The epochal crisis of global capitalism — Challenges for popular resistance from below
[Editor’s note: The following is a major extract from Robinson’s address to the opening plenary of the Peoples’ Platform Europe in Vienna on February 14.]
Global capitalism faces an unprecedented crisis of epochal proportions. It has entered into a stage of absolute violent predation. Its extermination impulse is now rising to the surface. We have entered a period of great upheavals and momentous changes. The historical conjuncture poses grave dangers but also new opportunities for mass struggle from the bottom up. Our burning challenge is to renovate projects of radical transformation and emancipation, to build up counter-hegemonic power from below — our very survival depends on it.
Over its 500-plus year history, capitalism has undergone ongoing waves of expansion through colonialism and imperialism, great cycles of crises and restructuring, followed by new waves of expansion. I want to talk about the nature of the global crisis, potentially more catastrophic than earlier cycles of crisis. I will present the “big picture” and naturally this means that I am forced to simplify and generalise.
What kind of a crisis are we facing? The internal dynamics of capitalism, by its very nature, produces crises. Crises are inevitable. We can speak about three types of crises. The first are cyclical, periodic downturns or recessions, which occur about once every ten years. There were downturns of this nature in the early 1980s, the early 1990s, and at the turn of the century.
But we are facing something much more serious: a structural crisis. Such structural crises occur about every 40-50 years. I call them restructuring crises because the only way to resolve them is to restructure how the system is organised and how it functions. There were structural crises in the 1830s, followed by the first great depression of the late 1870s into the early 1890s, then the Great Depression of the 1930s.
The last great crisis of this type took place in the 1970s. In response to that crisis, emergent transnational capital launched globalisation as prolonged class warfare from above. A transnational capitalist class, or TCC, emerged as the hegemonic fraction of capital on a world scale. It went on the offensive to recover the hegemony of capital and re-discipline the working and popular classes after the anti-colonial and Third World liberation struggles and mass rebellions of the 1960s and ’70s.
Globalisation over the past half century has involved a prolonged wave of worldwide capitalist expansion. The former Soviet bloc countries, China and the Third World revolutionary states were reintegrated. We have arrived at the end of the extensive enlargement of world capitalism, in the sense that apart from a few pockets there are no longer countries and peoples that are outside of the system. Every country has become inserted, often violently, into a new globalised system of production, finances and services controlled by the TCC and their political agents in states and transnational institutions. There have been vast new rounds of primitive accumulation, especially in the countryside of the former Third World. Hundreds of millions have been uprooted, thrown into the global labour market and made available for exploitation by transnational capital, or simply marginalised as surplus labour. The global proletarian now numbers five billion, the largest class in history. But it faces an all-out siege by the TCC and its political and military agents.
Throughout all of this there has been an extremely rapid and unprecedented concentration and centralisation of capital on a world scale in the form of transnational capital. In 2023, just 17 global financial conglomerates controlled $49 trillion in wealth, more than half the value of the entire global economy. In 2022, the world’s ultra-wealthy, made up of 62 billionaires and million millionaires, had a combined wealth of more than $190 trillion — more than double the entire global GDP. And this while 80% of humanity, some six billion people, lived in poverty or just above the poverty line.
We have seen an accelerated social polarisation. Global inequalities have reached unprecedented levels. The 2018 Oxfam International report on inequalities reported than the top 1% controlled more than 50% of the world’s wealth and the top 20% — that portion of humanity than can survive in global capitalism — controlled 95% of the world’s wealth, while 80% of humanity had to make do with just 5% of the world’s wealth. Moreover, there is a rapid precariatisation even among the ranks of that 20%. We live in the age of the global dictatorship of the TCC.
If capital managed to momentarily resolve the crisis of the 1970s, the next great structural crisis hit with the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. If we see this crisis as cyclical, it was resolved in the 2010s. But if we see it as structural, then it has actually been getting worse and is now spiralling into the third type of crisis — systemic — meaning that the only way we can resolve it is by moving beyond the system itself, beyond global capitalism.
Quite simply, we are facing the exhaustion of global capitalism’s capacity for renewal. The ruling classes are getting desperate. They are upping the ante with war, fascism and genocide. These ruling classes recognise the severity of the crisis. Recall that in 2023 the World Economic Forum released its report characterising the situation as a polycrisis of great magnitude. But the WEF is not the only transnational elite forum to sound the alarm bell. The Trilateral Commission released its own report, as did other forums and intelligence agencies.
We can identify four dimensions of the crisis. These are not separate crises that converge; they are distinct moments that form a unity — the epochal crisis of capitalist civilisation.
Structural: Overaccumulation and stagnation
The first is structural, a crisis of chronic stagnation. Overaccumulation is built into capitalism. The overproduction of capital is the most fundamental contradiction, internal to the system. The leading transnational corporations and financial conglomerates have registered record profits at the same time as the rate of profit has fallen and corporate investment has declined. The TCC has accumulated obscene amounts of wealth, more than they can possibly spend, much less reinvest. Global markets are saturated. They cannot absorb the output of the global economy.
This surplus accumulated capital with nowhere to go has ballooned since 2008. For example, average profits experienced a 52% rise for the 3-year period from 2021 to 2023 compared with the preceding three years. As the rate of profit has fallen, total cash held in reserves of the world’s 2000 biggest corporations sharply rose, from $6.6 trillion in 2010 to $14.2 trillion in 2020. As the global economy stagnates, corporations retain rather than reinvest profits. Since 1980 corporate cash holdings have ballooned to 10% of GDP in the US, 22% in Western Europe, 34% in South Korea, and 47% in Japan.
The ruling groups now face a great challenge: how to keep the global economy going and sustain accumulation in the face of stagnation? They have turned to financial speculation, debt-driven growth and the plunder of state finance, but these are temporary fixes that are now reaching their limits. Take the case of financial speculation: the real global economy of goods and services is a little under $100 trillion, whereas fictitious capital, which is simply speculative capital, is calculated in the quadrillions of dollars. Another financial collapse is on the horizon. Enormous pressures are building up to unload this overaccumulated surplus, to violently crack open new spaces for profitable investment.
This leads the system to become ever more violent, predatory and reckless. A deadly new round of extractivist accumulation around the world is already underway, a new round of global enclosures, and an intensification of what I refer to as militarised accumulation and accumulation by repression. Expanding systems of mass surveillance, warfare, social control and repression constitute in themselves strategies of accumulation.
We are living in a global war economy. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a tragedy for the Russian and Ukrainian peoples, for the world’s peoples. But the invasion was a bonanza for the global military-industrial complex and for a vast host of corporate actors, from tech to finance. This is why one defence consultant explained right after the invasion began, “happy days are here again.” This is why, when Israel launched its genocide against Gaza, a Morgan-Stanley executive declared, “Gaza fits quite nicely into our portfolio.”
Wars on poor communities, immigrants, refugees, gangs and cartels, privatised mass incarceration, the construction of material and digital border walls, gated cities and omniscient surveillance systems — all this and more are major sources of accumulation in the face of stagnation, throwing fresh firewood on the embers of a stagnant global economy. Overaccumulation explains as much of the current worldwide war drive and the escalation of conflicts as do geopolitical and other considerations. Capital’s coercive domination is becoming deeply embedded in new strategies of militarised accumulation and accumulation by repression. Genocide becomes enormously profitable and attractive, as it resolves political and economic problems for the ruling groups. The limits to expansion must be overcome by technologies of death and destruction.
Crisis of social reproduction: Capital’s extermination impulse
Surplus capital produces its alter-ego, surplus labour. Two billion people have become surplus humanity. The global proletariat is spread out into two overlapping categories: those expelled from the circuits of global capital, made redundant and surplus; and those incorporated into capital’s circuits as precarious labour. The digitally-driven restructuring now underway will vastly expand the ranks of both categories. Billions of people cannot survive. Social disintegration is spreading. Millions face displacement by conflict, climate change, economic collapse and political, ethnic and religious persecution.
Whole communities, whole countries are collapsing. Look at Haiti, Sudan, Congo. Whole portions of countries — take the examples of Mexico, Colombia or Ecuador — are under the control of rising political and military mafias, gangs, and corrupt cliques. These are new forms of criminal power that are not apart from formally constituted state power but an adjunct to it. They rule their criminal fiefdoms in consort with transnational capital. They violently open up space for transnational capital in exchange for snatching up a portion of the pie and distributing crumbs among their networks.
At the deepest structural level, the Gaza option — extermination — is an attempt to resolve the problem of surplus humanity through genocide. Then there is the Salvadoran option, the new mega-prison geographies. In 2023, the Salvadoran government opened its “Centre for the Confinement of Terrorism” to incarcerate 40,000 young men, surplus youth that must be disposed of, locked out of the economy and society. They are of no use to global capitalism. Following El Salvador’s example, Brazil, Turkey, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Egypt, the Philippines, India and other countries have announced plans to build new mega prisons.
These are the new geographies of containment. Borders become less physical markers than axes around which intensive control of those expelled is organised. These borderlands are zones of non-being, zones of death. The US-Mexico border is one such zone, where 7000 people have died in recent years, although this is only the bodies that have been recovered and identified. Thousands more are unaccounted for, or perished making the treacherous journey from as far away as South America through Central America and Mexico. The Mediterranean is another such zone of death. Between 2014-24, more than 24,000 people perished, although again, this does not take into account thousands, maybe tens of thousands never identified or who perished making such survival journeys.
These zones of non-being and death are worldwide. In 2023, Saudi border guards opened fire without warning or provocation against Ethiopian migrants trying to enter the Kingdom to join their 750,000 countrymen and women who serve as migrant workers in that country, leaving several hundred dead and wounded. Transnational migrant labour is crucial to the global economy. The ruling groups want to generalise the Gulf States model, a system of virtual slavery whereby migrants are brought in with work visas, may not change employment, have no labour, civil, social or political rights, are often held in households or labour camps under virtual slave-like conditions, and are deported once their labour is no longer needed.
In this brave new world of global capitalism, a select few are let into the Global Fortress as peons while the rest of humanity is locked out and abandoned. These are the new Late Victorian Holocausts, to borrow the phrase coined by Mike Davis, who was referring to the period of British colonisation of India, when the colonisers shipped out all the country’s agricultural resources so that periodic famines would take millions — tens of millions — of Indian lives. For the colonisers these victims were just human waste. Gaza, Congo, Haiti, the world’s borderlands — these hellscapes are real-time alarm bells warning that capitalism’s extermination impulse is now being activated to resolve capital’s intractable contradiction between surplus capital and surplus labour.
Finally, regarding the crisis of social reproduction, global capitalism increasingly turns women proletarians from producers of labour power required by capital into producers of supernumeraries for which capital has no use. Women’s labour, already devalued when it is unwaged, is further devalued, and women denigrated, as the function of the household economy moves from rearing labour for incorporation into circuits of capital to rearing supernumeraries. This ever-greater degradation and devaluation of women proletarians in times of epochal crisis involve deep structural processes, which combine with cultural and political processes to breed pandemics of degradation, misogyny and aggression and violence against women, aggravating the worldwide crisis in gender relations.
Political crisis: A general crisis of capitalism’s rule
Global capitalism faces a political crisis of state legitimacy and capitalist hegemony. The ruling groups are desperate to re-establish their hegemony and legitimacy. We are seeing an escalation of state violence, the spread of a neo-fascist far right around the world, and an expansion of the global police state. Unprecedented inequalities can only be sustained by extreme violence, militarisation and repression. The ruling groups face a crisis of social control: how to maintain a grip on power and prevent uprisings?
Consensual mechanisms of social control are breaking down as authoritarian, dictatorial and neo-fascist systems of political domination spread. Twenty-first century fascism, in my view, involves a triangulation of transnational capital with reactionary and repressive state power and a fascist mobilisation in civil society. It is a project that seeks to channel mass insecurity and social anxiety away from their source in a global capitalism in crisis and redirect it towards the Other, whether other countries, ethnicities, immigrants and refugees, religious minorities, and so on.
This generates an explosive situation — tinderboxes that can go off at a moment’s notice. Look at the anti-immigrant riots that broke out in Britain this past summer. Who was doing the rioting were poor, unemployed white proletarians. Hyper-nationalism is always a characteristic of fascism, as are racism, scapegoating and hyper-masculinisation. Frighteningly, elements among the TCC are now coming on board the fascist project. Donald Trump and Elon Musk are both billionaire racists and fascists and, as we saw, Musk — acting as shadow US co-president — has openly endorsed the Alternative for Germany and other far-right and neo-fascist forces in Europe and around the world.
The agenda of the TCC is to use the state machinery to consummate the neoliberal counterrevolution of the past half century, to liberate capital from any remaining constraints. In the US, a new bloc of capital is emerging that brings together Silicon Valley with the Pentagon and Wall Street — that is, tech, finance and the military industrial complex, along with the medical-industrial complex and energy.
At the same time, the post-World War II international order is cracking up. We are experiencing a radical reconfiguration of global geopolitical alignments to the drumbeat of escalating financial turbulence and political chaos. Yet the crisis of hegemony in the international order takes place within a single, integrated global economy.
We need to be clear: emerging global capitalist pluralism may offer greater manoeuvring room for popular struggles around the world, but a politically multipolar world does not mean that emerging poles of global capitalism are any less exploitative or oppressive than established centres. An anti-imperialism that supports one centre of global capitalist power over another is an anti-imperialism of fools.
Ecological holocaust
We face a collapse of the biosphere. Each round of expansion of world capitalism has been more catastrophic than prior ones for the planetary ecosystem. Artificial intelligence and the digital revolution now underway promises to bring about a massive new wave of expansion with a devastating impact on the biosphere.
Capitalism by its very nature requires perpetual expansion, endless growth, endless accumulation. Halting expansion, or the call by environmentalists for degrowth, is not an option for capital. Now the frontiers of appropriation are closing. They are becoming exhausted. The infinite process of capital accumulation is running up against the finite character of the biosphere.
Concluding comments: Options for resistance
This analysis has been sombre. But the more we understand the beast of global capitalism, the better we are equipped to confront it. An objective analysis is a crucial part of devising our fightback in these times of epochal crisis.
A global revolt has been underway for some time. Unrest is escalating everywhere. Mass disaffection is simmering below the surface. As I mentioned, the whole world is a tinderbox. The ruling groups fear mass uprisings. They have been preparing for them, expanding the global police state and criminalising dissent and resistance. In sum, global capitalism’s extermination impulse will be restrained only to the extent that we resist. Never has the slogan, “resist to exist,” been more opportune and appropriate.
By way of conclusion, I would like to quote a very brief passage from my book on the global crisis that will be released later this year (Epochal Crisis: The Exhaustion of Global Capitalism, Cambridge University Press):
There is a rapid political polarisation in global society between poorly organised and ideologically inchoate counterhegemonic forces and an increasingly well-organised far right as the centre collapses. There have been sustained bursts of global protest around the world, coming in waves, first at the turn of century with the rise of the global justice movement, then in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse, and then again on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic. The global revolt, however, has spread unevenly and faces many challenges, including fragmentation, absorption by capitalist culture, and for the most part the lack of a coherent left ideology and a vision of a transformative project beyond immediate demands.
If capitalist crises are times of great upheavals and suffering for millions of people, they also shatter complacency and activate mass struggles. How to develop the subjective and organisational conditions that would allow the mass of oppressed humanity to take advantage of the objective reality of the epochal crisis of global capitalism to push forward anti-capitalist emancipatory projects? The most remarkable, and despairing, aspect of the global revolt is the absence, for the most part, of organised left leadership that could amalgamate within and beyond borders the diverse movements into a program for confronting global capitalism with an emancipatory project of transformation.
Yet a socialist-oriented left that could give some direction to the mass revolts should not and could not be anything like the twentieth century worldwide socialist left, with its debilitating top-down vanguardism and patriarchal authoritarianism. When the left has come to power in recent years through institutional means it has too often acted to contain popular struggles, as we have seen in the so-called Pink Tide in Latin America. In power it has tended to accommodate itself to transnational capital by absorbing rebellion into the capitalist state and the hegemonic order, acting as transmission belts for the structural power of transnational capital and neutering the anti-systemic potential of one uprising after another.
What a renewal of the left could or should involve is a discussion for elsewhere. I believe we do need political organisations that cannot be collapsed into social movements as well as the inverse — mass social movements autonomous of political parties and independent of states. Any renovated left would have to rethink the relationship between social movements, political organisations and states, and how it could play the role of articulating the struggles and demands of the popular classes, bringing them to the political arena without commandeering them, much less subordinating them to the institutions of the capitalist state
We cannot transform the world by simply occupying the capitalist state and expecting that this state can be used to overthrow the rule of capital and transform society from above. On the other hand, we cannot simply ignore the question of state power, yet in the larger picture the only justification for occupying the capitalist state is to destabilise and dismantle it from within. We have a lot to learn from Rojava, with its model of Democratic Confederalism, from the Zapatistas, and other such experiments in local emancipatory struggles that place bottom-up autonomy and the struggle against patriarchy at the front and centre. But also there is a lot to debate. Autonomy and popular power at the local level is of critical importance but we cannot leave the macro levels and the states that dominate them free of anti-capitalist, anti-systemic challenges. The two need to come together as we try to figure out the balance between developing local, autonomous popular power and challenging the capitalist state in its own space.