Where Are We Now?
Reflecting upon the publication of my new book, Twin Killers: Dispatches Against Global Apartheid & Planetary Ecocide, this dispatch sets the stage for future endeavors by summarizing the picture of the prevailing world system that I have been painting here on the (De-/Re-)Constructing Worlds blog over the course of the past two years, as my abstract theoretical writings gave way to more historical and contextual writings.
I.
In the wake of the “non-events” of emancipation, decolonization, and desegregation, it transpired that global apartheid and planetary ecocide became the means and ends of the “War on Terra” — the unnamable biopolitical and necropolitical war that racial capitalism has waged for nearly six centuries against our planet and her multitudes, with an extreme prejudice against her Black and indigenous multitudes.
“Global apartheid” names the structures of international racial hierarchy and unequal integration that have been formed to preserve the privileges of Euro-Atlantic elites and their proxies/redeemers in the wake of emancipation and decolonization.
“Planetary ecocide” names the managed depletion of our planet’s natural resources by those bent on maximizing the pleasures and profits that they can enjoy at the top of the aforementioned international racial hierarchy.
The terms “global apartheid” and “planetary ecocide”, as I employ them, do not name well thought out elite conspiracies. Rather to the contrary, the terms name the accretion of centuries of desperate and hasty marriages of convenience that have enabled Euro-Atlantic elites and their proxies/redeemers to maintain and advance privileges to which they are trauma bound: a loose consensus formed around numerous local solutions to cascading social crises — solutions that seem to overcome short-term difficulties at the time of their formulation.
II.
Global apartheid as we know it is in crisis at present due to the East Asian mainland’s return to economic prominence after enduring centuries of foreign depredations and geopolitical exclusions under Euro-Atlantic hegemony. The Euro-Atlantic elites at the top of the international racial hierarchy could welcome upward mobility for a few East Asian peninsular and island states accounting for a twentieth of the world population — Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan — provided that they remained militarily dependent upon the Euro-Atlantic powers; but they are finding it increasingly difficult to abide an upwardly mobile China, a single state accounting for nearly a fifth of the world population, possessing vast territories on the East Asian mainland, and militarily independent. To understand the demographic significance of China’s rise, note that the Euro-Atlantic powers and their East Asian client states together do not even account for a seventh of the world population.
Euro-Atlantic elites are ruing the day that they made their bid to solve the social crises of the later decades of the 20th century by encouraging China’s incorporation into the material community of capital as “the world’s factory,” as pivotal source of industrial and consumer goods, produced by a vast, cheap, and disciplined labor force, to feed the ravenous appetites of Euro-Atlantic consumer societies.
In a manner harkening back to the “coolie” trade that took off in the wake of emancipation, Euro-Atlantic elites had imagined that they could exploit masses of impoverished workers from mainland East Asia but, this time, without having to facilitate the migration of peoples across borders, only the movement of goods — all thanks to the triumphs of containerized logistics and just-in-time production lines. Their strategy revolved around the construction of a ring of container ports and adjacent industrial hubs located in extraterritorial Special Economic Zones that were to be reminiscent of the treaty port concessions that Euro-Atlantic elites were able to impose upon the rulers of the East Asian mainland by and through gunboat diplomacy during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The hubris of the Euro-Atlantic elites engaging in this strategy was that they imagined that they had the means and the foresight to control the resulting geopolitical situation and to keep China in a subordinate position. To their chagrin, their strategy has wound up properly shifting the geography of rising fortunes from the Euro-Atlantic to the Asia-Pacific and enabling China to become a formidable competitor for the current Euro-Atlantic imperial hegemon, the United Settler States.
Even though the rise of China constitutes a crisis for global apartheid as we know it today, it seems unlikely to spell the end of global apartheid tout court. At present, China’s rise only threatens the specific international racial hierarchy that emerged under United Settler hegemony. Otherwise, all indications are that a rising China will maintain a global order built on the presumption of scarcity, for it maintains just such an order at home, and, to quote Ivan Illich, “without apartheid based on sex or pigmentation, on certification or race, or party membership, a society built on the assumption of scarcity cannot exist.” Ay, and the Black and indigenous multitudes of our planet seem certain to remain at the bottom of whatever structures of international hierarchy and unequal integration emerge in the wake of a Chinese bid for hegemony. China’s rise will no doubt transform the demography and geography of Empire in a manner that calls Euro-Atlantic white-supremacy into question, yes, but not in a manner that does away with coloniality and anti-blackness.
What’s more, it must be added that the rise of China no more spells an end to planetary ecocide than it does an end to global apartheid. Even worse, it announces an acceleration, as China competes with the United Settlers for the hegemonic prerogative of extracting and depleting the greatest share of the planet’s resources. Indigenous peoples’ lands and waters are being subjected to new extractive pressures all over the world and a new Scramble for Africa is underway targeting the extraction of the continent’s rich bio-geo-chemical resources, all while climate catastrophes wreak havoc upon so many already fragile ecologies.
III.
In response to the rise of China and the decline of their hegemony, the United Settlers are betting that maintaining and exacerbating hostilities in the Euro-Atlantic region (against Russia) and in the Asia-Pacific region (against China) will “fix” present social crises at home and firm up their position as global military muscle for wealthy client states in Western Europe and East Asia — Germany and Japan being the most prominent of these clients for having been rebuilt, reconfigured, and enriched as pivotal client states by the United Settlers after the Second World War.
The crises that the United Settlers must "fix" at home are, in fact, crises that are afflicting the entire Euro-Atlantic world. For at the same time that the maintenance of the present international racial hierarchy has run into difficulties, it happens that intra-national racial, ethnic, gender, and class hierarchies within the Euro-Atlantic nations are also beginning to yield under pressure. As the fortunes of the Euro-Atlantic nations have declined relative to those of the Asia-Pacific, the Euro-Atlantic economies, having been built on the premise of maintaining global dominance and forever rising fortunes, are in turmoil over how to distribute their declining fortunes amongst their fractious populations. Most of those higher up in their nations' racial, ethnic, gender, and class hierarchies, white male property owners above all, are pushing for those at the bottom to absorb most, if not all of the decline in fortunes. At the same time, many at the bottom — Black peoples, indigenous peoples, racialized migrants, the unemployed and unhoused — believe that those at the top should absorb the decline, and the most radical amongst those at the bottom are taking matters further and agitating for the dismantling of racial, ethnic, gender, and class hierarchies altogether, intra-nationally and inter-nationally..
Sensing increasing disquiet coming from those at the bottom, a loose consensus has emerged amongst Euro-Atlantic elites that the most promising way to revive their fortunes and keep those at the bottom in check is to mobilize for an economic and military war to contain and force China back into a subordinate position and jumpstart economic growth to their advantage. In the meantime, while they ready materiel and rationales for a war against China, Euro-Atlantic elites are, fascistically, shifting greater and greater resources to public and private police and paramilitaries in order to maintain order at home as their oppressed multitudes absorb declines in fortunes. The ruling classes of the United Settler States, who have the most to lose by far if things go sideways, are presently spending more state resources on policing the racialized minorities within their territories and the racialized migrants at their borders than most other states have to spend on any given prospect or project whatsoever. Similarly disposed, the European Union’s ruling classes, who regard racialized migrant groups to be the greatest threat to their internal cohesion, have increased funding to the EU’s Border and Coast Guard Agency, Frontex, by an unprecedented 194% in the most recent EU budget, making Frontex the best funded of all EU agencies. All of this is to say, in other words, that the rise of China has, thus far, only inspired Euro-Atlantic elites to defend and double-down on their apartheid measures, intra-nationally and inter-nationally.
Meanwhile, peripheral elites ruling over the poorer, darker nations of the world, already struggling to consolidate their own positions of privilege vis-à-vis the multitudes over whom they presume to rule, now also find themselves caught up in the competition for global hegemony between the United Settlers and China, attempting to play the two opposed sides against each other to their own advantage, which all too often happens to be to the disadvantage of our distressed planet and her oppressed multitudes. These peripheral elites are mostly competing with one another to be among the lucky few who make the move from the periphery to the semi-periphery. Those who play their cards right and properly hedge their bets in the race for hegemony, without going all in on either the current frontrunner or the up-and-comer, may very well move up in the inter-national hierarchy, but at what cost to the peoples and the places that they presume to rule?
IV.
But what of those of us who would rebel against all of the above? What of those of us who would form counter-powers to destabilize and dissipate both inter-national and intra-national racial, ethnic, gender, and class hierarchies, and who would upset the imperial order of things that makes for (over-)developed cores that prey upon under-developed peripheries? Where are we now and what are we to do to bring an alternative world into being?
We stand against efforts to keep the so-called “peace” that is killing our planet under the old global hegemon, against efforts to dethrone the old global hegemon and crown a new one, and against efforts to construct a multi-polar order in which a new cold war between rival hegemons creates a meta-stable Empire that perpetuates global apartheid and planetary ecocide under variable terms. In other words, we oppose the United Settler States and their clients, we oppose the Chinese state and its clients, and we oppose the peripheral elites who are maneuvering to join the semi-periphery by playing the rival blocs for hegemony against one another to their own advantage and to the detriment of the global majority. We want none of it because none of it is actually against global apartheid and planetary ecocide.
Ay, and this is precisely where I believe we find ourselves today: needing to articulate ways of doing, making, saying, and thinking against global apartheid and planetary ecocide, regardless of which ruling class formation these twin killers serve to empower and privilege. My new book, Twin Killers: Dispatches Against Global Apartheid & Planetary Ecocide, and its immediate predecessor, The War on Terra & the New Underground Railroad, were written as humble contributions to this very end. Written over the course of two years, these two books together call for the formation of a radical resistance that is premised upon radical everydayness and revolutionary love, that is nourished by the therapeutic imagination, and that endeavors to make artful reparations for all that the War on Terra has wrecked, (re-)creating and multiplying confluences amongst peoples of different races, ethnicities, classes, and genders, firmly standing against global apartheid and planetary ecocide.
It is, however, one thing to make a call and another to heed a call, and this heralds the transition that I hope to make over the coming months. Future dispatches will be less historical and theoretical and more “practical”: I will be writing about those who are, perhaps unbeknownst to themselves, heeding the call that I have made in some way shape or form and, going further, I will be writing about my own attempts to heed the call in collaboration and correspondence with others, including many of you, my readers.
