In May last year, we advanced a political hypothesis based on an interpretation of global relations after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 in a collective volume entitled In the Third World War. The book was published amid another invasion, the Israeli invasion of Gaza, when the genocide of the Palestinian people was plain for all.
Our political hypothesis did not position itself within the field of strategic studies nor in that of geopolitics, whether critical or not. Rather, we asked whether and how it might be possible to get out of this now global war without passing through a clear and complete defeat of contemporary living labour. The two previous world wars, with their undeniable and enormous massacres of men and women, ended with the October Revolution in 1917 and, in 1945, with the victory of the Chinese Revolution, the irresistible intensification of the decolonization process, and the promise of compensating labour for exploitation through the welfare state in the West. Knowing that we could not adopt a local perspective, because it is inevitably limited and partial, we sought to critically investigate those processes that could enable us to act politically at the same level imposed by the Third World War.
The global relations within which the world war unfolds, and which it contributes to reproducing, are what we have defined as the transnational, understood as the material and contemporary form of globalization. For some time now, the promise of a new world order has proven to be a lie and an illusion. Trade, which for centuries has no longer been able to claim to be sweet, has failed to establish a network of symmetrical and peaceful relations. The New Silk Road and the WTO have revealed their mutual and interconnected limitations. Once the liberal lie about the beneficial powers of trade collapsed, the world returned without hesitation to wars of conquest. In this context, the presidency of Donald Trump has accelerated the processes of decomposition of the world order that were already underway, adding an extra layer of violence and domination. For decades, the transnational had been the form taken by the crisis of regulation, not only of international relations but also of the capital relationship guaranteed by nation-States. With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the uncontrolled genocide of Palestinians by the State of Israel, it has now taken the form of war.
The Trumpian practice of power is the definitive confirmation of this transition. MAGA theorists seem to be the last readers of The Communist Manifesto: conquer the state and empty it of its universal characteristics from within. Only they do so in reverse, negatively, preserving only its oppressive and hierarchical traits. They use it as an instrument to enact the wild and violent character of the transnational, which fully emerges when the United States raise territorial acquisition claims against Canada or Danish Greenland, which had been its allies until that moment. The imperial coup in Venezuela in the name of oil has shown the now irresistible erosion of the international law which arose from the Second World War. As Marx already suggested, even the right of the strongest is, in the end, a right. But what is taking shape in Gaza, in Ukraine, in the Middle East, and in Latin America is no longer the order of international law as we knew it in the second half of the twentieth century.
The last Gulf War is the most blatant display of this deliberate practice of the transnational. What defines its character is not only its anachronistic language – «we are massacring Iran» – but its deliberate indifference to any authorization other than that of force. It differs from previous oil wars and attempts to ideologically combine a war of conquest with a war of liberation. For us, the problem is that the feminist cry woman, life, freedom risks being hijacked and overdetermined by the monarchical or, in any case, authoritarian restoration of democracy. Beyond the real dangers of an uncontrolled escalation of the war, we are faced with the clear evanescence of democratic ideology, which becomes useful for legitimizing any action at home and abroad, thus turning into the democracy of the strongest.
For two years, with only slightly different words, first Vice President Vance and then Secretary of State Rubio have declared in Munich that the partition of global spaces must be accompanied by a genuine ideological assimilation. This must explicitly include recognition of the racial and sexual hierarchies constructed over centuries by Western societies themselves, along with the consequent hatred toward migrants and all those subjects who, by practicing sexual freedom, threaten the ideological unity of the West. Fragments of a past that seemed definitively overcome return as a present of oppression and define the necessarily transnational scale of our struggles.
The transnational is a field of tension and of struggle. It is not a revised and corrected version of the old international society. It produces and multiplies differences, and the drive to regiment them appears constantly counterfactual, because it does not even ideologically aim to produce homogeneity, unlike previous ideas of order, but rather seeks recognition of hierarchies of power and status. It is not by chance that there currently appears to be no possibility of a negotiation table where different actors might sit to discuss the conditions of some kind of truce without completely submitting to the law of the strongest.
The transnational does not produce only external wars, which are instead the almost necessary supplement to those fought internally. Significantly, the ongoing conflict over artificial intelligence is being fought on two inseparable terrains: its use in automated weapons systems and in the mass control of populations. The possibility of killing enemies in the field, assessing how dangerous they are on a statistical basis, is accompanied by the need to algorithmically control the movements of men and women who threaten the political order that is to be imposed.
If artificial intelligence is not enough, more traditional means are still available. In Minnesota, some sort of top-down civil war was waged to sever the connections among the different figures of living labour coexisting in that territory, and who responded en masse with solidarity. If civil war is not enough, Medicaid funding – healthcare funds for the poorest segments of the population – can always be cut. Even if the trail of blood is not the same, the violent logic of this internal war is not dissimilar to that fought on battlefields. Security decrees, restrictions on freedom of speech, and repressive legislation spreading across Europe differ in methods but are perfectly consistent with the aims of Trumpian policies. Not to mention that a potential victory of the right-wing in France and then in Great Britain would likely eliminate many of these remaining differences.
At the same time, the unilateral war waged worldwide against migrants produces thousands of deaths and disappearances. For all states, regardless of the ideological orientation of the governments in power, migrant men and women seem to represent the greatest threat to the stability of the social order. It is not only their limitless exploitation that is sought. Their presence – almost always employed at the lowest levels of social production – hinders the general attempt to put to work the existence of every single man and woman. Dominant militarism does not amount to a militarization of society, but it is, in the strictest sense, an ideology of social reproduction that seeks to impose a general compulsion to work, which is supposed to be accepted without too much discussion over wages and additional rights. Legally supported work exploitation in Milei’s Argentina is not an exception, but finds its correspondences in Greece, Hungary, and the rest of Europe. The exploitation of living labour is the only homogeneous trait of the transnational as a whole.
Within and against this scenario, we are thus facing the problem of a political action capable of practicing, and not merely of coping with, the disorder of the transnational. Beyond campism and mere resistance, beyond the tyranny of the local, the task is to confront the internal war and its consequences before the external one closes off every possible space of initiative.