The global police state is not a dystopia to come—it is the present condition under which the disintegration of liberal democracy takes place.
Shortly after Donald Trump was sworn in for a second time—an inauguration conducted not so much in triumph as in defiance of legitimacy—Keir Starmer entered Downing Street for the first. The mood in Britain was one of weary relief, the kind that follows the end of a long illness. Starmer offered not hope but normalcy, a restoration of managerial competence after years of Tory cruelty, incompetence, and open class war. But if Starmerism presents itself as the sober alternative to Trumpist spectacle, both projects are animated by the same deeper imperative: to govern an ungovernable capitalism.
if Starmerism presents itself as the sober alternative to Trumpist spectacle, both projects are animated by the same deeper imperative: to govern an ungovernable capitalism.
William I. Robinson’s Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity (2014) and The Global Police State (2020) read less like warnings now and more like handbooks for understanding the present. The earlier volume traces the emergence of a transnational capitalist class and the crisis of overaccumulation that renders much of humanity redundant to capital’s needs. What begins in 2014 as a crisis of global legitimacy is, by 2020, a fully fledged police project, an operating system of control calibrated to manage that redundancy. In Robinson’s view, the crisis is not cyclical but structural: the system can no longer sustain accumulation by expanding production. Instead, capital turns to militarisation, surveillance, financialisation, and the control of surplus populations. Repression, once a means to secure order, is now a central avenue of accumulation in its own right. There is no longer any real contradiction between capitalism and authoritarianism. They have become mutually reinforcing.
“The rise of a global police state involves a tighter integration of capital and the state… dependent on a global war economy that in turn relies on perpetual state-organized war making, social control, and repression.”
The Global Police State pg.18
Where Trump dramatises the crisis, blustering against the migrant, the protester, the imagined Marxist Tesla saboteur, Starmer domestics it. But the mechanics are the same. As Robinson outlines, a transnational capitalist class (TCC)1 now operates beyond the reach of any single state2, and it is this class that both the American and British political establishments serve. Their job is no longer to mediate between labour and capital, or to promise broad-based growth. It is to maintain order in the face of decline, and to turn the administration of repression into a profit centre.
Accumulation by Repression
In recent months, the logic of exclusion has extended beyond the border and into the airport terminal. Under Trump’s second administration, the U.S. has adopted a posture of anticipatory repression, not merely detaining people at the border but turning them away at the gate. Members of the veteran British punk band U.K. Subs were denied entry upon arrival at LAX, detained, and deported without charge. A French academic was similarly removed, and a British woman who crossed legally from Canada found herself in ICE custody. Most disturbingly, Mahmoud Khalil, a U.S. citizen and graduate student at Columbia, was detained by immigration authorities following his participation in pro-Palestinian protests. Despite his legal status, he was treated as an internal threat, his political speech rendered grounds for incarceration.
This anticipatory posture is the latest phase in the remaking of the post-9/11 security state into an apparatus for managing surplus humanity3. ICE now operates with expanded discretion, empowered to relocate detainees not just to private facilities in Texas or Arizona, but to Guantánamo Bay itself. In February 2025, hundreds of migrants were transferred to the offshore facility, a space outside the reach of American constitutional law but fully within the circuits of American capital. Most were later rerouted or deported, but the message was clear: the law may end at the border, but the state’s capacity for violence does not.
Meanwhile, in an arrangement with Nayib Bukele’s government, the United States began deporting suspected gang members to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), paying $6 million annually per 300 detainees. CECOT, notorious for its brutal conditions and lack of legal oversight, functions as a kind of carceral subcontractor. It is repression outsourced: convenient, deniable, and efficient. Trump has even suggested expanding this arrangement to include U.S. prisoners, outsourcing not just migration enforcement, but the very machinery of domestic incarceration. In doing so, the state signals not simply a retreat from legal responsibility, but an embrace of authoritarian pragmatism: justice repackaged as logistics.
In Britain, Starmer’s Labour has moved more cautiously but along parallel lines. Though the Rwanda plan was technically a Tory policy, Labour’s refusal to oppose it on principle left the door open. Now in government, Starmer has floated his own scheme for offshore migrant processing, not in Rwanda, but in the Balkans. With a phrase that captures the bureaucratic banality of cruelty, Labour has dubbed these facilities “migrant hubs” a term whose anodyne flatness conceals the reality of forced removal, indefinite containment, and legal limbo. It is, as ever, the language of liberal authoritarianism: clean, managerial, bloodless. The effect is to normalise what should be unspeakable. “Return hubs” in Albania, Serbia, or North Macedonia would house failed asylum seekers, keeping them off UK soil and out of the reach of British courts. It is the same strategy as the Americans: export the violence, outsource the liability.
“The so-called wars on terrorism and drugs, the undeclared wars on immigrants, refugees, and gangs… amount to vast programs for global accumulation through militarization and repression.”
The Global Police State pg.111
The border, then, is no longer a line but a system, a transnational mesh of containment zones, processing centres, detention facilities, and biometric surveillance regimes. Migrants become logistics problems. The state’s role is not to welcome or even reject them, but to manage their mobility on capital’s terms, preferably at a distance. As Robinson writes, “surplus humanity” must be controlled, not integrated. The old promise of incorporation through labour has collapsed. What remains is exclusion, surveillance, and incarceration.
“The expansion of the precariat and surplus humanity presents a double challenge to the TCC. This mass of humanity must be controlled and any pretense at rebellion repressed.”
The Global Police State pg.80
Legitimation Crisis and Ideological Containment
The liberal democratic state once promised a bargain: prosperity in exchange for consent. But what happens when prosperity is no longer deliverable, and consent no longer forthcoming? For Robinson, this is the terrain on which the global police state emerges, not as an aberration, but as the logical continuation of a system in decline.
Trump answers the crisis through open ideological warfare. Every institutional check is reframed as sabotage, every protest as insurrection. The state’s failure to provide becomes the people’s failure to obey. Dissent is not refuted, but delegitimised, branded as un-American, foreign, or criminal. The goal is not to win over the public, but to isolate and neutralise enemies.
Starmer answers the same crisis through technocratic paternalism. Where Trump bellows, Starmer briefs. Britain’s authoritarian turn is conducted in the dulcet tones of efficiency and responsibility. Migrants must be processed “safely and swiftly.” Protesters must not “disrupt everyday life.” Surveillance infrastructure is expanded in the name of “modernising public services.” New protest laws—already challenged in court by Liberty as unlawful—extend police powers under vague and sweeping terms. The language is bloodless, but the logic is no less violent. Alongside this, the government has secretly issued orders requiring Apple to allow covert access to its users’ encrypted messages, a move now also under legal challenge. The convergence of data extraction and protest suppression is no accident, it is the architecture of control, operating behind a screen of legal normalcy. The language is bloodless, but the logic is no less violent.
In both cases, the project is the same: to foreclose the political. No longer able to generate consent, the state now manufactures necessity. Repressive measures are framed not as choices, but as inevitabilities, forced upon responsible governments by the unruliness of the governed. Gramsci would recognise this moment as an interregnum: the old world dying, the new one struggling to be born, and in the meantime, a proliferation of morbid symptoms.
“A transnational capitalist class… emerged as the manifest agent of global capitalism… made up of the owners and managers of the giant transnational corporations and financial institutions that drive the global economy.”
The Global Police State pg.26
The distinction between ideological persuasion and coercive containment is collapsing. Politics is increasingly confined to the margins: NGOs, managed opposition, digital protest, all carefully surveilled and periodically suppressed. What remains is administration, governance stripped to its procedural skeleton. This is not politics as representation or debate, but the bureaucratic management of populations: spreadsheet sovereignty, database rule. It is the rule of forms, not of principles; a state apparatus more fluent in risk scores than rights. And at its core, a repressive machinery growing ever more central to governance itself.
Data Capitalism and the Infrastructure of Control
If the twentieth century was the age of the factory, the twenty-first belongs to the data centre. Control is no longer imposed through the assembly line but through the algorithm. The infrastructure of the global police state, as Robinson shows, is inseparable from the rise of digital capitalism. Technology is not a neutral tool wielded by governments, it is capital’s latest terrain of accumulation, and the means through which surplus humanity is catalogued, tracked, and controlled.
Trump’s America exemplifies this fusion. In 2025, after a wave of targeted vandalism and arson at Tesla facilities—acts linked to the so-called ‘Tesla Takedown’ protests—his administration labelled demonstrators as domestic terrorists. The response was as symbolic as it was strategic: an affirmation of the regime’s alliance with Elon Musk, whose Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had become the primary vehicle for dismantling what remained of the federal administrative state. Attorney General Pam Bondi invoked federal anti-terror legislation against several accused, while Trump floated the possibility of sending those convicted to serve their sentences in El Salvador’s CECOT prison. The criminalisation of dissent has always served capital, but here it does so in the name of defending a company indistinguishable from the regime itself. This is not the policing of violence, it is the protection of the economic order.
Trump’s America exemplifies this fusion. Facial recognition software, biometric tracking at the border, predictive policing algorithms, and mass data harvesting by firms like Palantir and Clearview AI are not aberrations. They are the logical endpoint of a system in which data extraction is indistinguishable from social control. Private surveillance contracts balloon under the guise of national security, but their real function is commercial: to enclose yet another frontier of human experience.
Starmer’s Britain pursues a more sanitised version of the same. The rhetoric is one of innovation and reform—“digital transformation,” “smart borders,” “modern policing.” Yet beneath the euphemisms lies the same imperative: to render populations transparent to the state and opaque to each other. The expansion of biometric identity systems, algorithmic casework in the Home Office, and AI-led fraud detection in public services reveals a political project not of liberation but of legibility and control.
In both cases, the convergence of state power and digital capital creates a new mode of governance: not rule by law or representation, but rule by code. Decisions are automated, contestation is pre-empted, and dissent becomes a data anomaly to be managed. Surveillance capitalism, in this schema, is not an excess, it is the form that class rule takes when it no longer needs to persuade.
“The global order as a unity becomes increasingly repressive and authoritarian… the entire social order becomes surveilled.”
The Global Police State pg.107
The global police state is not simply an apparatus of repression. It is an operating system, distributed, automated, and permanently upgrading.
What Comes After Consent
What does resistance look like in a world where consent has been replaced by code, and repression by infrastructure? In a system where decisions are made by algorithms rather than deliberation, and where violence is enacted through logistics rather than law, resistance cannot simply appeal to conscience or legality. The architecture of domination is no longer personal or even ideological, it is procedural, silent, embedded. The question is no longer how to protest against power, but how to evade its circuitry. Robinson holds out the possibility of global solidarity, of a new emancipatory politics arising from the contradictions of the system itself. But the terrain has shifted. We are no longer contesting the old liberal state, with its promises of reform and inclusion. We are confronting a transnational apparatus of control that does not negotiate, it predicts, sorts, and neutralises.
Still, cracks remain. The very technologies used to manage us also connect us. Every system of control generates its own forms of rupture. Workers strike against algorithmic bosses. Migrants organise across detention centres. Protesters find each other through encrypted channels. The challenge is not to recover the old politics, but to invent a new one, rooted not in the demand to be heard by power, but in the capacity to act without its permission.
Robinson reminds us that the global police state is not destiny. It is a response—a panicked, volatile response—to a system that can no longer reproduce itself through accumulation or consent. That volatility is its weakness. Starmer and Trump, in their respective countries, are administrators of crisis, not its resolution. Their regimes may survive the collapse of legitimacy, but they cannot solve the contradictions that produced it.
What comes next will not be decided in parliaments or press conferences. It will be forged in streets, warehouses, factories and prisons, in the spaces where surplus humanity refuses to be surplus any longer. If the future is to be reclaimed, it will be not by appealing to the state, but by breaking it.
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Footnotes
- The Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC) refers to the globally integrated elite of corporate owners, executives, financiers and technocrats who operate across national boundaries and control the major levers of global production, investment, and policy. As Robinson argues, they are not loyal to any one nation-state but to the global system of capital accumulation itself. ↩︎
- For example, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s recent meeting with BlackRock CEO Larry Fink at 10 Downing Street exemplifies this dynamic. During this meeting, which included Chancellor Rachel Reeves and other BlackRock executives, discussions centered on strengthening economic ties and exploring investment opportunities in the UK. ↩︎
- Robinson uses the term surplus humanity to describe populations rendered unnecessary to the productive process under global capitalism, those excluded from labour markets, displaced by automation, or confined in zones of abandonment. It is a deliberately stark and emotive term, capturing the structural devaluation of human life under conditions of systemic overaccumulation. ↩︎
