Transnational Capitalism: Organized Crime Fueling Global Destruction for Profit
CAPITALISM, 1 Sep 2025
Koenraad Priels - TRANSCEND Media Service
29 Aug 2025 – In the pursuit of sustainable development and true world peace, social ecological economics and peace studies cannot rely on conventional frameworks alone. They require the incisive lens of critical criminology to illuminate the structural roots of violence and injustice that mainstream approaches too often overlook or obscure. Understanding rentier capitalism and militarism as organized crime is the key paradigmatic shift needed to take the blinders off—the blinders imposed by a vast interconnected propaganda machinery embedded in mainstream media and academia. This machinery keeps the majority of people in the dark, complicit in a systemic violence whose origins trace back to humanity’s most archaic and brutal forms—the bronze age legacies of domination, exploitation, and war.
Without this critical insight, efforts toward peace and ecological sustainability risk being superficial or coopted by the very powers driving conflict and ecological destruction. Rentier capitalism, with its parasitic extraction of wealth through control, monopoly, and militarization, alongside the normalization of global militarism, is not merely an unfortunate backdrop but the engine of ongoing crises. Peace and ecological wellbeing are actively undermined by these interlocking systems of control and violence, sustained by legal, financial, and epistemic architectures designed to protect elite interests.
Humanity stands at an existential crossroads: it must learn these vital lessons or face an increasingly dystopian future marked by war, environmental collapse, and social fragmentation. Critical criminology offers not only a framework for understanding the crimes of the powerful but a foundation for justice-based social and environmental transformation. Embedding this understanding into the core of socio-economic sciences and peace studies is an indispensable step toward dismantling the transnational criminal cartel fueling war and destruction, and toward creating a sustainable future centered on peace, equity, and ecological stewardship.
Transnational capitalism is not merely an economic system but a vast, transnational criminal cartel that fuels wars and undermines peace to sustain its profits and power. From the vantage point of critical criminology, this network of global elites, corporations, financial institutions, and even knowledge producers operates beyond legal and moral boundaries, committing social harms on a mass scale while evading accountability. The war in Ukraine starkly exemplifies this dynamic, where the machinery of violence is entrenched, and peace is sacrificed at the altar of capital accumulation and geopolitical control.
Critical criminology teaches us that crime cannot be understood simply as individual wrongdoing or “street crime” but must be seen in relation to power, privilege, and systemic inequality. The crimes of the powerful—the structural violence, environmental destruction, and mass suffering engineered by elite interests—cripple the human rights of millions. Transnational capitalism, in its relentless pursuit of profit, orchestrates wars, manipulates markets, and deploys sanctions that devastate ordinary lives while enriching a global cartel of war profiteers. This criminal network uses state power, legal frameworks, and ideological apparatuses to shield itself, normalizing repression and violence as business as usual.
The Ukraine war reveals this reality in striking detail. Oligarchs, multinational arms manufacturers, energy conglomerates, and finance capitalists have all reaped immense gains from the prolongation of conflict. Each weapons shipment, each disrupted supply chain, each punitive sanction is a transaction that fuels a cycle of suffering and destruction. While Ukrainian communities face displacement, trauma, and ecological ruin, transnational capitalists absorb billions in profits, shielded by governments complicit in this system of legalized crime.
Yet peace is both an ethical imperative and a practical necessity for social and ecological wellbeing. Peace enables investments in human rights, community health, education, and environmental restoration—foundations for a just and sustainable future. But for the transnational capitalist cartel, peace is a threat to profitability and power. Stability interrupts their flow of wealth, and international law challenges their impunity. Thus, peace is actively undermined through militarization, geopolitical manipulation, and economic coercion.
Viewed through a human rights lens, the transnational capitalist system is not an abstract market but a criminal enterprise that perpetuates injustice on a global scale. Its victims are the vulnerable populations whose rights are trampled—displaced refugees, impoverished communities, and degraded ecosystems. Its operators wield immense influence over governments, lawmaking, global institutions, and intellectual production, ensuring that their crimes remain unpunished and hidden behind the veneer of legality.
Integral to this global criminal enterprise is the role played by key international institutions, particularly the United Nations, which paradoxically both symbolize and sustain peace while tacitly enabling rentier capitalism and militarism. The UN was established as a beacon of hope for collective security and human rights. However, its structures increasingly reflect the paradigmatic flaws of the system they were tasked to mitigate. The revolving doors between political elites, corporate lobbyists, and the security-industrial complex have transformed the UN into a platform that, rather than genuinely dismantling militarized profit networks, actively facilitates their persistence.
Rentier capitalism—the economic condition in which wealth accrues primarily through ownership and control of scarce resources rather than production or innovation—finds expression within UN mechanisms and its wider ecosystem. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) highlights how the proliferation of market concentration and rent-seeking behavior is global and endemic. The UN’s peacebuilding budgets and interventions often channel vast financial flows into fragile or war-torn states that become rentier economies dependent on external funding and subject to manipulation and kleptocracy. Instead of nurturing sustainable development, these mechanisms entrench cycles of war capitalism, tying the fates of vulnerable populations to the interests of transnational elites.
Moreover, the institutional culture of the UN Security Council exposes profound contradictions. With five permanent members holding veto power—states heavily invested in arms manufacturing and geopolitical control—many war-fueling acts are shielded from sanction or censure. This selective enforcement undermines international law, enabling a dual standard in the defense of peace and justice. The same bodies that ostensibly safeguard global security also protect the interests of militarized capital and state actors profiting from instability.
Further complicating this picture is the close entanglement of the UN with multinational corporations linked to defense and extractive industries. Systemic corruption and regulatory capture exacerbate this problem, as influential corporations engage in lobbying and rent extraction that cripple democratic governance and prioritize profit accumulation over social welfare.
The banking and financial institutions that operate within and alongside the UN framework also expose paradigmatic flaws emblematic of this system. Instead of serving public welfare, the global financial architecture is dominated by rentier interests extracting wealth through debt, financial speculation, and complex capital flight networks. This financial cartel facilitates tax evasion, illicit transfers, and inequality, deepening the corrosion of state sovereignty and accountability. Though the UN proclaims commitments to anti-corruption and financial inclusion, these remain largely rhetorical in the face of powerful elite influence preserving rentier capitalism’s core.
Yet the capture of global institutions and economic power by transnational capital does not end with governments and corporations. Academia, the supposed bastion of critical thought and truth, has become deeply complicit. Many scholars and intellectuals have been reduced to epistemic prostitutes of Mammon, producing knowledge and discourse that serve to naturalize and legitimize the capitalist system and its wars. Academic research is increasingly funded and shaped by corporate interests, military contracts, and neoliberal funding regimes, which constrain critical inquiry and promote technocratic narratives that obscure the criminal nature of transnational capitalism.
This commodification of knowledge undermines the potential for academia to challenge systems of oppression and exploitation. Instead, universities and think tanks often reproduce elite ideologies, sanitizing war profiteering and militarism and minimizing the voices of marginalized peoples most affected by violence and economic injustice. The intellectual hegemony maintained by this academic cartel fortifies the transnational criminal network by shaping public opinion, policy, and even international law to serve capitalist accumulation over human rights and peace.
In sum, the system driving the Ukraine war—and many other conflicts—is a transnational criminal cartel whose vested interests in war, militarism, and economic instability are deeply embedded not only within private capital and global governance institutions but also within academia’s epistemic structures. The urgent task is to expose this cartel’s operations, hold its members accountable, and radically transform our political, economic, and knowledge institutions. Only through reclaiming democratic control, strengthening transparency, and centering human rights and ecological stewardship as foundational values can humanity break free from this cycle of systemic organized crime and build a truly just and peaceful future.
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Koenraad Priels is an independent researcher. He has published six peer-reviewed articles in the Journal of Critical Realism in Socio-Economics, authored a report to ‘The Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth’, recognised by the UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty, and initiated the first legal case against Rentier Capitalism at the European Court for Human Rights. He is currently applying for a PhD by publication at KULeuven, focusing on the fundamental links between financial architecture and systemic violence, ecocide and genocide.
Tags: Billionaires, Capitalism, Ecocide, Environment, Exploitation, International Law, International Trade, Mafia, Military Capitalism, Multinational corporations, Nature, Organized crime, Profits, Space Weapons, Transnational Corporations, Trillionaires
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 1 Sep 2025.
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