Of the many crises of capitalism, one has become particularly pronounced over the past

half century. As the gap between rich and poor widens, factory workers can no longer

afford to buy the products of the factories they work in. Salespeople can't afford the

products of the shops they staff and riders can't afford the food they deliver. This is

what's called over-accumulation, a glut of stuff and not enough people to buy it.

What then happens is that this surplus wealth is consumed mostly by the super rich. In the

US in 2012, for example, the top 5% of households did 38% of spending. You know how the financial

times has a magazine that until recently was called How to Spend It? That's because

capitalists genuinely have more money than they know what to do with. In 2017, the largest

US-based companies had over $1 trillion in uninvested cash, while worldwide reserves

were over 12 trillion. Meanwhile, as capitalists exhaust the traditional

means of profit generation, making stuff mostly, they turn to more and more creative methods

of making money, mostly in the financial markets. This over-accumulation creates a surplus

not only of capital, but of labour, who needs people to make widgets when your money

can make you money all by itself. This creates a further problem. What do you do with all

the people you no longer need in the economy? They certainly can't be left to plot a revolution.

Unable to exploit this mass of surplus humanity, the only option of the transnational capitalist

class is to control it. This is William I. Robinson's starting point in the global

police state. Published in 2020, his book examines how the transnational capitalist class,

by which he means governments working in tandem with and often at the behest of corporations,

has sought to use all of the methods at its disposal to suppress an increasingly inevitable

rebellion. His analysis has aged depressingly well.

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