“How can it hold? How can an international order founded on the subjugation of the majority of humankind manage to endure in the face of everything resisting it? What is it that really stops us from liberating ourselves?” [1]
This is the important question asked, and largely answered, by Mathieu Rigouste in La guerre globale contre les peuples (‘The global war against the peoples’).
It is worth noting that this 2025 book, issued from “left-wing” circles, is based on the assumption that a single global empire does actually exist, that one entity lies behind all the near-identical squads of violent robo-cops, CCTV surveillance systems, ID schemes, drones and barbed wire.
If Rigouste does not go so far as to identify this as ZIM, the zio-satanic imperialist mafia, his analysis is not in fundamental contradiction with my own conclusions as to the nature of the Empire and, indeed, I would say that it provides valuable detail to bolster them.
While I find it odd that the author often restricts himself to referring to the imperial entity as “the transatlantic bloc”, [2] his own findings confirm that we are not looking here at a “West” now being challenged by rising non-imperial “multi-polar” power, but at what he calls “the global architecture of domination”. [3]
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Behind the iron fist of military occupation and its development we find, of course, the long arm of global finance.
They are really just different aspects of the same thing.
As Rigouste writes, industrial capitalism contains within itself “an imperialist propensity, in other words a dynamic of expansion, aiming to capture and submit, dominate and exploit new social groups and new resources”. [49]
“It developed by dispossessing European peasantry of its ability to be self-sufficient by means of the enclosures, laws and measures preventing free access to the Commons (rivers, meadows, forests)”. [50]
The Empire necessarily finds itself in “a permanent state of war” [51] against those in the way of, or actively resisting, the advance of its “imperial modernity”. [52]
With its greed-fuelled expansion into the Americas it inflicted “the near-extermination of the peoples who lived there and went on to capture, deport and enslave millions of Africans”, says Rigouste. [53]
This drive for “the maximum accumulation of profits for industrialists” [54] has been relentless for many centuries now and we always see the same financial interests behind it.