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The Global Police State

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Highlights

the inner workings of the capitalist system have remained constant over the centuries. These include the relentless drives to endlessly accumulate capital (to maximize profit) and to expand outwardly. — location: 202 ^ref-16244

in response to global crisis, the system is at this time undergoing a new round of transformations, involving the construction of a global police state. — location: 209 ^ref-23731

global capitalist culture of corporate brands, consumerism, and a narcissistic individualism. — location: 262 ^ref-61556

capitalist system cannot be sustained through market relations alone. Capitalism requires the state in order to function. — location: 283 ^ref-63761

States have to generate the conditions for transnational capital accumulation, and this means not only assuring a favorable climate for making profit but also repressing any threat to the rule of capital. — location: 293 ^ref-6764

national governments do not exercise the transnational political authority that global capitalism requires. — location: 297 ^ref-60291

one of the most explosive contradictions of global capitalism is the contradictory mandate that national governments have. They must promote the conditions for global capital accumulation in their territories and at the same time they must secure their legitimation through “the nation.” — location: 305 ^ref-62709

The worldwide mesh of transnational finance capital has its tentacles in every nook and cranny of the global economy and shapes the lives of every person on the planet. As we shall see, it is deeply enmeshed with the global police state. — location: 318 ^ref-60654

the global power elite “doesn’t produce recommendations but rather instructions which they expect to be followed.” — location: 341 ^ref-36433

global economy is acquiring the character of a planned oligopoly, with centralized planning taking place within the inner network of TNC nodes, TNS apparatuses, and the global elite forums that Phillips and others have documented. — location: 356 ^ref-38857

globalization involved a massive new round of primitive accumulation around the world, throwing hundreds of millions more into the ranks of surplus humanity subject to the control of an expanding global police state. — location: 375 ^ref-37040

The capitalist system is by its nature expansionary. In each earlier structural crisis, the system went through a new round of extensive expansion—that is, incorporating new territories and populations into it—from waves of colonial conquest in earlier centuries, to the integration in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries of the former socialist bloc countries, China, India and other areas that had been marginally outside the system. — location: 405 ^ref-18692

There are no longer any new territories to integrate into world capitalism. — location: 409 ^ref-53339

Capitalism by its nature must constantly expand intensively by commodifying more and more of the world. What is there left to commodify? Where can the system now expand? New spaces have to be violently cracked open and the peoples in these spaces must be repressed by a global police state. — location: 413 ^ref-37457

Nation-states face a contradiction between the need to promote transnational capital accumulation in their territories and their need to achieve political legitimacy. — location: 431 ^ref-59140

governments must attract to the national territory transnational corporate and financial investment, which requires providing capital with all the incentives associated with neo-liberalism—downward pressure on wages, deregulation, low or no taxes, privatization, fiscal austerity, and on so— that aggravate inequality, impoverishment, and insecurity for working and popular classes. As a result, states around the world have been experiencing spiraling crises of legitimacy. — location: 432 ^ref-7667

there is a contradiction between the accumulation function and the legitimacy function of nation-states. — location: 436 ^ref-61810

public governance at the local, national, regional, and international levels has weakened. — location: 478 ^ref-9816

immediate and particular profit-seeking interests over the long-term or general interests of the class. — location: 494 ^ref-64755

the social crisis is decidedly not a crisis for capital, and may even help it to reproduce its rule, until or unless it leads to mass rebellion that threatens the ruling groups’ control. — location: 501 ^ref-555

The rise to hegemony of transnational finance capital is a major historical development of the globalization epoch. — location: 654 ^ref-31312

capitalist state finance has been reconfigured to reduce or even eliminate the state’s role in social reproduction and to expand its role in facilitating transnational capital accumulation. — location: 674 ^ref-28415

The toxic mixture of public finance and private transnational finance capital in this age of global capitalism constitutes a new battlefield in which the global rich are waging a war against the global poor and working classes. — location: 681 ^ref-35636

Yet the enormous cash reserves and profits accumulated in the tech sector do not represent the production of new value so much as the appropriation by digital capitalists of the lion’s share of surplus value through rents. — location: 821 ^ref-6389

As every area of the economy becomes increasingly integrated with a digital layer, the companies that control the digital infrastructure become immensely powerful and are able to reap a growing portion of total corporate profits in what appears, in significant part, to be rents. — location: 831 ^ref-29430

If such savage inequalities keep the TCC up at night, they impose untold hardships on billions of people who face daily struggles for survival and uncertain futures. — location: 884 ^ref-32420

“the central criterion for class formation is the capacity of a social formation or a constellation of them for self-organization and self-representation”41— that is, to forge some sense of a shared identity and a community. — location: 1100 ^ref-30130

above all, secondary exploitation takes place through the contraction of debt that must be paid back with interest. — location: 1128 ^ref-43235

This poverty industry preys in particular on the most vulnerable within the precariat, such as immigrants, racially oppressed communities, single mothers, the handicapped, informal sector workers, and the un- and underemployed, for whom “debt has become the last hope for avoiding, reducing, or at least delaying the pain of marginalization.” — location: 1139 ^ref-3958

the “millennial generation” is the first to be born into a digital world in which precarious work is becoming the norm and which could become normalized in the absence of a class-conscious movement against precariatization. — location: 1204 ^ref-859

that the “revolutionary energy [of this young digital proletariat] is spent elsewhere—on computer games, porn, gambling, endless forms of intoxication to escape the reality of the working day.” — location: 1228 ^ref-61303

Many young people continue to place their hopes on higher education to escape the fate of the precariat, but training is becoming more and more disconnected from income. — location: 1252 ^ref-61060

it is only when hegemony breaks down that ruling groups rely on the direct coercion of the state’s repressive apparatuses and private organs of violence. — location: 1456 ^ref-34339

The more mass capitalist culture infects the thinking and attitudes of the population the less the dominant groups must resort to use harsher forms of coercion to sustain their rule. — location: 1465 ^ref-20900

The omnipresent media and cultural apparatuses of the corporate economy, along with capitalist schooling, aim to colonize the mind—to impose a dull uniformity, to numb the senses, to pacify and undermine the ability to think critically or outside the dominant worldview. In this sense, it is thoroughly totalitarian. — location: 1468 ^ref-9187

Incarceration increasingly serves, as Bauman argues, as “an alternative to employment: a way to dispose of, or to neutralize a considerable chunk of the population who are not needed as producers.”100 In the United States, the imprisoned population is made up of the poorest and most excluded sector of the population. — location: 1484 ^ref-42891

More than half of all prisoners did not hold full-time jobs at the time of their arrest. Two-thirds came from households whose annual income amounted to less than half the poverty line, and more than half were Latino or black, although these groups accounted for only 25 percent of the general population. — location: 1488 ^ref-44231

“When considering the economic costs of mass incarceration,” notes Jay, “it is essential to keep in mind the benefits to capital provided by punitive policies that reduce social protest and coerce workers into accepting lower wages.” — location: 1490 ^ref-36738

Once masses of people are no longer needed on a long-term and even permanent basis, there arises the political problem of how to control this expanded mass of surplus humanity. — location: 1511 ^ref-53767

In 2017, some 15 percent of inmates in federal and state prisons performed work for such companies as Boeing, Starbucks, and Victoria’s Secret, — location: 1990 ^ref-33541

In Colorado, for instance, some 1,600 prisoners in 2014 were employed by private companies manufacturing furniture, in the dairy industry, car repair, landscaping, and the military industry, making less than one dollar an hour. — location: 1992 ^ref-30266

day some 400,000 people in the United States are held in jail awaiting trial. — location: 2017 ^ref-50080

Israel, meanwhile, perhaps more than any other country in the world exhibits an entire economy and political-colonial system predicated on militarized accumulation. — location: 2288 ^ref-8713

The country is at the very heart of the global police state, listed by the Global Militarization Index as “the most militarized nation in the world.” — location: 2290 ^ref-17231

The secret to securing this niche, notes Israeli researcher Jeff Halper, is the use of Occupied Palestinian Territory as a laboratory for testing these weapons, security, and intelligence systems and technologies so that they can be marketed globally as “combat tested.” — location: 2303 ^ref-26599

sum, absent a change of course forced on the system by mass mobilization and popular struggle from below, mounting crisis will push militarized accumulation and accumulation by repression into more and more spaces in the global economy and society. — location: 2395 ^ref-58853

If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions. — location: 2423 ^ref-42672

In this age of globalized capitalism, there is little possibility in the United States or elsewhere of providing such benefits, so that the “wages of fascism” now appear to be entirely psychological. In this regard, the ideology of twenty-first-century fascism rests on irrationality—a promise to deliver security and restore stability that is emotive, not rational. It is a project that does not and need not distinguish between the truth and the lie. — location: 2582 ^ref-753

the fact that global capitalism is producing chronic stagnation, widespread corruption, and a free fall into authoritarianism). — location: 2856 ^ref-60571

The political and economic elite, if they are unable to stabilize capitalism through moderate reform, will be all too willing to turn to authoritarianism and neo-fascism to secure capitalist control. — location: 2865 ^ref-54111

To beat back the descent into global police state and twenty-first-century fascism, we need to bring together the multiplicity of fragmented struggles, which requires moving beyond identitarian and “folk” politics. — location: 2933 ^ref-7334

subordinating the popular agenda to winning elections will only set us up for defeat, even if we must participate in electoral processes when possible and expedient, and even as the electoral arena may be a strategic space of struggle. — location: 2998 ^ref-44296

once a left force wins government office (which is not the same as state power … state power is imposed structurally by transnational capital), — location: 3001 ^ref-22694

The matter is one of the ability of autonomous mass social movements from below to force states to undertake transformations that challenge the prerogatives of transnational capital. — location: 3009 ^ref-7203

“The Network of Global Corporate Control,” — location: 3053 ^ref-63805