Policing the Wastelands

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Swept up in the anticommunism of the 1950s, a young Samuel P Huntington came to believe that ‘the foundations of society are threatened’ from the Left and, in such circumstances, liberals like him had to take on a conservative defense of governing institutions, especially the military. A lifelong Democrat, he had been appointed to the faculty of Harvard’s Government Department in 1950 and remained there, almost without interruption, for half a century. From the 1960s, he began shuttling between Cambridge and Washington as a policy advisor to successive administrations. As chair of the Vietnam subcommittee of the government’s Southeast Asia Development Advisory Group in 1968, he advocated a policy of forcibly resettling Vietnamese villagers into cities, to counter the Viet Cong. The same year, he became the first voice in the US foreign policy establishment to interpret worldwide rebellions against the US-led economic system as symptoms of a Third World cultural incompatibility with market orders. His book Political Order in Changing Societies, published in 1968, was the most influential account of what had gone wrong and how an alternative strategy might be developed.

In the two decades after World War II, Huntington pointed out, successful coups d’etat had occurred in a majority of Latin American countries. The Middle East was similarly unstable. Thirteen coups had occurred in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. ‘Revolutionary violence, insurrection, and guerrilla warfare’, he wrote, ‘wracked Cuba, Bolivia, Peru, Venezuela, Colombia, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic in Latin America, Algeria and Yemen in the Middle East, and Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, China, the Philippines, Malaya, and Laos in Asia.’ This was because modernisation policies had led to ‘the rapid mobilisation of new groups into politics’ in the Third World, such as peasant classes, middle classes, and groups of radical intellectuals. Political participation was growing rapidly across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Too many groups were becoming politically organised and making demands on government resources. And because these governments did not have the effective authority to manage ‘the escalation of aspirations’, they were ‘at the mercy of alienated intellectuals, rambunctious colonels, and rioting students.’ Modernisation theory had claimed that stable government would grow organically from the consolidation of a bourgeois class. But Huntington contended that the creation of a large middle class was ‘often a highly destabilising event.’ Modernisation was not producing a bourgeois civil society but ‘political instability and disorder’, creating the ideal circumstances for ‘political extremism’ to arise. Huntington’s argument followed the neoliberal template: it claimed that the key political problem was organised mass movements making increasingly excessive resource demands on governments, combined with a decrease in the extent to which governments could deny these demands, leading to the danger of a collapse into far-left or far-right extremism. What was distinctive about Huntington’s position was its emphasis on the need to establish government authority to manage these spiraling demands. Before economic underdevelopment could be addressed, political underdevelopment had to be dealt with.

The root of the problem of political underdevelopment, he claimed, was not the actions of Third World governments themselves. Those that were not in the communist camp followed the well-established rules of international relations and were largely responsive to the various policy mechanisms that the US had at its disposal – ranging from aid-with-conditions to military action. However, it was not just a matter of having a pro-capitalist government in place, but whether it could hold up in the face of the increasingly mobilised Third World masses. To understand this mass behavior, Huntington relied on the assumption that some cultures were ill suited to the rational, anonymous, rule-based orders characteristic of modern economic and political systems. Political instability was prevalent in cultures 

marked by suspicion, jealousy, and latent or actual hostility toward everyone who is not a member of the family, the village, or, perhaps, the tribe. These characteristics are found in many cultures, their most extensive manifestations perhaps being in the Arab world and in Latin America. 

Huntington’s argument was that small-group loyalties in the cultures of these regions were irrationally excessive, making the populace harder to govern. It was no coincidence that these two regions were especially troublesome for US imperialism at the time. Arab nationalist movements gained in popularity across the region in the 1960s and succeeded in overthrowing Western colonialist regimes in Algeria and Yemen. And across Latin America, leftist guerillas were fighting for their own versions of the Cuban revolution. These movements were posing the question Nkrumah raised: Who sets the rules of the international economic system once direct colonialism has ended? This was fundamentally a political question of unequal power, but Huntington’s argument reframed it as a matter of more or less fixed cultural differences. It presented opposition to Western power as a symptom of a cultural failure to adapt to modernity rather than a contest over resources and legitimacy: the problem was ‘their’ culture, not ‘our’ politics.

It followed from Huntington’s argument that the US would better achieve its goals if it abandoned its policies of supporting education and science in the Third World; these were only helping to grow a middle-class intelligentsia prone to radicalism. Instead, US policy should aim to slow down economic modernisation and focus more on establishing pro-US governments able to forcefully impose their will in the face of opposition, especially in those regions where the destabilising effects of local cultural values needed to be reined in. To this end, the US needed to ally with pro-Western military leaders in the Third World, who were ‘intelligent, energetic, progressive’, and advise them to form governments that were at once modernising and authoritarian while avoiding ‘premature’ increases in political participation, such as through elections. Huntington proposed ‘the military may yet be able to play a constructive role, if they are willing to follow the Kemalist model’ – replicating Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s earlier authoritarian molding of Turkey into a pro-Western secular, industrialising nation that officially disdained its earlier Middle Eastern orientation. ‘The achievements of Ayub Khan in Pakistan, of Calles and Cárdenas in Mexico, of Kemal and Inönü in Turkey, of Pak and Kim in Korea, and of others such as Rivera in El Salvador, show that military leaders can be effective builders of political institutions’, he wrote. The more a culture in a particular region had a reputation for being antagonistic to Western modernity, the more US policies should encourage governments there to be repressive, to prevent that culture from expressing itself in ways that might hamper the success of the purportedly essential new market policies. In the short term, repression could modify a people’s behavior to be more responsive to market signals, even if they were not culturally predisposed to act in these ways; over the longer term, the culture itself might be transformed as citizens internalised these new behaviors. Authoritarian regimes were the lesser evil that would stem the growth of extremism and prevent the need for costly US military actions later: having another Kemalist military government was preferable to having to fight another Viet Cong.

Huntington’s argument was representative of a broad transformation in US foreign policy thinking in the late 1960s and through the 1970s. US foreign policy-makers abandoned the earlier goal of fostering a bourgeois civil society in Third World states. Instead, in line with neoliberal thinking, their new aim was to prevent mass struggles outside the West from making redistributive demands at the international level. And they did this by using the existing tools of neocolonial discipline: the leverage that came from debt, the use of conditions attached to aid, the influence of Western economic advisers, and covert and overt intelligence and military actions. But they deployed these tools to impose a policy package quite different from the modernisation policies of the 1950s and early 1960s. The key change was that, rather than using tariffs to protect nascent industries from international competition, Third World countries were to compete to attract foreign investment. Enshrining the principle of competition for foreign investment implied that governments had to pressure their own population to bear the costs of turning the nation into an attractive location for exploitation. In this way, mass movements’ demands for resources would be contained. Without a long-term process of planned development, there was no longer any need to nurture a scientifically educated middle class to manage it; instead, military men were needed, and a small elite of MBAs. Creditworthiness and market indicators were the new gods. Huntington played a direct role in developing the architecture of this neoliberal empire: he was an adviser to the State Department on Southeast Asia in the 1960s, chairman of the Democratic Party’s Foreign Policy Advisory Committee in the mid-1970s, and coordinator of security planning for the National Security Council in President Carter’s administration in the late 1970s. By 1975, he had come to believe that the issue he identified in the Third World applied also to the US itself, where an ‘excess of democracy’ had led to Americans ‘progressively demanding and receiving more benefits from their government’. Crucially, Huntington was one of the first to argue that the ‘democratic distemper’ of the 1960s caused the ‘inflationary tendencies in the economy’ of the 1970s. A too vigorous democracy meant too much welfare, paid for, he claimed, with too much government borrowing – inflation was the consequence. The argument was questionable: as the Kings had argued, government programmes to tackle poverty would have been affordable were it not for the cost of fighting the war in Vietnam; and government debt did not necessarily cause inflation. Nevertheless, Huntington’s presentation of inflation as a symptom of political disorder and overly generous welfare payments became a leitmotif of neoliberal commentary in the late 1970s and early 1980s. 

The approach Huntington advocated had its initial trial run in Indonesia. There, after the defeat of Dutch colonialism in 1949, left-wing ideas about national development dominated the political scene. The existence of the largest Communist Party outside of China and the Soviet Union – with approximately three million members by 1965 – reflected Indonesians’ desire for a radical transformation of colonial structures. The Asia-Africa Conference in Bandung in 1955 proclaimed a new kind of Third World solidarity made possible by successful struggles against colonialism. Then, in 1966, the military leader Suharto took power amid the systematic extermination of between one-half and one million Indonesians suspected of affiliation to the Communist Party or holding left-wing sympathies. The CIA provided direct assistance to the death squads, including supplying lists of targets. With left opposition annihilated, Suharto embraced a new set of economic policies aimed at enabling US corporations to gain access to Indonesia’s natural resources and the potential profits to be made from selling to the sixth largest population in the world. The Ford Foundation and the CIA had already been working with the Indonesian military to lay the ground for this policy shift. A group of Indonesian economists – known in the new government as the ‘Berkeley mafia’, because they had initially studied at the University of California, Berkeley – were trained by the Ford Foundation at the Indonesian Army Staff and Command School in Bandung, which served as a base of operations for the army’s usurpation of political power. After the coup, Suharto appointed these economists to work alongside Ford Foundation–sponsored US economists in drafting Indonesia’s new economic policy. A select list of US and European capitalists were flown to attend a meeting in Geneva where the new Indonesia was marketed – they were told its selling points were ‘political stability … abundance of cheap labor … vast potential market … treasurehouse of resources’.

In 1967, Suharto’s government introduced the Foreign Investment Law, which protected the rights of multinational corporations in Indonesia, opening the door to the exploitation of its natural resources, especially oil, and later its low-wage workforce. The rubber and tea plantations that had earlier been taken under government control were returned to their previous Dutch, British, and US corporate owners. Foreign direct investment increased dramatically from the 1970s onward. Thereafter, to maintain its competitiveness in attracting foreign capital, Indonesia kept wages low, increased its tax incentives to foreign investors, banned strikes, and made indigenous lands available to corporations for timber and palm oil cultivation. By the 1990s, Indonesian workers were assembling Nike sports shoes for less than a dollar a day. As Huntington had anticipated, the country’s working and peasant classes could only be made to endure these circumstances because an authoritarian government had forced them to do so. Today, factory workers in Indonesia receive an average wage that is a fifth of what equivalent workers earn in the US. When more than two million workers organised a general strike in 2012 to raise their wages, the IMF responded by warning that ‘rising unit labor costs’ would affect ‘competitiveness’, and the Indonesian government introduced new bans on industrial action.

What was done in Indonesia from 1966 was repeated in a host of other countries through the late 1960s and 1970s, as Washington used the same combination of covert action, military rule, and free-market policies to discipline organized demands for social and economic progress in the Third World. The 1973 overthrow of Salvador Allende’s socialist government in Chile and its replacement by Pinochet’s military dictatorship, advised by Hayek and Friedman, was the most well-known example. Across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, new authoritarian regimes emerged and existing ones hardened, with US government agencies supplying armored cars, tear gas, and other weapons of internal political warfare, along with training in the techniques of repression. In each case, the US-friendly regime oriented the economy to exporting raw materials and foodstuffs, offered a cheap labour force as an incentive to foreign investment, and treated any opposition to the interests of foreign capitalists as a national security problem. The repressive apparatuses of colonial government were, as Fanon had predicted, repurposed by new indigenous elites who, lacking any other means of securing their legitimacy, relied upon force. These were the elites with whom US policy-makers allied in order to implement neoliberal policies in the Third World. Neoliberal intellectuals cheered it all on. As well as supporting Pinochet, Hayek publicly defended the Suharto regime in Indonesia and the generals in Argentina.

Petrodollars and Palestine

The decisive moment in the emergence of a neoliberal empire came in 1973 when six Arab oil-producing states announced they would impose an embargo on shipping oil to the United States until Israel evacuated the Palestinian territories it had occupied in 1967. This was the opportunity and basis for a neoliberal restructuring of racial capitalism. To understand how this happened requires reckoning first with what gave the Palestinian struggle a special significance within the imperialist system.

The Zionist colonisation of Palestine occurred in the same period that the majority of the Third World achieved formal decolonisation, in the years from 1947 to the end of the 1960s. From the Nakba of 1947–49 to the occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights in 1967, Zionism appeared as a regression to the exclusivist settler colonialism that characterised the early colonisation of North America and Australasia. Palestine represented an exception to the seeming drift of history: a reminder of some of the most devastating episodes of the colonial past, an example of the limits of decolonisation in the present, and a harbinger of neocolonial dangers in the future. Until the late 1960s, hopes for the Palestinian cause were vested in the diplomatic and occasionally military efforts of the governments of neighbouring Arab countries. But these were in vain. The Arab states were completely discredited after their defeat by Israel in the June 1967 war. The Palestinians were forced to mobilise their own resources. The existing Palestinian armed groups ended their alliance with the militaries of Arab states and, within the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) coalition, united under the leadership of Yasser Arafat with the demand for a single, secular, and democratic state in Palestine. The struggle now presented itself as being specifically rooted in the aspirations of the Palestinian people, rather than tied to a state-centred Arab nationalism. The PLO was soon the best funded and most widely supported of all the insurgencies engaged across the Third World.

Among US policy-makers, the shift from Arab diplomacy to Palestinian insurgency was associated with the fear of a broader radicalisation of Arab politics. In 1972, the Nixon administration issued a set of directives, known as Operation Boulder, that enabled the FBI and CIA to coordinate with the pro-Israel lobby, subjecting nonviolent Arab American political activists to surveillance and harassment. The great anxiety was that a growing culture of Arab radicalism would lead governments in the most important oil-producing region of the world to use their control of oil to advance radical political goals. Capitalism’s dependence on Arabs for oil was perceived as analogous to its dependence on miners for coal. Because of the centrality of coal to industry, striking miners could shut down an entire economy, and they leveraged this power to redistribute national wealth from capitalists to workers; radical Arabs could do the same with oil to force international redistributions of wealth from the West to the Third World. From the beginning of the 1970s, Arab oil-producing states had been reducing supply as a way to negotiate better terms of trade with Western corporations. But the 1973 embargo deployed the ‘oil weapon’ not for economic motives but ostensibly on behalf of the Palestinian national struggle, suggesting that the world’s oil supply was now vulnerable to Arab political radicalism. In fact, the Gulf Arab elites had no such intentions. Their aim was to integrate themselves as loyal and wealthy subordinates in the US empire. The embargo was a face-saving performance of pan-Arab solidarity; within a few months it was suspended without any gains for the Palestinians. But even a gesture in this direction sent shockwaves through the capitalist system, as the price of oil lurched upward.

On the pages of its house journal, Foreign Affairs, the US foreign policy elite had already begun to raise the danger of a revolutionary Arab spirit gaining control of the world’s oil, perhaps in a Third World Marxist alliance with China. Nervous discussions of Arabic and Islamic identity were launched, on the assumption that the political management of Arabs rested on an understanding of their culture. Islam appeared as the factor that determined the fate of oil, from the Arab Gulf states and Iran to Indonesia. Matters of Islamic jurisprudence were suddenly considered relevant to the international economy. A flurry of commentaries with titles like ‘The depth of Arab radicalism’ appeared, discussing the meaning of Islamic terms like ‘sharia’ and ‘jihad’, ‘the compatibility of Islam itself with the “modern” outlook’, and ‘problems [with] their whole culture’.The political antagonism between US-led imperialism and Third World radicalism was beginning to be reframed as a cultural antagonism between the West and Islam. The ‘Muslim problem’ began to take the form that became ubiquitous in the twenty-first century with the War on Terror.

What seemed like a moment of danger was also an opportunity. James E. Akins, the US ambassador to Saudi Arabia and the most important diplomat in relation to Arab oil, persuaded policy-makers that the era of cheap oil was anyway at an end, because, as he wrote in Foreign Affairs, it had become ‘plainly evident’ to the producing states that it was in their interests to raise prices. The resulting dramatic increase in the oil price meant that a historically unprecedented amount of wealth – expected to be over $200 billion from 1973 to 1980 – would be redistributed from consumers around the world to oil corporations and Arab elites, particularly in the Gulf. ‘What will be done with this money will be a matter of crucial importance to the world’, Akins wrote. And so it proved: Wall Street absorbed these ‘petrodollars’ and sent them free-wheeling around the world in pursuit of resources to extract, labour to exploit, and governments to indebt. The neoliberal principle of global market competition was brought to life with this injection of funds from the oil crisis in a context where the older modernisation policies had been discredited. A more globalised and financialised capitalism for the first time became possible.

In the US, rather than acting to subsidise the price of gas, which shot up from 38 to 55 cents a gallon, the government told the public that the market had to adjust to new circumstances – an education in the market principles neoliberals were trying to inculcate. The oil crisis was the hook upon which were mounted neoliberal arguments about allowing commodities, including labour, to find their ‘true market price’. US news media reworked older stereotypes of Arabs to produce a new image of the wealthy ‘sheikh’, able to manipulate the world economy – an analogue of the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory of Jews secretly running the world. Public anger about the crisis was thus redirected outward to new racial enemies. Moreover, the hunger for investment opportunities in financial markets implied easy credit and a new era of indebtedness. In the US, the growth in household debt, such as student and healthcare loans, went hand in hand with the neoliberal decline in publicly funded education and collectively bargained healthcare plans, which fostered in workers the more individualised relationship to economic processes that neoliberals desired. In addition, the oil funds were pumped into loans to financially weakened Third World governments; Western lenders then took advantage of the leverage they had over them to impose neoliberal market principles. Moreover, the oil funds circulated in a system of market discipline that would now be upheld by regional surrogates, armed to the teeth and empowered by the US to carry out the brutal suppression of local insurgencies. Following the US’s defeat in Vietnam, the Middle East became the testing ground of this new imperial strategy, with Israel offering the paradigm of a regional power allying with the US in the name of mutual security. Israel’s new strategic role was to counter the danger of Arab radicalism. To this end, the US government dramatically increased its military support: between 1949 and 1968, the US supplied half a billion dollars in arms to Israel; from 1969 to 1976, it supplied $22 billion. Thus neoliberalism took shape in the crucible of oil, Palestine, and imperial crisis.

‘Superfluous humanity’

As Third World authoritarian regimes, such as Suharto’s, started to offer Western multinationals highly policed cheap labour forces, the potential arose for an epochal relocation of the world’s industrial manufacturing. Multinational corporations were now able to move production to wherever in the Third World they could find low wages. With its Border Industrialization Program, launched in 1965, Mexico was a pioneer in seeking to attract such investment. It led to the development of maquiladoras, the foreign-owned assembly plants situated in ‘free trade zones’ along Mexico’s northern border, where US corporations could take advantage of wages that were a fraction of those north of the border. Corporations centralised their administrative, financial, research, design, and marketing functions in their home country while subcontracting labour-intensive manufacturing and assembly via global supply chains to low-wage, export-led production zones in Southeast Asia, Turkey, and Mexico. Western capitalists profited from a new form of super-exploitation of Third World workers, made possible by, first, the difference in the wages prevailing where products were made and where they were sold being greater than the difference in productivity and, second, capital and goods being free to circulate while labour’s movement was restricted by progressively fortifying racist border regimes. By 2010, there were 541 million industrial workers in the global South compared to 145 million in the North. In Juárez, Mexico, for example, the cost of employing a manufacturing worker in 2015 was $2 an hour; in El Paso, Texas, the cost was five times higher. The border cutting through the middle of the Juárez-El Paso conurbation allows capital and goods to move freely but not labour, making the wage difference possible and giving it a racial meaning.

By offering well-policed, low-wage labour, it has been possible for some Third World countries to achieve a sustained growth in their industrial production. But corporations can relocate easily if labour costs rise too high. In the garment industry, for example, the cost of manufacturing labour is so small a proportion of the final retail price that, if workers were to be paid three times as much, the retail price would only have to increase by 2–6 per cent to pay for it. Yet wages are nevertheless kept crushingly low. The entry level wage in the Bangladeshi garment industry – which employs about 3.5 million workers and makes clothes for companies like Wal-Mart, H&M, Tesco, Levi Strauss, Tommy Hilfiger, and Marks & Spencer – was about $43 a month in 2010. As such, industrialisation in most Third World countries has not provided the basis for rising standards of living, as had happened in Europe and the US in the nineteenth century. Instead, a new imperialism has operated through a global racial division of labour and unequal exchanges in global supply chains. The earlier wealth drain from the colonial periphery to the core has continued in this new form into the twenty-first century, amounting to a total drain of $62 trillion from 1960 to 2018, according to one estimate. And over this period, the new imperialism greatly increased the inequality between the richer and poorer nations (China excepted), with the per-capita GDP gaps between the US and Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia each roughly tripling.

While some regions of the Third World were incorporated into global capitalism as zones of low-wage industrial production, the larger part was still defined by communal land relations and subsistence farming in rural areas. This served as a bulwark against capitalist market discipline – it preserved a sense of non-capitalist rights and entitlements, even among those who left the rural areas for the cities. And food and energy prices tended to be set by government policy at levels lower than those of international markets. All of this added up to the ‘collectivist’ culture that neoliberals wished to dissolve. The Oxford University economist, S. Herbert Frankel, summed up such neoliberal concerns when he complained at the 1958 Mont Pèlerin Society meeting that, outside West African banks, people wait for their relatives to draw money ‘ready to pounce on them like vultures, because they believe they have the “right” to be supported or assisted by a relative who has some wealth.’ What was needed was a cultural shift to break up the communal cultures that, according to neoliberals, cushioned individuals from the imperatives of market competition. The role of Western governments was to design the institutions that could deliver this process of cultural reform.

By the end of the 1970s, US development policy was wholly focused on using market mechanisms to break the social expectations of Third World peasants and workers. To achieve this goal, there needed to be what World Bank head Robert McNamara in 1979 called the ‘structural adjustment’ of Third World countries: privatisation of government-owned businesses, privatisation of land tenure, abolition of government subsidies on food and energy, cuts to public healthcare and education, abolition of labour and environmental protections, abolition of tariffs and capital controls, and fiscal austerity. The way to bring about this structural adjustment was for Western banks and agencies like the IMF and the World Bank to shift from lending for specific projects to using debt as a lever to impose broader policy changes. US Treasury secretary William Simon wrote privately in 1976 that the IMF had ‘to change the policies of countries that have wandered from the reservation in terms of conduct of their affairs’. It was an apt idiom, unconsciously linking neocolonial economic policies to settler-colonial rule. Not only did international financial institutions adopt neoliberal policies; the neocolonialism Nkrumah had described also made it possible for these institutions to impose neoliberalism on the Third World. Increasingly, the acceptance of the IMF’s directives was necessary even to obtain private bank loans. Third World debt, as Nkrumah had cautioned, was not simply one side of an economic transaction but a means by which powerful agencies could directly control the indebted; it authorised surveillance, judgement, and domination. In most cases, Third World governing elites were made up of profiteers and kleptocrats whose wealth derived from trade relationships with multinational corporations; they were therefore enthusiastic to implement the unpopular austerity and trade liberalisation policies that the IMF insisted upon. In other cases, where Third World leaders sought international redistributions of wealth, they faced sharp rebuke from US policy-makers. ‘It is time we asserted that inequalities in the world may be not so much a matter of condition as of performance’, wrote Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1975, then the US ambassador to India. He was subsequently appointed ambassador to the United Nations, where he led a counter-offensive against Third World efforts at creating a more equal international economic order.

The consequences of this neoliberal transformation of the Third World were devastating, especially in Africa. Ghana, for example, completed sixteen structural adjustment programmes with the World Bank and the IMF during the 1980s. By the end of it, it still had an external debt of $3.5 billion and was, as it had been at independence, entirely reliant on cocoa exports. Ghana’s tropical forest was reduced to just a quarter of its original size, in the process wiping out both the wild game that provided food for the majority of the population, and the supply of fuel and medicines that was previously harvested from the trees. Meanwhile, the privatisation of education forced two-thirds of children in rural areas to stop attending school. Inequality and absolute poverty both rose in what was nevertheless described by the IMF as one of its few success stories in Africa. Across the continent, the abolition of subsidies for agriculture and the privatisation of land tenure displaced great swathes of people from subsistence farming. Uprooted from the terrain on which their existing rights and entitlements were entrenched, these rural evictees put their hopes for survival in the cities.

The epic displacement of the Third World’s rural masses, a consequence of the neoliberal privatisation of communally owned resources, was another iteration of what Marx called ‘primitive accumulation’. Indeed, neoliberalism produced the most intensified and wide-ranging processes of primitive accumulation in world history, as capitalists seized both state-owned and communally owned resources. This process of dispossession and eviction was, as Marx had described, necessarily violent. But there was an important difference between the primitive accumulation at the dawn of English capitalism, which Marx analysed, and that of the neoliberal era. In Marx’s analysis, those dispossessed from subsistence economies on the land were generally absorbed as waged workers in capitalist agricultural and industrial production. Those who were not emigrated to the settler colonies of North America or Australasia or fell into the reserve army of labour as disposable workers, brought in to waged work temporarily as needed and then expelled. But neoliberal primitive accumulation has functioned differently. The Third World dispossessed arrived in cities that could not provide waged work even for their existing workforces, as cutbacks in the public sector took hold. There was, then, only the informal economy of street vendors and day labourers, and a life of surviving hand to mouth in the slums that had become a permanent feature of Third World cities. The United Nations Human Settlements Programme found in 2003 that one third of the world’s urban population lived in slums, and four out of ten inhabitants of the global South were informal settlers. Some of these dispossessed Third World city-dwellers – such as those settling in Juárez, Mexico, to work in the maquiladoras – were connected through subcontractors to major capitalist corporations. But the majority were deemed to be surplus to capitalism’s needs. Capital did not engage them as waged labour, even as a reserve army. The Cameroonian theorist Achille Mbembe writes they ‘are unable to be exploited at all. They are abandoned subjects, relegated to the role of a “superfluous humanity.” Capital hardly needs them anymore to function.’ For the Indian economist Kalyan Sanyal:

 The dispossessed are left only with labor power, but their exclusion from the space of capitalist production does not allow them to turn their labor power into a commodity. They are condemned to the world of the excluded, the redundant, the dispensable, having nothing to lose, not even the chains of wage-slavery.

Neoliberalism thus produced ‘a vast wasteland’ inhabited by those who have lost the entitlements of subsistence economies but ‘for whom the doors of the world of capital remain forever closed’; this wasteland is a space outside of capitalism’s labour relations and a challenge to its claims to universality. There, women especially have had to take on the task of improvising survival strategies in the face of multiple crises of food and health – in short, of social reproduction.

Anti-Muslim racism

By the end of the century, neoliberal intellectuals, activists, and politicians could survey the world they had built with some satisfaction. Soviet communism had collapsed. Labour movements in the West had been disaggregated. The industrial working class in Europe and the US could no longer call upon ‘its pristine form, shape, size, homogeneity of experience, unity of will, clout’, as Sivanandan, the London-based antiracist activist and writer, wrote in 1990. Meanwhile, the workforces of the newly industrialising global South were held firmly in check by the force of authoritarian regimes sponsored by Western governments. In any case, Sivanandan noted, neoliberalism had succeeded to some extent in inculcating new cultural values in the global South. The ‘food you eat, the clothes you wear, the music you hear, the television you watch, the newspapers you read’, he wrote, trained the mind to celebrate ‘individual greed in place of collective good’. Across the global South, elites were enthusiastic to be incorporated into the ‘liberal world order’ that a victorious neoliberalism proclaimed. Some were able to join the top 10 per cent of income-holders, which by the twenty-first century was less dominated by elites from Europe and the US, with East Asians making up around 1 in 10. The position of China in the world system was dramatically transformed. Most significantly, the earlier redistributive agendas of Black and Third World radicalism – which had so troubled neoliberals – were no longer on the agenda. The collectivism that neoliberals had attacked for decades was politically dead. Even the leaders of the African National Congress, upon the success of its struggle against apartheid in South Africa, decided to implement neoliberal policies of reducing import tariffs, offering tax incentives for foreign corporations, and cutting social spending.

Yet the neoliberals’ triumphs did not diminish their sense that the market system was endangered by the dispossessed and excluded masses of the global South. The wealth gap between the poor and the rich countries of the world remained at a similar level to what it had been in the heyday of European imperialism a century earlier. The poorest half of the world’s population, largely in South Asia and Africa, possessed barely any wealth at all while the richest tenth owned three-quarters of everything. Neoliberalism was haunted by these impoverished masses, most of whom were deemed surplus to capitalism. They signified a limit to neoliberalism’s reach, a failure of its claims to universal validity, and a space within which anti-market cultures might thrive. Neoliberal concern expressed itself in a farrago of publicly circulated fears about population explosions, out-of-control migration, extremism, underclasses, ethnic conflict, and fundamentalism – all issues that neoliberals interpreted in terms of a cultural failure of surplus populations to follow the rationality of the market order.

But it was Palestine that once again became the major focus of disquiet in the 1990s. The Palestinian national struggle stood out as the one remaining antagonism that could not be resolved through incorporation into the neoliberal order. The hope was that the Oslo accords signed in 1993 would achieve in Palestine the pacification that had been effected elsewhere in the global South. But the mass of the Palestinian movement outside of the PLO leadership opposed the accords, on the grounds that they gave the Palestinians only ‘a series of municipal responsibilities in bantustans dominated from the outside by Israel’, as Edward Said wrote. The radical energies of twentieth-century Third World nationalism had not entirely dissipated. Once again, the US foreign policy establishment set aside the political nature of the conflict – a struggle over land and rights – and interpreted Palestinian resistance to Israel’s military occupation as nothing but mindless terrorism inspired by Islamic values that were ill adjusted to modernity. Prior to the 1980s, the concept of terrorism had not yet solidified as a major term in US policy-making discourse and, when people did refer to ‘terrorism’, it was not especially associated with Arabs or Muslims. But by the early 1980s, the image of the Muslim extremist began to be crafted from the earlier figure of the Arab radical. A pivotal moment was the 1984 Jonathan Institute conference on terrorism, held in Washington, DC, and organised by Benjamin Netanyahu, then the Israeli permanent representative to the United Nations, where delegates argued that terrorist violence was endemic to Islamic culture. President Reagan’s secretary of state, George Shultz, and his ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, attended the conference. The Reagan administration began to present terrorism as the number-one foreign policy issue. Time magazine published excerpts of the conference, and the ideological link between Islam and terrorism began to form – as images of mad mullahs, suicide bombers, and angry turbaned crowds circulated in Hollywood movies and news reports. Then, in the early 1990s, with the Cold War over, Samuel P. Huntington developed his earlier thinking about the role of culture in political development to argue that what threatened the West was not only Palestinian intransigence derived from Islamic culture, but also Islam in general; it was, drawing on Bernard Lewis’ phrase, a ‘clash of civilizations’. On this account, culture played the same role as race: a force that drove a whole people’s behaviour and could be used to mechanically explain anything they did. Huntington wrote that, with communism defeated, Islam was the ‘ideal enemy’ for the US as it was ‘ideologically hostile, racially and culturally different, and militarily strong enough to pose a credible threat to American security’.

This narrative about Islam served to shield Israel from domestic criticism in the US, especially after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, its laying siege to Beirut, and its direct responsibility for the Sabra and Shatila massacres. But anti-Muslim racism also offered what Stuart Hall called a ‘lay ideology’ that could be used as a framework to make sense of random and shocking events, such as acts of terrorism, in ways that disavowed those events’ political meanings – their origins in conflicts over land, rights, and resources – and instead explained them as products of an unchanging alien culture. Since the neoliberal ordering of the world inevitably generated political violence and chaotic movements of peoples, it was not hard to find the crisis events around which such a framing could be organised, from acts of Palestinian resistance to the 9/11 attacks to Syrians seeking asylum. Within the US media system, national security agencies and associated ‘terrorism experts’ were granted a particular authority to interpret the meaning of those events. From the 1990s, they consistently placed events involving Muslims within the framework of an assumed Islamic propensity to extremism.

With the launch of the War on Terror in September 2001, anti-Muslim racism was solidified in the global machinery of counter-terrorism. National security think tanks and pro-Israel lobby groups organised and coordinated the represention of Islam in this way. But there were deeper reasons for anti-Muslim racism’s grip on US public culture. These reveal themselves when the War on Terror’s ideologists detail their justifications. The journalist Robert Kaplan, for example, one of the most effective defenders of the 2003 Iraq war and an adviser to the Pentagon, described the War on Terror as ‘really about taming the frontier’. Yale University military historian John Lewis Gaddis argued that the Iraq war had its origins in the wars that cleansed the US frontier of ‘native Americans, pirates, marauders, and other free agents’. Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld told US troops in 2003 that, in ‘fighting terrorists in the mountains of Afghanistan’, they had ‘lived up to the legend of Kit Carson’ – the nineteenth-century US army officer responsible for the deaths of thousands of Navajo people. And when Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo wrote his 2003 memo seeking to justify torture, he turned to an 1873 case involving Modoc Indian prisoners for a legal precedent. Propagandists for the War on Terror repeatedly conceived of Muslim extremism as an analogue of the Indigenous insurgencies against US settler colonialism in the nineteenth century. Not for nothing was the operation to kill Osama bin Laden named ‘Geronimo’, after the nineteenth-century Apache leader who organised armed resistance to US colonialism.

The ideological traffic between the War on Terror and histories of US settler colonialism flowed through another site of settler colonialism: Palestine. Israeli colonisation had occasionally assimilated Palestinians as citizens or exploited them as a subordinate migrant workforce, but its primary drive was to remove them entirely from occupied land. By their very existence in Israel and the occupied territories, the Palestinians signified a barrier and a limit to the Zionist project. They were a kind of surplus population. Thus, through a series of displacements, the Muslim extremist stood in for the Palestinian who stood in for surplus populations in general – and all were conceived in the US, at a more or less unconscious level, as the savages at the frontiers of civilisation, once again standing in the way of modernity’s expansion. Israel’s colonisation of Palestine became a microcosm of the broader US-led imperial structure. Fundamentally, anti-Muslim racism took hold in the US because, via these linkages, it offered a systematic framework for working through and responding to the problem of surplus populations at the core of the neoliberal world. The Muslim extremist became a metaphor for Third World radicalism, and the global policing of Muslims meshed with the broader problem of policing neoliberalism’s surplus populations, within and without the West. The violence upon which US capitalism depended to manage surplus populations – its support for authoritarian regimes, its wars of pacification, its fortification of borders – found a new rationale in the inflated danger of Muslim extremism. Ostensibly liberal governments could now understand their mass violence as a proportionate response to the inherently aggressive and threatening nature of the fanatical Muslim enemy. The necessary violence of an imperialist system was projected onto the personality of the Muslim and seen as emanating from outside its own processes. A Western self-image of innocence and beneficence could be maintained by way of the fantasy of securing the civilised from the menace of savage violence.

For Israel, this set of relationships enabled it to develop techniques of policing the dispossessed surplus populations of the global South, specialising in programmes of surveillance, police violence, border fortification, aerial bombardment, and propaganda. Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, once hoped to be the last gasp of a dying European colonialism, became the model for the neocolonial present. As Roei Elkabetz, a brigadier general for the Israel Defense Forces, told a security conference in El Paso, Texas, in 2012: ‘We have learned lots from Gaza … It’s a great laboratory’. In the US, security agencies and police departments have adopted methods of repression that Israel pioneered. When the Obama administration needed to find a legal justification for its programme of using drones to carry out ‘targeted’ killings, it explicitly cited the arguments developed by the Israeli Defense Forces for its analogous programme. When the Customs and Border Protection agency needed to step up its policing of the US-Mexico border in 2014, it hired the Israeli security company Elbit Systems to build the same network of fixed towers containing cameras, radar, and motion sensors that Israel has built in the West Bank. And when the New York Police Department sought to initiate a programme of mass surveillance of every aspect of Muslim life in the city, it emulated the methods used by the Israeli military and internal security service, Shin Bet, in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. In all its years of operation, the NYPD surveillance programme generated no leads of potential terrorist activity to investigate; its main effect was to instill in Muslim New Yorkers the fear that they would be targeted if they spoke out against the injustices of the War on Terror.

Arun Kundnani is a writer based in Philadelphia, currently working on a biography of Jamil Al-Amin.