Volume 4, Issue 11, November – 2019
ISSN No:-2456-2165
The Postmodern Face of War in Hong Kong Protests:
How does Modern Technology Work Geopolitically?
DE ALMEIDA, L.L
Abstract:- This article’s main goal is to analyze the
correspondence between War and Work along their
evolution in human history, tracing its similarities and
then trying to understand the new modality of both
practices, defending the thesis of the existence of a new
type of war, a virtual one, marked by the non-visible
intervention of the global potencies and by the
intermittent combats against the enemies of the liberal
establishment.
Keywords:- Uberizaton. War. Geopolitics. China. Hong
Kong.
I. INTRODUCTION
Work and War have accompanied humankind since its
beginning. In ancient wars the main goal of both belligerent
groups was to exterminate each other. The modern era
inaugurates a new model of war in Europe with the
Westphalia Treaties and the continental division in different
Nation-States. War became a circumcised and respectful
mean of solution of international controversies between two
sovereign States.
However, the second stage of capitalism and the rise
of the industrial potencies in Europe bring a new form of
war. The belligerent activity became mortal as never before.
The industrial mentality of factories went to trenches and
war acquired an industrial capacity of killing and
destruction. In parallel, in the factories workers became
increasingly explored and coercively controlled by the
policies of security. This was the era of the Total
Mobilization (Junger, 2002).
The rise of postmodernity brings a new perspective on
work. We contemplate the dissolution of the old model of
industrial production and police vigilance and physical
coercion of the workers. Instead, there is the so-called
“uberization” of work, or the rise of a new stage of
capitalism in which the workers are explored and controlled
by the machine. Modern technology made possible a
system in which workers are not physically controlled but
virtually and unconsciously - workers think they are
autonomous and free when they are imprisoned by
technology.
This process of “uberization” is also present at war. If
the old industrial model inaugurated the total war, the new
technologies inaugurated the virtualized war, or a new type
of managing conflicts without the mobilization of yore.
Nowadays, the world potencies make war by virtual means,
financing “colorful revolutions”, “protests for (western
IJISRT19NOV270 www.ijisrt.com
International Journal of Innovative Science and Research Technology
model of) democracy” and so on. That is exactly what is
occurring in Hong Kong.
II. BRIEF HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Many are the possible definitions to what is work.
Different ideological and religious visions of this human
activity bring diverse perspectives on this polemical
question. For us, in the construction of this research, the
best definition of “work” is, in simplified words, the
relationship between man and nature.1
This relation is modified with the rise of capitalism.
Work became alienated as well as the man and its relations
are objectified. Thus, there is a real mutilation of the
interaction between man and nature2.
The relations of work are progressively modified
alongside the development of capitalism. The craft work
typical of the pre-capitalist era practically disappeared with
the ascension of this system of production in its second
phase.
During the first stage of capitalism, with mercantilism
and the ascension of the Nation-States, we witnessed the
fall of the medieval society and all that it represented: the
theocentric civilization and the secular and religious power
of the Catholic Church.
In such moment, those reformations were required for
the development of capitalism and the accumulation of
capital by the unborn bourgeoisie. The forms and types of
work and production change in accordance with the
demands for accumulation of capital, and also the whole
social structure changes.
The ascension of the mercantilist phase of capitalism
proportionated the decline of the medieval feudal-
1
See: HEGEL, G. W. F.. Filosofia do Direito. Lisboa,
Guimarães Editora, 1992, p. 187. and MARX, K. O
Capital. V.L., Rio de Janeiro, DIFEL, 1982, cap. V., p. 201-
208.
2
ANTUNES, Ricardo. "Trabalho e Estranhamento". In:
Adeus ao Trabalho? Ensaio sobre as Metamorfoses e a
Centralidade do Mundo do Trabalho. São Paulo: Cortez,
(4ª ed.), 1997, apud DE OLIVEIRA, Ana Maria Soares.
Relação Homem-Natureza no modo de produção
capitalista. REVISTA ELECTRÓNICA DE GEOGRAFÍA
Y CIENCIAS SOCIALES
Universidad de Barcelona. ISSN: 1138-9788. Depósito
Legal: B. 21.741-98
Vol. VI, núm. 119 (18), 1 de agosto de 2002
625
Volume 4, Issue 11, November – 2019
theocentric society as well as the rise of the Nation-State,
the great Leviathan. The European potencies, stately
organized, launched themselves into the amplitude and
deepness of the oceans, conquering and colonizing the
“barbarian” ultramarine lands.
Although the medieval political and economic
structure declined and disappeared, its remains were visible
in European society until the advent of the so-called Public
European Law – Jus Publicum Europaeum 3 , with the
celebration of the Westphalia Peace, which reconfigured
Europe as an order of National States, in detriment of the
Catholic Church and the decadent Romano-Germanic
Empire.
But, in fact, capitalism is not static; instead it is
dynamic, fluid and mutable. If the rise of the State was
interesting for the bourgeois class to destroy the medieval
theocentric ecclesiastically structured society – with
privileges for the clergy -, the advent of the Industrial
Revolution (XVIII Century) made the State progressively
an obstacle for the interests of that same class.
The Illuminist ideas gave the bourgeoisie the secular
cosmovision it necessitated at such moment. The process of
secularization demonstrated itself as a continuous one; from
the theocentric society into a Nation State; from the Nation
State into a Legal State.
If the medieval social-political model was
disinteresting for bourgeoisie because of the privileges of
the clergy, neither the absolute uncontestable power of the
Monarchic Sovereign could attend such interests in an age
of capitalist development, industrial production and
necessity of work and consumption market.
This industrial phase of capitalism developed this
system and changed the whole European society until the
shameful advent of the World War that reconfigured the
world, not continentally, instead, as a globe, destroying the
European civilizational epicenter and rising the United
States as the greatest world potency.
It is curious to note that the Industrial Revolution was
the first moment in human history since the advent of the
Agricultural Revolution in which humanity has changed
totally its form to produce means of survival. With the
Mesopotamian advent of agriculture (circa 10.000 B.C.),
the human groups acquired the possibility of producing
more than the strictly necessary for the consumption and
storing the surpluses for the adverse times, as well as the
necessity to create armies and ancient forms of State and
institutional structures to protect the production.
The Industrial Revolution gave men the enormous
capacity to product much more than the strictly necessary
and also to store and sealing it for the peoples from non-
3
SCHMITT, Carl. El Nomos de la Tierra en el Derecho de
Gentes del “Jus Publicum Europaeum”. Struhart
&Cia. Buenos Aires. 2005.
IJISRT19NOV270 www.ijisrt.com
International Journal of Innovative Science and Research Technology
ISSN No:-2456-2165
industrialized regions. At that moment, work and the whole
society acquired together the “factory logics”. The systems
of controlling and vigilance became strictly connected with
industrial model of production. It coincides not incidentally
with the advent of the prison system of punish and disciple
that was masterly worked by the French philosopher
Michel Foucault4.
The logics of control and discipline changed just with
the obsolescence of the industrial capitalist system. The rise
of the process of financialization in the XX Century
proportionated a big change in the way of work. As
while the factories converted from the center of the
economic system into a small part of it, the work in them
also became devalued and unprofitable for the elites. The
conquests of the working class along her history, as the
labor rights, the unionization and the capacity of mobilizing
people’s violence to require them became then
progressively obsolete.
The rise of the neoliberal model represents the apogee
of this third phase of capitalism. It means the disappearance
of the stable jobs legally regulated and defended by a
Welfare State that guaranteed a healthy system of
consumption since the post-29 Crisis reforms 5 , which
culminated in the substitution of the old Proletarian class –
base of the capitalist system – by the unborn precariat6, the
new class of the global slavery, characterized by informal
jobs, intermittent work and the absence of labor rights and
guaranties.
The great advent of this process of deterioration of
work conditions is the recent phenomenon of uberization,
which, not referring strictly to the homonymous
corporation of transport “by applicative”, represents a
whole tendency in new forms of work, marked by
intermittence and alienation of the employee from its
employer and corporation hierarchy as well as from the
working identity and legally determined labor rights7.
4
FOUCALT, Michel. Vigiar e punir - Nascimento da
prisão. 24. Ed.. Petrópolis: Vozes, 2001.
5
The Great Depression of 1929 caused the delusion with
the classic liberal model of production and proportionated
the appearance of the Welfare State that reconfigured the
consumption society and proportionated its survival and of
capitalism at all.
6
See: https://www.geopolitica.ru/en/article/rise-precariat
and; Standing, Guy. The Precariat and Class Struggle,
RCCS Annual Review [Online], 7 | 2015, Online since 01
October 2015, connection on 30 April 2019. URL :
http://journals.openedition.org/rccsar/585 ; DOI :
10.4000/rccsar.585.
7
See: HUFFINGTON POST (Arnaud Touati & Harry
Allouche). Uber: le parfait esclavagiste modern? In:
<http://www.huffingtonpost.fr/arnaud-touati/greve- -uber-
economie_a_21650772/>; FONTES, Virgínia. Capitalismo
em tempos de UBERização: do emprego ao trabalho. Marx
e o Marxismo - Revista do NIEP-Marx, [S.l.], v. 5, n. 8, p.
p. 45-67, jul. 2017. ISSN 2318-9657.
626
Volume 4, Issue 11, November – 2019
III. THE QUESTION OF WAR
The greatest German jurist, Carl Schmitt (1888-1985),
wrote, in the first years of the post-war era, his book Der
Nomos der Erde (2005), in which he traced the history of
international law and international society, dividing it
according to the concept of Nomos.
This Greek word refers to the daemon of “law”. It
means, in schmittian terms, the law or the rule of the Earth.
For Schmitt, the Earth has passed in her history by three
Nomoi, in such a line in which the first Nomos was that of
the Ancient Times and the Middle Ages; the second, the
correspondent to the Westphalia order and; finally, the
current Nomos, characterized by the legal universalism8.
During the first Nomos times, civilizations were
practically uncommunicable, being the contact between
each other always made through the war of extermination –
that type of conflict with the objective of total annihilation
of the enemy.
The period of the European Middle Ages was marked
by the legal horizontality and pulverization among many
different institutions under the central dominion of the
Catholic Church. The European community was organized
under the secular and spiritual domain of the Roman Pope.
Schmitt called this community Respublica Christiana9.
Outside the Respublica Christiana there was the
barbarian world, that one of the infidels and heretics – and
against them the Pope could determine the war of
extermination. This was the era of the religious wars.
The ascension of the States changed completely the
medieval society. The continuous process of secularization
and the loss of political power by the Church and the
Roman-Germanic Empire with the propagation of the
protestant communities and the State armies caused the
retraction of the Pope’s temporal authority.
These circumstances became clearer with the fuse of
the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) that reorganized the
European order into an order of Nation States, secularly
constituted. These States were sovereign and recognized
the sovereignty of each other, dismantling the ancient idea
of spiritual community.
The practice of war in Europe acquired a new aspect.
It was not an act of extermination destined to the barbarians
and heretics anymore, but a sovereign and limited form of
solution of conflicts. Sovereign States, recognizing
their sovereignty, could decide sovereignly to start a war.
This war became that described by the Prussian genius,
Carl von Clausewitz in his famous treat On War10 . This
model of conflict established a limited type of clash and a
8
Op. cit. Schmitt, 2005.
9 12
Ibidem, pp.36-48.
10
VON CLAUSEWITZ, Carl. On War. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007.
IJISRT19NOV270 www.ijisrt.com
International Journal of Innovative Science and Research Technology
ISSN No:-2456-2165
strict obedience to an immaterial chivalrous code. There
were demarked differences between front and rear, military
and civil people and the parts of the national production
destined to the war or to the internal population.
The rule of the Westphalian order persisted until the
advent of the new technologies and the necessity of
capitalism to expand its horizons beyond the limits of the
Nation States. The advance of technology proportionated
the development of new forms of making war and the rise
of the industrial capacity of killing. As a result of this
process, in the XX Century we witnessed the phenomenon
of the Total War (der Totale Krieg), which dismantled the
European order of the Nation States and raised the
universal order commanded by the Unites States of
America.
It is important to note that the Westphalian order was
based on a spatial and terrestrial (telluric) principle of
acquisition, division and ruling of the land. This principle
created a legal order on a determined space, outside which
the norms were not valid. That is why outside Europe, i.e.,
in the colonized lands, the limits of war and States were
meaningless.
This telluric principle was totally eradicated from the
legal world order with the intervention of the United States
at the First World War. An alien potency intervened in a
continental war, won it and became the most empowered
nation on Earth with the complete destruction of the
European countries.
Total War was the central point of transition from the
Westphalian world – the second Nomos – to the universal
order - the third and current Nomos11. This new order is not
spatially demarked, but discontinuous and universal, or, in
other terms, a maritime and thalassocratic order12, without
any spatial physical delimitations.
Carl Schmitt wrote his referenced book in the last
century speculating about the possibilities of this new
world order. For him, the universalization could be
dangerous in the sense to become the international politics
into international power of police. Since the moment that
one single State domains the whole world, there is no
11
I dedicated this theme a full article in: Guerra, S., &
Almeida, L. (2019). GUERRA TOTAL E A ORDEM
JURIDICA INTERNACIONAL. Revista Direito Em
Debate, 28(51), 153-164. https://doi.org/10.21527/2176-
6622.2019.51.153-164.
See more about this opposition: SCHMITT, Carl. Land
und Meer. Eine weltgeschichtliche Betrachtung. 4ª ed.
Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2001.
627
Volume 4, Issue 11, November – 2019
13
political relation and the international order acquires the
logics of a Nation State14.
The western world – under the US -, having
dominated the whole world 15 , can dictate its universal
norms 16 . The ones who go against these norms become
international enemies of the world order – become
unhuman17. And against them it is legitimate to promote the
total war. Thus, Schmitt notes how the legal universalism
resurrects the concept of justum bellum, which is nothing
more than war of extermination 18 . If in the Westphalian
world war was a legal practice between sovereign entities,
being limited by the jus in bello, in the universal order, war
becomes a crime 19 (jus contra bellum) – as well as,
currently, “peace”, i.e., the Pax Americana, is the new
international greatest value. So, the ones against whom the
war is waged are international criminals.
This new reality can be perfectly visualized in the
recent innovation in international law of the appearance of
the so-called “humanitarian interventions” that are specific
cases in which war becomes “legal” in international law
against the ones who are outside the global legal order.
These interventions are purely cases of total war waged
against the enemies of the universal status quo20.
13
For Schmitt, the concept of the political is the distinction
between friends and enemies. See: SCHMITT, Carl. The
Concept of the Political. Expanded Edition (1932), trans.
by G. Schwab, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2007.
1414
Op. cit. GUERRA; DE ALMEIDA, 2019.
15
Firstly, the universalization was precarious, with the
existence of the Soviet Union and the bipolar geopolitical
balance in the Cold War. The fall of the communist
civilization occasioned the complete domination of the
world by the USA and the universalization of the western
liberal values and principles. The process of westernization
became so deep that liberalism is confused with the own
reality, being this same westernization always referenced as
“globalization”. More about in: DUGIN, Alexandr. A
Quarta Teoria Política. Editora Austral: Curitiba-PR, 2012.
16
It is important to reflect critically about the Universal
Declaration of the Human Rights.
17
Op. cit. SCHMITT, 2007.
18
Op. cit. SCHMITT, 2005.
19
United Nations Charter, 1945.
20
The idea that in politics good can only engender good
ignores what Max Weber called the
paradox of consequences. Historical experience shows that
the best intentions can have
catastrophic effects. It also shows that the right of
interference never resolves any problem but
tends, on the contrary, to multiply them, as one has been
able to see in Kosovo, in Afghanistan or in
Iraq. Democracy and freedoms are not imposed from
outside, especially in one moment. Their
establishment can only result from a local evolution, not
from a forced conversion. Furthermore, the
political authorities attacked or crushed as a result of the
discussion of human rights do not
IJISRT19NOV270 www.ijisrt.com
International Journal of Innovative Science and Research Technology
ISSN No:-2456-2165
IV. NEOLIBERALISM, UBERIZATION AND NEW
FORMS OF WORK AND WAR
The phenomenon of neoliberalization of economy,
originated from the 70’s, is a global tendency, advanced
with the victory of the American ideology in the Cold War.
This tendency represents some characteristics of the old
classical liberal thought but in a larger scale and shows a
staunch opposition to the Welfare State and the policies of
State intervention at all.
Neoliberalism becomes stronger accompanying the
progress of technology and its effects in work, global
economy and capitalist system that is experiencing its new
financial phase, creating a complex of artificial money by
speculative schemes.
As exposed in the first part of this article, the
transition from the industrial capitalism to the financial one
is the central mark of our era and has produced a new social
extract, the precariat that refers to the workers victimized
by the obsolescence of the factory scheme of production
and the consequent dismantle of the old system of jobs and
the flexibilization of labor rights.
disappear to the advantage of a pacified and more just
world, but to the advantage of economic and
financial institutions, which create social inequalities and
tensions, exercised still more arbitrarily
by multinational enterprises and financial markets. ‘The
ideology of human rights’, affirms Alain
Bertho, ‘calls less for the liberation of peoples than for the
police of the states’. Hardly had the
French Revolution proclaimed human rights than, to
render them more effective, it instituted the
Terror. From 1792 to 1801, it was in the name of ‘freedom’
that France was engaged in a politics
of occupation, annexations and conquests. The right of
humanitarian interference is equally
belligerent. ‘It is not excluded that, just as men make war
“for a better peace”’, wrote Julien Freund,
‘it may happen that one day they may fight in the name of
conceptions equally estimable concerning
human rights’. We are, quite precisely, there already.
Bernard Kouchner who, not so long
ago, flattered himself that he ‘found himself always on the
side of those who receive the bombs and
not of those who throw them’, declares today, ‘A preventive
war is a notion which seems to me not
only just, but which approximates to what, with others, we
have proposed as a duty, and then a
right, of interference’. But the right of interference does not
justify preventive war alone. By
endowing the wars that it provokes with a moral character,
by presenting them as ‘just wars’, it
ends by criminalising the enemy, in making him a symbol of
Evil: one who makes war in the name of
humanity can only place his adversaries outside humanity.
By definition, ‘just war’ is a total war.(DE BENOIST,
Alain. Beyond Human Rights. Defending Freedoms. Arktos.
1 ed. 2011. P. 39)
628
Volume 4, Issue 11, November – 2019
There is no security in jobs anymore. The workers are
not internalized by their corporations and the so-called
“internal labour markets”21 are deconstructed in favor of the
continuous process of alienation of the employee from his
employer.
 Stone (2006) Explains:
In the twentieth century, most large corporations
organized their workforces into what have been termed
“internal labour markets.” In internal labour markets, jobs
were arranged into hierarchical ladders and each job
provided the training for the job on the next rung up.
Employers who used internal labour markets hired only at
the entry level, and then used internal promotion to fill all
the higher rungs.
Employers wanted employees to stay a long time, so
they gave them an implicit promise of long-term
employment and of orderly and predictable patterns of
promotion. Consistent with internal labour market job
structures, employers structured pay and benefit systems so
that wages and benefits rose as length of service increased.
Recently, employers have dismantled their internal labour
market job structures and abandoned the implicit promises
that went along with them. They now create new types of
employment relationships that do not depend upon, or
encourage, longevity. This gives employers flexibility to
cross-utilize employees. It also allows for quick
adjustments in production methods as firms confront
increasingly competitive product markets. Work has thus
become contingent, not only in the sense that it is formally
defined as short-term or episodic, but also in the sense that
the attachment between the firm and the worker has been
loosened. The “recasualization of work” has reportedly
become a fact of life all along the employment spectrum,
from blue-collar workers to high-end professionals and
managers22.
The most recent tendency in this process, deflagrated
with the advent of the transport by applicative corporations,
reveals the cruelest face of labor market dismantle and
flexibilization. With this advent, flexibilization is raised
to an unimaginable degree of collective insecurity. Factory
logic is replaced by the phenomenon of uberization, which
extinguishes coercive police control (inside and outside
factories) and imposes on workers an invisible - and a
thousand times more efficient - control: the machine
control.
21
Katherine V.W. Stone, From Widgets to Digits:
Employment Regulation for the Changing Workplace.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
22
Stone, Katherine V. Flexibilization, Globalization, and
Privatization: Three Challenges to Labor Rights in Our
Time. Osgoode Hall Law Journal. Vol 44. N.1. 2006.
IJISRT19NOV270 www.ijisrt.com
International Journal of Innovative Science and Research Technology
ISSN No:-2456-2165
The worker goes from being an employee to being a
number. He no longer submits himself to direct control by
physical coercion, but really believes that he is free,
autonomous, and engaged in an "enterprise" when in fact it
is controlled by the machine and guided according to his
invisible employer’ interests.
 In Fleming’s Words (2017):
Hence one of the more unexpected outcomes of
radical responsibilization. We are told that human
capitalists are ‘free agents’, alone determining how and
when they work. But much of the evidence suggests that
these workers are micro-managed, monitored and directly
supervised more now than ever. The observation is missed
by celebrants and critics alike, who emphasize self-
management and self-regulation, albeit insecure,
precarious and stressful. Even hardened critics of new
capitalism like Andre Gorz (2010) wrongly assume that old
fashion managerialism tends to disappear with the advent
of individualized, market-based employment practices.
People are assumed to manage themselves, anxiously
micro-managing their lives from project to project. But
here is the rub. Disenfranchised human capitalists are
certainly on their own when it comes to absorbing the risks
and costs of economic insecurity. But this does not mean
they are left alone. Just the opposite. Authoritarianism is
now a definitive aspect of this approach to labour relations,
even in the relatively well-paid corporate sector, as the
shocking expose of white-collar employment at Amazon
recently revealed (Kantor & Streitfeld, 2015). Perhaps it is
here that the promise of full autonomy pledged in the name
of human capital is truly betrayed. In their extensive study
of organizational-level employment practices, Kleinknecht,
Kwee, and Budyanto (2016) found that deregulated labour
markets tend to have ‘thicker’ and more ridged
management structures than normal workplaces:
‘organisations employing high shares of flexible workers
have higher shares of managers in their personnel. We
argue that flexibility in labour markets (i.e. easier firing
and higher labour turnover) damages trust, loyalty and
commitment. This requires more management and control’
(Kleinknecht et al., 2016, p. 1137). The management
function – especially its policing aspect – returns with
vengeance given the unhappiness that radical
responsibilization fosters in the workforce, a trend
predicted back in the mid-1990s by more prescient
economic commentators (e.g., Gordon, 1996). Blend this
hyper-distrust with technological surveillance and then
some really worrying work patterns emerge, even in
relatively skilled and secure occupations. For example, in
January 2016 journalists at a well-known London
newspaper were suddenly ordered to wear heat/motion
sensors that monitored whether they were at their desks
(Waterson, 2016). The initiative was introduced without
notice. Employees simply found the devices at their work
stations on Monday morning and Googled the brand name
to identify what they were. An edict was later issued by
senior management. The monitors must be worn at all times
during work hours. For many it did not make sense.
Journalism does not operate this way. It flourishes when
workers can rove from their desk, not when needlessly tied
629
Volume 4, Issue 11, November – 2019
to it. But perhaps the issue was no longer about
productivity. Management distrust had clearly become self-
defeating. Superiors were willing to risk obstructing the
very labour process they ostensibly sought to optimize
rather than lose control. This is how the insecurity caused
by radical responsibilization can fuel a vicious cycle. More
disgruntlement leads to even more intrusive controls and so
on23.
It is the most efficient system for capitalism in its
contemporary phase. There is no longer an agglomeration
of workers for hours inside a factory, so there is no longer a
workers' identity and collective force capable of handling
mass violence and driving social change. Everything is
pulverized and virtually controlled.
In the postmodern liberal era, we can see how the old
socialist thinkers were wrong on the possibility to free man
from exploration through technological development.
Instead, technology has raised a new and more coercive
way to explore and control man in favor of capitalist
interests.
V. THE UBERIZATION OF WAR
As we exposed, the evolution of capitalism is the
evolution of its forms of production and is consequently
accompanied by the progress of the mechanisms to vigil,
control and defend (vigilance, penal system and war).
The rise of postmodernity, with its economic system
par excellence, neoliberalism, represented the dismantle of
the old internal labor market, disappearing the labourist
structures of requiring rights and, above all, the secure jobs
to the advantage of the intermittent unsafe work.
But, another perspective is required to analyze this
phenomenon, especially on the matters of war as it is
currently practiced.
Briefly remembering some approaches, the primitive
human groups lived by the fruits of the collection of natural
means, fighting constantly each other for the group’s
individual benefit; the Agricultural Revolution
proportionated the victory of man over nature, producing
means in relative abundance, creating the State and Army
to protect production; the agricultural model survived until
the advent of the mercantilist capitalism, the old primitive
form of capitalist production; finally, we contemplated the
Industrial Revolution and the rise of the factory as a model
of work and society.
Each phase of this development had its own typical
form of war. Until the Westphalian World, war was a
practice of extermination, since the ancient primitive pre-
agricultural human groups until the medieval religious wars.
After the Treaties that established the Jus Publicum
23
Fleming, P. (2017). The Human Capital Hoax: Work,
Debt and Insecurity in the Era of Uberization. Organization
Studies, 38(5), 691–709.
IJISRT19NOV270 www.ijisrt.com
International Journal of Innovative Science and Research Technology
ISSN No:-2456-2165
Europaeum, war became delimited, circumscribed and
aristocratic. Then, the factories inaugurated the industrial
form of war and killing – the Total Mobilization of Ernst
Junger24, which is a phenomenon of both, factory and front
-, annihilating the Westphalian order and raising the
universal legal thought. So, this system created a new
international legal order which is characterized by the
complete domain of the “winners”, the great world
potencies, especially the US, which rules the whole world
with its own norms and values, in such a way that
determine who is and who is not human itself – “human” is
basically everyone one who obeys the western ideology of
the individual universal rights and “unhuman” are the those
outside the norms, against whom there is only one possible
dialogue: total war.
Though, we have some interesting aspects to note,
especially since the victory of liberalism in the Cold War.
War, as we understand this term traditionally, is a
phenomenon in extinction. But this extinction does not
mean pacification, instead, it means the rise of new forms
of war.
Legally speaking, war is the armed conflict between
two or more sovereign States. Few are these experiences
since the end of the Cold War, although very tragic and
lamentable the ones that occurred. But, geopolitically
speaking, the definition of war is larger and the experiences
all around the world are much more, especially after the
World Trade Center’s attacks in 2001.
The War on Terror inaugurated the global asymmetric
intermittent conflict against an invisible and undetermined
enemy that is literally everywhere all the time. Against
these enemies there is the global total war. But this total
force is undefined territorially and temporally, creating a
global atmosphere of fear, insecurity and uneasiness.
As while the enemy at this war is an invisible entity,
everyone can be classified as such. That is why the War on
Terror, since its inception, was a global war against the
enemies of the globalist order 25 . This war could not be
made with the traditional means of the armed conflicts just
because it would mean a global total war and the complete
destruction of the world.
So, there were developed mechanisms to contain the
“world’s-enemies” and maintain peace around the globe. It
was possible just because of the advancement of
technology, which proportionated new and better forms of
control and vigil. These new forms are born from necessity
of controlling the world from the possible threats to the
global establishment. If it is impossible to guarantee a
global military domain physically, modern technology
proportionates this possibility by remote and immaterial
means.
24
JUNGER, Ernst. A mobilização total. Nat. hum., São
Paulo, v. 4, n. 1, jun. 2002.
25
The ilegal Invasion of Iraq is an evidence of that.
630
Volume 4, Issue 11, November – 2019
Nowadays, we contemplate the progress of
disintegration of the traditional concept of war and military
occupation in parallel with the success of a new tendency,
in which the whole world in controlled and remotely
monitored by the Western potencies – or the US – without
the necessity of military physical intervention in most cases.
I call this process a true “uberization” of war, just
because it reminds, geopolitically, the phenomenon of
“uberization” in work: the alienation of worker from their
own labor conditions and their control and vigilance by the
most efficient and oppressive mean: the machine. In the
same sense, entire nations became controlled and are
constantly attacked when go in contrast with the interests of
the global financial oligarch and still thinking they have
control on the situation in their countries and that they are
sovereign and free, corroborating the dangerous legal
international fiction.
This is the central analysis of this article that we begin
now.
A. Negative Essay
We claimed here the existence of a process of
uberization of war. Let us see what this process is, firstly
analyzing what it is not.
 Uberization of War is not:
 Hybrid Warfare: this term, popularized by the brilliant
American political analyst Andrew Korybko 26 is
undoubtable a very interesting concept, but it became
vulgarized by the liberal leftist political sectors and in
its theoretical content does not correspond with the
concept proposed here. Summarily, Hybrid Warfare is
correspondent to the occasion of intercourse between
conventional military and unconventional – non-
military organization and cyberattacks – forms of war
waged by the US imperialist program against the
tendencies to build a multipolar world. This is not
uberization of war;
 Outsourced War: This concept belong to the
phenomenon of outsouring national military
competencies to private corporations in profitable
benefits of the State and its establishment27. This is not
uberization of war;
 Asymmetric warfare 28 : this concept belongs to those
armed conflicts with evident asymmetry of force and
military capacity between the belligerent parts. It
became famous and was propagated after the
26
See: KORYBKO, Andrew. Guerras híbridas, das
revoluções coloridas aos golpes. 2018. São Paulo, Editora
Expressão Popular.
27
Singer, P. W. (2005). Outsourcing War. Foreign Affairs,
84(2), 119. doi:10.2307/20034280
28
Freedman, L. (2006). Asymmetric war. The Adelphi
Papers, 45(379), 49–60.
IJISRT19NOV270 www.ijisrt.com
International Journal of Innovative Science and Research Technology
ISSN No:-2456-2165
declaration of the War on Terror. This is not uberization
of war;
 Total war in its traditional concept: Undoubtable, total
war did not disappear from geopolitical scenario, but it
has acquired new forms that do not correspond with its
ancient theory and praxis. Postmodern war, although
employs total force against the enemies, is not spatially,
temporally and personally determined anymore. There
is no such thing as a correspondence between the total
war from the first half of the XX Century and currently
geopolitical kind of war.
B. Positive Essay
Having accorded what uberization of war is not, let us
see it really is – according with the partial results of this
unborn research.
 Uberization of War is:
 A practical mechanism of world control: Uberizating
war was the best way found by the US and Western
potencies to control the whole world and establish its
unipolar domain;
 A postmodern version of colonization and military
occupation: Through military pulverized and invisible
domination, the world potencies exercise their power
over the geopolitical south – the old colonized world,
without physical wear and financial costs of yore;
 Total war in a new meaning: Total war still exists. But it
has acquired new forms and practices. Nowadays, total
war and mobilization of forces is managed against the
enemies of the international order in an intermittent and
unfinishable conflict to preserve the status quo through
the total elimination of its enemies;
 A geopolitical consequence of technological
advancement and evolution of work: the new capitalist
logics, with financial capitalism and neoliberal as
ideological ascension has consequences not only in
work and capitalist production, instead, it has an
international and geopolitical dimension that is the
acquisition of control over the whole world through
technological means that permit that controlled and
attacked nations do not comprehend themselves as such.
Summarily, uberization of work is the currently praxis
of control, vigil and rule of the world by the globalist
establishment through unclear mechanisms proportionated
by the advanced technology. In another sense, this is the
geopolitical expression of the technical progress in
capitalism and of the new kind of work.
631
Volume 4, Issue 11, November – 2019
VI. HONG KONG’S CASE
Being clear what we are proposing with the term
“uberization of war”, finally, we entry the question of Hong
Kong protests.
Recently, a lot of episodes all around the globe
denounce the obsolescence of the old conventional war.
The western globalist establishment controls its dominion
by cheap and un-exhausting means through advanced
technology that allows sparser military actions and,
especially, unclear and imperceptible ones, creating the
illusion of sovereignty in the Nation States and avoiding the
possibility of incisive responses.
In most cases, these actions assume, at least firstly, the
obscure form of political conspiracy, moving the points to
the construction of radical changes – in favor of the
globalist oligarchy – that are identified as such just at
points of irreversible situation.
The examples are multiple, especially the so-called
Arabic Spring, the Euromaidan in Ukraine, the political
situations of Venezuela and Bolivia and, finally, the most
important case for our work: the unborn crisis in Hong
Kong.
Hong Kong protests started in March 2019 as a
supposed popular reaction to the new Extradition Bill. The
main fear of the so-called “democratic” organization
involved with the protests was the possibility of easier
extradition of fugitives to China, which could be interpreted
as a violation against Hong Kong’s “autonomy”.
The great question to be analyzed, though, is that the
respective bill was suspended in June, being the
government available to conciliate the popular claims and
really interested in social pacification and harmonization.
But the protests did not stop, and, actually, became
more violent and ambitious in its claims, converting into an
indistinct anti-government and anti-Chinese reaction,
requiring “democratic” reforms and causing a true social
unfruitful destabilization in favor of western strange
interests.
To separate Hong Kong from China is a strategic
objective of the West in the currently geopolitical scene.
The reasons are known and simple: China is a key-point for
the construction of a multipolar world – the greatest fear of
the American-western liberal hegemony.
The inconvenient truth behind protests’ flag “to
liberate” Hong Kong is to take Hong Kong from China in
favor of building a “zombie-State”, weak and incapable of
maintaining sovereignty in the context of a world
characterized by western interventionism and absence of
self-determination.
IJISRT19NOV270 www.ijisrt.com
International Journal of Innovative Science and Research Technology
ISSN No:-2456-2165
It is not an ideological flag to reminder that Hong
Kong belongs to China and that China is a democracy – not
a western model of, though -, and, in such sense, every
movement raised to implement the liberal way of
democracy is a subversive one and attends to the interests
of the global hegemonic establishment.
It is a practical simple and meaningful example of the
thesis proposed here: China is being attacked by
international adversaries through postmodern war means. If
there is a process of uberization of war, as suggested here,
it is evident in Hong Kong, when meaningless flags are
raised by liberal-democratic pro-West groups interested in
defeating Chinese sovereignty over Hong Kong in favor of
strange agents.
VII. CONCLUSIONS
Capitalism is not productive anymore. Money is not
real. Coercion of workers is not physical. Work itself is
virtual and almost unreal. In the age of electronic money, e-
commerce, drones, financial capitalism and Uberization of
work, the whole of society has changed and became the
postmodern current organization.
The changings are also clear in war, defense and
geopolitics. There is no reason to mobilize thousands of
soldiers and materials when it is easier and more lucrative
to occultly finance, support and manage local protests,
militias, financial blockages and terrorist attacks.
In long-term, this postmodern war kills more and
causes more damages than the old model of total war, and
does it invisibly. We have reached the event that Carl
Schmitt (2005) called the Weltburgerkrieg 29 , the Global
Civil War, in a system in which the western potencies
provoke and manage a world war against every country or
organization that raises any type of opposition to the liberal
western hegemony.
The West did not physically invade Ukraine, Syria,
Venezuela, instead has managed Euromaidan, Arab Spring
and the Venezuelan opposition.
China, being a non-liberal and non-western world
potency, represents a risk to the American global hegemony.
China is the living proof that it is possible to raise a just and
developed political-economic system alternative to
liberalism and western model of democracy. For this reason,
West is managing a virtual war against China and the Hong
Kong violent protests are an evidence of that.
To recognize this new reality of the international
system is an important step for China and for all developing
non-western countries. It means that China and countries
passing the same situation can act incisively against these
forms of mobilization, respecting the norms of International
Humanitarian Law.
29
Op. cit. SCHMITT, 2005.
632
Volume 4, Issue 11, November – 2019 International Journal of Innovative Science and Research Technology
ISSN No:-2456-2165
As conclusion of this work, we contemplate a process [15]. __________ The Concept of the Political.
that we can call an “uberization of war”, or virtualization of Expanded Edition (1932), trans. by G. Schwab,
the armed conflicts and the military occupation. This term Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
cannot be confused with other similar, as Hybrid or [16]. STANDING, Guy. The Precariat and Class Struggle,
Asymmetric Warfare. The uberization of war is currently RCCS Annual Review [Online], 7 | 2015, Online since
practice of virtualized warfare, military control and 01 October 2015, connection on 30 April 2019. URL :
domination of the world through technological means. And http://journals.openedition.org/rccsar/585 ; DOI :
the Hong Kong protests, requiring western interests in 10.4000/rccsar.585.FONTES, Virgínia. Capitalismo
China, are one of the greatest evidence of this type of war. em tempos de UBERização: do emprego ao trabalho.
Marx e o Marxismo - Revista do NIEP-Marx, [S.l.], v.
This research has only just begun. The thesis proposed 5, n. 8, p. p. 45-67, jul. 2017. ISSN 2318-9657.
here is innovative and without correspondences or [17]. STONE, Katherine V.W Flexibilization,
precedents in international academy. This article was an Globalization, and Privatization: Three Challenges to
initial step in the investigation of uberization of war. Labor Rights in Our Time. Osgoode Hall Law Journal.
Vol 44. N.1. 2006.
REFERENCES [18]. ___________., From Widgets to Digits: Employment
Regulation for the Changing Workplace. New York:
[1]. ANTUNES, Ricardo. "Trabalho e Estranhamento". In: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Adeus ao Trabalho? Ensaio sobre as Metamorfoses e [19]. United Nations Charter, 1945. In:
a Centralidade do Mundo do Trabalho. São Paulo: https://treaties.un.org/doc/publication/ctc/uncharter.pd
Cortez, (4ª ed.), 1997. f.
[2]. DE BENOIST, Alain. Beyond Human Rights. [20]. VON CLAUSEWITZ, Carl. On War. Oxford: Oxford
Defending Freedoms. Arktos. 1 ed. 2011. University Press, 2007.
[3]. DE OLIVEIRA, Ana Maria Soares. Relação Homem-
Natureza no modo de produção capitalista. REVISTA
ELECTRÓNICA DE GEOGRAFÍA Y CIENCIAS
SOCIALES
Universidad de Barcelona. ISSN: 1138-9788.
Depósito Legal: B. 21.741-98
Vol. VI, núm. 119 (18), 1 de agosto de 2002.
[4]. DUGIN, Alexandr. A Quarta Teoria Política. Editora
Austral: Curitiba-PR, 2012.
[5]. FAYSHAL, Wan. The Rise of the Precariat. In:
https://www.geopolitica.ru/en/article/rise-precariat.
[6]. FLEMING, P. (2017). The Human Capital Hoax:
Work, Debt and Insecurity in the Era of Uberization.
Organization Studies, 38(5), 691–709.
[7]. FOUCALT, Michel. Vigiar e punir - Nascimento da
prisão. 24. Ed.. Petrópolis: Vozes, 2001.
[8]. Guerra, S., & Almeida, L. (2019). GUERRA TOTAL
E A ORDEM JURIDICA
INTERNACIONAL. Revista Direito Em
Debate, 28(51), 153-164.
https://doi.org/10.21527/2176-6622.2019.51.153-164.
[9]. HEGEL, G. W. F.. Filosofia do Direito. Lisboa,
Guimarães Editora, 1992.
[10]. HUFFINGTON POST (Arnaud Touati & Harry
Allouche). Uber: le parfait esclavagiste modern? In:
<http://www.huffingtonpost.fr/arnaud-touati/greve- -
uber-economie_a_21650772/>, 10/01/2017.
[11]. JUNGER, Ernst. A mobilização total. Nat. hum., São
Paulo, v. 4, n. 1, jun. 2002.
[12]. MARX, K. O Capital. V.L., Rio de Janeiro, DIFEL,
1982.
[13]. SCHMITT, Carl. El Nomos de la Tierra en el
Derecho de Gentes del “Jus Publicum Europaeum”.
Struhart &amp;amp;Cia. Buenos Aires. 2005.
[14]. ____________Land und Meer. Eine
weltgeschichtliche Betrachtung. 4ª ed. Stuttgart: Klett-
Cotta, 2001.

IJISRT19NOV270 www.ijisrt.com 633