William I Robinson: The global meaning of Gaza

First published at ZNet.

One of the hallmarks of radical social science is to place the “noisy abode” of headlines and the swirl of current events in a larger historical and structural context that give them deeper meaning. The genocide in Gaza and the repression and criminalization of Palestine solidarity on and off U.S. university campuses and around the world tell a larger story of global capitalist crisis. The absolute savagery of the unfolding genocide has touched a raw nerve throughout the world precisely because it brings home the high stakes involved as the dynamics of global crisis play out, from Kenya to Argentina, from France to the United States, from Bangladesh to Nigeria.

Structurally this crisis is one of overaccumulation. Chronic stagnation places mounting pressure on the political and military agents of transnational capital to crack open new spaces of accumulation. At the same time, these agents have to contain rebellion from below brought about by mounting discontent with the global status quo. But the crisis is as much political as it is economic. Rising inequality, impoverishment, and insecurity for working and popular classes after decades of social decay wrought by neoliberalism undermine state legitimacy, destabilize national political systems, jeopardize elite control, and give impetus to the rise of a neofascist Right. The Ukraine and Gaza wars along with the New Cold War between Washington and Beijing are accelerating the violent crackup of the post-WWII international system.

The crisis of social reproduction is particularly acute. The past half century of capitalist globalization has involved a very profound and ongoing restructuring and transformation of world capitalism that has involved a vast new round of primitive accumulation and expulsions around the world. Hundreds of millions of people have been displaced from the countryside of the former Third World and by deindustrialization in the former First World. The ranks of surplus labor, of those structurally excluded and relegated to the margins of existence, now number in the billions. The level of inequality worldwide is unprecedented. One percent of humanity controls 52 percent of the world’s wealth and 20 percent of humanity controls 95 percent while the remaining 80 percent has to make do with just five percent of that wealth. Billions of people cannot survive as social disintegration spreads. Whole regions and countries are collapsing. Millions more face displacement by conflict, climate change, economic collapse, and political, ethnic and religious persecution.

Surplus capital finds its alter ego in surplus labor as crises of overaccumulation expand the two antagonistic poles of this dialectical unity. The process of capitalist development “constantly produces and produces in direct ratio of its own energy and extent, a relatively redundant population of laborers, i.e., a population of greater extent that suffices for the average needs of the self-expansion of capital, and therefore a surplus-population,” famously noted Marx in Capital. “This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation” (emphasis in original). Decades of globalization and neoliberalism have relegated great masses of people around the world to marginal existence. In the coming years new technologies based on automation, machine learning and artificial intelligence combined with displacement generated by conflict, economic collapse, and climate change will exponentially increase the ranks of surplus humanity. In this age of global capitalism the system produces an historically unprecedented multiplication of surplus humanity; people who are proletarianized to be sure, but too numerous to be useful to capital as a reserve army, unable to consume, restless and on the move. They must be contained through the global police state whose contingent end game is extermination.

There is no more potent and tragic symbol of the fate of surplus humanity than the genocide now being perpetrated by Israel. The Palestinian proletariat in Gaza ceased serving as cheap labor for the Israeli economy when the blockade was imposed in 2007 and the territory became a vast, open-air concentration camp. Of no use to Israeli and transnational capital, Gazans stand in the way of global capitalist expansion in the Middle East and are entirely disposable. The October 7, 2023, Palestinian resistance attack came just as Israel and Saudi Arabia were to normalize relations, which in turn was supposed to stabilize the Middle East, deepen the Israeli-Arab regional economic integration that has taken off in recent years, and pave the way for a new round of transnational corporate and financial investment throughout the region.

While the attack put a temporary hold on those plans, the Israeli government, even in the midst of the genocide, set about granting licenses to transnational energy companies for gas and oil exploration off Gaza’s Mediterranean coast while Israeli real estate companies advertised for the construction of luxury homes in bombed out Gaza neighborhoods, and others spoke of resuscitating the Ben Gurion Canal Project. Donald Trump’s son in law, Jared Kushner has openly talked about seizing prime beachfront real estate in Gaza. In the larger picture, the siege appears as a form of primitive accumulation through genocide.

Capital’s extermination impulse

If these are the particular historical circumstances that constitute the background to the Gaza war, they also help us understand how the world-historic conjuncture of globalization and crisis can activate capital’s always-latent potential for extermination. Gaza and other such spaces around the world must be cleared for capitalist expansion. The ruling class fear mass uprisings in the face of ongoing and growing popular protest. Gaza is a microcosm and extreme manifestation of ruling class strategies to create new geographies of containment and butchery of surplus populations that stand in the way of transnational capitalist appropriation and expansion.

Gaza as a giant open-air concentration camp may be an extreme case of managing surplus humanity yet such mega-prison geographies are spreading around the world. In 2023, the Salvadoran government inaugurated its draconian mega-prison, Center for the Confinement of Terrorism, the largest in the world, locking up 40,000 prisoners, virtually all of them young, unemployed and impoverished. If Gaza shows us the extermination option, El Salvador provided a model of control over surplus labor based on manipulating insecurity and inducing fear in the face of crime and social violence, themselves the consequence of chronic poverty, unemployment and deprivation.

Mega-prisons as a method of containing surplus humanity has spread very rapidly. After the Salvadoran prison was opened, Brazil, China, Turkey, Thailand, the Philippines, and India, among other countries, announced similar plans for prisons holding tens of thousands of people. Between 2016 and 2021 construction began in Turkey on no less than 137 new prisons. In Sri Lanka the government announced in 2021 plans to build a 200-acre prison complex that would allow 100,000 people to be detained across the country – more than three times the prison population in that year. Egypt announced that year it would soon open a new prison to lock up 30,000 people. While there were already some 200 private for-profit prisons around the world, many of those under construction were to be “public-private partnerships,” with corporations contracted to build and run prisons – for a handsome profit, of course.

Paramilitary insurgencies and multinational military deployments have displaced upwards of seven million people in the Congo in recent years, most of them in the Eastern provinces, with the aim of opening up access to the country’s vast mineral resources, including abundant deposits of gold, diamonds, silver, cobalt, coltan, tin, oil, gas and more. Often reported as ethnic conflict or struggles among local factions for political control, these are proximate causes of transnational wars by capitalists and states to seize resources in which twin dimensions of the global police state merge: militarized accumulation, or accumulating capital and seizing resources through war and conquest, and accumulation by repression, or accumulating capital by mass repression of the working and popular classes.

Borders become less physical markers of territory than axes around which intensive control over those expelled is organized. They are ever more militarized. In the half century of capitalist globalization, no less than 63 border walls have been built worldwide to lock in or keep out surplus humanity. Along with repression meted out by states, transnational migrants are subject to the predation of human traffickers, slavers, drug cartels and other criminal gangs. Borders between national jurisdictions become war zones and zones of death. The US border patrol reported more than 7000 deaths at the Mexico/US border from 1998 to 2023, likely a great underestimate since it does not take into account those whose bodies were not recovered or the many who have died making the long journey through Central America and Mexico. The figures for deaths in the Mediterranean are shocking – more than 20,000 drowned or disappeared from 2014 to 2023.

Gaza, the Congo, and other such hellscapes are real-time alarm bells that genocide may become a powerful tool in the decades to come for resolving capital’s intractable contradiction between surplus capital and surplus humanity. Simply put, political chaos and chronic instability can create conditions quite favorable for capital. It is difficult not to heed the wakeup call as working-class populations abandoned by parties that once represented them turn to ethnonationalist ideologies and charismatic personages, as the global police state perfects its mechanisms of surveillance and repression with the aid of more and more sophisticated technologies, and as our communities continue to be pillaged and scorched, rendering the planet increasingly uninhabitable for vast swathes of the world’s population.

This is the “big picture” behind the intifada of solidarity with Palestine that exploded on and off our campuses in recent months. University administrators viciously attacked our free speech and academic freedom, calling in police and paramilitary forces to violently repressed peaceful student protests. But they were not acting alone. They were responding to the threat represented by the tidal wave of solidarity with Palestine to the interests of transnational corporate capital and the capitalist state, especially a military-industrial-security-intelligence-big tech complex. Research universities are heavily funded by corporations that are in turn intertwined with the state’s military, security, and intelligence agencies. My own campus, the University of California at Santa Barbara, receives multimillion dollar funding from Northup Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Caterpillar, Hewlett Packard, and so on, in coordination with state agencies. These corporations invest heavily in Israel, including partnering with the Israeli Defense Forces to develop and deploy the military hardware and technology used in the genocide.

The demand by student and faculty protesters that our universities divest from these corporations is a direct threat to the interests of the transnational capitalist class (TCC). It should be no surprise that a consort of multimillionaires and billionaires in New York City instructed Mayor Eric Adams to send police to storm Columbia and other campuses in that city. The CEO of Palantir, Alex Karp, made clear the very high stakes that the TCC believed were at play in the protests. Palantir, a multi-billion-dollar high technology corporation based in Silicon Valley, signed an agreement in early 2024 with the Israeli Ministry of Defense to supply the Israeli Defense Forces with artificial intelligence and other digital technologies that were used in the Gaza genocide. “College campus protests are not a side show. They are the show,” said Karp. “If we lose the intellectual battle, we will not be able to deploy any army in the West, ever.”

William I. Robinson is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. This is a modified version of an article that appeared in the summer 2024 newsletter of the Global and Transnational Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association.