Transnational Institute of Social Ecology

The Epochal Crisis of Global Capitalism – Challenges for Popular Resistance from Below

Excerpt from the speech William I. Robinson delivered at the Peoples’ Platform Europe Conference held in Vienna, Austria in 14-16 February 2025.

Global capitalism faces an unprecedented crisis. It is a stage of absolute, violent predation. Its extermination impulse is now rising to the surface. Our burning challenge in this situation is to renovate projects of radical transformation and emancipation and build up counter-hegemonic power from below.

The global crisis we face right now is potentially more catastrophic than earlier cycles of crisis. But what kind of crisis is this? We can identify three types of crisis – cyclical crisis, structural crisis and systemic crisis. Great structural crises can be seen every 40 to 50 years. They affect the entire world. The last great crisis was in the 1970s. In response to that crisis transnational capital launched globalisation as prolonged class warfare from above. The transnational capitalist class emerged as hegemonic fraction of capital on a world scale. The past half-century involved prolonged waves worldwide of capital expansions, reintegration of the former Soviet Bloc, China, Third World revolutions, etc. Also, the violent insertion of every country into the new globalised system of production, finance and services. It was a vast new round of primitive accumulation. Today, the global proletariat is at 5 billion people – the largest class in history. […]

Capital’s coercive domination is becoming deeply embedded in the new strategies of militarised accumulation by repression. Genocide is becoming enormously profitable and attractive because it resolves economic and political problems for the ruling groups, as limits to expansions must be overcome by technologies of death and destruction. […] Surplus capital produces its alter ego: surplus labour. That means we have two billion people that count as surplus humanity. The global proletariat can be seen in two categories:

1. Expelled people, that are made surplus (2 billion people) and
2. Labourers that are incorporated into capital’s circuits as precarious labour (2 billion people).

That means 4 billion of the 5 billion proletariat is completely precarious or surplus. Billions can’t survive. Social disintegration is spreading. Millions are facing displacement by conflict, climate change, economic collapse and political, ethnic and religious persecution. […] What we see in Gaza is the attempt to resolve the problem of surplus humanity through genocide.

This is the Gaza Option: extermination on the deepest structural level. Then there is the Salvadorian Option: new mega-prison geographies. And new geographies of containment, where borders are less physical markers than axes around which intense control of those expelled is organised; these are zones of non-being and zones of death like the Mexican border with 7 000 deaths, and the Mediterranean with more than 24 500 deaths between 2014-2024.

We have a lot to learn from Rojava, with its model of democratic confederalism, from the Zapatistas, and other such experiments in local emancipatory struggles that place bottom-up autonomy and the struggle against patriarchy at the centre. […] Autonomy and popular power at the local level is of critical importance but we cannot leave the macro levels and the states that dominate them free of anti-capitalist, anti-systemic challenges.

Video from the whole speech: