Tag: politics

The Silicon Valley Global Warriors: From Neoliberalism to Geopolitics

Two books have been published over the past five years that analyze the political and economic relationship between the big tech corporate sector and the U.S. national security state. The first, written by Ho-fung Hung, Clash of Empires, offers an explanation for why the U.S. national security state pivoted away from an economic engagement strategy with China toward a strategy of militarized confrontation. Hung points out that there was always a push from the U.S. national security state, or the military-industrial complex, to categorize China as a security threat and to oppose renewal of China’s most-favored nation status as early as the 1990s. The geopolitical interests of the U.S. state was reinforced by the interests of firms in the U.S. that perceived themselves to be especially vulnerable to trade with China, such as steel and aluminum, and those firms that did not have any investments or plans for investments in the China market. They were joined by U.S. labor federations such as the AFL-CIO, which also opposed renewing China’s MFN status. However this coalition during the 1990s was out-financed and outmaneuvered by a much more powerful cohort of domestic lobbyists representing leading sectors of global capital. This group of transnational capitalists spent big and worked with Chinese political officials to mount an effective lobbying campaign that included ATT, GE, IBM, ExxonMobil, Automobile companies, farm businesses and even sectors of the military-industrial complex that were interested in pursuing more aggressive sales of aircraft (Boeing) and satellites (Hughes) to China.

However, this balance of political forces favoring economic engagement with China changed dramatically after the global capitalist crisis of 2008, for reasons that are detailed and analyzed by Nick Srnicek in his book, Silicon Empires, Polity Press, 2026. Both Hung and Srnicek locate this shifting political landscape to a calculation by transnational capitalists that the engagement strategy with China was becoming too costly by the 2010s, a realization that emerged gradually but ultimately explains why the U.S. national security state pivoted toward a strategy of militarized confrontation.

What is most striking from Srnicek’s book is the careful documentation of how both the U.S and Chinese governments facilitated the rise of their respective big tech sectors by policies that enabled these sectors to consolidate into large-scale oligopolies and to expand their reach as global powerbrokers. The U.S. took the lead here by handing big tech decades of publicly subsidized telecommunications infrastructure for free in the 1990s, then encouraging big tech’s global expansion through aggressive backing from the U.S. government, which included domestic and global support for deregulation of the big tech sector.

This tech-state relationship was initially built around U.S. support for China’s entry into the World Trade Organization by 2001, which provided added momentum to transnational capital to expand foreign direct investment in China, which emerged as the global leader in the production of a wide range of manufactured goods, but was initially quite dependent on U.S. global tech firms for investment in high-tech global value chains. U.S. foreign investors adapted well to their circumstances, massaging their political relationships to the Chinese political and economic elites to pave the way for billions of dollars in annual profits.

At the same time, the Chinese government was adopting a very light regulatory touch to their own big tech sector, whose product innovation and extreme consolidation of ownership was encouraged and facilitated by the state. From the mid-2000s, as growth began to slow in traditional manufacturing sectors, “local governments, especially in coastal provinces, began to take up a model of development based around science and technology” (Srnicek, 83). Srnicek goes on to add:

“Tech firms increasingly became a core part of the restructuring of the Chinese economy as the focus became to develop into an innovation-driven economy. This approach solidified in 2015, with support for the digital economy becoming the core priority of the state, and in 2016, China’s 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-2020) deemed ICT to be the highest priority sector and placed innovation at the forefront of its strategy. As in the United Stares, a coalition of interests solidified between the tech elites and the political elites over this period. The merger of state and platform capitalists can be seen, for instance, in the growing inclusion of tech leaders into the governing bodies of the state-with a number of tech CEOs becoming members of the National People’s Congress” (84).

Chinese policy of state subsidies, light regulation, and promotion of rapidly consolidated tech sectors in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis accomplished many of the same outcomes already established in the U.S. Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple and Microsoft grew into global mega-giants in a deregulated and permissive legal structure backed by U.S. global geostrategic power. Likewise, the Chinese state did not apply the new Chinese antitrust law of 2008 against its large-scale domestic big tech platforms, but instead encouraged and facilitated their massive consolidation into domestic and global tech mega players. On the other hand, antitrust law was used against foreign investors, who were faced with more competition in China and upscaling by Chinese mega tech firms on a global scale. This was assisted by massive investments from Chinese firms such as Alibaba ant Tencent, who “spent between 80 and 100 percent of their revenue on investing between 2014 and 2019, whereas the largest big five U.S. tech firms invested only 30-66 percent of their revenue” (86).

This shifting geoeconomic landscape led to a pivot by U.S. mega-tech giants from cooperation with China toward a more confrontational approach, though there are still divisions within this sector as to how confrontational and how non-cooperative the U.S. should be regarding applying sanctions to the China market. The give and take between heightened militarized competition, increased U.S. sanctions by both the Trump and Biden Administrations and the willingness of exceptions to be carved out to ease or remove sanctions that negatively affect big tech firms is readily apparent in the Trump Administration’s decision to allow Nvidia to continue to sell its H200 AI chips to approved Chinese firms. However, the Chinese government refused to approve the purchases, opting instead to prioritize its own domestic chip technology.

The aggressive geopolitical competition between the U.S. and China is thoroughly interdependent with the global tech war between consolidated blocs of transnational capitalists who are aggressively competing for global market share. This has resulted in a shift from neoliberal strategies of transnational global integration of capital toward militarized geopolitical competition between imperial states that back competing blocs of transnational capital. Many of the same big tech firms that were critical of Trump’s China strategy during his first term have shifted in favor during his second term, due to both their reliance on the U.S. state to promote a deregulatory agenda at home and abroad and due to the fact that military spending is proving to be a lucrative way to support some of the enormous costs associated with large-scale and long-term investments in general purpose technologies associated with AI (Srnicek does a masterful job distinguishing among the different types of AI investments and the costs involved). As was the case with neoliberal capitalism, and all forms of capitalism, the U.S. and global publics are expected to bear the costs of these investment expansions, with the domestic and global battles over the construction of data centers emerging as a key arena of future class conflict. More on that topic to come in future blogs.


Transnational Capitalism and Global Crises

The race among dominant transnational corporations for ownership and control of AI technologies is a defining characteristic of the latest phase of the geoeconomics and geopolitics of global capitalism. This phase accelerated after the global capitalist crisis of 2008, which has resulted in several trends that have been driven by a systemic crisis of neoliberal capitalism. The first is the stagnation of global value chains reflected by global trade statistics, as the volume of global trade dramatically fell in the aftermath of the 2008 capitalist recession and has failed to rebound to pre-crisis levels if adjusted as percentage of GDP. The biggest factor behind the global trade slowdown has been the slower growth rates of trade within global value chains. In response, transnational corporations reduced the complexity of global value chains (incorporating fewer suppliers) in favor of greater capital-intensity and greater consolidation of those value chains around the most important global markets. As part of this process, transnational corporations have reorganized their global capitalist employees more rigidly around two categories: production supervisors and managers that oversee the logistical and supply operations of the global value chains and are relatively well-paid, and workers who produce within these chains at wages that continue to stagnate and decline relative to capitalist revenues.

Second, the gap between the profits of the dominant transnational corporations and the wages of the global capitalist workforce has grown wider, as more wealth is concentrated at the top. This has resulted in a further “hollowing out” of the industrial workforce in the core capitalist states, often expressed as a shrinking “middle class,” alongside the increased exploitation of the global working class. These class tensions have resulted in further deligitimacy of capitalist governments in the West, contributing to the rise of Donald Trump in the U.S. and other neo-fascist political figures and parties in Western Europe, and also in several countries in the global South. The increased intra- and inter- class tension is a long-term byproduct of the contradictions of a capitalist political project that has steadily increased the power of transnational interest blocs while reducing the political influence of workers and ordinary citizens, whose political marginalization and alienation have steadily increased.

Third, the global value chains that were previously dominated by North-South linkages, with the dominant transnational corporations concentrated in the Northern states, have increasingly been challenged by the dramatic rise of China and the policies of the Chinese state, particularly in the area of high-technology, which has helped to shift global value chains in a South-South direction, with countries of the global South, led by China, reorienting global value chains toward production, marketing and consumption within the global South, driven by the global expansion of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative. At the same time, the Chinese state has enacted policies that have contributed to a greater emphasis on domestic production and accumulation and to more stringent requirements for foreign transnationals investing in high-technology manufacturing in China in an attempt to assert greater control over some of the most lucrative global value chains.

The business and political coalitions in U.S. foreign policy that once advocated political and economic cooperation with China have been eclipsed from the mid-2010s to the present. Global capitalist crises, starting with the 2008 global recession, have sharpened the tensions between U.S. corporations which have long benefitted from locating their global value chains within the China market and those corporations who have long felt threatened by the competition posed by Chinese exports. Meanwhile the Chinese government has sought to extract more concessions from foreign investors and to increase the scope and scale of state intervention toward an upscaling of Chinese capacity in 5G technology and artificial intelligence.

An acceleration of Chinese nationalist political strategies in recent years, combined with the global political and economic crises of the covid pandemic, have increased the costs of foreign direct investments for Western corporations in China. Western corporations that have long been in competition with China, have been joined by a broader coalition of transnational investors that have aggressively led the campaign for heightened sanctions against China. This coalition has been bolstered by defections of some transnational firms in the information technology sector away from supporting cooperation with China and toward support for a more militarized competition with China. In fact, as I have documented elsewhere, there is a growing marriage between several powerful Silicon Valley firms and the military-industrial-surveillance complex reflected in the ascendancy of military contracts secured by the big tech sector, especially driven by the AI arms race.

Interest groups within the military-industrial-surveillance complex, which have long sought to identify China as a threat justification for higher military budgets, have identified an expansion of Chinese military capacity and utilization, especially in the South China Sea, as a threat to U.S. extra-regional hegemony in Asia. The rise of China’s economic and military capacity in Asia and its long-term claim to the island of Taiwan, with newly rising military maneuvers and tensions in recent years, has accelerated an increasing confrontational posture between the U.S. and China. The heightened competition between the U.S. and China, filtered through transnational capitalist competition for AI supremacy in global markets, is driving much of the geoeconomic maneuvering between transnational firms and the geostrategic competition between the U.S. and China.

My 2019 book, Corporate Power, Class Conflict and the Crisis of the New Globalization, is where I develop many of the these arguments (this blog includes material updated from that book). See also two excellent books that provide more recent analysis of how transnational capitalist competition is fueling geostrategic rivalry between the U.S. and China, including Clash of Empires by Ho-fung Hung, Cambridge Press, 2022, and Silicon Empires by Nick Srnicek, Polity Books, 2026. The key battles revolve around how surplus value will be extracted from global value chains, which transnational interest bloc coalitions will benefit the most from the political economy of value extraction and, most importantly, how will ownership and control over high-technology processes be determined in this phase of global capitalism? In my next two blogs, I will review the books referenced here and provide further reflections on how to understand our current configuration of global corporate and class power.

A Long History of Elite Domination: Haiti and Imperial Power

The following is the Preface that I just wrote for the forthcoming book by Professor Guy Metayer, titled The Role of Foreign and Domestic Elites in the Destruction of Haiti, to be published in hardback by Brill and in paperback by Haymarket Books. Guy’s peer-reviewed article written for the academic journal that I edit, Class, Race and Corporate Power (linked below), is being used as part of the documentation defending the legal case for retention of Haitian Temporary Protected Status in the Trump v. Miot case currently being considered by the U.S. Supreme Court.

https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/record/2369?ln=en

Here is my Preface to Dr. Metayer’s book:

When I first met Guy Metayer as a PhD student at Florida International University, where I teach, I was impressed by his intellect, his passion and his longstanding commitment to social justice. He has demonstrated these qualities throughout his life, as a legislator in Haiti struggling against very difficult odds, as a graduate student at FIU working to understand how the global political economy has kept Haiti trapped, and most recently as a Haitian diplomat speaking truth to power regarding the kind of far-reaching changes that are needed in Haiti (and the world) for ordinary people to have a chance at a sustainable and livable existence.

This book is a culmination of Guy’s work and determined resilience over the past few decades. It shines a bright light over the historical power structures that have subjected Haiti to centuries of pillage by global and national elites, most recently through the rise of Haitian gangs closely tied to the long-standing domination of the upper one percent in Haiti over the country, a group whose position in power has been reinforced, enabled and propped up by U.S. Presidents and transnational capitalists willing to sacrifice Haiti’s domestic economy for the sake of expediting more profit opportunities for themselves.

Only the tactics of the U.S. and global elites have changed over the years. Their objectives have remained incredibly consistent. At first, when Haiti struggled mightily and successfully for their political independence from France by waging an heroic revolutionary war that became the envy of anti-colonial movements everywhere, the global powers that had a stake in maintaining a hierarchy of plunder and privilege waged a war on Haiti to punish it for having the temerity to defy the rule of the powerful. This meant oppressive debts and isolation combined with a “divide and conquer” strategy that relied on propping up dictators, courtesy of foreign interventions, the most lasting and impactful coming from an imperial U.S. that occupied the country from 1915 to 1934. During this time, the U.S. helped construct the military architecture in Haiti that would be further entrenched by U.S. military aid during the Cold War, where the U.S. worked closely with a Haitian elite that repressed its domestic population.

As sections of this Haitian elite grew richer after decades of U.S. assistance, they outgrew their ties to Haiti itself and became part of larger networks of transnational power and privilege—at least that was the case for the richest of the Haitian elite, representing far less than one percent of the Haitian population. In this way, Haitian society was sacrificed in favor of those whose profits tied them to ventures that either bypassed Haiti entirely or were connected to Haitian impoverishment.

The rise of a transnational class of capitalists, whose wealth and power includes a narrow section of Haitian elites and powerbrokers, is a central theme of this important book. This includes Guy’s detailed account of how the U.S. deployed U.S. aid in the 1980s as part of a strategy to insert Haiti within a transnational system of capitalist accumulation that was to be accompanied by a “managed democratic” transition from military rule to elections. The U.S. never wanted Haiti to stray very far from its agenda here, having always been quick to block efforts by Haitians themselves to mobilize for electoral alternatives that went beyond the narrow confines of U.S. preferences.

In 1990, Haitians elected populist Jean Bertrand Aristide in an historic repudiation of the U.S. preferred outcomes of “managed democracy,” with Aristide representing what many Haitians saw as an opportunity to redistribute wealth and power from the Haitian elites to the masses. Haitian militarists, who alongside Haitian economic and political elites, opposed Aristide’s promotion of economic redistribution, overthrew Aristide in a military coup in 1991. Both Aristide and the military coup against him proved problematic for the U.S., Aristide with his support for redistribution of wealth and the coup for the instability that it posed to the U.S., triggering a refugee crisis that led to a U.S. political backlash in the important electoral state of Florida.

The Clinton Administration pressured an exiled Aristide to agree to several preconditions for his return, which included many of the neoliberal measures that are carefully documented in Guy’s book: a radical opening of the agricultural sector in Haiti by slashing tariffs, further decimating the rural economy and encouraging more internal migration to Port-au-Prince, an expansion of the industrialization strategy for Haiti with the expansion of assembly factories designed to insert parts of the Haitian economy within a transnational global production system dependent on cheap and exploited labor, and a pact with Haitian militarists and police forces to “keep the lid” on popular struggles for social justice in Haiti.[1]

What has emerged since has been an unrelenting war on capacity of the Haitian state and society by a global economic, political and security architecture that has continued to work for the benefit of the upper one percent of Haitian and global elites while deepening the crisis inside Haiti. What some have called the global NGO-industrial complex has seen foreign aid to Haiti funneled through a vast network of large-scale international aid organizations, bypassing Haitian grassroots groups in favor of perpetuating a dependency on bureaucratic non-profits whose goals are perpetual growth of their own organizations, not on improving Haitian resource distribution or governing capacity.[2]

Guy has written this book to carefully map out the consequences of centuries of plunder of Haiti, but also to offer hope for far- reaching economic, political, and social change that is necessary to reverse these dynamics. The importance of creating an alternative power structure in Haiti in which ordinary people have the capacity to make a living, to govern themselves and to break free of the constraints of elite rule, is developed extensively in these pages. The latest expression of the urgency of change is the rise of criminal gangs in Haiti, which as Guy shows cannot be separated from the larger structures of power that have long decimated the country. Guy’s book is intended to be part of efforts to challenge these power structures so that Haitian society can finally break free of the constraints that have long bound them. This is a necessary and critical intervention to be a part of. I am proud to contribute in a small way to this effort.

[1] I traveled to Haiti after Aristide’s return to power, which resulted in this publication: “Private Interests and U.S. Foreign Policy in Haiti and the Caribbean,” in David Skidmore, ed., Contested Social Orders and International Politics, Vanderbilt University Press, 1997.

[2] Ronald W. Cox, “U.S. Foreign Policy, Business NGOs and Low-Intensity Democracy,” Class, Race and Corporate Power, 2016, Vol. 4, No. 2.

Muskism as a Systematic Expression of Big Tech Weaponization

I just finished an important new book by two of my favorite authors, Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff. The book, Muskism, is directly relevant to understanding the contemporary dynamics of corporate power and the military-industrial complex. The authors make the case that multi-billionaire oligarch Elon Musk has long embraced “technocracy” as an all-encompassing system of corporate power that aspires to merge private ownership of technology with a militarized techno-state underpinned by white supremacy, xenophobic border restrictions and a (futher) deregulation of capitalist accumulation facilitated by heightened surveillance and repression of labor and social movements. The influences that shaped Musk are traced extensively in the book, from his childhood in South Africa and the system of racial apartheid to his fascination with science fiction novels such as Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, from which Musk identifies with the efforts of mathematician Hari Seldon to create a Second Empire inside the decay of the Galactic Empire.

In fact, Musk’s ambitions to secure and expand his power by destroying and recreating a government that is more accountable to himself has echoes of the science fiction characters he most admires. Musk sees himself as leading the creation of a new empire of technocracy, where capitalist power and state power will be more intertwined to facilitate the path to a technocratic society governed by the owners of big tech. As the authors explain, Musk’s pivot toward the far right and in support of the Trump presidential campaign was a direct outgrowth of his perceptions of “wokism” as a “mind virus” and a threat to the capitalist ambitions of big tech oligarchs like himself. Toward that end, in the aftermath of the pandemic, when the profits of big tech were threatened by societal protections and regulations, Musk railed against the so-called enemies of advanced civilization, embodied by government regulators, labor unions, BlackLivesMatter protestors, and transgender activists. He memed in favor of a “workerist” ethos, a society in which the “virus” of “wokism” would be eliminated in favor of a social order predicated on accelerating capitalist profit making, subsuming labor to the dictates of the technocracy, disciplining social movements by declaring war on Black Lives Matter, MeToo and civil rights.

Musk purchased Twitter as part of a larger effort to use its data and its social media infrastructure to facilitate the further development and testing of Grok AI, an “anti-woke” AI assistant built by Musk’s xAI and since incorporated into SpaceX. Grok AI intersects with Musk attempts to integrate artificial intelligence into a mind-body ecosystem dominated by far right ideology. To those on the left that somehow think that the culture wars were simply a distraction for the left, this book, Muskism, has plenty of ammunition against that notion. Musk and other big tech leaders have long seen any social movements fighting for labor rights, civil rights and human rights as a product of a kind of “woke” mind virus. The belief in natural racial and gender hierachies as a conduit to unfettered capitalist accumulation has taken root politically in the big-tech alliance with Trump in his second term.

This relates directly to the alliance between big tech and the longstanding military-industrial complex in the U.S. As recently as May 1 of this year, “the Pentagon announced an agreement with eight leading artificial intelligence companies: SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, Nvidia, Reflection, Microsoft, Oracle and Amazon Web Services. As part of this pact, the U.S. Department of Defense budgeted tens of billions of dollars for purchasing technologies from these firms related to intelligence, drone warfare, classified and unclassified information networks, and $54 billion for the development of autonomous weapons systems” (The Guardian, May 1, 2026). This is on top of the expansion of big tech militarization that was already being subsidized by the U.S. Department of Defense over the past decade, totaling at least $53 billion between 2019 and 2022 alone (Costs of War Project 2024). This level of integration of big tech with militarized capital accumulation is perceived by the tech industry as a backstop to their unsustainable stock market valuations.

The problem is that this level of government subsidization is nowhere close to the massive investments being made in the private sector by a few dominant firms whose revenues will not be able to cover their colossal cost overruns. J.P. Morgan Chase analysts anticipate $5 trillion of spending on AI infrastructure between now and 2030. “This year alone, four tech companies–Amazon, Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft–have plans to invest $670 billion on AI infrastructure. When measured by U.S. GDP, this is more than the Apollo space program, the U.S. interstate highway system, railroads, and every other major capital spending program in U.S. history, according to the Wall Street Journal. Yet OpenAI and Anthropic have annualized revenues of about $25 billion and $19 billion, respectively. Unless AI revenues grow by orders of magnitude soon, there’s a Grand Canyon-sized gap that will be hard to cross (Time, March 26, 2026).”

What makes this dramatic overleveraging especially dangerous to the public is that this investment money is coming from a wide range of sources, impacting most financial markets including 401ks that house life insurance and pension plans, alongside “the record levels of corporate bonds, leveraged private credit, junk bonds, structured financed, asset-backed securities and more” (Time, March 26, 2026). This overleveraging feeds the aggressive lobbying of the big tech sector to increase their cash flow with more aggressive military subsidies and a push for more deregulation to expedite a radical expansion of big data centers. Large segments of the public oppose these data centers and will lose from the kind of hyper-militarism being proposed by the Trump Administration in its latest discretionary budget proposal, which sets military spending at 80 percent of the budget allocation, up from between 50 and 60 percent in recent years.

The clash between an emerging economic populist current in U.S. politics and an entrenched big tech oligarchy is evident in analyzing campaign expenditures by big tech, especially the flows of wealthy dark money donations to the Super PAC “Majority Democrats” that is coming disproportionately from big tech donors (The Lever Podcast, “The Democratic Party’s New Dark Money Machine,” May 21, 2026). These tech oligarchs are attempting to use their wealth and power to defeat populist Democrats pledging to regulate AI data center expansion (even modest regulation is opposed by the tech titans). The fact that economic populists are gaining ground is epitomized by efforts of corporate Democrat groups like Third Way to fund an upcoming campaign, backed by billionaire money, to target the Democratic Socialists of America as “enemy number one.” The big tech oligarchs already are working with Trump to further deconstruct and demobilize an already gravely weakened regulatory state. Their overleveraged bets on the future profits of AI have put us on the ledge of another economic crisis. Financial investors who see this crisis coming are already preparing to leverage the crisis as an opportunity for enrichment at public expense. The political battles ahead will determine who will pay for the crisis and on what terms.

On the Relevance of C. Wright Mills for the Contemporary Military-Industrial Complex

I have been re-reading a book by sociologist C. Wright Mills from 1958 titled The Causes of World War III. Mills is famous for developing the power elite theory of U.S. politics. Mills identified three pillars of elite power concentrated in the political, economic and military spheres of U.S. society. Driven by what Mills called a “permanent war economy,” this elite power structure reinforced a “march to war” as a central feature of its existence. The linkages between the political, corporate and military elites were solidified within the U.S. during World War II, reducing politics to a hollow shell game of unaccountability with the growth of corporate power, the imperial presidency and a globalized military-industrial complex.

There is much to learn from Mills in assessing today’s military-industrial complex. An important caveat is that the power elite identified by Mills has always been more fractured and divided than his framework would allow for. I have been part of a group of scholars that have advanced a business conflict or, more recently, a transnational interest bloc conflict theory of capitalist power. This perspective argues that transnational corporations compete with each other based on on their sectoral and territorial location within global capitalism, a framework closely tied to the investment theory of political parties developed by Tom Ferguson, and advanced in various iterations by me and my frequent co-author Daniel Skidmore-Hess, as well as David Gibbs and James H. Nolt, to name a few. During Mills time, there was certainly an interdependency between the profits of dominant global corporations and the expansion of the military-industrial complex, but there was also business conflict around the extent, scope and purposes of military spending. This became especially evident with the Vietnam War escalation from 1965 to 1968, which fractured corporate blocs between those advocating for military escalation and those advocating for deescalation. The former were concentrated within sectors producing for the military or sectors benefiting directly from war spending versus financial sectors that had come to view the escalation of the Vietnam War as damaging to their portfolios.

My caveats aside: Mills did understand the exent to which the elite power structure served to drive the U.S. toward a permanent war economy. The accelerating growth of the military-industrial-intelligence-surveillance complex and the imperial presidency in recent decades has served to highlight the relevance of Mills’ power elite theory long after his passing in 1962. The ascendancy of the permanent war economy has reached new heights in current U.S. politics. Today the U.S. is spending more on global militarization than it did at the height of the Cold War, a trend enabled by a bipartisan political elite, a big tech investment bloc, an acceleration of private equity investment, and a highly consolidated bloc of military contractors that has globalized production and sales of military weapons with the support of powerful institutional investors such as BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, who collectively hold stakes as high as 17 to 25 percent in the top five U.S. defense contractors. As William Robinson has noted, there is a push toward militarized capital accumulation on a global scale that transcends the old contours of the military-industrial complex analyzed by C. Wright Mills.

The permanent war economy has become even more central to capitalist accumulation of profits. This is especially evident when examining the extent to which the big tech sector in the U.S., Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, SpaceX, Palantir Technologies, and Anduril Industries, have become heavily invested within the military-industrial-intelligence-surveillance complex. As was the case during the Cold War, U.S. military spending is used to subsidize leading sectors of the global capitalist economy, providing sources of finance for big tech firms whose militarization of capital accumulation is providing them with greater concentration of power and privilege. It’s here that we see the clearest relevance of the work of C. Wright Mills to the present global expansion of U.S. militarism. As Mills would have expected, absent guardrails of popular dissent, this current system of militarized accumulation is driven by a constellation of elite interests whose positions within the hierarchy of state and capitalist power structures contribute to unchecked wars and genocide.

In my next blog post, I will talk about the political and economic instability of this global system of militarized accumulation, which rests on a shaky foundation of imperial overreach, rising domestic and global opposition to U.S. empire, and an unsustainable balance sheet of overvalued stocks that portend a market crash of the big tech sector that has been so central to the hyper-growth of the stock market. Once this economic crisis manifests itself as a deepening political and social crisis, the battle over who will pick up the costs and who will seize distressed assets will shape the political fights ahead. As Mills would have understood, the role of intellectuals here is not to engage in “business as usual” but to use their positions as advocates for the public good, positioning us with popular struggles capable of checking corporate power and securing more resources and political/economic capital for the vast majority that have been exploited and oppressed by this global capitalist system.

Trump the Grifter Idiot

Here are just a few thoughts about what it’s like for those of us in the U.S. to be in a country that is literally being led by the equivalent of a stupefying and mind-numbing infantile asshole. How can anyone doubt that Trump the Idiot’s rule is both an extension of a system that has long been plutocratic, corrupt, venal and self-destructive and one that has degenerated into an Onion-like parody of its historically most rapacious, uncaring and venomous tendencies. Even attempts at rational analysis, such as I have tried with my blog, fail to capture the full amount of the head-slapping, cringe inducing headlines that reflect the priorities of a deranged lunatic whose proclivities for self-enrichment are aided and abetted by Nazi symbols and music being deployed by a domestic occupying army whose activities of death and destruction are being celebrated by inside the beltway grifters and propagandists. Meanwhile, some Democrats look at this and only call for better training? 

Regarding the so-called “ruling class,” they are overwhelmingly concentrated in the tech billionaire sector whose wealth and power far exceeds any other coherent expression of unified interests. Therefore any analyst has to recognize that the marriage of Trump gangster capitalism and big tech gangsterism has taken ludicrous turns, illustrated by the economic and military threats to take Greenland. Reuters News reported during the 2024 Presidential campaign that Trump addressed his corporate donors about his Greenland plans, supported by members of the billionaire venture capitalist and big tech profiteers, as a way to expand their zones for super wealthy capitalist enrichment as a kind of plutocratic paradise free of any regulation or accountability. Grifters everywhere who want to shield their wealth from public scrutiny applaud this as a victory for global con men and mafioso elites who now have their closest friend in the White House.

The historian Quinn Slobodian has long chronicled the rise of the anarcho-capitalist big tech billionaires in the U.S. whose plans for tech monarchy freed from democratic accountability has a lengthy history. Trump’s alliance with these big tech billionaires has been starkly evident in his administration’s global threats to U.S. state governors and foreign leaders that there will be consequences if regulation blocks unbridled tech expansion of energy guzzling data centers. Rachel Adams in The New Empire of AI and Karen Hao in Empire of AI both detail the neo-colonial domination of the tech billionaire class, leveraging its wealth and resources to force concessions on taxation, regulation and subsidies on governments and localities around the world.

Meanwhile capitalist political parties in the U.S. and elsewhere, who have long lost much of their power of the purse to become heavily dependent on capitalist financiers to finance government debts and carry out government programs, channel public money through the big tech sector without asking much in return. Whether Democrat or Republican in the U.S., the answer is not accountability of big tech to the public, but instead how can the government lavish big tech with resources to be even more dominant, under the guise of global competition with China. This is competition that allows the already super rich to get richer still, and take down the globe with them, fueling climate degradation, increased militarism and resource grabbing imperialism.

The “left”, to the extent we exist, have to be as nimble as possible in maneuvering through a corporate-dominated system by broadening the tent to include all activities that have a chance to shine a spotlight on the costs and consequences of this corporate plutocracy: diminishing living and working conditions, environmental devastation, and even larger gaps between rich and poor. We need to work with everyone fighting back against this, but not with politicians aiding and abetting a neo-fascist party whose rhetoric of “populism” is merely a cover for their rapacious and authoritarian political project.

The Trump Regime Tries to Cut a Mafia-Style Deal with the Venezuelan Regime

To fully understand what is happening in Venezuela, analysts should watch the Venezuelan bond markets, as they’ve soared in the past few days, as U.S. investors close to Trump are expecting deferential treatment in collecting on debts that they have held for a long time. That’s where the real action is, and the oil markets are connected to this, but not with the goal of owning Venezuela oil production—there’s little interest in that right now. But instead, wealthy bondholders in the U.S., several very close to the Trump administration, hope to benefit in the long term from revenues generated by increased production, which some U.S. oil companies would help service. Remember that all of the big global oil corporations make money in a lot of different ways, partly by placing derivative bets on oil markets, rather than owning facilities that produce oil.

Trump is an extension of a longtime U.S. tradition when it comes to protecting massively wealthy U.S. bondholders who are looking for the best political solution for extracting payments on debts held: authoritarian rulers who agree to cooperate in paying bondholders and increasing accessibility and protection for foreign investors. At the same time, the Trump Administration is accelerating and expanding the close relationship between the U.S. state and the U.S. oil sector by leveraging the U.S. military to appropriate assets that will be delivered to private U.S. oil corporations, investors and service companies at taxpayers’ expense. This follows existing power dynamics whereby the U.S. government has long subsidized the costs of foreign direct investments by the U.S. oil corporation supermajors. What many analysts miss when they reference oil executives’ verbal hesitancy in investing in Venezuela, due to the expense, uncertainty and long-term payback for their investment, is the way that the oil sector continues to rely on U.S. tax breaks and state subsidies to underwrite their costs and expand their short- and long-term profit margins. The return of a more militarized and interventionist U.S. imperialism is designed to expand U.S. state and corporate power, discourage and reverse oil nationalizations and displace Chinese and Russian investments in favor of preferred U.S. investments. The Venezuelan bond markets are a useful starting point for understanding how this imperialism is operationalized.

At the time of the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro by the Trump Administration, there were as many as nine corporate lawsuits pending against the Venezuelan government alleging damages owed to U.S. corporations from the instability and termination of their operations in Venezuela. Several prominent investment firms that had stakes in extractive industries in Venezuela, including oil, natural gas and mining, are included in the list of litigants. Other corporate parties had previously sued Venezuela through the World Bank’s International Settlement of Investment Disputes, such as ConocoPhillips, which won nearly $9 billion dollars from the World Bank arbitration court. ExxonMobil has filed multiple claims against Venezuela, claiming $20 billion in payments owed by the Venezuelan state. Oil services firms such as Halliburton have also filed claims that are based on what the firm describes as instability that forced them to abandon investments in Venezuela. Halliburton’s litigation claimed that both U.S. sanctions and the Venezuelan government were to blame for the firms losses, but are currently suing only the Venezuelan government. Multi-billionaire investor Paul Singer, founder, President and Co-CEO of Elliott Management, is attempting to buy an ownership stake in Citgo, the downstream petroleum firm that was fully acquired by Venezuela’s state oil company PDVSA in 1990.

Collectively, these investors hope to leverage the U.S. intervention to collect billions of dollars in claims from U.S. acquisition of Venezuelan assets. In turn, the Trump Administration would provide these firms with a potential avenue to expand profit-making opportunities in Venezuela. This could involve Elliott Management’s energy firm Amber Energy purchasing CITGO, which owns an oil refinery in Lake Charles, Louisiana that is equipped to refine Venezuelan oil. This could also involve a return to Venezuela of ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, alongside service companies such as Halliburton who would be in line for infrastructure projects. Chevron, which is the one U.S. oil firm that stayed in Venezuela and has been allowed to export to the U.S., also could emerge as a long-term winner.

The Venezuelan bond market brings together the interests of U.S. investment firms, U.S. oil corporations and the U.S. state in an imperialist project, designed to expand the power of the U.S. throughout the Western Hemisphere at the expense of China and, to a lesser extent, Russia. U.S. intervention would be directed at protecting and expanding the role of U.S. investors and crowding out/excluding Chinese investors. The Trump Administration would also leverage a direct appropriation of oil from Venezuela as a piggybank for crony capitalist allies, whose riches would expand based on accelerated control and leverage of oil reserves. This brazen expansion of U.S. imperialism in its most overt and militaristic form would intensify the climate crisis, increase inequality between rich and poor throughout the Hemisphere and subject any government that wants to exercise control over its own resources to mafia-like extortion.

Following this playbook, what the Trump administration is doing now is attempting to cut a political deal on mafia terms with the Venezuelan state. The reason that Trump’s advisers have decided to keep the current Venezuelan regime intact is they think the Venezuelan military is a necessary precondition for ensuring stability and protection for any financial and investment deal they can negotiate. The outlines of any political deal would be: agreement by the Venezuelan regime to pay debts owed to bondholders, though percentages and who would be favored would have to be worked out (here the U.S. hopes to crowd out Chinese investors); opening Venezuela to more foreign investment across a range of productive and portfolio type investment options; oil concessions to the U.S. government; and commitments by the Venezuelan military to provide investment guarantees through security, police and contractual provisions. In return, the Trump administration would lower sanctions.

It’s a mafia state attempting to cut a deal with another mafia state: the Trump Administration with the Venezuelan military, which has been identified by Trump as the most powerful institution in Venezuelan politics. Indeed, the Venezuelan military cannot easily be dislodged without triggering a large-scale civil war, according to a CIA report which concluded that retention of the Venezuelan military, alongside senior Maduro loyalists, offered the best option for governing the country. Trump is currently pressuring Venezuelan officials to offer oil concessions to the U.S., reported to involve as much as $2 billion of Venezuelan oil concessions. If the U.S. acquires such quantities cheaply, at below market rates, profits from sales would likely be distributed to U.S. creditors, many of whom have ongoing lawsuits against the regime.

U.S. imperialism is designed to enrich wealthy investors, who are hopeful of being bailed out by U.S. militarism. The Trump Administration is the latest manifestation of brazen illegality in the expansive use of military force in the Western Hemisphere, intervening in ways reminiscent of late 19th and early 20th century U.S. military invasions, which at the time were concentrated in Central America and the Caribbean. The use of militarized violence on a large-scale is a symptom of an empire in decline, gasping at lowest-common denominator tactics to extract wealth by force, without bothering to address the larger systematic reasons for its decay.

The Globalization of the Military-Industrial Complex

The U.S. military-industrial complex has grown over time, both domestically as a powerful lobby in U.S. politics, and globally, as a conduit for U.S. imperial expansion that has occurred in lockstep with the transnationalization of capital. I define the U.S. military-industrial complex as a constellation of powerful domestic interests within U.S. politics that includes military contractors, U.S. national security bureaucracies, and a bipartisan political establishment in both the U.S. executive branch and Congress that enables its systematic and long-term expansion. The growth of transnational capitalist investment, production and trade during the decades of neoliberal capitalism have increasingly linked the U.S. military-industrial complex toward global expansion, often supported by transnational capital—inside and outside the U.S., fusing the expansion of U.S. empire with the broader interests of transnational capitalist firms that benefit from U.S. imperial expansion.

Global networks of U.S. defense contractors, transnational capitalist investors and political elites have defined the terms of the expansion of U.S. empire. The U.S. military-industrial complex incorporates U.S.-based corporations that produce military weapons within a broader ecosystem of domestic and international alliance networks. Domestically, the complex includes a wide range of political bureaucracies, think tanks, domestic lobbies and bipartisan political support from the U.S. executive branch and Congress. Globally, the complex connects the interests of this U.S. domestic political network to transnational investment blocs that directly benefit from global militarization and the expansion of U.S. empire. As the most powerful sectors of capital have transnationalized their investment and production over the decades, the global expansion of the U.S. military-industrial complex has often functioned as a political, economic and ideological vehicle to advance the profit-making interests of transnational capitalist investment blocs.

Investment blocs refer to the political-economic networks of transnational capitalist firms, political actors, interest groups and ideologues that form across state borders in support of transnational capitalist expansion. The growth of U.S. empire is therefore intertwined with both global militarization and the transnationalization of global capital, which is enabled and promoted by the global expansion of the U.S. military-industrial complex, providing both structural and instrumental benefits to a range of global capitalist investors.

Structurally, the expansion of the military-industrial complex protects access to foreign markets within a system of transnational capitalist accumulation. Instrumentally, the global expansion of the military-industrial complex offers profit-making opportunities that include military production but also the inputs linked to military production through global supply chains and production networks. Transnational investment blocs have been central to a global expansion of the military-industrial complex as a vehicle linking the U.S. domestic interests comprising the military-industrial complex to a broader set of transnational interests that benefit from the expansion of U.S. empire.

Throughout the history of global capitalism, there have been rivalries between global capitalist firms over access to foreign markets, trade and investment. The trends of the past several decades are not a departure from the history of capitalist globalization, but instead are a specific manifestation of a long-term neoliberal reorganization of global capitalism that has its own iterations, tendencies and expressions. Corporate power within the capitalist state and through transnational organizations has been used to expand the opportunities for capitalist accumulation and profit-making.

The imperatives of global capitalist accumulation have led to a more intensive and structured system of globalized production, defined by political, economic and geostrategic competition between transnational investment blocs. Transnational investment blocs have battled over the terms of globalized production, specifically over which capitalist firms and investment blocs will be in the best position to profit from newly established and negotiated economic, political and geostrategic arrangements. Corporations have organized within transnational investment blocs to lower the costs of global accumulation and increase profits. By expanding globalized production, transnational capital has sought to reverse tendencies of the rate of protit to fall by securing more favorable global conditions for the transnationalization of capitalist production.

The U.S. military-industrial complex has been at the center of defining the geopolitics of global military, political and economic alliances between the U.S. and foreign governments, from the expansion of NATO to the U.S. militarization of the Persian Gulf to the militarization of U.S.-China relations. In each of these cases, military contractors within the U.S. military-industrial complex and transnational capitalist investors coalesced within transnational investment blocs to lobby for an expansion of global military spending. These transnational investment blocs advocated an expansion of militarization in Europe, the Persian Gulf and Asia to protect and advance the profit-making interests of sectors of transnational capital against threats from rival capitalist competitors and/or states that were perceived to be sources of instability.

Two recent articles highlight aspects of this complex. Ken Silverstein examines the expansion of the corporate intelligence firm WestExec Advisors that provides a revolving door connecting global corporate profit-making opportunities to positions within the national security bureaucracy:

https://www.washingtonbabylondc.com/p/recent-hiring-spree-westexec-advisors

Another article from the New York Times covers the staggering costs, $1.7 trillion over 30 years that the U.S. national security bureaucracy began planning in 2010, and is rapidly implementing to pay for a new fleet of bomber jets, land-based missiles, submarines, and thermonuclear warheads:

Favorite Books of 2023

This past year was rich in scholarship. A few of these books were published in 2022, but I read them this year and felt they had to be on this list since they were so compelling. That includes the first two, The Long Land War by Jo Guldi and Internet for the People by Ben Tarnoff. Guldi’s book is a magisterial account of the history of social, political and economic battles over ownership of land.

Guldi provides a sweeping overview of how colonial power structures, militaries, police forces and laws imposed from above, worked to expand control of land for the few, but in turn have been consistently challenged by social movements and revolutions from below, which have attempted, sometimes successfully, but often not, to redistribute landholding from the few to the many. Guldi is meticulous in identifying the historical patterns that have helped determine the winners and losers in the “Long Land War,” and as such, produces the first book of its kind to be written on such a large and inclusive historical and geographical canvas.

Ben Tarnoff also examines structures of power and domination within the history of the Internet, focusing on how public funding was used in the U.S. to develop the architecture of the Internet, only to transfer that architecture to private sector corporations for profit. Tarnoff offers compelling examples of efforts to fight back and create public alternatives to private sector domination of the Internet.

Michael Zweig, an economist and long-time organizer and activist, has written a gem of a book: one of the best introductions on how to think about the relationship between theory, practice, and building successful social movements. Instead of getting caught up in the counterproductive exercise of separating class from race and gender, Zweig articulates what should be a common sense notion for people on the left: advancements toward greater equality in each and all of these areas: class, race and gender, should be applauded. Zweig provides a useful roadmap of how to conceptualize the fight for social justice in a way that should be of use for a wide range of social justice movements.

Quinn Slobodian, whose previous book The Globalists tracked the origins of neoliberal ideology from the 1920s and 1930s to the present, examines how libertarians, especially anarcho-capitalists, have championed special economic zones as areas of uber-privilege for capitalist owners—free of any public accountability or democratic control. Within these zones, which have proliferated under neoliberal global capitalism, capitalist ownership enclaves determine winners and losers through monetary exchange, which then sorts out the successful from the unsuccessful based on private capitalist accumulation, absent intermediaries, other than—and this is an important caveat: a militarized and authoritarian state structure that serves to protect wealth from democratic politics. It’s an eye-opening account of the marriage between libertarian ideology and authoritarianism.

The other books on my list cover a wide range of provocative topics in a thoughtful and informed way. Christina Gerhardt offers a compelling account of the impact of climate change from the bottom up, profiling the islands that are slowly and steadily disappearing through the eyes and minds of islanders themselves. Malcom Harris examines the historical evolution of Silicon Valley, especially its connections to systemic racism and eugenics, the military-industrial complex, corporate welfare and corporate power blocs that have used their privilege to monopolize their positions in contemporary capitalism. Antony Loewenstein traces the history of the Israeli state from a militarized domestic apartheid to a global seller of weapons to dictatorships around the world. Gary Anderson has edited an important collection of articles showing how the creation and expansion of NATO has always been firmly grounded in the interests of dominant corporations and states, not so much in the interests of the public.

Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire have written a must-read account of the corporate forces that have engaged in a decades long push to privatize public schools in the U.S. and the consequences of these policies, as well as the efforts to fight back. Will Bunch identifies the corporatization of universities, with less public funding, rising tuition and dependence on large-scale student debt, as systemic drivers of inequality in the U.S.

Kerry Howley in Bottoms Up examines the growing infrastructure of the U.S. surveillance state, especially its lack of accountability and its treatment of whistleblowers. Joe Posnanski is a beautiful writer of baseball history and his new book captures many of the joys of fandom.

Victor Lavalle’s Lone Women is a wonderful narrative that combines science fiction with social history in its story of an African-American woman homesteading from California to Montana in the early 20th century in search of a new beginning, but also in possession of both a curse and a revenge for wrongs committed in the past. Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi wrote a science fiction novel about The Centre, a language institute that is capable of training individuals to speak any foreign language fluently within just a couple of weeks, but at a significant price.

Steven Conn’s Lies of the Land is a much-needed corrective to simplistic tropes about rural America. Conn argues that the same corporations that have dominated urban areas also prevail in rural America, from military-industrial corporations, retail chains, extractive industries, and manufacturing plants. There is a class structure here from which the politics follow, rather than just a disgruntled angry base that votes for Donald Trump. Naomi Klein has written one of her best books that captures the larger socioeconomic and political implications of identity creation, re-creation and marketing through social media, led by Klein’s own experience of being confused for Naomi Wolf, a deep state conspiracist of the far right. Gilbert Achcar has published a collection of his excellent and perceptive essays on the ways that the U.S. has used the post-Cold War period to entrench a set of expansive, militaristic policies in search of new enemies. Costas Lapavitsas has edited a book, The State of Capitalism, that has several worthwhile contributions useful for understanding trends in global corporate power. Evan Drellich examines the ethical bankruptcy of major league baseball’s Houston Astros by locating their cheating scandal within a larger use of baseball analytics in which winning becomes the justification for scrapping morality, not that this is terribly new or novel, but a compelling read.