The war in Ukraine is a neoimperialist conflict that serves as a prelude to the process of the implosion of world capitalism, disintegrating amidst socioecological crisis and a civil war of global latitude. In other words, capital—the dominant form of social production—falls back into the rhythm of the same soundtrack that witnessed its world-historical birth in the economic and military revolution of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: war, blood, and violence.
The decomposition of capitalism manifests itself in the unleashing of uninhibited violence, a nihilistic “thirst for annihilation.”1 As stated previously, this takes the form of a global civil war. Or in other words, a conflict that is waged at every scale: from the most intimate dimensions of capitalist social life to the level of a geopolitical conflict between contemporary neoimperialist powers. In order to understand the manifold phenomena that make up the process of this nihilistic aggravation of violence, though, we ought to take a closer look at its connection with the movement of expanded social reproduction of capital. We must analyze this particular historical evolution from the perspective of a critique of political economy. Such a critique apprehends both the global and molecular aspects of violent phenomena as integral parts of the capitalist accumulation process,2 occurring alongside the dynamics of the socioecological crisis of the mercantile mode of production. To fully grasp the development of the conflict and neoimperialist economic competition in Ukraine would be to summarize the totality of the current global crisis. For this reason, however, it implies that one has to analyze the problem from a broad-scale historical perspective. Indeed, the military invasion by Russia (the last stronghold of the lagging capitalist modernization regime that was the ussr) of Ukraine (one of the former Soviet republics that was integrated into that state with the Bolshevik counterrevolutionary process in that region, at the time of the Russian Revolution) has different economic, political, cultural, social, and historical dimensions. These comprise a complex and diverse totality, which has its axis of unity in global capitalism’s movement of production and expanded reproduction.
In this sense, it is by no means a coincidence that we find the epicenter of this global conflict in the post-Soviet sphere. This is of course a geographical space where a state capitalist dictatorship of modernization was established during the first few decades of the twentieth century, which would capitulate a decade before the end of the last millennium. Considering the process on a grand scale, the current moment of post-Soviet capitalism accordingly draws to a close the cycle that opened between 1923 and 1927 with the rise of Stalin to the head of the Soviet state. His ascent heralded a violent process of accelerated primitive accumulation that would lead the ussr to become a world capitalist superpower between 1945 (with the victory over Germany in the modern industrialized war) and 1949 (with the detonation of its first atomic bomb, six months after the foundation of nato). From 1947 until its official dissolution in 1991, the ussr established itself as a pole of capital accumulation fully integrated into the world market competing against the Western powers for planetary hegemony within the capitalist mode of production. However, its lagging character with respect to the Western capitalist powers was the determining factor in its dissolution. When capitalist restructuring finally arrived in the 1970s, it was increasingly unable to compete in the productive sphere. Its industries were left behind in the face of the relocation of production processes, the intervention of Asian countries like Singapore and Hong Kong in the world market. This, along with the microelectronic revolution and the massification of consumption, completely undermined the industrial exports of East Germany and Czechoslovakia.
Contrary to most of his contemporaries, Robert Kurz understood that the implosion of barracks socialism—a capitalist formation of lagging modernization carried out under the banner of Marxism—constituted the prelude to the collapse of the global modernization process.3 However, this process should not be understood as the imminent and immediate collapse of the capitalist system. Rather it is the crumbling, still in progress, of an historical mode of production that increasingly collides with its internal and external limits. The implosion of the Soviet state did not therefore immediately imply the collapse of capitalism as such in the geopolitical space of the former socialist bloc, but instead its reorganization and adaptation to the new historical circumstances created by the capitalist globalization process. Putin’s arrival at the helm of the Russian state on the last day of the past millennium at once signifies the reorganization of Russian capitalism and its entry into a process of decomposition. This occurs amidst a permanent state of exception over society. In fact, its true historical “merit”—if we think of it according to the ideology of death typical of the enlightened subject—would be precisely the stabilization of Russian capitalism. It represents the formation of an independent and arch-authoritarian imperialist state capable of competing with the West, a state which could halt the sustained Western efforts to turn the Russian Federation into a periphery subjugated to Western neoimperialism.
Indeed, the currently dominant political and economic elite within the Russian state are former members of the Soviet nomenklatura who secured dispositional power over economic units and the means of production in the framework of an accelerated privatization process. They thereby mutated from being state-capitalist functionaries to members of a bourgeoisie. Or, more precisely, capitalist oligarchy.4 In this regard, Tomasz Konicz points out the following structural features of the state and the post-Soviet capitalist economy in Russia:
The state [is] the country’s central power factor, [which] acted to assume direct control of strategic sectors of the Russian economy. Particularly the raw materials sector. In Russia… a renationalization was carried out of large parts of the Russian energy sector. This was part of the political strategy of the “energy empire,” decisively shaped by Putin, striving for the Kremlin’s complete control possible of all energy production and distribution. Apart from the arms industry, the raw materials sector is the only internationally competitive branch of its industry. Meanwhile, the rest of commodity production, suffering from huge investment deficits, has never recovered from the collapse of state socialism.5
Mutatis mutandis, this also applies with equal force to the formation of the post-Soviet Ukrainian capitalist oligarchy, the warlords who presently finance the neofascist military squads fighting as elite units on the frontlines.6 In fact, the position of Ukraine within the post-Soviet sphere—as well as its insertion in the world capitalist market and the neoimperialist conflicts plaguing the region—meant that it was trapped between East and West in a political and economic impasse. No way out was offered, other than military and economic adherence to one of the competing sides: “Kyiv had to choose between the imf austerity regime and cheap fossil fuels from Moscow. Both options were accompanied by losses of sovereignty.”7 Like almost all the rest of the post-Soviet states, Ukraine is indeed an economically unviable state. Its main industries besides agriculture are generally obsolete, and not very competitive internationally. This also led to the tug-of-war between East and West over the country prior to the civil war.8
In this way, post-Soviet misery and the Russo-Ukrainian war constitute two complementary spheres of the world crisis of late capitalism, in which neoimperialist competition in Eurasia is carried out to try to overcome the social and economic decline caused by the crisis, as well as it also expresses the will of the central powers of global capitalism to maintain their hegemonic position at the cost of the collapse of the peripheries.9 It was, in fact, the promotion of the political and economic bloc known as the “Eurasian Union” by the Kremlin—which held the integration of Ukraine to be one of its fundamental components10—that determined the outbreak of the civil war in the region, and the subsequent confrontation between countries, since through such an initiative Russia sought to establish a counterweight to the growing Western influence in the post-Soviet space while consolidating its position as an economic and military power in Eurasia:
The “Eurasian Union” would be the Russian economic bloc between the “West” and China. And more powerful than the eu, because Russia’s military would likely spearhead a common security policy. The European Union completely lacks this arm. With a fully developed Eurasian Union, the eu would be dependent on Moscow, given the current flow of goods, for its raw materials and energy sectors.11
The West today sheds crocodile tears over the violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty by a Western-oriented government and the bombing of its civilian population. But it had no regard for that sovereignty when, as part of a broader strategy, it cooperated to remove the pro-Russian government of Yanukovych and thus separate the country from the geopolitical orbit of Russian capitalism. Indeed, the fundamental objective and point of convergence of the Western intervention in Ukraine in 2014 (despite the different interests of the United States and the European Union in general, as well as an increasingly independent Germany in particular) was to prevent the establishment of a power bloc capable in the long term of competing with the Atlantic powers. This represented a latent threat that could have curbed the West’s ambitions in the post-Soviet space and, something which was of particular concern to leadership in Washington, might have opened the possibility of an alternative economic and political alliance in the eastern portion of the European Union. Thus the Russian imperialist plans for the construction of said bloc in the post-Soviet space were sabotaged through the collapse of the Ukrainian government, the outbreak of a civil war, and the formation of openly neo-Nazi battalions which have terrorized the Donbass region in recent years with the tacit support of the European elite and the silence of Western media.
For Russia, the ongoing war is among its last chances to maintain its status as a power in the global market. Losing it would amount to a geopolitical collapse that would destroy the ambitions of Putin and the post-Soviet oligarchy that sustains him.12 For this reason, the conflict in Ukraine can also be understood as part of a broader struggle for world hegemony between the United States and China. These two first-rank powers tend to consolidate their alliances from Eurasia to the Pacific Ocean, and increasingly face each other more openly due to the worsening social, economic, and ecological crisis affecting the entire global structure of contemporary capitalism. Yet this belligerent global standoff, which is for now being waged in Ukraine and in the peripheries of the world system, has a different material basis than the imperialist conflicts of the first half of the twentieth century. Effectively, that was an imperialism which corresponded to an expanding capitalism—a process in which the peripheral zones of the capitalist world-system were integrated by force of the bellicose operations of primitive accumulation. By contrast, the current conflict is objectively based on the contraction of the process of the valorization of capital. This proceeds in lockstep with the accelerated destruction of nature and the economic, social, and political collapse of different regions of the planet.13 In other words, the current neoimperialist war has as its objective material foundation not the expansion of capitalism but its decomposition, not the conquest of new territories but the conservation of accumulation zones which can be defended from the disintegration of the global economic order. It is a true “crisis imperialism.”14
On the other hand, in a different aspect of this process, the current neoimperialist conflict expresses the exhaustion of the United States as a hegemonic planetary power within world capitalism. This correlates to an increase in tensions with other rising neoimperial powers, such as China.15 Despite the current process of decomposition of the Western capitalist powers’ hegemony at the global level, however, this does not imply their necessary replacement by China or by some other bloc of powers. This is because it is a neoimperialist conflict within the framework of the global capital’s process of reproduction, a process which is objectively dissolving with the decrease of the overall mass of surplus value.16 Hence the paradoxical situation of China: it has managed to do in decades what other powers achieved in centuries, but like the United States it is a giant with feet of clay. It has reached the vanguard of world capitalism at the precise moment when that system is collapsing amidst a socioecological crisis.
While China is positioning itself as a rising power within the historical framework of crisis imperialism, however, Washington is struggling to maintain its eroded global hegemony, particularly since its withdrawal from Afghanistan. Hence its efforts to keep the us dollar as the main currency of the world, a condition that allowed it to issue money from the Federal Reserve without falling into inflation (at least until this year). Since this mechanism no longer works, and since inflation has increased in the United States over the past year at a pace unseen in four decades, its government is forced to take risky actions at the geopolitical level.17 Risky actions like escalating its indirect confrontation with Russia through the conflict in Ukraine, which threatens to reach the point of using tactical nuclear weapons. Supposedly these are less “devastating” and more “ecologically friendly” than their more destructive cousins.18 Thus has Ukraine become the battlefront of a global neoimperialist war, which for the first time since the end of World War II has European territory as the direct theater of military operations.
This offensive by the West—i.e., its geopolitical expansion towards the East—has gone hand-in-hand with the erosion of Russian capitalism, as well as that of its satellites. All this stems from the valorization crisis of world capitalism. The Kremlin elite found itself increasingly on the defensive on the international stage. In the Caucasus region, in Belarus and, this year, in Kazakhstan, the power bloc articulated after the fall of the Soviet Union around the renewed Russian imperialism has begun to show increasingly evident signs of wear and tear. Thus, the neoimperial ambitions of the Muscovite elite found themselves trapped in a process of wear and tear accelerated by the socioecological crisis, which began by affecting its satellites first. In 2020, Belarus—ruled by the authoritarian [Aleksandr] Lukashenko since 1994—showed signs of economic stagnation. Trapped in an apparently insurmountable political and economic situation, massive protests broke out in the country. These protests were of a similar nature to the ones that shook international capitalism in 2019. Lukashenko responded to this crisis with unceremonious repression, pursuing a broader rapprochement with Moscow in the hopes of clinging to power. Thus did the Russian neoimperial dream of becoming an independent economic bloc between the European Union and China (via the “New Silk Road’’) begin to crash head-on with the economic and geopolitical reality imposed by the current socioecological crisis. On the contrary, Russian capitalism should fight with the force of arms and goods to maintain its status as a central power while trying to stop the process of disintegration of its sphere of influence.
The Russian elite led by Putin in reality found itself with its back to the wall well before the invasion of Ukraine. And this situation only worsened with the outbreak of a major social conflagration in Kazakhstan earlier in the year. In fact, we could say that the Kazakhstani social revolt was a direct prelude to the process of war we are witnessing today. A former Soviet republic, and today a satellite of the Kremlin regime, Kazakhstan contains in its territory all the characteristics that will soon reach the population of the central powers of world capitalism. Especially as regards the degradation of living conditions. The sustained rise in the cost of living and the impoverishment of the population, combined with a rise in the price of gas, set off a revolt that had features similar to the one that shook Chile in 2019. Unlike the democratic spectacle offered to the population by Chilean capitalism to contain the subversive dimension of the latter revolt, however, the former rebellion was drowned in blood through the joint terrorist policy of the Kazakh government and Russian armed forces. Although today forgotten by public opinion, the revolt in Kazakhstan—and above all by the hysterical antifascists who praise the military policy of Russian imperialism—reinforced the permanent state of exception in which its population has lived since the disintegration of the ussr. From now on, the country’s ruling class is aware that it will have to reinforce the already harsh daily repression of the population in order to maintain its place within world capitalism: a lesson that its superiors in Moscow are already actively applying.
In this sense, the revolt in Kazakhstan is indicative of both the impoverishment of living conditions on a worldwide scale (particularly strongly felt in the countries on the periphery of global commodity chains) and the traits this process will adopt in those regions where modernization lagged in the twentieth century. On this last point, it is necessary to note that the authoritarian structure of these regimes seems to be typical of such regions. Their place is determined both by the world capitalist market and the network of competitive rivalries between the neoimperialist powers. A democratic regime in any of the countries that remain in Russia’s sphere of influence, and in the Russian Federation itself, would indeed make room for Western intervention. This is a risk that the political and business elite at the head of Russia, and the various rackets19 linked to it, cannot allow.
In this way, the revolts in Kazakhstan (2022) and in Belarus (2020–2021) allow us to glimpse the Russian regime’s reinforcement of constant repression of the population in an historical context where material living conditions will only worsen. Amidst the socioecological crisis of late capitalism, we could thus invert the famous phrase from Capital to say that backwards countries do nothing but show the most advanced the image of their own future. The worsening of this crisis in Kazakhstan at the beginning of the year was not only a local manifestation of the world crisis, but also a preview of the future for its imperial metropolis based in Moscow. For the last decade this city has moved in its competition for a hegemonic place within global capitalism during the contemporary socioecological crisis. In this regard it should be noted that, according to a statement by Putin himself, climate change is advancing in the region 2.5 times faster than the average for the planet. This does not mean that it has served to change the productive configuration of Russian capitalism, but on the contrary that the production of gas and fuel for export has accelerated.
This seems to be a logical consequence of the historical development of capitalist modernization: to die in misery amidst wealth. Russia is indeed one of the weakest chains of global capitalism, due to its lagging position vis-à-vis the West. At the same time, however, it is a military superpower that has inherited a huge weapons arsenal and a massive infrastructure for scientific and technological development. Putin’s maintenance of power in perpetuity constitutes both an inheritance of the “concentrated” capitalist legacy of the Soviet regime as well as a necessity imposed by the specific character of its historical modernization process. It is only by virtue of this open state of emergency, of a permanent nature, that Russian capitalism has been able to perpetuate itself to this day. And this is one of the immediate reasons why, at a decisive moment in its competition with the Western powers and the eastward advance of nato, the military invasion of Ukraine has been imposed as a mortal necessity for a Russian capitalism which sees its economic, political, and social foundations decomposing within its own borders. Not to mention those of its allies within the post-Soviet sphere.
The anti-Russian propaganda broadcast on a massive scale throughout Western media, which presents Putin as the new archenemy of democracy, conveniently forgets that Russia is fighting for its survival in the context of the worsening systemic crisis of world capitalism. It hopes to not be reduced to a peripheral country by Western neoimperialism, which has consistently torpedoed and hemmed in the rise of the Russian Federation as a great power. Additionally, this process marks the end of the policy of Germany—the country that has established itself as the hegemonic nucleus of Western Europe—of the simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of Russian capitalism in the economic structure of the European Union. From now on they will have to deal with the contradiction posed by the economic development of the last couple decades, where Russia occupied a peripheral position of supplier of raw materials and energy while at the same time every effort was made to minimize its influence in Eastern Europe and in the post-Soviet space.
The various European powers will henceforth have to navigate between the latent threat of a military confrontation with a nuclear superpower surpassing them by decades in the scientific and technological development of hypersonic weapons, weapons that have broken the de facto balance of power between the nuclear powers, and the needs of its energy supply, mainly oil and gas. The neo-tsar Vladimir Putin and his gang of henchmen have fully understood this situation. In their false consciousness, they will exploit it to the end. Using persecution, jail, dictatorial laws, and political police, they will be forced to suppress rising social unrest due to the war and Western sanctions. Economic pressures will cause the working class and the declining middle class to suffer. At the same time they must continue their military advance until they achieve their strategic objectives, knowing that they have hypersonic weapons pointed at the neck of Germany and the rest of Europe. They know how to deal with the hunger of the Russian people, silencing their complaints with the blow of an electric baton. But they will not stop with their advance, considering they can always cut off the gas. In fact, in this regard Putin has been genuinely candid. Namely, when he blasts Western genocides for their commonplace nature, pointing out that Russia is part of the global commercial system and would never do anything on its own that would damage that of which it is a part. So it will press on with its course of action to force demands on Ukraine, and to do so will accept the weight of the sanctions imposed on it. After all, what Russia risks in the long run—and what it is fighting for today, despite the sad illusions of left anti-imperialists—is its place at the table in partitioning the mass of global surplus value.
When the crisis reached the centers of world capitalism, on the other hand, it was marked by an increase in the cost of living. A New Right and various postfascisms20 arose out of the economic turmoil, from the broken promise of a universal middle class. The powers clustered in nato have increasingly abandoned their liberal rhetoric, giving way to an exaltation of war in response to the crisis. Official media outlets are already beginning to insinuate that a war with Russia will not only improve the economy, but could also help reduce global warming.21
Additionally, the us capitalist elite has achieved a strategic short-term objective by managing to drive a wedge between Germany and Russia. For the moment it has banished the specter of a Eurasian alliance which, along with that of the Chinese “New Silk Road,” might further corrode its already weakened global hegemony. This current process will therefore allow the United States to consolidate an oceanic alliance stretching from the Atlantic (nato) to the Pacific (Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan), openly directed against China’s rise to the top of world capitalism.
In this way, we can say that the invasion of Ukraine marks the beginning of a new era for the major power centers of world capitalism. Grouped into clearly defined imperialist camps, but with independent and contradictory interests among the powers that make up said blocs, they will be increasingly pushed towards armed conflict. Especially towards hybrid forms, as a way of concealing the consequences of a generalized crisis that cannot be resolved except through conflict. Already this allows us to observe that the historical decline of capitalism will occur amidst worsening socioecological crisis and the war between superpowers.
Indeed, war as a strategic tool for political support will henceforth become increasingly attractive to states navigating the crisis of late capitalism. Without hesitation, they will begin to mobilize troops, produce propaganda, and whip up the masses towards the achievement of their political and economic goals. As a result of this process, a global scenario is played out in the present where the structural socioecological crisis of capitalism entails an unleashing of violence throughout every sphere of capitalist society.22 Just as it did in the process of its initial historic formation, this opens up the material condition for capitalism’s expanded reproduction. It is, as already anticipated, a civil war on a global scale in which different conflicts and forms of violence are superimposed, a war that is lived within the current subjects of the crisis. This war is fought from Third World neighborhoods controlled by post-state mafias, through capital accumulation circuits linked to the drug trade, human trafficking, and suicidal massacres, all the way up to the neoimperialist war fought between Ukrainian soil, world finance, and cyberspace.
It is also worth noting the rise of the global extreme right in the midst of this process. Trump and Bolsonaro were only the tip of the spear of a phenomenon that is here to stay. This is the same phenomenon that has thousands of militants armed to the teeth fighting in the Ukrainian army, to which the West prodigiously provides state-of-the-art weapons. Just as it did in the Middle East during the Cold War, blindly pursuing its geopolitical interests, the West will end up weakening another pillar of its social stability by arming and training the vanguard units of rightwing terrorism of the near future. Sooner rather than later the war will end in a power vacuum, allowing these nato-financed rackets and the Ukrainian oligarchy to further consolidate themselves within the state. Once there, they can begin carrying out their delusional and fearsome ideological dreams. In this sense, as Konicz points out, “the war in Ukraine could outlast the formal end of the imperialist proxy war.” The death drive takes over countries in conflict, this fascination with war and death among different sectors of the population, especially ultranationalists and neoreactionaries of different tendencies (even those who fly the antifascist banner) must be understood as an ideology of death. It expresses the universal cry of despair of a humanity self-destructing within its form of global capitalist socialization. Those who feared the collapse of civilization should no longer have any doubts, because barbarism is already here. From here on out, emancipatory forces must unite around the radical criticism of these new conditions and the promotion of a new paradigm of social emancipation. This can only take place through the very catastrophe we are experiencing, through the latent possibilities in the science and technology of twenty-first century capitalism. In short, in a worse way than [Antonio] Gramsci could have foreseen when he delivered his famous maxim that “now is the time of monsters.”23
Conclusion
In one of the climaxes of Roberto Bolaño’s posthumous novel 2666 it is stated, regarding the disappearance and subsequent murder of women in Mexico, that “no one pays attention to these murders, but the secret of the world is hidden in them.”24 In the same way, no one pays much attention to the murders in Ukraine anymore, which initially sparked so much hysteria and crocodile tears from the Western democratic press. As with the femicides, the school shootings, the terror of the drug traffickers, and the innocents stabbed in the streets, people have learned to live with war as part of everyday life. It should be noted, however, that these facts are only acceptable to the subjectivity of late capitalism because it is structurally nihilistic.25 But as Bolaño profoundly and clairvoyantly pointed out, it is in these violent murders—which today occur daily in every metropolis of capitalist civilization—that the secret internal logic of the global system containing our historical moment is revealed.
The internal logic of capital is a logic of sacrifice and (self-)extermination, of uninhibited violence established as the order of things. The Marxian critique of political economy, as a rational understanding of the real movement of capital, allows one to apprehend the material root behind the deployment of the most abject forms of violence in this time of catastrophes. Of course this analysis can also be extended towards a detailed understanding of the structural link between the process of capitalist modernization on a world scale on the one hand, and the violence unleashed as a condition of possibility for the establishment and upkeep of the capitalist mode of production on the other. In the current process of socioecological crisis, neoimperialist war, and military rearmament, a critique of the political economy of violence becomes a necessary instrument for both collective theoretical reflection and the practical implementation of emancipatory sociopolitical alternatives to the plunge into barbarism.
Regarding this last point, the slogan “barbarism or emancipation” can function here as the conclusion of the analysis. Empirical data will only confirm this thesis, revealing the real core of the present and its future development. Barbarism isn’t just about the school shooter, the robbers who murder for tiny sums of money, or the extremists of the New Right who go on killing sprees before offing themselves, but also about the states and multinational capitals that seek to maintain capitalist accumulation at the cost of annihilating the biophysical foundations of planetary life. It’s about the potential for the major power centers of capitalism to escalate conflict to the point of threatening catastrophic nuclear war. Only the critical theory of society can reveal that those capable of pressing the button that would bring about armageddon are guided by the same suicidal and annihilatory logic that guides the terrorist or the school shooter.26
It is only by acknowledging this empirical fact, this objectivity of subjectivity, that critical theory can contribute today to the proposal of a new paradigm of emancipation. In this sense, this brief intervention does not consider itself the last word against the multiplicity of theories seeking to address the problem of contemporary violence, but rather an exercise in critical thinking that aims to offer some fundamental lines for a broader study. A deeper understanding of this problem can then serve as theoretical support for a practical, emancipatory solution to the historical challenge posed by the global civil war and the new quality of the capitalist crisis which is already throwing the entire world into barbarism, violence, and uninhibited destruction.
- Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (London: Routledge, 1992).↩︎
- Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott, “Modernizaci&oThe War of Russian Capitalism’s Decomposition: Neoimperialism, Uninhibited Violence, and Global Civil WarPablo Jiménez CeaThe war in Ukraine is a neoimperialist conflict that serves as a prelude to the process of the implosion of world capitalism, disintegrating amidst socioecological crisis and a civil war of global latitude. In other words, capital—the dominant form of social production—falls back into the rhythm of the same soundtrack that witnessed its world-historical birth in the economic and military revolution of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: war, blood, and violence.The decomposition of capitalism manifests itself in the unleashing of uninhibited violence, a nihilistic “thirst for annihilation.”1 As stated previously, this takes the form of a global civil war. Or in other words, a conflict that is waged at every scale: from the most intimate dimensions of capitalist social life to the level of a geopolitical conflict between contemporary neoimperialist powers. In order to understand the manifold phenomena that make up the process of this nihilistic aggravation of violence, though, we ought to take a closer look at its connection with the movement of expanded social reproduction of capital. We must analyze this particular historical evolution from the perspective of a critique of political economy. Such a critique apprehends both the global and molecular aspects of violent phenomena as integral parts of the capitalist accumulation process,2 occurring alongside the dynamics of the socioecological crisis of the mercantile mode of production. To fully grasp the development of the conflict and neoimperialist economic competition in Ukraine would be to summarize the totality of the current global crisis. For this reason, however, it implies that one has to analyze the problem from a broad-scale historical perspective. Indeed, the military invasion by Russia (the last stronghold of the lagging capitalist modernization regime that was the ussr) of Ukraine (one of the former Soviet republics that was integrated into that state with the Bolshevik counterrevolutionary process in that region, at the time of the Russian Revolution) has different economic, political, cultural, social, and historical dimensions. These comprise a complex and diverse totality, which has its axis of unity in global capitalism’s movement of production and expanded reproduction.In this sense, it is by no means a coincidence that we find the epicenter of this global conflict in the post-Soviet sphere. This is of course a geographical space where a state capitalist dictatorship of modernization was established during the first few decades of the twentieth century, which would capitulate a decade before the end of the last millennium. Considering the process on a grand scale, the current moment of post-Soviet capitalism accordingly draws to a close the cycle that opened between 1923 and 1927 with the rise of Stalin to the head of the Soviet state. His ascent heralded a violent process of accelerated primitive accumulation that would lead the ussr to become a world capitalist superpower between 1945 (with the victory over Germany in the modern industrialized war) and 1949 (with the detonation of its first atomic bomb, six months after the foundation of nato). From 1947 until its official dissolution in 1991, the ussr established itself as a pole of capital accumulation fully integrated into the world market competing against the Western powers for planetary hegemony within the capitalist mode of production. However, its lagging character with respect to the Western capitalist powers was the determining factor in its dissolution. When capitalist restructuring finally arrived in the 1970s, it was increasingly unable to compete in the productive sphere. Its industries were left behind in the face of the relocation of production processes, the intervention of Asian countries like Singapore and Hong Kong in the world market. This, along with the microelectronic revolution and the massification of consumption, completely undermined the industrial exports of East Germany and Czechoslovakia.Contrary to most of his contemporaries, Robert Kurz understood that the implosion of barracks socialism—a capitalist formation of lagging modernization carried out under the banner of Marxism—constituted the prelude to the collapse of the global modernization process.3 However, this process should not be understood as the imminent and immediate collapse of the capitalist system. Rather it is the crumbling, still in progress, of an historical mode of production that increasingly collides with its internal and external limits. The implosion of the Soviet state did not therefore immediately imply the collapse of capitalism as such in the geopolitical space of the former socialist bloc, but instead its reorganization and adaptation to the new historical circumstances created by the capitalist globalization process. Putin’s arrival at the helm of the Russian state on the last day of the past millennium at once signifies the reorganization of Russian capitalism and its entry into a process of decomposition. This occurs amidst a permanent state of exception over society. In fact, its true historical “merit”—if we think of it according to the ideology of death typical of the enlightened subject—would be precisely the stabilization of Russian capitalism. It represents the formation of an independent and arch-authoritarian imperialist state capable of competing with the West, a state which could halt the sustained Western efforts to turn the Russian Federation into a periphery subjugated to Western neoimperialism.
Indeed, the currently dominant political and economic elite within the Russian state are former members of the Soviet nomenklatura who secured dispositional power over economic units and the means of production in the framework of an accelerated privatization process. They thereby mutated from being state-capitalist functionaries to members of a bourgeoisie. Or, more precisely, capitalist oligarchy.4 In this regard, Tomasz Konicz points out the following structural features of the state and the post-Soviet capitalist economy in Russia:
The state [is] the country’s central power factor, [which] acted to assume direct control of strategic sectors of the Russian economy. Particularly the raw materials sector. In Russia… a renationalization was carried out of large parts of the Russian energy sector. This was part of the political strategy of the “energy empire,” decisively shaped by Putin, striving for the Kremlin’s complete control possible of all energy production and distribution. Apart from the arms industry, the raw materials sector is the only internationally competitive branch of its industry. Meanwhile, the rest of commodity production, suffering from huge investment deficits, has never recovered from the collapse of state socialism.5
Mutatis mutandis, this also applies with equal force to the formation of the post-Soviet Ukrainian capitalist oligarchy, the warlords who presently finance the neofascist military squads fighting as elite units on the frontlines.6 In fact, the position of Ukraine within the post-Soviet sphere—as well as its insertion in the world capitalist market and the neoimperialist conflicts plaguing the region—meant that it was trapped between East and West in a political and economic impasse. No way out was offered, other than military and economic adherence to one of the competing sides: “Kyiv had to choose between the imf austerity regime and cheap fossil fuels from Moscow. Both options were accompanied by losses of sovereignty.”7 Like almost all the rest of the post-Soviet states, Ukraine is indeed an economically unviable state. Its main industries besides agriculture are generally obsolete, and not very competitive internationally. This also led to the tug-of-war between East and West over the country prior to the civil war.8
In this way, post-Soviet misery and the Russo-Ukrainian war constitute two complementary spheres of the world crisis of late capitalism, in which neoimperialist competition in Eurasia is carried out to try to overcome the social and economic decline caused by the crisis, as well as it also expresses the will of the central powers of global capitalism to maintain their hegemonic position at the cost of the collapse of the peripheries.9 It was, in fact, the promotion of the political and economic bloc known as the “Eurasian Union” by the Kremlin—which held the integration of Ukraine to be one of its fundamental components10—that determined the outbreak of the civil war in the region, and the subsequent confrontation between countries, since through such an initiative Russia sought to establish a counterweight to the growing Western influence in the post-Soviet space while consolidating its position as an economic and military power in Eurasia:
The “Eurasian Union” would be the Russian economic bloc between the “West” and China. And more powerful than the eu, because Russia’s military would likely spearhead a common security policy. The European Union completely lacks this arm. With a fully developed Eurasian Union, the eu would be dependent on Moscow, given the current flow of goods, for its raw materials and energy sectors.11
The West today sheds crocodile tears over the violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty by a Western-oriented government and the bombing of its civilian population. But it had no regard for that sovereignty when, as part of a broader strategy, it cooperated to remove the pro-Russian government of Yanukovych and thus separate the country from the geopolitical orbit of Russian capitalism. Indeed, the fundamental objective and point of convergence of the Western intervention in Ukraine in 2014 (despite the different interests of the United States and the European Union in general, as well as an increasingly independent Germany in particular) was to prevent the establishment of a power bloc capable in the long term of competing with the Atlantic powers. This represented a latent threat that could have curbed the West’s ambitions in the post-Soviet space and, something which was of particular concern to leadership in Washington, might have opened the possibility of an alternative economic and political alliance in the eastern portion of the European Union. Thus the Russian imperialist plans for the construction of said bloc in the post-Soviet space were sabotaged through the collapse of the Ukrainian government, the outbreak of a civil war, and the formation of openly neo-Nazi battalions which have terrorized the Donbass region in recent years with the tacit support of the European elite and the silence of Western media.
For Russia, the ongoing war is among its last chances to maintain its status as a power in the global market. Losing it would amount to a geopolitical collapse that would destroy the ambitions of Putin and the post-Soviet oligarchy that sustains him.12 For this reason, the conflict in Ukraine can also be understood as part of a broader struggle for world hegemony between the United States and China. These two first-rank powers tend to consolidate their alliances from Eurasia to the Pacific Ocean, and increasingly face each other more openly due to the worsening social, economic, and ecological crisis affecting the entire global structure of contemporary capitalism. Yet this belligerent global standoff, which is for now being waged in Ukraine and in the peripheries of the world system, has a different material basis than the imperialist conflicts of the first half of the twentieth century. Effectively, that was an imperialism which corresponded to an expanding capitalism—a process in which the peripheral zones of the capitalist world-system were integrated by force of the bellicose operations of primitive accumulation. By contrast, the current conflict is objectively based on the contraction of the process of the valorization of capital. This proceeds in lockstep with the accelerated destruction of nature and the economic, social, and political collapse of different regions of the planet.13 In other words, the current neoimperialist war has as its objective material foundation not the expansion of capitalism but its decomposition, not the conquest of new territories but the conservation of accumulation zones which can be defended from the disintegration of the global economic order. It is a true “crisis imperialism.”14
On the other hand, in a different aspect of this process, the current neoimperialist conflict expresses the exhaustion of the United States as a hegemonic planetary power within world capitalism. This correlates to an increase in tensions with other rising neoimperial powers, such as China.15 Despite the current process of decomposition of the Western capitalist powers’ hegemony at the global level, however, this does not imply their necessary replacement by China or by some other bloc of powers. This is because it is a neoimperialist conflict within the framework of the global capital’s process of reproduction, a process which is objectively dissolving with the decrease of the overall mass of surplus value.16 Hence the paradoxical situation of China: it has managed to do in decades what other powers achieved in centuries, but like the United States it is a giant with feet of clay. It has reached the vanguard of world capitalism at the precise moment when that system is collapsing amidst a socioecological crisis.
While China is positioning itself as a rising power within the historical framework of crisis imperialism, however, Washington is struggling to maintain its eroded global hegemony, particularly since its withdrawal from Afghanistan. Hence its efforts to keep the us dollar as the main currency of the world, a condition that allowed it to issue money from the Federal Reserve without falling into inflation (at least until this year). Since this mechanism no longer works, and since inflation has increased in the United States over the past year at a pace unseen in four decades, its government is forced to take risky actions at the geopolitical level.17 Risky actions like escalating its indirect confrontation with Russia through the conflict in Ukraine, which threatens to reach the point of using tactical nuclear weapons. Supposedly these are less “devastating” and more “ecologically friendly” than their more destructive cousins.18 Thus has Ukraine become the battlefront of a global neoimperialist war, which for the first time since the end of World War II has European territory as the direct theater of military operations.
This offensive by the West—i.e., its geopolitical expansion towards the East—has gone hand-in-hand with the erosion of Russian capitalism, as well as that of its satellites. All this stems from the valorization crisis of world capitalism. The Kremlin elite found itself increasingly on the defensive on the international stage. In the Caucasus region, in Belarus and, this year, in Kazakhstan, the power bloc articulated after the fall of the Soviet Union around the renewed Russian imperialism has begun to show increasingly evident signs of wear and tear. Thus, the neoimperial ambitions of the Muscovite elite found themselves trapped in a process of wear and tear accelerated by the socioecological crisis, which began by affecting its satellites first. In 2020, Belarus—ruled by the authoritarian [Aleksandr] Lukashenko since 1994—showed signs of economic stagnation. Trapped in an apparently insurmountable political and economic situation, massive protests broke out in the country. These protests were of a similar nature to the ones that shook international capitalism in 2019. Lukashenko responded to this crisis with unceremonious repression, pursuing a broader rapprochement with Moscow in the hopes of clinging to power. Thus did the Russian neoimperial dream of becoming an independent economic bloc between the European Union and China (via the “New Silk Road’’) begin to crash head-on with the economic and geopolitical reality imposed by the current socioecological crisis. On the contrary, Russian capitalism should fight with the force of arms and goods to maintain its status as a central power while trying to stop the process of disintegration of its sphere of influence.
The Russian elite led by Putin in reality found itself with its back to the wall well before the invasion of Ukraine. And this situation only worsened with the outbreak of a major social conflagration in Kazakhstan earlier in the year. In fact, we could say that the Kazakhstani social revolt was a direct prelude to the process of war we are witnessing today. A former Soviet republic, and today a satellite of the Kremlin regime, Kazakhstan contains in its territory all the characteristics that will soon reach the population of the central powers of world capitalism. Especially as regards the degradation of living conditions. The sustained rise in the cost of living and the impoverishment of the population, combined with a rise in the price of gas, set off a revolt that had features similar to the one that shook Chile in 2019. Unlike the democratic spectacle offered to the population by Chilean capitalism to contain the subversive dimension of the latter revolt, however, the former rebellion was drowned in blood through the joint terrorist policy of the Kazakh government and Russian armed forces. Although today forgotten by public opinion, the revolt in Kazakhstan—and above all by the hysterical antifascists who praise the military policy of Russian imperialism—reinforced the permanent state of exception in which its population has lived since the disintegration of the ussr. From now on, the country’s ruling class is aware that it will have to reinforce the already harsh daily repression of the population in order to maintain its place within world capitalism: a lesson that its superiors in Moscow are already actively applying.
In this sense, the revolt in Kazakhstan is indicative of both the impoverishment of living conditions on a worldwide scale (particularly strongly felt in the countries on the periphery of global commodity chains) and the traits this process will adopt in those regions where modernization lagged in the twentieth century. On this last point, it is necessary to note that the authoritarian structure of these regimes seems to be typical of such regions. Their place is determined both by the world capitalist market and the network of competitive rivalries between the neoimperialist powers. A democratic regime in any of the countries that remain in Russia’s sphere of influence, and in the Russian Federation itself, would indeed make room for Western intervention. This is a risk that the political and business elite at the head of Russia, and the various rackets19 linked to it, cannot allow.
In this way, the revolts in Kazakhstan (2022) and in Belarus (2020–2021) allow us to glimpse the Russian regime’s reinforcement of constant repression of the population in an historical context where material living conditions will only worsen. Amidst the socioecological crisis of late capitalism, we could thus invert the famous phrase from Capital to say that backwards countries do nothing but show the most advanced the image of their own future. The worsening of this crisis in Kazakhstan at the beginning of the year was not only a local manifestation of the world crisis, but also a preview of the future for its imperial metropolis based in Moscow. For the last decade this city has moved in its competition for a hegemonic place within global capitalism during the contemporary socioecological crisis. In this regard it should be noted that, according to a statement by Putin himself, climate change is advancing in the region 2.5 times faster than the average for the planet. This does not mean that it has served to change the productive configuration of Russian capitalism, but on the contrary that the production of gas and fuel for export has accelerated.
This seems to be a logical consequence of the historical development of capitalist modernization: to die in misery amidst wealth. Russia is indeed one of the weakest chains of global capitalism, due to its lagging position vis-à-vis the West. At the same time, however, it is a military superpower that has inherited a huge weapons arsenal and a massive infrastructure for scientific and technological development. Putin’s maintenance of power in perpetuity constitutes both an inheritance of the “concentrated” capitalist legacy of the Soviet regime as well as a necessity imposed by the specific character of its historical modernization process. It is only by virtue of this open state of emergency, of a permanent nature, that Russian capitalism has been able to perpetuate itself to this day. And this is one of the immediate reasons why, at a decisive moment in its competition with the Western powers and the eastward advance of nato, the military invasion of Ukraine has been imposed as a mortal necessity for a Russian capitalism which sees its economic, political, and social foundations decomposing within its own borders. Not to mention those of its allies within the post-Soviet sphere.
The anti-Russian propaganda broadcast on a massive scale throughout Western media, which presents Putin as the new archenemy of democracy, conveniently forgets that Russia is fighting for its survival in the context of the worsening systemic crisis of world capitalism. It hopes to not be reduced to a peripheral country by Western neoimperialism, which has consistently torpedoed and hemmed in the rise of the Russian Federation as a great power. Additionally, this process marks the end of the policy of Germany—the country that has established itself as the hegemonic nucleus of Western Europe—of the simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of Russian capitalism in the economic structure of the European Union. From now on they will have to deal with the contradiction posed by the economic development of the last couple decades, where Russia occupied a peripheral position of supplier of raw materials and energy while at the same time every effort was made to minimize its influence in Eastern Europe and in the post-Soviet space.
The various European powers will henceforth have to navigate between the latent threat of a military confrontation with a nuclear superpower surpassing them by decades in the scientific and technological development of hypersonic weapons, weapons that have broken the de facto balance of power between the nuclear powers, and the needs of its energy supply, mainly oil and gas. The neo-tsar Vladimir Putin and his gang of henchmen have fully understood this situation. In their false consciousness, they will exploit it to the end. Using persecution, jail, dictatorial laws, and political police, they will be forced to suppress rising social unrest due to the war and Western sanctions. Economic pressures will cause the working class and the declining middle class to suffer. At the same time they must continue their military advance until they achieve their strategic objectives, knowing that they have hypersonic weapons pointed at the neck of Germany and the rest of Europe. They know how to deal with the hunger of the Russian people, silencing their complaints with the blow of an electric baton. But they will not stop with their advance, considering they can always cut off the gas. In fact, in this regard Putin has been genuinely candid. Namely, when he blasts Western genocides for their commonplace nature, pointing out that Russia is part of the global commercial system and would never do anything on its own that would damage that of which it is a part. So it will press on with its course of action to force demands on Ukraine, and to do so will accept the weight of the sanctions imposed on it. After all, what Russia risks in the long run—and what it is fighting for today, despite the sad illusions of left anti-imperialists—is its place at the table in partitioning the mass of global surplus value.
When the crisis reached the centers of world capitalism, on the other hand, it was marked by an increase in the cost of living. A New Right and various postfascisms20 arose out of the economic turmoil, from the broken promise of a universal middle class. The powers clustered in nato have increasingly abandoned their liberal rhetoric, giving way to an exaltation of war in response to the crisis. Official media outlets are already beginning to insinuate that a war with Russia will not only improve the economy, but could also help reduce global warming.21
Additionally, the us capitalist elite has achieved a strategic short-term objective by managing to drive a wedge between Germany and Russia. For the moment it has banished the specter of a Eurasian alliance which, along with that of the Chinese “New Silk Road,” might further corrode its already weakened global hegemony. This current process will therefore allow the United States to consolidate an oceanic alliance stretching from the Atlantic (nato) to the Pacific (Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan), openly directed against China’s rise to the top of world capitalism.
In this way, we can say that the invasion of Ukraine marks the beginning of a new era for the major power centers of world capitalism. Grouped into clearly defined imperialist camps, but with independent and contradictory interests among the powers that make up said blocs, they will be increasingly pushed towards armed conflict. Especially towards hybrid forms, as a way of concealing the consequences of a generalized crisis that cannot be resolved except through conflict. Already this allows us to observe that the historical decline of capitalism will occur amidst worsening socioecological crisis and the war between superpowers.
Indeed, war as a strategic tool for political support will henceforth become increasingly attractive to states navigating the crisis of late capitalism. Without hesitation, they will begin to mobilize troops, produce propaganda, and whip up the masses towards the achievement of their political and economic goals. As a result of this process, a global scenario is played out in the present where the structural socioecological crisis of capitalism entails an unleashing of violence throughout every sphere of capitalist society.22 Just as it did in the process of its initial historic formation, this opens up the material condition for capitalism’s expanded reproduction. It is, as already anticipated, a civil war on a global scale in which different conflicts and forms of violence are superimposed, a war that is lived within the current subjects of the crisis. This war is fought from Third World neighborhoods controlled by post-state mafias, through capital accumulation circuits linked to the drug trade, human trafficking, and suicidal massacres, all the way up to the neoimperialist war fought between Ukrainian soil, world finance, and cyberspace.
It is also worth noting the rise of the global extreme right in the midst of this process. Trump and Bolsonaro were only the tip of the spear of a phenomenon that is here to stay. This is the same phenomenon that has thousands of militants armed to the teeth fighting in the Ukrainian army, to which the West prodigiously provides state-of-the-art weapons. Just as it did in the Middle East during the Cold War, blindly pursuing its geopolitical interests, the West will end up weakening another pillar of its social stability by arming and training the vanguard units of rightwing terrorism of the near future. Sooner rather than later the war will end in a power vacuum, allowing these nato-financed rackets and the Ukrainian oligarchy to further consolidate themselves within the state. Once there, they can begin carrying out their delusional and fearsome ideological dreams. In this sense, as Konicz points out, “the war in Ukraine could outlast the formal end of the imperialist proxy war.” The death drive takes over countries in conflict, this fascination with war and death among different sectors of the population, especially ultranationalists and neoreactionaries of different tendencies (even those who fly the antifascist banner) must be understood as an ideology of death. It expresses the universal cry of despair of a humanity self-destructing within its form of global capitalist socialization. Those who feared the collapse of civilization should no longer have any doubts, because barbarism is already here. From here on out, emancipatory forces must unite around the radical criticism of these new conditions and the promotion of a new paradigm of social emancipation. This can only take place through the very catastrophe we are experiencing, through the latent possibilities in the science and technology of twenty-first century capitalism. In short, in a worse way than [Antonio] Gramsci could have foreseen when he delivered his famous maxim that “now is the time of monsters.”23
Conclusion
In one of the climaxes of Roberto Bolaño’s posthumous novel 2666 it is stated, regarding the disappearance and subsequent murder of women in Mexico, that “no one pays attention to these murders, but the secret of the world is hidden in them.”24 In the same way, no one pays much attention to the murders in Ukraine anymore, which initially sparked so much hysteria and crocodile tears from the Western democratic press. As with the femicides, the school shootings, the terror of the drug traffickers, and the innocents stabbed in the streets, people have learned to live with war as part of everyday life. It should be noted, however, that these facts are only acceptable to the subjectivity of late capitalism because it is structurally nihilistic.25 But as Bolaño profoundly and clairvoyantly pointed out, it is in these violent murders—which today occur daily in every metropolis of capitalist civilization—that the secret internal logic of the global system containing our historical moment is revealed.
The internal logic of capital is a logic of sacrifice and (self-)extermination, of uninhibited violence established as the order of things. The Marxian critique of political economy, as a rational understanding of the real movement of capital, allows one to apprehend the material root behind the deployment of the most abject forms of violence in this time of catastrophes. Of course this analysis can also be extended towards a detailed understanding of the structural link between the process of capitalist modernization on a world scale on the one hand, and the violence unleashed as a condition of possibility for the establishment and upkeep of the capitalist mode of production on the other. In the current process of socioecological crisis, neoimperialist war, and military rearmament, a critique of the political economy of violence becomes a necessary instrument for both collective theoretical reflection and the practical implementation of emancipatory sociopolitical alternatives to the plunge into barbarism.
Regarding this last point, the slogan “barbarism or emancipation” can function here as the conclusion of the analysis. Empirical data will only confirm this thesis, revealing the real core of the present and its future development. Barbarism isn’t just about the school shooter, the robbers who murder for tiny sums of money, or the extremists of the New Right who go on killing sprees before offing themselves, but also about the states and multinational capitals that seek to maintain capitalist accumulation at the cost of annihilating the biophysical foundations of planetary life. It’s about the potential for the major power centers of capitalism to escalate conflict to the point of threatening catastrophic nuclear war. Only the critical theory of society can reveal that those capable of pressing the button that would bring about armageddon are guided by the same suicidal and annihilatory logic that guides the terrorist or the school shooter.26
It is only by acknowledging this empirical fact, this objectivity of subjectivity, that critical theory can contribute today to the proposal of a new paradigm of emancipation. In this sense, this brief intervention does not consider itself the last word against the multiplicity of theories seeking to address the problem of contemporary violence, but rather an exercise in critical thinking that aims to offer some fundamental lines for a broader study. A deeper understanding of this problem can then serve as theoretical support for a practical, emancipatory solution to the historical challenge posed by the global civil war and the new quality of the capitalist crisis which is already throwing the entire world into barbarism, violence, and uninhibited destruction.
- Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (London: Routledge, 1992).↩︎
- Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott, “Modernización compulsiva y metamorfosis de la violencia.” In Heterografías de la violencia: historia, nihilismo, destrucción (Santiago de Chile: Ediciones La cebra; 2016), p. 153–166.↩︎
- Robert Kurz, Der Kollaps der Modernisierung: Vom Zusammenbruch des Kasernensozialismus zur Krise der Weltökonomie (Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn Verlag, 1991).↩︎
- Herbert Böttcher, „Eskalation des Weltordnungskrieges um die Ukraine“, Exit! Krise und Kritik der Warengesellschaft, 2022.↩︎
- Tomasz Konicz, „Zerrissen zwischen Ost und West: kurzer historischer Überblick über den Weg in den Ukraine-Krieg vor dem Hintergrund der Weltkrise des Kapitals“, Revista online Untergrund Blättle, 2022.↩︎
- On the relationship between oligarchs and neofascists, see Aris Roussinos, “The Truth about Ukraine’s Far-Right Militias,” Unherd, 1 June 2022.↩︎
- Konicz, „Zerrissen zwischen Ost und West….”↩︎
- Ibidem.↩︎
- Böttcher, „Eskalation des Weltordnungskrieges um die Ukraine.”↩︎
- Konicz, „Zerrissen zwischen Ost und West….”↩︎
- Ibidem.↩︎
- Ibidem.↩︎
- Robert Kurz, „Krisen-Imperialismus: 6 Thesen zum Charakter der neuen Weltordnungskriege“, Exit! Krise und Kritik der Warengesellschaft, 2003.↩︎
- Tomasz Konicz, „Was ist Krisenimperialismus? Und wodurch unterscheidet er sich vom klassischen Imperialismus früherer Epochen?“ Analyse & Kritik, Zeitung für linke Debatte & Praxis, 2022.↩︎
- Rodrigo Karmy, “Tesis sobre el fuego,” Revista Disenso, 2022.↩︎
- Böttcher, “Eskalation des Weltordnungskrieges um die Ukraine“.↩︎
- Ibidem.↩︎
- Gordon Corera, “Qué son las armas nucleares ‘tácticas’ (y cuántas tiene Rusia),” BBC mundo, 2022, last checked 7 July 2002.↩︎
- “Rackets” in English in the original.↩︎
- When I speak of postfascism, I refer specifically to the neofascist movements that have spread in different parts of the world, as in the case of Ukraine or the United States, which, although they maintain a formal and symbolic link with the “original” fascism of the twentieth century, have specifically postmodern characteristics that respond to the unleashing of the death drive of competition and the current crisis conditions of capitalist modernization. That’s why I assign a different name to fascism as such, since it is an historically differentiated phenomenon.↩︎
- Dean Praetorius, “Could a Small Nuclear War Reverse Global Warming?” Huffington Post, 26 February 2022.↩︎
- Franco Berardi, “Guerra civil psicótica global.”↩︎
- A loose translation popularized by the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, modified from the original Italian: “La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi piú svariati.” In French the last part was rendered as « dans ce clair-obscur surgissent les monstres ».↩︎
- Robert Bolaño, 2666 (Barcelona: Anagrama; 2012), 249.↩︎
- Anselm Jappe, La sociedad autófaga: capitalismo, desmesura, autodestrucción (Logroño: Pepitas de calabaza; 2019), 279–290.↩︎
- Robert Kurz, “The Fatal Pressure of Competition” [2002], Libcom, 14 July 2011.↩︎