The next economic crisis: digital capitalism and global police state

Abstract

Transnational capitalists and global elites are confident that the world economy has recovered from the 2008 financial collapse, but there is good reason to believe that another crisis of major proportions looms on the horizon. Digitalisation and fourth industrial revolution technologies are driving a new round of global capitalist restructuring, yet they are also aggravating the underlying structural conditions that generate crisis; in particular, overaccumulation. Transnational investors have been pouring billions of dollars into the rapid digitalisation of global capitalism as the latest outlet for its surplus accumulated capital and hedging their bets on new investment opportunities in global police state. The concept of global police state allows us to identify how the economic dimensions of global capitalist transformation intersect in new ways with political, ideological and military dimensions of this transformation. There is a convergence around global capitalism’s political need for social control and repression and its economic need to perpetuate accumulation in the face of stagnation. When the next crisis hits, the Left and resistance forces from below must be in a position to seize the initiative and to push back at global police state.