The era we are living in is passing through a new form of warfare that transcends and even overrides the classical definitions of war in history. War is no longer a phenomenon where one country officially declares war on another, where fronts are drawn and armies face each other. Today, war operates as a fragmented, regionalized, continuous and globally interconnected regime.
This is why many people, without realizing it, are actually living in the midst of the Third World War. The most distinctive feature of this war is that it is not concentrated in a single center. There is no Europe-centered front, as in the First and Second Wars of Partition, but rather multiple areas of conflict unfolding simultaneously in different parts of the world, feeding each other, triggering each other and determining each other's strategic outcomes. The war in Ukraine, the devastation in Palestine, the tension in the Red Sea, the coups in Africa and the southern wars, the military buildup in the Taiwan Strait, the ruptures in the Caucasus, and many other low-intensity wars. None of these are independent of each other. They are all different fronts in the struggle to re-establish energy corridors, trade routes, supply chains, financial hierarchies and technological supremacy at the threshold of global capitalism's restructuring.
Therefore, the Middle East is being redesigned not only over oil, religion or ethnic tensions, but also over energy transit, logistics lines, digital infrastructure, military bases, population movements, water resources and migration waves triggered by the climate crisis. The Middle East is in a constant state of “Controlled Chaos” for Global Capital, which expands the arms market, guarantees reconstruction tenders and feeds the legitimacy of authoritarian regimes. This chaos is not coincidental, it is a new version of the historical crisis cycles of Capitalism. In every period of great crisis, capitalism has built its new accumulation regime through war, destruction, reconstruction and forced geopolitical redistribution. What we are experiencing today is an updated version of this historical cycle.
The war between global capital and its local collaborators is now a classic “Imperialism vs. National Bourgeoisie” dualism. Capital is divided into different factions within itself. US-EU Financial capital and technology monopolies, China-based production capital and infrastructure investments, Russia's Energy-Security axis, the financial blocs of the Gulf monarchies and the hegemony projects of regional powers such as Turkey, Iran, Israel, Egypt and many others. These factions are waging a global struggle for redistribution using state apparatuses, international institutions, media networks and proxy wars. Therefore, today's conflicts cannot be explained solely by the will of regional actors; behind each of them are the interest calculations of global capital blocs, energy and trade routes, digital infrastructure projects and military bases.
The new front of economic, commercial and technological warfare is not limited to classic tariffs or embargoes. Today, semiconductors, artificial intelligence infrastructures, 5G/6G communication networks, rare earth elements, data centers, digital platforms and payment systems form the nervous system of global capitalism. The US chip restrictions on China, the Huawei sanctions, the critical role of Taiwan, the threats of exclusion from the System of Bank Financial Institutions (SWIFT), the financial blockade of Russia, China's attempt to break the dollar hegemony with its own Digital currency, Bitkoin, etc., are all part of a large-scale war to re-establish the global capital cycle. This war is not fought with tanks, but with algorithms, data centers, fiber optic cables, satellites, artificial intelligence models, financial flows and cyber attacks. Data lines are as much at war as power lines, semiconductors as critical as oil, digital surveillance centers as decisive as military bases.
The Middle East is in a perpetual “Controlled Chaos” to keep it in place serves three main functions for global capital.
- It is expanding the arms market.
- It guarantees reconstruction tenders.
- It strengthens the legitimacy of authoritarian regimes.
This chaos is not accidental; it is a new version of capitalism's historical crisis cycles. In every period of great crisis, capitalism has built its new accumulation regime through war, destruction, reconstruction and forced geopolitical redistribution. What we are experiencing today is precisely an updated version of this historical cycle. The war between global capital and its local collaborators can no longer be explained by the classical dualism of “imperialism vs. national bourgeoisie”. Capital is divided into different factions within itself.
- US-EU financial capital and technology monopolies,
- China-centered manufacturing capital and infrastructure investments,
- Russia's energy-security axis,
- The financial blocs of the Gulf monarchies,
- The hegemony projects of regional powers such as Turkey, Iran, Israel and Egypt.
Using state apparatuses, international institutions, media networks and proxy wars, these factions are waging a global struggle for redistribution. Therefore, today's conflicts cannot be explained solely by the will of regional actors; behind each of them are the interest calculations of global capital blocs, energy and trade routes, digital infrastructure projects and military bases.
The alliances established in the reshaping of the Middle East are also based on these factional interests. Blocs such as NATO, EU, BRICS, Shanghai Cooperation Organization represent the security and expansion architecture of global capital blocs, not states. While the US-Israel axis seeks to control the region through its energy-finance-military alliance with Gulf capital, China is building a long-term geo-economic encirclement through ports, railways, energy lines and digital infrastructure with its Belt and Road initiative. Russia, on the other hand, plays a role that limits both the US and China by disrupting the regional balance through energy, weapons and nuclear technology.
This picture condemns the Middle East to a continuous cycle of “destabilization and stabilization”. War does not end and peace does not come. This is because instability creates a situation that is economically, politically and ideologically profitable for global capital.
The capital cycle of the global system no longer operates solely through flows of goods and money, but is being reorganized through Information, Data, Algorithms and Security. Financial markets, algorithmic transactions, high-frequency trading, shadow banking, tax havens, crypto-assets and central bank digital currencies are creating a new form of capitalist sovereignty that transcends the borders of the Nation-State but puts the State apparatus at its service. This new form of sovereignty, unlike classical capitalist accumulation models, has a structure that controls both material production and all areas of social life through data flows. The ideological front of this transformation is “Clash of Cultures” discourse. While on the surface the claim that cultural differences lead to an inevitable conflict seems clear on the surface, in reality it functions as a veil used to render invisible the class conflict, exploitation, imperialist domination and the wars of interest of the global capital factions. This discourse is an ideological smokescreen designed to fragment the common interests of the peoples, weaken class solidarity and divert the anger of the oppressed away from the real targets.
The new political and ideological dimensions of the global system converge on three axes. Authoritarian Neoliberalism, Right-Populism and the Liberal-Progressive showcase. When these three axes work together, the global system establishes a hegemony that appears both repressive and liberal, both nationalist and cosmopolitan. These seemingly contradictory but in reality complementary ideological forms are used to manage the crises of the capitalist order, to channel popular anger and to neutralize social opposition. The class alliances to be established by the Poor-Laboring peoples, the Working class, Women and Oppressed peoples against the new global system cannot be established through a single centered working class subject in the classical sense. Because today's Capitalism has consciously weakened the unity of the class by fragmenting the labor regime. Today, the class is not only the worker in the factory, but also Platform workers, Couriers, Migrant-Laborers, Care-Laborers, Women, informal workers and millions of people subjected to Digital exploitation.
A revolutionary-socialist perspective must therefore redefine class. The class must be reconstructed not only in terms of its position in the sphere of production, but also in terms of multiple oppressed forces such as precarity, indebtedness, invisible labor, digital exploitation, militarization and unregistered labor. The women's liberation struggle is at the center of this new definition of class. Because informal labor is one of the main pillars of capital accumulation both in the wage labor market and in the field of reproduction. The struggle of oppressed peoples is not only a class struggle for cultural recognition, but also for land, resources, language, self-government and anti-colonial resistance. The three basic predictions of the Revolutionary-Socialist perspective, the permanence of the war regime, the climate and life crises triggering new waves of rebellion, the expansion of digitalization as a field of both exploitation and organization, show that it is necessary to develop not only a theoretical framework but also a practical strategy of struggle. This strategy must establish an equally multi-layered line of resistance against the multi-layered forms of domination of the global capitalist order.