/04/22/kenya-police-brutality-during-curfew.
93 “No Vaccine for Cruelty,” 51.
94 Noa Landau and Netael Bandel, “To Stop the Coronavirus, Shin Bet Can Now Track Cellphones without Court Order,” Haaretz, March 15, 2020, accessed October 15, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/2haxnnk.
95 “Covid-19 Investment Implications Series.”
96 See, inter alia, Maurizio Guerrero, “Con la Excusa de Combatir la Pandemia, Avanza la Militarización de América Latina, Alertan Los Expertos,” Equal Times, November 6, 2020, accessed October 15, 2021, https://www.equaltimes.org/con-la-excusa-de-combatir-la?lang=en#.X6hnO1l7lTZ.
97 “Americas: The COVID-19 Pandemic Must Not Be a Pretext for Human Rights Violations,” Amnesty International, October 15 2020, accessed October 15, 2021, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/10/americas-covid19-pandemic-not-pretext-human-rights-violations.
98 See various entries at the web page of the US-based Honduras Solidarity Network, accessed October 15, 2021, http://www.hondurassolidarity.org; also see “Honduran Government Declares State of Emergency, Suspends Right to Free Expression,” Committee to Protect Journalists, March 18, 2020, accessed October 15, 2021, https://cpj.org/2020/03/honduran-government-declares-state-ofemergency-su.php.
99 “COVID-19/People in Hone Quarantine Told to Send Selfies Every Hour to Govt,” Hindu, March 30, 2020, accessed October 15, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/4vucfy95.
100 “IIFL Wealth Hurun India Rich List 2020,” September 29, 2020, accessed October 15, 2021, https://www.hurunindia.net/copy-of-iifl-wealth-hurun-ap-and-tg.
101 William I. Robinson, “The Next Economic Crisis: Digital Capitalism and Global Police State,” Race and Class, 2018.
102 See Robinson, The Global Police State.
103 Stanley McChrystal and Chris Fussell, “What 9/11 Taught Us About Leadership in a Crisis,” New York Times, March 23, 2020, accessed October 15, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/23/opinion/coronavirus-mcchrystal-leadership.html.
104 I have been writing on this matter for nearly three decades now; for my latest iterations, see William I. Robinson, Into the Tempest: Essays on the New Global Capitalism (Chicago: Haymarket, 2018); William I. Robinson, The Global Police State.
105 Ronald W. Cox, “The Crisis of Capitalism through Global Value Chains,” Class, Race and Corporate Power 7, no. 1 (2019): 3.
106 The corporate research firm Rhodium provides a wealth of data and analysis on US-China ties; see “Research Topic: China,” accessed October 15, 2021, https://rhg.com/research-topic/china.
107 See “Contradiction and Overdetermination,” in Louis Althusser, For Marx (London; Verso, 2006). There is also the larger theoretical discussion on the relative autonomy of the state that I cannot take up here, but it is important to remember that official state discourse is not to be taken at face value. As I have discussed in my other works cited here, notwithstanding Trump’s protectionist rhetoric, his policy has unambiguously been to open up the United States for capital investment from around the world.
108 See “Snowbalisation: The Steam Has Gone Out of Globalization,” Economist, January 24, 2019, accessed October 15, 2021, https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/01/24/the-steam-has-gone-out-ofglobalisation. The larger story here is that state-centric approaches violate the fundamental methodological tenet of Marxism, for which the story starts with the mode of production and class relations, from which state forms derive.
Chapter 2
1 Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism (London: Polity Press, 2016); his excellent study prompted me to undertake my own research into the process.
2 A Sivanandan, “Heresies and Prophecies: Social Fallout of the Technological Revolution,” Race and Class 37, no. 4 (1996), 11.
3 There is now a vast literature on the new technologies; see, inter alia, Klaus Schwab, The Fourth Industrial Revolution (Geneva: World Economic Forum, 2016).
4 The one-third figure is from Klaus Schwab, “The Fourth Industrial Revolution: What It Means and How to Respond,” in The Fourth Industrial Revolution: A Davos Reader (Washington, DC: Council on Foreign Affairs, 2016); this is a collection of essays previously published in Foreign Affairs, a journal edited out of New York, between 2012 and 2015; the more than half figure is from Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret, Covid-19: The Great Reset (Geneva: Forum Publishing, 2020), 27; the 5.2 billion figure is from ibid., 165. Meanwhile, mobile phone penetration in the least developed countries category rose from five subscriptions per hundred people in 2005 to seventy-two in 2018; United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Digital Economy Report 2019 (New York: United Nations, 2019), 13, accessed October 15, 2021, https://unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/der2019_en.pdf.
5 UNCTAD, Digital Economy Report 2019.
6 Thomas Marois, “TiSA and the Threat to Public Banks,” April 21, 2017, Transnational Institute, accessed October 15, 2021, https://www.tni.org/en/publication/tisa-and-the-threat-to-public-banks.
7 See, e.g., Mary Adams, “What Is Intangible Capital?” Smarter Companies, May 15, 2013, accessed October 15, 2021, https://www.smarter-companies.com/profiles/blogs/what-is-intangible-capital-part-one-of-a-series.
8 See, inter alia, Deborah James, Digital Trade Rules: A Disastrous New Constitution for the Global Economy, by and for Big Tech (Brussels: Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung, 2020), accessed October 15, 2021 https://cepr.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/digital-trade-2020-07.pdf.
9 Manfred Steger and Paul James, “Disjunctive Globalization in the Era of the Great Unsettling,” Theory, Culture, and Society 37, nos. 7–8 (October 2020).
10 See, most recently, William I. Robinson, Into the Tempest: Essays on the New Global Capitalism (Chicago: Haymarket, 2018); William I. Robinson, The Global Police State (London: Pluto, 2020).
11 As reported by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, “New World Order: Labor, Capital, and Ideas in the Power Law Economy,” in The Fourth Industrial Revolution: A Davos Reader, 98.
12 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Information Economy Report, 2017 (Geneva: UNCTAD, 2017), 17.
13 Nell Lewis, “Seven-Foot Robots Are Stacking Shelves in Tokyo Convenience Stores,” CNN Business, September 15, 2020, accessed October 15, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/14/business/robots-japan-supermarkets-spc-intl/index.html.
14 UNCTAD, Digital Economy Report 2019, 6.
15 Cited in Ibid., 9.
16 “Blue-Sky Thinking,” Economist, October 24,2020, accessed October 15, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/kf2chza4.
17 “Covid-19 Investment Implications Series: The World After Covid Primer,” Bank of America, May 5, 2020, accessed 8 November 2020, unavailable October 14, 2021, https://www.bofaml.com/content/dam/boamlimages/documents/articles/ID20_0467/the_world_after_covid.pdf.
18 This data is from two reports: Nicole Rashotte, “10 Top Technology Stocks by Market Cap,” Investing News, February 11, 2020, accessed October 15, 2021, https://investingnews.com/daily/tech-investing/top-technology-stocks; Melissa Pistilli, “10 Top Technology Stocks by Market Cap,” Investing News, November 19, 2020, accessed October 15, 2021, https://investingnews.com/daily/tech-investing/top-technology-stocks; Investing News periodically updates the information.
19 “Alphabet Market Cap 2006–2020,” Marcrotrends, continuously updated graph, accessed October 15, 2021, https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOGL/alphabet/market-cap.
20 UNCTAD, Digital Economic Report 2019, xvii; the report noted that the comparison of composition by sector of the top twenty companies in the world by market capitalization shows a dramatic shift in the global business landscape. The number of technology and consumer services companies in the top twenty surged from three in 2009 to eight in 2018. Only two companies in oil and gas and mining remained among the top twenty in 2018, compared with seven in 2009; see page 17.
21 “Private Fixed Investment in Information Processing Equipment and Software,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Economic Research, accessed October 15, 2021, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A679RC1Q027SBEA; continuously updated.
22 See Ronaldo W. Cox, “The Crisis of Capitalism through Global Value Chains,” Class, Race and Corporate Power 7, no. 1 (2019).
23 Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: W.W. Norton, 2014), 100–1. The average growth of output per worker in the United States was 2.3 percent a year between 1891 and 1972. It was just 1.4 percent a year between 1972 and 1996 and 1.3 percent between 2004 and 2012, although it recovered historical levels between 1996 and 2004, corresponding roughly to the period in which computerization became generalized in industry and services; see Marin Wolf, “Same as It Ever Was: Why the Techno-Optimists Are Wrong,” in The Fourth Industrial Revolution: A Davos Reader, 117–18.
24 “Where Top US Banks Are Betting on Fintech” (research brief), CBinsights, August 20, 2019, updated March 4, 2021, accessed October 15, 2021, https://www.cbinsights.com/research/fintech-investments-top-us-banks.
25 Naomi Klein, “Screen New Deal: Under Cover of Mass Death, Andrew Cuomo Calls in the Billionaires to Build a High-Tech Dystopia,” Intercept, May 8, 2020, accessed October 15, 2021, https://theintercept.com/2020/05/08/andrew-cuomo-eric-schmidt-coronavirus-tech-shock-doctrine.
26 Peter Phillips, Giants: The Global Power Elite (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2018).
27 Emil Protalinsky, “How Draganfly Brought a ‘Pandemic Drone’ to the U.S.,” Machine, April 30, 2020, accessed October 15, 2021, https://venturebeat.com/2020/04/30/draganfly-pandemic-drone-united-states-pilots.
28 “The Dawn of Digital Medicine,” Economist, December 2, 2020, accessed October 15, 2021, https://www.economist.com/business/2020/12/02/the-dawn-of-digital-medicine. In Britain, less than 1 percent of initial medical consultations took place via video link in 2019; this jumped to nearly 100 percent during the pandemic lockdown; see Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret, Covid-19: The Great Reset (Geneva: Forum Publishing, 2020), 179.
29 Timothy Erik Strom, “Antennas Aflame: Cybernetics, Conspiracies, and 5G,” Arena Quarterly no. 4, December 2020, accessed October 14, 2021, https://arena.org.au/antennas-aflame-cybernetics-conspiracies-and-5g.
30 Cited in Laurie Garrett, “Biology’s Brave New World: The Promise and Perils of the Synbio Revolution,” in The Fourth Industrial Revolution: A Davos Reader, 64, 84.
31 Kees van der Pijl, “Health Emergency or Seizure of Power? The Political Economy of COVID-19,” New Cold War, April 27, 2020, accessed October 14, 2021, https://www.newcoldwar.org/health-emergency-or-seizure-of-power-the-political-economy-of-covid-19; the drug had been in developed before the pandemic as a treatment for Ebola.
32 “Cosmetic Surgery and Procedure Market Worth $43.9 Billion by 2025,” Grand View Research, July 2017, accessed October 15, 2021, https://www.grandviewresearch.com/press-release/global-cosmetic-surgery-procedure-market.
33 Jo Ling Kent and Scott Stump, “Puppy Plastic Surgery on Pets Is a Booming Business,” TODAY, July 13, 2017, accessed October 15, 2021, https://www.today.com/pets/puppy-plastic-surgery-pets-booming-business-t113801.
34 Salveen Richter et al., The Genome Revolution: Sizing the Genome Medicine Opportunity (New York: Equity Research, Goldman Sachs, 2018), accessed October 15, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/dcpm672w.
35 Cited in UNCTAD, Digital Economy Report 2019, 9.
36 Kenneth Neil Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger, “The Rise of Big Data,” in The Fourth Industrial Revolution: A Davos Reader.
37 Shoshona Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2019) 187–88, 194.
38 See inter alia, Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage Books, 1995 [1977]); Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004); James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).
39 See, inter alia, Walter L. Perry et al., Predictive Policing: The Role of Crime Forecasting in Law Enforcement Operations (Washington, DC: Rand Corporation, 2013), accessed October 15, 2021, https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR200/RR233/RAND_RR233.sum.pdf.
40 Kenneth Neil Cuckier and Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger, “The Rise of Big Data,” in The Fourth Industrial Revolution: A Davos Reader, 49; the authors describe this increase in evictions as “a huge efficiency gain.”
41 Alex Ferrer, Terra Graziani, and Jacob Woocher, “Nearly 1,000 Homeless People Died in LA in 2020 as 93,000 Homes Sit Vacant,” Truthout, October 23, 2020, accessed October 15, 2021, https://truthout.org/articles/nearly-1000-homeless-people-died-in-lain-2020-as-93000-homes-sit-vacant.
42 Ed Pilkington, “Digital Dystopia: How Algorithms Punish the Poor,” Guardian, October 14,2019, accessed October 19, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/14/automating-poverty-algorithms-punish-poor.
43 Laurel Wamsley, “World’s Largest Asset Manager Puts Climate at the Center of Its Investment Strategy,” NPR, January 14, 2020, accessed October 15, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/2v57jtpn. It should be noted that Fink was referring to a major shift in capital toward alternative energy sources. While I cannot take up the discussion here, “green capitalism” is bound up with the emerging hegemonic bloc of capital, which involves a much closer relationship to tech capital than traditional energy sources.
44 Bank of America Securities, “Covid-19 Investment Implications Series.”
45 See “On the March,” Economist, October 10, 2020, 16.
46 “Queen of the Colony,” Economist, October 10, 2020, 19.
47 UNCTAD, Digital Economic Report 2019, 25.
48 Ibid., 32.
49 See Robinson, The Global Police State.
50 Yasha Levine, Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet (New York: PublicAffairs, 2018).
51 Carten Cordell, “CIA Awards Multibillion-Dollar Cloud Contract to Multiple Vendors,” Washington Business Journal, November 20, 2020, accessed October 15, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/j5bby6nv.
52 See Robinson, The Global Police State, chapter 3, “Militarized Accumulation.”
53 Cited in Brynjolfsson and McAfee, The Second Machine Age, 175.
54 David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (London: Verso, 2018 [1982]).
55 Karl Marx, “Wage Labor and Capital,” in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978), 206.
56 Lei Ding and Julieth Saenz Molina, “‘Forced Automation’ by Covid19? Early Trends from Current Population Survey Data,” Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, September 2020, accessed October 15, 2021, https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fedpcd/88713.html.
57 Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo, Robots and Jobs: Evidence from US Labor Markets, Working Paper 23285 (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2017), accessed October 15, 2021, https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23285/w23285.pdf.
58 “The Superstar Company: A Giant Problem,” Economist, September 17, 2016, accessed October 15, 2021, https://www.economist.com/leaders/2016/09/17/a-giant-problem.
59 Brynjolfsson and McAfee, The Second Machine Age, 126.
60 “Hanging Together, Economist, May 16, 2020, 60.
61 For a summary of the report, see Kenneth Rapoza, “Some 42% of Jobs Lost in Pandemic Are Gone for Good,” Forbes, May 15, 2020, accessed October 15, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/ymsjkmes.
62 “COVID-19 and the World of Work: Concept Note,” International Labour Organization, July 2020, 2, accessed October 15, 2021, https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dcomm/documents/meetingdocument/wcms_747931.pdf.
63 See, inter alia, Ding and Molina, “Forced Automation”; Alex W. Chernoff and Casey Warman, “Covid-19 and Implications for Automation,” Working Paper 27249, National Bureau of Economic Research, July 2020, updated November 2020, accessed October 15, 2021, https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27249/w27249.pdf.
64 Ding and Molina, “Forced Automation,” 15.
65 See, inter alia, Jeremy Rifkin, The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, The Economy, and the World (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2011); even as all available evidence points to exactly the opposite, Rifkin, a business consultant for corporations and governments, insists “a more distributed and collaborative industrial revolution” is leading to “a more distributed sharing of the wealth generated,” and that in this new revolution “self-interest is subsumed by shared interest,” ibid., 115.
66 Martin Ford, The Rise of the Robots (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 198.
67 Ibid.
68 Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Harmondworth: Penguin, 1973), 692–94.
69 UNCTAD, Information Economy Report 2017.
70 See World Employment Report 1996–97: National Policies in a Global Context (Geneva: International Labour Organization, 1996); Global Employment Trend 2011 (Geneva: International Labour Organization, 2011), accessed October 17, 2021, https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/@dgreports/@dcomm/@publ/documents/publication/wcms_150440.pdf; The Challenge of Job Recovery; World Employment and Social Outlook: Trends 2019 (Geneva: International Labour Organization, 2019), accessed October 17, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/3mrccma9.
71 UNCTAD, Digital Economy Report 2019, 8.
72 Cited in Schwab and Malleret, Covid-19: The Great Reset, 157.
73 See Cox, “The Crisis of Capitalism through Global Value Chains.”
74 Ford, The Rise of the Robots, 26.
75 One leading software company, AVEVA (https://www.aveva.com/en) supplies software and consulting on automating just about every production sequence, including mining. On the automation of California agriculture, see Geoffrey Mohan, “A New Generation of Farmworkers: Robots,” Los Angeles Times, July 25, 2017, A1, A10. More generally on the automation of agriculture, see “How Automation Is Revolutionizing Agriculture,” Innovation & Tech Today, July 15 2019, accessed October 17, 2021, https://innotechtoday.com/automatedagriculture. On the growth of the market for agricultural robotics equipment, see “Global Agricultural Robots Market Report 2020–2025 with Covid-19 Impact Analysis,” Business Wire, October 12, 2020, accessed October 17, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/3smn2jub. For “flippy” see the Miso Robotics company webpage, accessed October 17, 2021, https://misorobotics.com.
76 Brynjolfsson and McAfee, The Second Machine Age, 30.
77 Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974).
78 Cited in Jeremy Rifkin, The Third Industrial Revolution, 112.
79 ILO, “COVID-19 and the World of Work.”.
80 For the US data, see Jose Maria Barrero, Nick Bloom, and Steven J. Davis, “COVID-19 Is Also a Reallocation Shock,” Working Paper No. 2020-59, Becker Friedman Institute, University of Chicago, June 25, 2020, 3, accessed October 17, 2021, https://bfi.uchicago.edu/working-paper/covid-19-is-also-a-reallocation-shock; for the worldwide data, see ILO, “COVID-19 and the World of Work,” 4.
81 Kevin Lin, “Tech Worker Organizing in China: A New Model for Workers Battling a Repressive State,” New Labor Forum 29, no. 2 (May 2020): 52–59.
82 William I. Robinson, “Global Capitalist Crisis Deadlier Than Coronavirus (Part III),” Arena, April 28, 2020, accessed October 17, 2021, https://arena.org.au/global-capitalist-crisis-deadlier-than-coronavirus-part-iii.
83 Olivia Solon, “Amazon Patents Wristband That Tracks Warehouse Workers’ Movements,” Guardian, January 31, 2018, accessed October 17, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jan/31/amazon-warehouse-wristband-tracking.
84 Thomas L. Friedman, “After the Pandemic: A Revolution in Education and Work Awaits,” New York Times, October 20, 2020, accessed October 17, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/20/opinion/covid-education-work.html.
85 The anxiety and depression associated with these conditions of isolation and loneliness compound the mental health crisis, as does the acute distress of uncertainty, as life becomes a permanent trauma. The WTO predicted in 2017 that depression would become the second main cause of disease burden globally by 2020. In 2017, an estimated 350 million people around the world suffered from depression; see Schwab and Malleret, Covid-19: The Great Reset, 223.
86 Cited in Christian Fuchs, Rereading Marx in the Age of Digital Capitalism (London: Pluto, 2019), 43.
87 See, for example, Matthias Pierce, et al., “Mental Health before and during the Covid-19 Pandemic: A Longitudinal Probability Sample Survey of the UK Population,” Lancet, July 21, 2020, accessed October 17, 2021, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(20)30308-4/fulltext; Mark Czeisler et al., “Mental Health, Substance Use, and Suicidal Ideation during the Covid-19 Pandemic,” Center for Disease Control (CDC), August 14, 2020, accessed October 17, 2021, https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6932a1.htm.
88 Bank of America Securities, “Covid-19 Investment Implications Series.”
89 There has been much written on these effects of cyberspace and social media; see, e.g., Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W.W. Norton, 2020 [2010]).
Chapter 3
1 Samir Amin, “It is Imperative to Reconstruct the Internationale of Workers and Peoples,” IDEAs, July 3, 2018, accessed October 17, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/5bptfmu9.
2 Stuart Jeffries, “Why Marxism Is on the Rise Again,” Guardian, July 4, 2012, accessed October 17, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jul/04/the-return-of-marxism.
3 For Time’s ranking, see “Who/s Biggest? The 100 Most Significant Figures in History,” Time, August 21, 2017, accessed October 17, 2021, http://ideas.time.com/2013/12/10/whos-biggest-the-100-mostsignificant-figures-in-history; Jesus was ranked in first place and, curiously, Muhammad came in third, after Napoleon. In relation to the ranking of thirty-five thousand high profile scholars, see Smithsonian, November 6, 2013, accessed October 17, 2021, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/karl-marx-is-the-worldsmost-influential-scholar-180947581; Marx scored twenty-two times higher than the nearest historian and eleven times higher than the nearest economist.
4 For the 2019 Pew poll, see “Partisan Divide in Views of ‘Socialism,’ ‘Capitalism,’” Pew Research Center, June 25, 2019, accessed October 17, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/pp_19-06-20_socialism_feature. For the 2018 Gallup poll, see Kathleen Elkins, “Most Young Americans Prefer Socialism to Capitalism, New Report Finds,” Make It, August 14, 2018, accessed October 17, 2021, https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/14/fewer-than-half-of-young-americans-arepositive-about-capitalism.html. For the 2019 Gallup poll, see Mohamed Younis, “Four in 10 Americans Embrace Some Form of Socialism,” Gallup, May 20, 2019, accessed October 17, 2021, https://news.gallup.com/poll/257639/four-americans-embrace-formsocialism.aspx. The 2020 poll was conducted by the right-wing Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation; see David Fitzgerald, “Support for Socialism Jumps by Nearly 10 Percent among U.S. Youth amid Pandemic Depression,” World Socialist Web Site, October 22, 2020, accessed October 17, 2021, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/10/23/soci-o23.html. For the 2020 worldwide poll, see Mark John, “Capitalism Seen Doing ‘More Harm Than Good’ in Global Survey,” Reuters, January 19, 2020, accessed October 17, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/sbxhh3u8.
5 Chris Zappone, “Wave of Strikes Ripples Across U.S. as Crisis Bites,” Age, September 30, 2020, accessed October 17, 2021, https://www.theage.com.au/world/north-americ; Aaron Gordon, Lauren Gurley, Edward Ongweso Jr., and Jordon Pearson, “Coronavirus Is a Labor Crisis, and a General Strike May Be Next,” Vice, April 2, 2020, accessed October 17, 2021, https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3b9ny/coronavirus-general-strike.
6 In any event, it is worth noting that the massive injection of fiat money into the economy and the unprecedented expansion of fictitious capital, as discussed in chapter one, already constitutes a break with the monetarist orthodoxy of neoliberalism.
7 I do not normally cite Wikipedia, but one entry has perhaps the most comprehensive list of major protests in the twenty-first century, with links to original or other sources; List of Protests in the 21st Century, Wikipedia, accessed October 17, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_protests_in_the_21st_century.
8 APF, “Five Years On, the Indignados Have Changed Spain’s Politics,” Local, May 14, 2016, accessed October 17, 2021, https://www.thelocal.es/20160514/five-years-on-spains-indignados-have-shaken-up-politics.
9 Gideon Rachman, “2011, the Year of Global Indignation,” Financial Times, August 29, 2011, accessed October 17, 2021, https://www.ft.com/content/36339ee2-cf40-11e0-b6d4-00144feabdc0.
10 “Global Protest Tracker,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, January 2020 data, accessed January 19, 2020, https://carnegieendowment.org/publications/interactive/protest-tracker; the tracker is interactive and regularly updated. Below I will compare this data with the 2020 year-end update.
11 See, inter alia, Kevin B. Anderson, “Sudan’s Revolution of 2019,” New Politics 17, no. 4 (Winter 2020), accessed October 17, 2021, https://newpol.org/issue_post/sudans-revolution-of-2019.
12 Mélanie Vecchio, “Gilets Jaunes et Lycéens: 2891 Blessés Depuis Le Début du Mouvement, “ BFM TV, December 20, 2018, accessed October 17, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/y7hbnzdx.
13 For an excellent overall analysis, see Jean-Claude Paye, “The Yellow Vests in France,” Monthly Review, June 1, 2019, accessed October 17, 2021, https://monthlyreview.org/2019/06/01/the-yellow-vests-in-france.
14 Hao Ren, ed., China on Strike: Narratives of Workers’ Resistance (Chicago: Haymarket, 2016), 15–16.
15 Javier C. Hernández, “Workers’ Activism Rises as China’s Economy Slows. Xi Aims to Rein Them In,” New York Times, February 6, 2019, accessed October 17, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/06/world/asia/china-workers-protests.html; also see “China Labor Bulletin,” which posts workers’ actions day by day, accessed October 17, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/4dehya5u.
16 See, inter alia, Anita Chan, “From Unorganized Street Protests to Organizing Unions: The Birth of a New Trade Union Movement in Hong Kong,” MadeInChina, July 15, 2020, accessed October 17, 2021, https://madeinchinajournal.com/2020/07/15/from-unorganised-street-protests-to-organising-unions.
17 Kevin Lin, “Tech Worker Organizing in China: A New Model for Workers Battling a Repressive State,” New Labor Forum 29, no. 2, (May 2020): 52–59.
18 See, inter alia, “Over 250 Million Workers Join National Strike in India,” IndustriALL, November 26, 2020, accessed October 17, 2021, http://www.industriall-union.org/over-250-million-workers-joinnational-strike-in-india; Maria Aurelio, “The Biggest General Strike in the World: Over 200 Million Workers and Farmers Paralyze India,” Left Voice, November 27, 2020, accessed October 17, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/zfd9kc.
19 Heidi Shieholz and Margaret Poydock, “Continued Surge in Strike Activity Signals Worker Dissatisfaction with Wage Growth,” Economic Policy Institute, February 11, 2020, accessed October 17, 2021, https://www.epi.org/publication/continued-surge-in-strike-activity.
20 2020: Racism, Repression and Fightback in the USA (Tucson, AZ: Alliance for Global Justice, 2020), accessed October 17, 2021, https://drive.google.com/file/d/19wATYyqsHatDqvNQSN_41vJfVoFxfFKO/view.
21 Brent D. Griffiths, “Power Up: There’s Been a Dramatic Shift in Public Opinion About Police Treatment of Black Americans,” Washington Post, June 9, 2020, accessed October 17, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/azrfncwt.
22 “Global Protest Tracker.”
23 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “Worldwide Protests in 2020: A Year in Review,” December 21, 2020, accessed October 17, 2021, https://carnegieendowment.org/2020/12/21/worldwide-protests-in-2020-year-in-review-pub-83445.
24 Vijay Prashad and Alejandro Bejarano, “‘We Will Coup Whoever We Want’: Elon Musk and the Overthrow of Democracy in Bolivia,” Counterpunch, July 29, 2020, accessed October 17, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/dwuc93fa.
25 Debbie Carlson, “Lithium Is at the Heart of the Electronic-Vehicle Revolution—Here’s How the Market for the Raw Material Works,” MarketWatch, October 30, 2020, accessed October 17, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/m73fk58s.
26 See “Global Lithium Demand Expected to Double by 2021,” Mining. Com (global mining industry website), October 8, 2020, accessed October 17, 2021, https://www.mining.com/global-lithiumdemand-expected-to-double-by-2024. On the percentages, see “Lithium Supply in Bolivia,” Lithium Today (industry website), accessed October 17, 2021, http://lithium.today/lithium-supply-by-countries/lithium-supply-bolivia.
27 For a retrospective analysis, see Boris, “France 1981-84: From Hope to the ‘Austerity Turn,’” Socialist Alternative, September 25, 2019, accessed October 17, 2021, https://www.socialistalternative.org/2019/09/25/france-1981-84-from-hope-to-the-austerity-turn.
28 See William I. Robinson, Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), chapter two, “Notes on the Transnational State.”
29 For the Progressive International, see “Who We Are,” Progressive International, accessed October 17, 2021, https://progressive.international/about/en.
30 For Uber, see Kate Conger, Vicky Xiuzhong Xu, and Zach Wichter, “Uber Drivers’ Day of Strikes Circles the Globe Before Company’s I.P.O.,” New York Times, May 8, 2019, accessed October 17, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/08/technology/uber-strike.html. For Amazon, see Natasha Lennard, “Amazon Workers Are Organizing a Global Struggle,” Intercept, December 3, 2020, accessed October 17, 2021, https://theintercept.com/2020/12/03/amazon-workers-union-international-strike.
31 For a detailed treatment to the matter of the separation of the economic and the political under capitalism, see Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy against Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
32 Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 210–76, also see 12–13, 117.
33 Ibid., 244, 268–69.
34 Of course, demands for democratization and accountability are in the interest of the working class and the oppressed. It is when citizen rights replace class demands that challenges from below set themselves up for co-optation.
35 See, inter alia, my critique in William I. Robinson, “Marx After Post-Narratives: A Critical Reading of Ronaldo Munck’s Critical Reading of Marx,” Global Discourse 7, no. 4 (2017), accessed October 17, 2021, http://robinson.faculty.soc.ucsb.edu/Assets/pdf/MarxAfterPostNarratives.pdf.
36 Postmodernism and the identitarian paradigm may have originated in the West and in particular in the United States, however, the scholarly agenda set by universities and think tanks in the former First World is funded and shaped by foundations tied to transnational corporate capital. Research agendas originating in the United States often become hegemonic globally, framing the university curriculum in the former Third World; see, inter alia: Michael Barker, Under the Mask of Philanthropy (Leicester, UK: Hextall Press, 2017); William I. Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, U.S. Intervention, and Hegemony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
37 “An Interview with Political Scientist Adolph Reed, Jr. on the New York Times’ 1619 Project,” World Socialist Web Site, December 20, 2019, accessed October 17, 2021, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/12/20/reed-d20.html.
38 There is a large and growing body of literature critical of the identitarian paradigm, the “diversity” agenda, and the “antiracist” politics that flow from them, way to vast to list here. Among them are works by political scientists Adolph Reed, Jr. and Cedric Johnson; see, inter alia, Adolph Reed, Jr., “The Splendors and Miseries of the Anti-Racist ‘Left,’” Nonsite, November 6, 2016, accessed October 17, 2021, https://nonsite.org/splendors-and-miseries-of-the-antiracistleft-2; Adolph Reed, Jr., “Antiracism: A Neoliberal Alternative to the Left,” Dialectal Anthropology no 42 (2018), accessed October 17, 2021, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10624-017-9476-3; Cedric Johnson, “The Triumph of Black Lives Matter and Neoliberal Redemption,” Nonsite, June 9, 2020, accessed October 17, 2021, https://nonsite.org/the-triumph-of-black-lives-matterand-neoliberal-redemption; Cedric Johnson, “The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now,” Catalyst 1, no. 1 (2017); also see Touré F. Reed, Toward Freedom: The Case Against Race Reductionism (London: Verso, 2020); William I. Robinson, “Marx After Post-Narratives”; Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed, Jr., “The Trouble with Disparity,” Nonsite, September 10, 2020, accessed October 14, 2021, https://nonsite.org/the-trouble-with-disparity; Barbara Foley, “Intersectionality: A Marxist Critique,” Black Agenda Report, November 14, 2018, accessed October 17, 2021, https://www.blackagendareport.com/intersectionality-marxist-critique.
39 Azfar Shafi and Ilyas Nagdee, Recovering Antiracism: Reflections on Collectivity and Solidarity in Antiracist Organizing (Amsterdam: Transnational Institute, 2020), 8, accessed October 17, 2021, https://www.tni.org/files/publication-downloads/antiracism_online.pdf.
40 For a police shootings data base, see “Fatal Force,” Washington Post, accessed October 17, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database; the data base is regularly updated.
41 “Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect, 2018,” AFL-CIO, October 6, 2020, accessed October 17, 2021, https://aflcio.org/reports/deathjob-toll-neglect-2020; for the global figure, see, “Safety and Health at Work,” International Labour Organization, accessed October 17, 2021, http://www.ilo.org/global/topics/safety-and-health-at-work/lang--de/index.htm.
42 Dana Loomis and David Richardson, “Race and the Risk of Fatal Injury at Work,” American Journal of Public Health 88, no. 1 (January 1998), accessed October 17, 2021, https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.88.1.40.
43 See, for instance, Robert Reich, “Trump Stokes Division with Racism and Rage—and the American Oligarchy Purrs,” Guardian, June 14, 2020, accessed October 17, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/14/donald-trump-racism-american-oligarchy.
44 “Black Lives Matter: The George Floyd Effect,” Economist, December 12, 2020, 29.
45 See ibid.; Shafi and Nagdee, Recovering Antiracism. Cedric Johnson does not mince his words (and I concur with him): “Black Lives Matter sentiment is essentially a militant expression of racial liberalism,” cited in Johnson, “The Triumph of Black Lives Matter and Neoliberal Redemption.” In what was a fracturing of the BLM movement, at least ten local BLM chapters broke with the umbrella Black Lives Matter Global Network (BLMGN) in 2020 and 2021, denouncing its bureaucratic middle-class leadership. Calling themselves the BLM10, in a February 2021 statement they denounced the Global Network, which they described as “a top-down dogmatic organization that promotes certain chapters that choose to align with their direction and sequester the ones that don’t. … [I]n doing this, they received substantial donations and funding … [working] to undermine a grassroots movement by capitalizing on unpaid labor, suppressing any internal attempt at democracy, commodifying Black death, and profiting from the same pain and suffering inflicted on Black communities. The BLM name is now being used to sell products, acquire book deals, T.V. deals, and speaking engagements. We are opposed to the movement to substitute Black capitalism for white capitalism.” The statement went on to denounce the close relationship between the BLMGN and the Democratic Party; see “‘To Ally with the Democratic Party Is to Ally against Ourselves’: BLM Inland Empire Breaks with BLM Global Network,” Left Voice, February 4, 2021, accessed October 17, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/49y2menp.
46 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton and Norton, 1978), 496.
47 Barker, Under the Mask of Philanthropy, 217.
48 Among other places, Gramsci developed the notions of passive revolution and transformismo and discussed fraud and corruption in his various writings on Italian history. There is no one section in his Selections from Prison Notebooks (1972), but see in particular 52–120.
49 Hilbourne A. Watson, Errol Walton Barrow and the Postwar Transformation of Barbados: The Late Colonial Period (Kingston, JM: University of the West Indies Press, 2020), 256.
50 Ibid., 85; Watson is referencing Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009).
51 For the Philippines, see “Philippines’ Duterte Scores Record High Rating, Despite Virus Crisis,” Reuters, October 5, 2020, accessed October 18, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/y8u7bt34. For India, see “PM Modi’s High Approval Rating among World Leaders Matter of Pride for Indians: JP Nadda,” Business Today, January 2, 2021, accessed October 18, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/358fsfp2.
52 See, inter alia, William I. Robinson, “Global Capitalist Crisis and Twenty-First Century Fascism: Beyond the Trump Hype,” Science and Society 83, no. 2 (April 2019): 481–509, accessed October 18, 2021, http://robinson.faculty.soc.ucsb.edu/Assets/pdf/FascismbeyondTrump.pdf; William I. Robinson, Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), chapter five; William I. Robinson, The Global Police State (London: Pluto, 2020), chapter four.
53 On the rise of neofascist movements in many of these countries in turn of the century Europe, see, inter alia, Robert O. Paxon, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Vintage Books, 2004). In the second decade of the twenty-first century, and especially concurrent with Trump’s election in the United States, these new far-right and neofascist movements experienced an upsurge, often winning seats in national legislatures. These include the Freedom Party in Austria, the National Front in France, New Dawn in Greece, Alternative for Germany in Germany, both the Jobbik Party (Movement for a Better Hungary) and the Fidesz party of Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Hungary, Slovakia’s People’s Party–Our Slovakia, Holland’s Party for Freedom, Forza Nuova in Italy (although the Northern League is far-right, it could not, I believe, be characterized as extreme right/neofascist). Very useful also is Nick Robins-Early and Willa Frej, “A Guide to the Far-Right Power Players Tearing Europe Apart,” Huffington Post, August 25, 2018, accessed October 18, 2021, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/guide-far-right-players-europe_n_5b7bf18ee4b0a5b1febee47a.
54 While I cannot take up these issues here, only part of the story of the Trump electoral triumph was the racist mobilization of white workers and the petty-bourgeoisie. The flip side of this mobilization was widespread voter suppression and disenfranchisement of voters from racially oppressed communities.
55 See Anabel Sosa, “Who Are the Wolverine Watchmen, the Group Allegedly Part of Thwarted Plan to Kidnap Michigan Governor?” Inside Edition, October 14, 2020, accessed October 18, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/4pzz2eam.
56 Todd C. Frankel, “A Majority of People Arrested for Capitol Riot Had a History of Financial Trouble,” Washington Post, February 10, 2021, accessed October 18, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/02/10/capitol-insurrectionists-jenna-ryan-financial-problems.
57 See V.I. Lenin, “Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism,” in Selected Works, vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963 [1917]), 667–766, accessed October 18, 2021, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc; the quote is from chapter 8, “Parasitism and Decay of Capitalism,” accessed October 18, 2021, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/ch08.htm.
58 Ainhoa Ruiz Benedicto, Mark Akkerman, and Pere Brunet, A Walled World: Toward a Global Apartheid (Barcelona: Centre Delàs d’Estudis per la Pau, 2020), accessed October 18, 2021, https://tinyurl.com/stennyfu.
59 United States Army, The Operational Environment and the Changing Character of Future Warfare, TRADOC Pamphlet 525–92(Fort Eustis, VA: Department of the Army, 2019), accessed October 18, 2021, https://adminpubs.tradoc.army.mil/pamphlets/TP525–92.pdf.
60The war game is discussed in Nick Turse, “Pentagon War Game Includes Scenario for Military Response to Gen Z Rebellion,” Intercept, June 5, 2020, accessed October 18, 2021, https://theintercept.com/2020/06/05/pentagon-war-game-gen-z.
Conclusion
1 See Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin, Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet (London: Verso, 2020).
2 See, inter alia, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2016 [2015]).
3 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 276.