ABSTRACT
The end of the Cold War represented the climactic finish to a 40-year-old global struggle between competing ideologies derived from adversarial forms of political and economic organization. This struggle, albeit with minimized direct confrontations due to the rise of nuclear arms, reflected the twilight of the wars between industrialized states as a vestige of the modern Westphalian era. At its conclusion, we witnessed the economic implosion of the USSR and its subsequent partition and the rejection of a centrally planned economy by China that gave rise to its extensive market economy reforms. These events proved to unequivocally exorcise the nineteenth-century legacy of Marx, Engels, and their adherents by discrediting a school of political and economic thought at whose basis was that of a class struggle between the owners of production (the bourgeoisie; the propertied class-the capitalists) and the oppressed workers (the proletariat; the propertyless class) (Marx and Engels, 1886). Still, recent concerns over class conflict-even warfare-have been espoused by capitalist scholars whose work is far removed from the tenets of historical materialism. In hindsight, it would be accurate to state that the victory of capitalism over Marxism in many ways resulted in the seeds of its own demise-at least in the sense of the continuing existence of a moderated capitalism subordinate to the needs of the Western states and their peoples.1 The advent of globalization has in many respects gone sideways-a condition that has been commented on by a number of authors (Hertz, 2001; Stiglitz, 2003; Gilman et al., 2011; Rodrik, 2012). Back in the early 1990s, however, few individuals-be they scholar, policymaker, or common citizen-would have bet on these dark horses of globalization to even finish, much less sweep the competition, in what was then viewed as the start of bright new era.2 Still, this “trifecta of dark globalization” derived from the rise of predatory capitalism, the increasing wealth accumulated by multinational corporations and global elites; the proverbial 1 percent controlling them, and the resulting emergence of a “plutocratic insurgency” endangering the Western states and their peoples is winning out. Each of these components of this trifecta, symptomatic of the rise of a new and aberrant
form of post-modern political economy, will be addressed in turn in this chapter, and the public looting-that is the extraction of wealth from the middle classes and public institutions of the United States and United Kingdom-that has ensued will be addressed. Further, a comparison of plutocratic insurgency to the earlier recognized construct of criminal insurgency will be highlighted, as will some thoughts on the intersection between the extra sovereign and illicit economies upon which they are linked.
