Capitalism requires a state of permanent warfare to maintain accumulation and

expend surplus – turns case

Robinson 22 (William is a distinguished professor of sociology, global studies and Latin American
studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, “Global Capitalism Has Become Dependent on
War-Making to Sustain Itself,” 2022) //ae

But the provocation could not be reduced to geopolitical competition , however important, as most observers were keen
to do. Missing from the larger picture was the centrality of militarized accumulation — of endless low- and
high-intensity warfare, simmering conflicts, civil strife and policing — to the global political economy. Militarized
accumulation refers to a situation in which a global war economy relies on the state to organize war-making,
social control and repression to sustain capital accumulation in the face of chronic stagnation and
saturation of global markets. These state-organized practices are outsourced to transnational corporate
capital, involving the fusion of private accumulation with state militarization in order to sustain the process of capital accumulation. Cycles
of destruction and reconstruction provide ongoing outlets for over-accumulated capital; that is, these cycles
open up new profit-making opportunities for transnational capitalists seeking ongoing opportunities to
profitably reinvest the enormous amounts of cash they have accumulated. There is a convergence in this process of global
capitalism’s political need for social control and repression in the face of mounting popular discontent
worldwide and its economic need to perpetuate accumulation in the face of stagnation.

Wars provide critical economic stimulus. They have historically pulled the capitalist system out of
accumulation crises while they serve to deflect attention from political tensions and problems of
legitimacy. It took World War II to finally lift world capitalism out of the Great Depression. The Cold War legitimated a half century of
expanding military budgets and the Iraq/Afghanistan wars, the longest in history, helped keep the economy sputtering along in the face of
chronic stagnation in the first two decades of the century. From the anti-Communist
fervor of the Cold War, to the “war on
terror,” then the so-called New Cold War, and now the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the transnational elite, led
by Washington, have had to conjure up one enemy after another to legitimate militarized accumulation and
deflect crises of state legitimacy and capitalist hegemony onto external enemies and contrived threats.

The events of September 11, 2001, marked the start of an era of a permanent global war in which logistics,
warfare, intelligence, repression, surveillance and even military personnel are more and more the privatized
domain of transnational capital. The Pentagon budget increased 91 percent in real terms between 1998 and 2011, while
worldwide, total state military budget outlays grew by 50 percent from 2006 to 2015, from $1.4 trillion to more than $2
trillion. (This figure does not take into account the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on intelligence; contingency operations; policing; bogus
wars against immigrants, terrorism and drugs; and “homeland security.”) During this time, military-industrial complex profits
quadrupled.
However, focusing just on state military budgets only gives us a part of the picture of the global war economy. As I showed in my 2020 book,
The Global Police State, the various
wars, conflicts and campaigns of social control and repression around the world
involve the fusion of private accumulation with state militarization . In this relationship, the state facilitates the
expansion of opportunities for private capital to accumulate through militarization , such as by facilitating
global weapons sales by military-industrial-security firms, the amounts of which have reached unprecedented levels.
Global weapons sales by the top 100 weapons manufacturers and military service companies increased by 38 percent between 2002 and 2016
and can be expected to escalate further in the face of a prolonged war in Ukraine.

By 2018, private for-profit military companies employed some 15 million people around the world, while another 20 million people worked in
private security worldwide. The private security (policing) business is one of the fastest-growing economic sectors in many countries and has
come to dwarf public security around the world. The amount spent on private security in 2003, the year of the invasion of Iraq, was 73 percent
higher than that spent in the public sphere, and three times as many persons were employed in private forces as in official law enforcement
agencies. In half of the world’s countries, private security agents outnumber police officers.
These corporate soldiers and police were deployed to guard corporate property, provide personal security
for executives and their families; collect data; conduct police, paramilitary, counterinsurgency and surveillance
operations; carry out mass crowd control and repression of protesters; run private detention and interrogation
facilities; manage prisons and participate in outright warfare. Now, these same private military and security firms are pouring into Ukraine, with
some mercenary companies offering between $1,000 and $2,000 a day for those with combat experience.

The Russian invasion has accelerated but did not originate the ongoing surge in military spending around the
world. It is notable that state military spending worldwide skyrocketed in the wake of the 2008 global
financial collapse even beyond the post-9/11 spending hike, rising from about $1.5 billion in 2008 to over $2 trillion in 2022. The fact that
this explosion in spending coincides perfectly with continued worldwide stagnation following the Great Recession suggests that the
heightened militarization of the global economy is as much or more a response to this chronic stagnation
than to perceived security threats. If bursts of militarized accumulation (such as that unleashed by 9/11, then by the 2008 financial
collapse, and now by the Russian invasion) help offset the overaccumulation crisis further into the future, they are also high-
risk bets that heighten worldwide tensions and push the world dangerously towards all-out international
conflagration.

Capitalism is terminally unsustainable – social upheaval, overaccumulation, legitimacy

crises
Robinson 22 (William is a distinguished professor of sociology, global studies and Latin American
studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, “Global Capitalism Has Become Dependent on
War-Making to Sustain Itself,” 2022) //ae

The Crisis of Global Capitalism

This crisis of global capitalism is

economic, or structural, one of chronic stagnation in the global economy. But it is also
political: a crisis of state legitimacy and capitalist hegemony. The system is moving towards “a general crisis
of capitalist rule” as billions of people around the world face uncertain struggles for survival and question a
system they no longer see as legitimate. Historically, wars have pulled the capitalist system out of crisis while
they serve to deflect attention from political tensions and problems of legitimacy.

Economically, global capitalism faces what is known in technical language as “overaccumulation”: a situation in
which the economy has produced — or has the capacity to produce — great quantities of wealth but the market
cannot absorb this wealth because of escalating inequality. Capitalism by its very nature will produce abundant
wealth yet polarize that wealth and generate ever greater levels of social inequality unless offset by
redistributive policies. The level of global social polarization and inequality now experienced is without precedent.
In 2018, the richest 1 percent of humanity controlled more than half of the world’s wealth while the bottom 80 percent had to make do with
just 5 percent. The international development agency Oxfam reported in January that during
the first two years of the
coronavirus pandemic, the 10 richest men in the world more than doubled their fortunes, from $700 billion to $1.5
trillion, while 99 percent of humanity saw a fall in their income and 160 million more people fell into poverty.

Such inequalities end up undermining the stability of the system as the gap grows between what is — or could
be — produced and what the market can absorb . The extreme concentration of the planet’s wealth in the hands of
the few and the accelerated impoverishment and dispossession of the majority means that the transnational
capitalist class, or TCC, has increasing difficulty in finding productive outlets to unload enormous amounts of
surplus it accumulated. In the years leading up to the pandemic, there was a steady rise in underutilized
capacity and a slowdown in industrial production around the world. The surplus of accumulated capital with
nowhere to go expanded rapidly. Transnational corporations recorded record profits during the 2010s at the same time that corporate
investment declined. Along with militarized accumulation, the TCC has turned to unprecedented levels of financial
speculation and to debt-driven growth to sustain profit-making in the face of the crisis. If left unchecked,
overaccumulation results in crisis — in stagnation, recessions, depressions, social upheavals and war — just
what we are experiencing right now .
But there is a related dynamic at work in the global war economy: the need for dominant groups to suppress mass discontent and deflect the
crisis of state legitimacy. International
frictions escalate as states, in their efforts to retain legitimacy, seek to
sublimate social and political tensions and to keep the social order from fracturing. All around the world, a
“people’s Spring” has taken off. From Chile to Lebanon, Iraq to India, France to the United States, Haiti to
Nigeria, South Africa to Colombia, Jordan to Sri Lanka, waves of strikes and mass protests have proliferated
and, in some instances, appear to be acquiring an anti-capitalist character . Wars and external enemies allow the ruling
groups to deflect attention away from domestic malaise in their effort to maintain a grip on power as the crisis deepens.

In the U.S., this sublimation has involved efforts to channel social unrest towards scapegoated
communities such as immigrants or other marginalized groups — this is one key function of racism and was
a core component of the Trump government ’s political strategy — or towards an external enemy such as China
or Russia, which had clearly become a cornerstone of the Biden government’s strategy well before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. U.S.
presidents historically reach their highest approval ratings when they launch wars. George W. Bush reached an all-time-high of 90 percent in
2001 as his administration geared up to invade Afghanistan, and his father George H.W. Bush achieved an 89 percent approval rating in 1991,
right as the U.S. declared the end of its (first) invasion of Iraq and the “liberation of Kuwait.”

It is unlikely that an increasing militarization of the world economy can in the long run offset either the economic or the political dimensions of
the crisis of global capitalism. Global capitalism is emerging from the coronavirus pandemic with more inequality, more authoritarianism, more
militarization, and more civic and political strife. In the U.S., class
struggle is heating up, with a wave of strikes and of
unionization drives in Amazon, Starbucks, and elsewhere in the gig economy . The current inflationary spiral
and the escalation of class struggle in the United States and around the world point to the inability of the ruling
groups to contain the expanding crisis. The drive by the capitalist state to externalize the political fallout of the
crisis increases the danger that international tensions and localized conflicts such as in Ukraine will snowball into
broader international conflagrations of unforeseen consequences.

As the Ukraine crisis continues to drag on and the global

revolt escalates, there will be a radical reconfiguration of global
geopolitical alignments to the drumbeat of escalating turbulence in the world economy that will feed new
political upheavals and violent conflicts, making global capitalism all the more volatile. While it is hard to imagine a return to
the status quo antebellum in Eastern Europe, in the larger picture, the Ukraine crisis is not the cause but a consequence of the general crisis of
global capitalism. That crisis will only get worse. Fasten your seat belts; it will get much worse.

Cap causes massive poverty.

Holroyd 18 [Josh Holroyd, Activist and writer at Socialist Appeal; citing Jason Hickel, Professor at the
Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, “World
poverty: capitalism's crime against humanity,” 08/13/18, In Defence of Marxism,
https://www.marxist.com/world-poverty-capitalism-s-crime-against-humanity.htm]

Piercing through the sandstorm of misinformation thrown up in the media, it becomes apparent that world
poverty is a growing, not a diminishing problem. Many economists have argued that a poverty line of $5 a day would be
much closer to the real level of people’s basic needs. Using this “ethical poverty line” , Hickel estimates that the
global poverty headcount would stand at “about 4.3bn people… more than 60 percent of the world’s
population”. Moreover, this figure would represent an increase of over 1bn people compared to 1990. On
this basis the truth is clear to see: the world has never been richer, and yet there are more people living in
poverty today than at any other time in human history.
Worse still, the
World Bank itself has warned that even on its own flawed measure of global poverty, the
great poverty reduction miracle may have stalled, and it is looking increasingly doubtful that the goal of
eradicating extreme poverty by 2030 will be achieved on time, if at all. In Africa and Latin America, the
proportion of people living under the IPL is actually rising.

This fact should surprise no one considering the vast transfer of wealth from these regions to the
‘developed’ world. A study published by Global Financial Integrity and the Norwegian School of Economics reported that in 2012,
developing countries received a total income of just over $2tn including aid, investment, remittances etc. But in the same year, a total of $5tn
flowed out of them and into the developed countries. Hickel explains that this net outflow of $3tn is 24-times larger than all the aid budgets in
the world put together, so “for every dollar of aid that developing countries receive, they lose $24 in net
outflows”. For every school built, well dug or food package sent therefore, the bosses and banks of the West receive 24-times that amount
back through debt and interest payments, resource extraction, and a large helping of outright fraud.

The prophets of ‘facts-based’ thought don’t quote this figure when they are telling Western workers how good things are. This might be
because it fundamentally contradicts the story we have been told about world poverty for decades, and offers little evidence for their
Panglossian belief that if we leave the bankers and billionaires to their good work, all will be for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

And things are likely to get worse , not better, over the coming years. The perspective for developing economies in the short-
to-medium term is not nearly as rosy as we are sometimes led to believe. In April this year, The Financial Times published an alarming article
reporting that 40 percent of Sub-Saharan African nations are “slipping into a new debt crisis ”, only 13 years after
billions of dollars of African debt was written off in 2005. With interest payments doubling over the last decade to more than 20 percent of tax
revenues, countries like Ghana are warning of 20 years or more of crisis – a lost generation.

The IMF has offered up its usual medicine, urging debt-stricken countries to “increase the efficiency of public expenditure, hand over public
investment to the private sector, and fully implement fiscal consolidation plans, including seeking new revenues from consumer taxes”. The
effect of this on African workers’ living standards will be predictably disastrous, and no amount of statistical trickery will be able to hide it.

India is also at risk. In order to sustain the current flow of people from the villages into its growing cities, India must grow its economy by
about 8-10 percent a year – a figure agreed by many economists. It last reached 8 percent in July 2016. In the meantime, the state has been
wracking up an increasingly unsustainable fiscal deficit, while the level of “bad loans” has risen to 11.6 percent of all loans.
To put that in context, the extent of bad loans in the Italian economy, which has been threatening the stability of the entire Eurozone, currently
stands at 11.1 percent.

If rising interest rates in the USA should pull investment away from so-called ‘developing markets’ such as
India, which historically they have done, at the same time that the price of basic commodities such as oil are increasing internationally, the
recent debt-driven growth of the Indian economy could go into reverse, provoking an explosion of
unemployment and even an exodus from the cities as workers return to the villages. Such a scenario would effectively be a
repetition of the East Asian crisis that struck in 1997, only this time in the world’s sixth-largest economy, set to be the world’s most populous
country by 2024.

Factoring in the impact of climate change, which is already hitting developing countries hardest of all in terms of extreme weather
events, water shortages and crop failures, a serious perspective for the world’s poor offers little hope for miracles in the near
future. In fact, if the capitalist plunder of the world and its people is allowed to continue, the outcome will
be a human catastrophe of unprecedented and unimaginable scale.

Decoupling can only happen under socialism – rebound effects and market pressures.
Albert 20 [Michael J. Albert, lecturer at SOAS University of London in the department of Politics and
International Studies, “Capitalism and Earth System Governance: An Ecological Marxist Approach,” 2020,
Global Environmental Politics, Vol. 20, Issue 2, pp. 37-56, https://doi.org/10.1162/glep_a_00546, EA]

The capitalist law of value creates not only selection pressures to externalize costs but also a structural reliance on
continuous compound growth. Under constant pressure from the discipline of market competition, firms are
structurally incentivized to reinvest their profits in productivity-enhancing innovations, new products, and finding new markets, while those
that subordinate profit maximization to alternative goals risk being driven out of the market (Smith 2016, 15). While many
view growth as an “ideology” or “fetish” that could be done away with while keeping capitalist social relations intact (e.g., Daly 1996), most
economists agree with Schumpeter’s view that “stationary capitalism is a contradiction in terms” (quoted in Tanuro 2014, 74). After all, a
condition of low or no growth is a condition of “crisis” within a capitalist system, which leads to a reinforcing cycle of
slowing investment, rising unemployment, weakened demand, and political instability (Smith 2016, 47). For the same reasons, capitalism
cannot exist without rampant consumerism, which is not simply a bug but rather a fundamental feature that has been critical to its continuous
reproduction since the ascent of advertising in the post–World War II world (Foster et al. 2011, 379–380). Humanity thus finds
itself in
a double bind under capitalism, as starkly articulated by Richard Smith: “insatiable growth and consumption are
destroying the planet and will doom humanity in the long run—but without ceaselessly growing
production and insatiably rising consumption, we would have economic collapse in the short run” (Smith
2016, 23).

To escape this predicament, mainstream environmentalists (including planetary scientists like Johan Rockström) argue that growth
can be “decoupled” from ecological impact via efficiency improvements and “green” technologies (Rockström and
Klum 2015, 133). However, multiple studies demonstrate that decoupling is an illusion (made clear by focusing on
the global economy as a whole instead of individual nation-states) and that efficiency improvements often
lead to an increase in environmental impact by lowering costs and raising demand (the “rebound effect”)
(Wiedmann et al. 2015; Kallis and Hickel 2019). Some may point out that decoupling economic growth at least from CO2
emissions appears achievable, since the global economy has grown faster than CO2 emissions in recent years (Figueres 2017). However, this
ignores both rising methane emissions (driven largely by the conversion from coal to natural gas plants) (Howarth 2019) and the
fact that the estimated reductions likely needed to prevent 1.5°C of warming (7% annually, reaching net zero by 2050) are
well beyond what current models estimate would be feasible in a context of compound growth (Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change 2018, 15; Kallis and Hickel 2019). Thus even mainstream economists like Anil Markandya acknowledge that
reducing emissions 50 percent by 2050 , thereby stabilizing atmospheric CO2 concentrations around 550 parts per
million (PPM), is likely the “lowest credible target” in a context of continuous economic growth (Markandya 2009,
1145). Even though Rockström and colleagues estimate that 450 PPM constitutes the upper end of a likely threshold of
runaway climate change (Rockström et al. 2009), Markandya notes that “no one seriously believes this [450 ppm] is possible”
(Markandya 2009, 1145). Similarly, David Victor claims that “even a realistic crash program to cut emissions will blow through 2 degrees; 1.5
degrees is ridiculous” (Victor 2015).

Given mounting evidence that positive feedbacks in the earth system— including arctic ice loss, Amazon and boreal forest dieback, and
permafrost carbon and methane release—may be activated at 1.5°C and especially 2°C (Lenton et al. 2019), these economists
appear to
be accepting catastrophic climate change as the necessary cost of capitalist survival. And if we include
other planetary boundaries that may have already been overshot—including biodiversity loss, land conversion , and
nitrogen/phosphorous loading—the prospect of genuine solutions to the earth system crisis in a context of
compound growth recedes ever further into implausibility, given that these boundaries are primarily stressed
by global market pressures for agricultural intensification, commercial expansion into formerly intact
ecosystems, megainfrastructural development, and resulting fragmentation of habitats (Kallis 2018, 100). It should
thus be clear that any program of ESG that does not involve a system-wide assault on and eventual negation of the capitalist law of value, one
that goes far beyond “mainstreaming” environmental goals into global trade, investment, and finance regimes (Biermann et al. 2012a, 1307)
(which themselves rely on and exist to perpetuate continuous compound growth), would be radically insufficient.

A genuine solution, then, to the earth system crisis cannot lie within a capitalist system, no matter what global institutions
are grafted onto it, but requires a transition toward “ecosocialism.” As Ian Angus explains, ecosocialism

will be based on collective

ownership of the means of production, and it will work actively to eliminate
exploitation, profit, and accumulation as the driving forces of our economy.… [It] will imply the limitation
of growth and the transformation of needs by a profound shift away from quantitative and toward qualitative economic criteria.
(Angus 2016, 202–203)