Hyper-colonialism and Semio-capitalism

Caliban: You taught me language and my profit on’t
Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language

—Shakespeare, The Tempest

As Europe descends into open war with Russia, the elections in France and Germany only accelerate the disintegration of the European Union. The French and German ruling parties no longer have majorities. In both countries, instead, those on the (electoral) rise are more or less friendly with Putin; in France there are Le Pen’s fanatics, and in Germany both the Nazi AFD and nationalist workerists led by Sahra Wagenknecht have taken center stage. The longevity of the warmongering German government remains unclear as it plunges Europe’s largest economy into a recession and prepares the front lines of a Russian-European war.

Everywhere, liberal democracy marches toward war. Everywhere, nationalism festers.

Meanwhile, Israel, a nuclear superpower, continues its suicidal spiral, killing all those who dare to exist in its sightline—chiefly the Palestinians, but now Lebanon and Syria as well. Notwithstanding Israel’s military superiority in Gaza and beyond (due in large part to US support), internal divisions and international isolation, which are already evident, will only feed a psychotic crisis as the horror of genocide continues.

Netanyahu had hoped to use Hamas to divide Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.1 Even before October 7, many Israeli commentators, such as Gideon Levy, wondered whether Israel’s legitimacy and future were faltering.2

While Palestinians fight against dehumanization and occupation, and while Ukraine defends against an invasion, there is another war playing out in the center of empire that we cannot ignore. It is being waged by different segments of the white, European, elite power structure: between neoliberal imperialism and nationalist Trumpism. This is why Gaza has become the symbol of the tremendous epoch in which we live: because Israeli genocide is the symbol of contemporary hyper-colonialist violence.

Perhaps, emerging from this war amongst empire’s elites, one can find new orienting concepts and novel maps for desertion. To do so, we must first attend to how colonialism is different today than in the past.

Reassessing Colonialism

For many, Gaza has been and continues to be the symbol of the return of colonialism, which many had erroneously assigned to the dustbin of the twentieth century. Prefixes like “post-” aside, resistance movements across the world have shown for many decades that colonial projects never ended, they just changed character.

The history of colonialism is a history of land predation. Historically, it targeted resource-rich places to fulfil the needs of Western accumulation. Millions of men and women were exploited and subjected to colonial rule or deported to the territories of the colonizing power. It is impossible to describe the formation of the industrial capitalist system in Europe without considering that this process was preceded and accompanied by the violent subjugation of non-European territories and the enslavement of millions of people.

Many have underlined this logic, which Cedric Robinson called “racial capitalism.” In his Black Marxism, he demonstrates racialization’s key role in the accumulation of capital on the European continent and beyond. Furthermore, as many scholars of anti-colonialism have noted, perhaps most famously Aimé Césaire, European fascism was in some respects the application of the practices of colonial governance to the metropole—in the Nazi instance targeting Jewish, communist, queer, and Romani populations.3

This fact is so clear that even someone like Zbigniew Brzeziński, who served as national security advisor to Jimmy Carter, had to admit in 2016:

Periodic massacres of their not-so-distant ancestors by colonists and associated wealth-seekers largely from western Europe (countries that today are, still tentatively at least, most open to multiethnic cohabitation) resulted within the past two or so centuries in the slaughter of colonized peoples on a scale comparable to Nazi World War II crimes: literally involving hundreds of thousands and even millions of victims. … Just as shocking as the scale of these atrocities is how quickly the West forgot about them.4

Indeed, historical memory is very selective, especially when it comes to the crimes of European civilization. In particular, the memory of the extermination of non-European peoples is not given special attention and is not part of mainstream collective memory, unlike the Shoah.5

The British, Belgian, French, Italians, and others also exterminated entire populations as part of a larger project to impose European economic and political domination. Yet they are not as frequently invoked outside circles on the left or in academia; for those who control mainstream attention, it would appear that Hitler alone deserves to be forever execrated—perhaps because the majority of his victims did not have Black skin. A caricature of those who carried out the genocide of Indigenous peoples of North America is even celebrated in a heroic cult designed by Hollywood.

It is well-known that colonialism unleashed irreversible material effects on the globe—for example, what Andreas Malm refers to as “fossil capitalism”; however, colonialism also tremendously affected the social and psychological spheres, as attended to most powerfully perhaps by Frantz Fanon. The anti-colonialist movements of the twentieth century ultimately failed to transform political sovereignty into economic, cultural, and military autonomy—in large part because of neocolonial, counterinsurgent interventions by colonial powers.6 Today, colonialism continues apace, albeit with new, what we might call “deterritorialized,” techniques and modalities, regardless of the formal sovereignty enjoyed (so to speak) by countries in the Global South.

Hyper-colonialism: The Extraction of Cognitive Resources

Since the “deterritorialization” of global capitalism—in other words, its globalization and financialization—the relationship between the Global North and South has entered a phase of “hyper-colonization.” I use the term to refer more precisely to these new modalities of colonial aggression and governance. Their appearance does not signal the end of “old” techniques—whether extractivism or open theft—but rather indicates the rise of new forms of digital extraction from workers who physically remain in the Global South but produce value in a deterritorialized, fragmented, and technically coordinated manner.

Today, the extraction of value from the Global South takes place partly in the semiotic sphere: the digital capture of very cheap labor, essentially digital slavery, in sectors such as logistics and even agriculture. These are some of the modes of hyper-colonial exploitation integrated into the circuits of what I have been for many years calling semio-capitalism.

While some continue to erroneously think of slavery as a precapitalist phenomenon because of its decisive role in the so-called “primitive accumulation” of capital, it is now abundantly clear that slavery continues in an extended and pervasive form thanks to digital modalities of governance and deterritorialized coordination.

The global assembly line has been restructured in a geographically dislocated form: the workers who run the global network live in places thousands of miles apart, and it is partially because of this fragmentation that they are unable to set in motion a process of organization and autonomy.

The formation of digital platforms has created productive subjects who did not exist before the 1980s: a digital labor force that cannot be recognized as a social subject due to the precariousness and fragmentation of its internal composition. Platform capitalism creates two tiers of subjection and employment. A small minority of the workforce is involved in the design and marketing of so-called “immaterial” products, earning high wages and identifying with the company and its nominally liberal values. Simultaneously, a much more numerous and geographically dispersed workforce performs maintenance, tagging, and other clean-up tasks for online platforms for very low wages, and has no unions or political representation. Often, these workers are hired by subcontractors and almost completely disconnected from the company exploiting their labor power. In extreme cases, they might not even think of themselves as workers since their meager wages are paid in progressively more invisible forms. Between the 1990s and the first decade of the new century, this new digital workforce took shape, under conditions that make autonomy and solidarity almost impossible. Perhaps the signal example of this workforce is the workers of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk “crowdsourcing marketplace,” documented in Hans Block and Moritz Riesewick’s film Cleaners (2019), which chronicles conditions of acute material and psychological exploitation.

There have been isolated attempts by digital workers to organize unions or to challenge their companies. I am thinking, for example, of the eight thousand Google workers who stood up against their employer’s subordination to the US military-industrial complex.7 This and similar manifestations of solidarity have occurred where the digital workforce is assembled in large numbers and earns high wages.

In his book The Drowned and the Saved, the Italian-Jewish author Primo Levi writes that when he was interned in a concentration camp, he hoped for solidarity among fellow prisoners but had to recognize that they were “a thousand sealed-off monads, and in between them a desperate hidden and continuous struggle.”8 He describes this space as “the gray zone” because the binary of victim/perpetrator was inapplicable, since law and morality were absent. Under conditions of extreme violence and permanent terror, those involved are forced to constantly think about their own survival and they fail to create bonds of solidarity with other exploited people. As in the death camps, as in the cotton plantations of the slave states in the US, the immaterial and material slave circuit that digital globalization has helped to create seems to thwart the conditions for solidarity.

This is what I want to point to with the word “hyper-colonialism.” It is a dependent function of semio-capitalism: the violent extraction of mental resources and attention under conditions of deterritorialization.

Hyper-colonialism and Migration: The Expanding Genocide

But hyper-colonialism is not just evident in the extraction of cognitive labor. It is perhaps most visible in the exceedingly violent control of the flows of immigration—whether in the Mediterranean or along the US-Mexico border. This is also intimately related to the changes to the global, racialized capitalist mode of production brought about by semio-capitalism, which has altered the conditions for the global circulation of information and wealth.

The increasingly infertile, senescent, economically declining, and culturally depressed people of the Global North see the migrant masses as a danger. They fear that the poor of the earth will bring their misery to the wealthy metropolises. Migrants are portrayed as the cause of the misfortunes suffered by the privileged minority. A class of politicians who specialize in sowing racial hatred delude old white men into believing that if someone could wipe out that disturbing mass of young people pressing at the gates of the fortress, if someone could destroy them, annihilate them, then the good times would return. America would be great again, and the moribund white homeland would regain its youth.

In the past decade, the line that divides the North from the South, which runs from the Mexico-Texas border to the Mediterranean Sea to the forests of Central and Eastern Europe, has become the battleground of an infamous war—the black heart of global genocide. This is a genocidal war against unarmed people, exhausted by hunger and fatigue, assaulted by armed policemen, dogs, sadistic fascists, and above all by the forces of nature supercharged by climate change: the rivers, the seas, the desert.

Despite the glowing commodity advertisements that stimulate consumerist idiots, despite neoliberal propaganda, the logic of semio-capital continues. Because the Global North infiltrates the South through the innumerable tentacles of the web, populations press for access to territories where the climate is still tolerable, where there is water, where war has not yet arrived with all its destructive force. But these populations are repelled by armed police and genocide.

In the Global North, a significant portion of the white population (if not the majority) has decided to barricade itself inside the fortress and use any means to repel the migrant wave—whether parliamentary or extrajudicial. Yesterday’s colonialists, who moved across the seas to invade foreign lands, now cry “invasion” at the sight of millions pressing against the fortress’s borders.

Marxism’s Omissions

In the early work of Marx and Engels, the role of colonialism is scantly addressed, apart from a few passages. In the 1848 Communist Manifesto, for example, Western imperialism is essentially glossed as a progressive force that brings underdeveloped societies to a level of bourgeois civilization, paving the way for the formation of a global proletariat. In Capital, however, Marx demonstrates a keen, if not fully developed, awareness of the relationship between colonization, the slave trade, and the origins of industrial capitalism. In the first volume, the chapter on “primitive accumulation” is devoted to analyzing those processes. Colonial subjugation, slave deportation, and the exploitation of child labor are discussed in this chapter, albeit briefly. (Marx also devotes attention to Ireland throughout Capital.) As the famous first paragraph to the chapter reads:

We have seen how money is changed into capital; how through capital surplus-value is made, and from surplus-value more capital. But the accumulation of capital presupposes surplus-value; surplus-value presupposes capitalistic production; capitalistic production presupposes the pre-existence of considerable masses of capital and of labour power in the hands of producers of commodities. The whole movement, therefore, seems to turn in a vicious circle, out of which we can only get by supposing a primitive accumulation (previous accumulation of Adam Smith) preceding capitalistic accumulation; an accumulation not the result of the capitalistic mode of production, but its starting point.

In the chapter titled “Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist,” Marx examines the colonization of India: “Between 1769 and 1770 the English created a famine by buying up all the rice and refusing to sell it again, except at fabulous prices.” And: “While the cotton industry introduced child-slavery into England in the United States it gave the impulse for the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact the veiled slavery of the wage-laborers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the New world as its pedestal.”

Aside from a few exceptions, in much orthodox Marxist theory the question of colonialism remained poorly understood from a strategic perspective. A certain degree of Eurocentrism is constitutive of this Marxist point of view. Even in Lenin’s writings, including Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), the question is not fully developed. One had to wait until the 1960s for the topic of colonialism to come to the forefront of internationalist labor movements. Still, a strategic perspective was not fully defined except in signal works like Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972).

During those years, the anti-colonial movement transformed global power relations. However, even after gaining national sovereignty, colonized peoples across the world were unable to emancipate themselves from the economic subservience that five centuries of systematic exploitation and devastation had forced upon them. Perhaps only Maoism brought the colonial question to the center of revolutionary strategy. But can we really regard Mao Zedong as a Marxist thinker? Or should we rather regard him as the forerunner of a non-Eurocentric vision that went beyond the limits of Marxist theory?

All these questions about the relationship between global capitalism and imperialism have returned today with brutal urgency, but the ability to think in internationalist terms seems to have waned. Today, collective thought recoils in horror at the idea of nuclear war becoming possible again, of genocide’s endlessness. After the liquidation of workers’ internationalism, only capital has remained capable of offering a global vision—one not made up of concepts, but of financial algorithms and abstractions.

Despite the formal decolonization of the 1950s and ’60s, despite all the talk of postcolonialism in academia, colonized peoples are more oppressed today than ever before. But the general form of colonialism has changed profoundly, in parallel with the changing processes of capitalist valorization. Indeed, some of the language and ideals of past revolts against colonial forces have been adopted by movements with a nationalist character—for example, the right-wing ethno-nationalist Hindutva movement led by Narendra Modi—and have triggered an explosion of chaotic conflicts.

It is urgently necessary to consider the new modalities and forms of colonialism in the twenty-first century. Only then can we understand how these chaotic conflicts are unfolding. Only then can we imagine how our defection might unfold.