Capitalism’s lease on the future is more uncertain than ever before. Just a few months into 2024, we have witnessed ongoing war in Ukraine, a genocide in Gaza, a failing state in Haiti, the continuous rise in global temperatures and slow growth. Faced with growing food and housing prices, stagnant wages and layoffs, even the more materially privileged classes of the Global North are losing their faith in the capitalist system.

While the future is uncertain, two things are not: class struggle will intensify, and the ruling classes will continue their quest for profits by any means necessary. This is why we need to understand our unique material conditions and take stock of what we are up against. For these reasons, William I. Robinson’s work is indispensable. For the past three decades, he has been writing about the economic, social, and political features of the crisis we find ourselves living through, and why it’s a perfect storm of uncertainty and chaos both for us—the global working class—and for our class enemies. In this interview, Robinson provides insight into the crises that confront us, how our capitalist overlords are scrambling to respond, and the possibilities for the liberatory visions and movements we so desperately need.

William I. Robinson is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology, Global and International Studies, and Latin American and Iberian Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. His books include: Can Global Capitalism Endure? (2022), Global Civil War: Capitalism Post Pandemic (2022), The Global Police State (2020), Into the Tempest: Essays on the New Global Capitalism (2018), Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity (2014), Latin America and Global Capitalism: A Critical Globalization Perspective (2008), A Theory of Global Capitalism: ​​Production, Class and State in a Transnational World (2004), and Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, U.S. Intervention and Hegemony (1996), A Faustian Bargain: U.S. Intervention in the Nicaraguan Elections and American Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era (1992). He has also written articles, commentaries, and book chapters on politics, economics, and globalization, and has worked for many years with social justice movements in Latin America and the United States. His books and articles can be accessed through his website: https://robinson.faculty.soc.ucsb.edu

Zhandarka Kurti (Rail): I would like to start off by asking you about your own political development and how it shaped your writing about global capitalism.

William I. Robinson: I became politicized at a young age, growing up in New York and being around local community struggles. But in 1977, at the age of eighteen, I left the United States for West and East Africa and it was there that I was introduced to Marxism, socialism, communism, and revolution. My radicalization was profoundly influenced by my mentors, who were deeply involved in the struggle against colonialism, and then again in the struggle against neo-colonialism and the new African rulers. In fact, two of them ended up spending years in detention for their political activities. So, my experiences in Africa were my real political awakening. Right around the time I was getting ready to leave Africa, the Sandinista revolution was breaking out in Nicaragua. That was mid-1979, a vital time for massive political struggles worldwide. 1979 was the year of the Iranian Revolution and it was also the year the tiny island nation of Grenada had a revolution. There were calls for a new international economic order by the former Third World nations. In the 1970s, it wasn’t clear where things were headed. I considered myself a revolutionary and I wanted to participate in revolution, so I got as quickly as I could from West Africa to Nicaragua. I managed to get there shortly after the triumph itself and spent the 1980s in Nicaragua and around the struggles in Central America. I returned to the United States in the 1990s to get a doctoral degree but for another decade, until 2001, I was living between the US and Central America.

It was really my experience in the Sandinista revolution that shaped me politically and intellectually. In the 1990s, I tried to assess why the Nicaraguan revolution failed and US policy was successful. Why did other Central American revolutions not take place? I also tried to locate these questions in the larger story of how the worldwide offensive of working-class revolt in the 1960s and 1970s was pushed back. This is what led me to theorize a new historic stage of world capitalism: globalization and global capitalism. I concluded that the 1970s were a turning point in global capitalism in which the ruling classes in the global North, and especially in the United States, realized that that the constellation of social, political, and class forces was becoming unfavorable to capital, an assessment that led them to launch their counter-offensive, to restructure world capitalism. The next big crisis was 2008 with the global financial collapse. We are still in the midst of this last crisis.

Rail: What happened structurally to capitalism in the 1970s?

Robinson: Capitalism by its very internal dynamics produces crisis. Mainstream economists like to identify external, exogenous events that produce crises. And they say that if you didn’t have those external events then you wouldn’t have a crisis. But that’s a lot of nonsense. Built into the capital system is the dynamic in which the rate of profit will go down and down and down unless there are countervailing forces, other things that happen that lift the profit rate back up again. In the 1970s we had a crisis of accumulation based on the declining rate of profit. This is not my original research, my empirical work, and theorizing deals more with the 2008 crisis. But pretty much everyone agrees that the rate of profit was going down, so that capital is not going to continue to invest. Because why invest when your profit rate is going down and down?

But the other thing going on was the mass struggles worldwide. Some examples include the anti-colonial and national liberation struggles of the former Third World as well as Black liberation, Chicano liberation, women’s liberation, and the anti-war movement in the United States. And you have these mass struggles unfolding worldwide from Paris to Mexico City. So, it’s not just a structural crisis for capital but there is a deep crisis of political hegemony and legitimacy which we also have right now but under different conditions. So, all of this is the context of the Powell memorandum. Lewis F. Powell, Jr. who then went on to become an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, said that we need a radical offensive against the working and popular classes. You have this capitalist mobilization which takes off in the 1980s with the Volcker shock in which the US treasury substantially increased interest rates. And that was done intentionally, because it meant Third World countries that have this massive debt must pay much more debt back. So, the calls for a new international economic order and all these alternative or anti-capitalist, or at least different types of capitalist projects, in the former Third World are not going to be viable. And that gets the Third World back in line. Of course, here in the so-called First World, including Europe and especially the United States, there’s this offensive against the working class. So de-industrialization in the North and that industry goes to the South, where it is not unionized, and later industry leaves the country altogether.

Capital does recover its rate of profit and its ability to accumulate with the globalization boom of the late 1980s into the 1990s; even into the twenty-first century, there’s still new opportunities for accumulation and growth. But then 2008 hits, after which stagnation seems to be chronic. The ruling groups once again become alarmed about how to get out of this structural crisis.

Rail: One of the key contributions you have made in the last three decades is to argue that an important consequence of capitalism “going global” in the 1970s was the creation of a new class: the transnational ruling class. Can you say more about this class formation? If it’s not connected to any one nation state, how does it govern? What has been its role in the restructuring of global capitalism?

Robinson: This has been a key point of debate around my work and that of those that think like me. And it’s really important. I have been demonstrating empirically that the leading fractions of capitalist classes worldwide have integrated across borders which gave rise to the transnational capitalist class. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t capitalists that are still very local, regional, or national. But the hegemonic fraction of capital worldwide is transnational capital, what I call the transnational capitalist class, or the TCC. Class groups can go global thanks to new communications and information technologies, especially the internet. They have been able to bring into being a globally integrated production and financial system. The new technologies allow the TCC to put in place a new global economy synchronized in real time. Hence the iconic image of the global assembly line as well as the opening up of the global market through free trade agreements, deregulation, privatization, and liberalization. Neoliberalism is the class project of the TCC.

The TCC is that group of capitalists who own and manage the transnational corporations and financial conglomerates that drive the global economy. It really gives them an unprecedented class power over the global working and popular classes, but also a newfound structural power over states.

The argument that the commanding heights of capital are still organized nationally and pursue their national interests in competition with other national capitalist classes is an outdated one. It does not correspond to empirical reality. What we consider to be the leading US-based corporations, Indian-based corporations, German-based corporations, Brazilian-based, or even Chinese-based corporations (although China is a special case due to the relationship of private capital to the state), they’re fully transnational. I mean this in two ways. It’s not just that they operate all around the world or drive the global economy but that in doing so they merge and integrate with capitals from multiple countries, they become denationalized to a significant extent. And here we must emphasize the global financial system, which is the most integrated, most fluid dimension of the whole global economy. Finance zips around the world instantaneously. It has literally completely annihilated space through time. So, what may seem like different corporations in the US, India, Germany, etc. are integrated through this financial system.

Now, I must add that geopolitical competition is intensifying and reaching extremely dangerous dimensions. One of the gravest threats we face is that of World War III. The United States has instigated Russia into invading Ukraine. That’s a dangerous conflict. It is instigating a new Cold War with China. But here’s the key thing: those that don’t want to see the transnationalization of capital imagine that, for instance, the US and China, their capitalist classes, are in competition with one another. But this is not the case empirically, rather interstate competition is intensifying, and I’ve spoken to that in my recent books, including my two most recent, Global Civil War: Capitalism Post-Pandemic (2022) and Can Global Capitalism Endure? (2022) I also discussed it in a recent lengthy interview with the journal LINKS.¹

So, we need to see this contradiction in which capital has become transnational, whereas the political organization of world capitalism, political authority and domination, are still based in an interstate system involving about two-hundred countries and two-hundred states that need to reproduce their own internal orders and social formations.

Rail: I appreciate you bringing up this contradiction. It’s easy to get pulled into the state-level analysis because that seems more immediate in our day-to-day lives. But by doing so we—and here I mean leftists, activists, revolutionaries—forfeit a deeper understanding of the global picture. Why should leftists and anti-capitalist revolutionaries concern themselves with what the transnational ruling class is up to?

Robinson: That’s a good question. We must see that the project of the transnational capitalist class is precisely what we have been fighting against for the last thirty years. For example, free trade agreements that open up every country in the world to plunder by transnational corporate capital is a project which has been organized by the transnational capitalist class. This is because transnational capital needs free, easy, and safe access to the whole world, and that means access to labor, resources, and land to plunder. And making it safe means imposing a global police state, right? And we’ve been fighting the global police state, systems of transnational social control and repression of workers and social movements. So, everything that the left has been fighting the last thirty to forty years is specifically the project of the transnational capitalist class and especially of transnational finance. That’s why this is so important. We must understand our enemy.

And there’s one other thing I’ll add here: we are also up against rising fascism. The biggest reason why fascism is rising today is that there is a backlash against capitalist globalization, which has thrown hundreds of millions, billions of people into extreme insecurity and daily struggles for survival, and the left hasn’t been able to respond to that in a viable way. The liberal center is bankrupt and collapsing. Mass immiseration is very fertile ground for recruiting a social base for fascist projects. We need to understand the link between the transnational capitalist class and their project of capitalist globalization and how it has generated the conditions for a fascist project. So really understanding the restructuring of world capitalism in the last thirty to forty years is essential for the left to fight back.

Rail: In your book, Global Civil War: Capitalism Post-Pandemic (2022), you argue that the pandemic has accelerated the crisis of capitalism and capitalist rule specifically. Can you briefly explain what you mean by this and why it’s important?

Robinson: Briefly, the pandemic resulted in an acceleration of global inequalities and enhanced the power of transnational capital. It produced a massive transfer of wealth upwards towards the transnational capitalist class and the “billionaire class.” It allowed the leading fractions of capital worldwide, especially big tech and the financial conglomerates, along with the military-industrial and the medical-pharmaceutical industrial complexes that are integrated with it, to deploy what are known as fourth-industrial-revolution technologies just now coming online in a very big way, led by artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the collection, processing, and analysis of vast amounts of digitized data known as big data. In a nutshell, the transnational capitalist class is undertaking a vast new round of global economic and social restructuring based on these technologies. We can highlight how these technologies are deployed in ways that allow the ruling groups to greatly step up their systems of mass surveillance, social control, and repression. It enhances the predatory abilities of capital. Here I am summarizing a more complex argument developed in the book.

Rail: As even transnational ruling elites are themselves discussing, this crisis is multi-dimensional. In 2023, the World Economic Forum adopted the word “polycrisis” to highlight the geopolitical, environmental, and sociopolitical risks. One of the alarming headlines that caught my attention at the time was one that read: “’We’re on the Brink of a ‘Polycrisis’ – How Worried Should We Be?” A year later, it seems that there is no shortage of crises: war, genocide, climate catastrophes, and slow growth. Can you say more about what this “polycrisis” looks like and what it means for the legitimacy of the transnational ruling class and of the capitalist system in general?

Robinson: The report you mention is important because the transnationally oriented fraction of the global political elite is especially clustered in the World Economic Forum. The transnational capitalist class is integrated and embedded in the whole global economy and global markets, not in national economies and national markets. But transnational capitalists are not necessarily politically engaged. They just want to maximize profit all around the world. So, there’s this politicized leadership of the transnational capitalist class which I call the global ruling class. They do the political and strategic thinking for the transnational capitalist class and for global capitalism. They are well organized through all these transnational forums. And the most important really has been up until now, the World Economic Forum, which as you just mentioned is the author of the report on the “polycrisis.” The importance of that report is that this global ruling class, this politicized sector of the transnational ruling class, recognizes that the system faces these multiple challenges. They themselves are not clear how they’re going to manage this crisis. They recognize that it’s a crisis of stagnation, of slow growth. They don’t use Marxist language like we do, right? They don’t call it a crisis of accumulation. But they recognize that it’s an economic crisis, that it is a political crisis. Sometimes they use the term legitimacy. They recognize that it’s a deep ecological crisis. They use, of course, the capitalist buzz word of sustainability. So, they finally come aboard and recognize the crisis that I and other people have been emphasizing is getting worse and worse certainly, since 2007–2008. So that’s the importance of that report.

Rail: How much of this uncertainty is due to the lack of direction that a hegemonic power would be able to exert? Many, yourself included, have noted that today there is no clear hegemonic world power.

Robinson: For the whole history of world capitalism, going back five-hundred years, we have always had some hegemonic power. I think just about every leftist will agree that it starts with Iberian hegemony in the 1500s into the early 1600s, and then it shifts to the Dutch, the English, and then once you get into the twentieth century, the United States becomes the hegemonic power. In earlier centuries, that represented conflict among national capital classes. Lenin, in 1917, published Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism in which he very convincingly, drawing on data available, argued that World War I was national capitalist classes fighting each other for world control.

For the last couple of decades, my analysis has been that the role of the US hegemonic power was to open the world for transnational capital. It’s been the principal instrument of the transnational capitalist class in securing its class interests. Certainly, in the age of globalization, once a transnational capitalist class coheres at the end of the twentieth century, the US has used its hegemonic power to defend the interests of transnational capital all around the world, to suppress any effort from below, or of any state that resists, to challenge global capitalism. Take the US occupation of Iraq. Other countries might condemn the invasion and occupation of Iraq, but the fact is that the occupation opened Iraq to transnational investors from all over the world, including from China, the Middle East, and even Europe. Iraq is now integrated into globalized capitalism in a way that makes it available for transnational capital.

But now that begins to change, because, as you point out, the United States’ hegemonic position is falling apart. The United States cannot determine outcomes in the way it did. And every time it tries to, it ends up just making the crisis worse and worse for the ruling groups. We’re headed towards a perfect storm, into uncharted territory.

I reject the claim that Chinese capital is going to be the new hegemon because there is no empirical evidence that supports this. Unfortunately, much of the left, whether in or out of academia, still is unable to separate an analysis of the structure of global capital and the class interests of global capital from the structure of an interstate/nation-state system. That’s what I was saying earlier—you have this disjuncture between a globalizing economy and a nation-state and interstate system of political authority and domination. This disjuncture generates all sorts of contradictions, which is a big part of the story of rising geopolitical conflict.

Rail: I want to go back to the 2008 crisis. What role did transnational finance capital play and why should activists and revolutionaries familiarize themselves with what it’s doing?

Robinson: Our crisis is multidimensional. It is a crisis of state legitimacy, capitalist hegemony, and geopolitical confrontation. It is also a crisis of social reproduction. People cannot survive. Then, of course, it’s an ecological crisis. But let me focus on the first economic dimension of this crisis.

As I previously pointed out, the crisis is one of overaccumulation. So, you have this situation where the global economy produces enormous amounts of wealth and yet the global market is contracting, leading to underconsumption and overproduction. For example, in 2020, transnational corporations and banks were sitting on some 15 trillion dollars that they didn’t know where to invest. Transnational capitalists are therefore in an ever more desperate search for new investment outlets, for new opportunities to accumulate. In this search it has turned to several mechanisms.

One is what we call debt-driven growth, meaning that people do not have the income to continue to consume what they need so they turn to debt. They max out their credit cards. They can take out loans, they can refinance mortgages, right? And so, you have the highest level of consumer debt worldwide, not just in the US. You can’t keep on having debt-driven growth on the consumer side. Corporate debt is also at an all-time high. And then state debt, which is also at an all-time high, which means whole states may well collapse when they can’t pay their debt. Part of that is what’s going on in Argentina right now. The most recent figure which I had for 2023 was that global debt, those three categories surpassed 300 trillion dollars, compared to the whole global economy estimated at some 100 trillion dollars. So, you have debt-driven growth that has kept things going till now, but it can’t continue.

And then you have this new round of the state plunder of nature. And then you have the global police state which I hope we will get to because in the absence of other investment opportunities it becomes very profitable to unload surplus accumulated capital in the global police state. And lastly, we have unprecedented global financial speculation.

So, why is it important for leftists to understand global finance? Because it’s tied to everything. If we’re fighting against gentrification in our local neighborhood—that’s transnational finance capital. If we’re fighting to stop cuts on social spending, on health and education, on pensions, on community programs, that’s transitional finance capital trying to cut and instead shift those resources to itself. That’s why it’s urgent to understand transnational finance capital.

There’s two dimensions to what transnational finance capital is doing. One is this wild speculation. I mean, you can’t even wrap your mind around it. In my recent books, I have pointed out that speculation in derivatives trading worldwide is valued at a quadrillion dollars—not a billion, not a trillion, but a quadrillion—each year, and that compares again to the real economy of goods and services worldwide, which is valued at about 100 trillion. So, you have every imaginable speculative instrument—the stock market, derivatives, cryptocurrency, land, and real estate, and so on. It’s not real wealth. All it does is look like real wealth. Like right now, the stock markets are inflating once again, and the price of bitcoin is going up. But it’s not producing real goods and services that people need. And it’s not resolving any underlying structural contradictions in the system that’s generating the crisis.

The other thing that’s going on with finance, which is a bit more technical but important to understand, is that in the past forty years, finance has been constantly transformed. So, what’s happened is that any physical asset, for example a house, a forest, or anything that’s a physical asset or a real wealth asset that people need and want to consume can be financialized. What it means is that you turn it into a financial asset. You can sell it and you can buy it. That’s what happened with the mortgage crisis. Fifty years ago, I buy a house, I go to a bank. I get a mortgage. I pay that bank back for thirty years. But now I buy a house and within a day or two whoever issued me that mortgage bundles it up with another million mortgages, sells it as a financial instrument that can be bought by a financial investing company in Shanghai or in Johannesburg, and then traded, speculated on, and so forth. So that’s what financialization means at a deeper level. It means turning any and every asset into something which has a financial form that can be traded and speculated on. This represents an extreme form of commodification, a level of alienation unimaginable prior to financialization.

Right now, forest and natural resources are being financialized. And the biggest case that was in the news is a Singaporean holding company which got rights to control two million hectares of forest land in Borneo, and out of that space will be able to extract an estimated 80 billion dollars in profits.² They are taking this ecosystem and turning it into a financial instrument that can be bought and sold. So, it’s basically not just privatizing what’s left of the global commons but financializing it as a speculative instrument. And why is this important for the left? Because Indigenous groups and people that live in these areas that land grabs are going on are expelled from the land. The resources are taken away from them. They’re controlled. The global police state will be used to control them when they resist.

Rail: Speaking of which, something I find really compelling in your book, The Global Police State (2020) are all the ways in which you know the transnational ruling class is turning to war, repression, and social control to secure legitimacy in this moment of deepening capitalist crisis. Your book was published in a timely moment: the COVID pandemic and the George Floyd Rebellion. Can you say more about what you mean by the “global police state?” and why we are seeing a greater use of social control both at the local and at the global level?

Robinson: Before I get into what I mean by the global police state, I want to throw out an example: one from the highlands of Peru. One of the biggest open-pit copper mines in the world, Las Bambas, is run by Chinese-based corporations together with corporations from Europe. Indigenous people have been battling this copper mine. Some have died, others displaced from their land, their water and land are being poisoned. So, this is a massive battle of an Indigenous poor, peasant worker community against a giant mining operation run by Chinese transnational capitalists and their co-investors from other countries. Of course, the global police state comes in to maintain control and to keep the copper mine open. The global police state enters in the form of the Peruvian military and police forces. In fact, Peru has a law that a foreign corporation in the country can pay the police to come and do police work to protect their enterprise. So, the Chinese corporation has actually paid the Peruvian police to come and repress the Indigenous people trying to block the mining complex. Now, why am I raising all of this? Because in Peru there was a coup d’état against a left-oriented President Castillo in 2022, backed by the US. In the wake of that coup d’état, the US stepped up its training and supplying of the police in Peru—the same police that are then used by the Chinese corporation to protect their investments in the country. So, it’s not about one nation, or nation states against each other. It’s about transnational capital trying to get their profit. The global police state is making the copper safe and available to transnational capital. The left confuses things and says the problem is US imperialism and China is doing good in Peru. It’s not getting the picture in terms of the interest of the global proletariat and the popular classes in their struggles against transnational capitalist exploitation and oppression.

But I want to go back to what I mean by global police state. There are three different dimensions. The first is that ruling groups around the world need diverse and flexible instruments of repression, social control, and surveillance to maintain order in the face of the global revolt and crisis of global capitalism. This includes armies and police, but also private forces run by corporations. It involves mass immigrant detention centers and border walls. And it’s not just the US that is building border walls—there are more than seventy across the world. It also includes the spread of systems of mass incarceration. These systems are profitable, but they also help resolve the threat the ruling groups face from surplus populations that may revolt. The global police state also includes ideological and cultural dimensions. In fact, there are more than one-thousand different films and TV shows in the US that have come out in recent years whose production was financed and even advised by the Pentagon. The surveillance state applies such technologies as facial recognition systems. China is taking the lead in that. They’re selling their facial recognition to Israel in the occupied territory. So, sure the Western states are the ones really sponsoring the genocide in Gaza, but Chinese capitalists also have blood on their hands.

The second big dimension of the global police state is what I call militarized accumulation and accumulation by repression: in the face of stagnation in the global capitalist system, wars and conflicts, civil strike, political upheavals, all of that becomes enormously profitable. So, it’s no surprise that the military, industrial, financial, technological, complex really welcomes this Russian invasion of Ukraine because it allowed for billions of dollars in profits. A Morgan Stanley official I quoted in my last article on Gaza, said that the siege of Gaza “seems to fit quite nicely with [their] portfolio.” But it’s not just that. It’s that all these different dimensions of the global police state are profitable. Take immigrant jails in the US, which are almost exclusively run by private companies like the GEO Group and CoreCivic. It’s wildly profitable to lock up immigrants. So, these are just some of the countless examples of how you make profit in the face of stagnation. The global police state is big business.

Finally, “global police state” refers to the increasing turn from consensual to more coercive mechanisms of social control and domination in the face of the crisis of legitimacy and capitalist hegemony. The system faces mounting popular discontent and mass rebellion. Ruling groups are turning to authoritarianism, dictatorship, and even fascism. These new political dispensations are more willing to deploy the global police state without concern for legitimacy.

When you study these different dimensions of the global police state, you see that there are different sectors of capital that come together around it, especially the military-industrial complexes; these complexes are integrated with the tech and financial sectors. Tech is investing big time in the global police state and finance underwrites it. Capitalists from around the world invest in financial management firms such as BlackRock that are in turn heavily invested in the military-industrial complex and in big tech, as well as in mining companies that need coercive instruments to protect their operations, such as in the case of Peru that we discussed earlier.

Some of my colleagues and comrades have said to me, well, there’s other sectors of capital that could move us away from a global police state, like “green capital,” and developing renewable energy. But the problem is that green capital still relies on minerals extracted in the mining sector, in industrial processes. Those mining and industrial complexes linked to green capitalists will still be dispossessing land and exploiting workers and Indigenous communities. So green capital will also need the global police state for its social control function. So yes, we can’t get away from the need for the left to understand the global police state and how it is an instrument vital to global capitalism.

Rail: I appreciate your focus on the intensification of war, repression, and social control. However, as Gramsci argued, the ruling class cannot just turn to repression alone to secure its hegemony because that would be a suicide mission. It also must secure consent to some degree. What do you think are some of these reformist measures at the nation-state and global level? Here I am particularly thinking of Bidenomics in the US. But what about reformist projects of the transnational ruling class? And what difficulty does the growing hegemonic crisis pose to these efforts?

Robinson: An ever-expanding global police state indicates that we are seeing a worldwide breakdown of consensual mechanisms of domination. It is increasingly more and more just outright coercive domination. We’re seeing the rise of dictatorships, of authoritarian regimes, and of course, fascism. And both you and Gramsci are right that this is not a viable solution for the ruling class over the long term. You can’t stabilize your domination, and therefore the system of capitalist exploitation, on coercion alone. The fact that the system is moving more and more towards coercion, and that consensual mechanisms of social control are breaking down is a sign of how serious this crisis is. The ruling groups know that they can’t rule by coercion alone. But they need that coercion to keep the masses in check. The fact that they turn to more coercive systems of social control reflects a crisis that they don’t know how to resolve, that springs from the contradictions internal to global capitalism.

And there is a deep global revolt underway. The masses are on the move. Class consciousness is rising around the world. This should give us hope. I examined this global revolt in my book, The Global Civil War (2022). The younger generation wants a transformation of the wider system. My students are open to hearing about Socialism, Marxism. They are not scared of these terms or concepts. Some of the largest mobilizations of working and popular classes ever in recorded history have taken place in just the last few years. Look at the George Floyd rebellion in the US. Putting aside its political limitations, 25–30 million largely young people took to the streets. It was the largest single popular mobilization and uprising in the history of the Western Hemisphere, and almost at the same time there was first one and then a second general strike in India. The first brought out 150 million people, the second 250 million people. It was the single largest labor mobilization in the history of the planet, and these types of mobilizations are happening more frequently. So, there’s tremendous hope. But the main challenge remains. Where is this going? How do you coordinate this across borders? Because with global capitalism, the response must be globally coordinated. But the biggest challenge is the lack of an organized left, one that has renewed itself for the twenty-first century. Where are the revolutionary political organizations that we need to link up these mass social and worker struggles?

Rail: What threat does this global revolt pose to the ruling classes and how do you anticipate they will respond? More repression or more accommodation?

Robinson: In the 1980s counteroffensive, they managed to cobble together a Gramscian global historic bloc. Gramsci’s concept of an historic bloc is based on the argument that in order to stabilize a capitalist project over time you cannot limit yourself to meeting the interests of the ruling groups. Those groups also need to bring in some among the subordinate classes into the dominant project. This worked until the 2008 crisis.

There has been a fraction of the transnational ruling class arguing for reformism. They’re doing so not because they care about the global working class or surplus humanity but because they want to save capitalism from itself. They recognize that under the current course the whole capitalist system is under threat, and so by carrying out reforms you relieve the pressure for more radical change and try to stave off a chaotic disintegration of global capitalism.

The G20 did pass a rule that there be a 15 percent tax rate on cross-border financial transactions. And there’s others. The reformists are arguing for very strong environmental regulations and for a faster transition to renewable energies. So, there are growing voices among the transnational elites calling for substantial reform in response to this “polycrisis.” However, it hasn’t really spread. I mean, for reasons we can analyze, it hasn’t taken off. It’s not the predominant response of the ruling groups around the world. And it doesn’t really resolve anything at this point.

So, what could happen in the future? I think we are moving towards a pre—not a revolutionary, but a pre-revolutionary situation. What can we imagine in the next few years, with this mass revolt from below? In the 1930s, during the New Deal, a fraction of the ruling elite agreed to reformism to prevent radical transformation. So it’s not inconceivable that there will be a similar radical reform of global capitalism that might give the system a new lease on life for a few years. But it will never resolve the internal contradictions of capitalism.

But before that even happens, we’re facing the threat of World War III and the specter of the collapse of the biosphere. We’re not even making progress but moving backward in that regard. So that’s why I say we’re in uncharted territory. We’re in the perfect storm. We’re not headed towards it. We’re in it.

Rail: In a recent conversation, a good revolutionary friend of mine brought up a great point: what is the ruling class thinking to have Genocide Joe represent their unfolding interests?

Robinson: Well, it’s interesting. In the United States, the capitalist class is putting their eggs in both baskets, but they’ve always done that. But the political elite, which of course is the political agent and the state agent for the transnational capitalist class is extremely divided and confused. They don’t know what to do. The Koch brothers denounced Trump when he imposed tariffs that undermined some of their economic interests in 2018, but now they once again support Trump.

I’ve never claimed that the transnational capitalist class and the political elite that represents their interests are unified. They have internal differences and conflicts over everything. The only thing that unifies the transnational capitalist class is that they pursue the same objective of making sure that the whole world is open and available for transnational corporate plunder. Beyond that they have all different political and sectoral interests, and they can never be a unified, coherent force. So, if you look at these elections, the capitalist class is disunited around what to do with this crisis of legitimacy, the rise of Trumpism. They can’t resolve the conflicts raging around us. The more politically enlightened of the transnational capitalist class doesn’t want Trump at all. They fear that he’s going to cut back on the free movement of capital around the world with tariffs, populist measures, and so forth. I read the Economist, which has been around since Marx’s time, to know how the ruling class is interpreting the world. They are really scared of Trump, as are those clustered in the World Economic Forum. They don’t want a war with China. They are unified around that because they want transnational capital to have access to the entire world without state interference, including access to the Chinese market, and let’s recall that transnational capitalists from around the world are co-invested with Chinese based transnational capital.

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