Gaza: A ghastly window into the crisis of global capitalism

T he Palestinian masses have gone from serving as a tightly-controlled and super-exploited labour force for Israeli and transnational capital to surplus humanity standing in the way of a new round of capitalist expansion. Gaza thus becomes a potent symbol of the plight of surplus humanity around the world. Decades of globalisation and neoliberalism have relegated great masses of people to marginal existence. New technologies based on artificial intelligence combined with displacement generated by conflict, economic collapse, and climate change will exponentially increase the ranks of surplus humanity. The International Labour Organization reported as far back as the turn of century that some one-third of the global labour forces had been made superfluous. A 2020 study by the US National Academy of Sciences predicted that for every additional one degree centigrade rise in the average global climate, a billion people will be forced to abandon their locations and to endure insufferable heat.