Ten children amputated without anesthesia in Gaza, how China surpassed Kosovo with cars, and how we are financing the death of capitalism on Facebook
By Veton Surroi
1.
We have entered the final months of the first quarter of the century.
Here is a quote that captures what it looks like:
“Regarding the attacks along evacuation routes and within designated safe zones, the Commission found that Israeli security forces had clear knowledge of the presence of Palestinian civilians, including children. Nevertheless, Israeli security forces fired and killed civilians, including children carrying improvised white flags. Some children, including very young ones, were shot in the head by snipers.”
This quotation comes from the Report of the Independent UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, chaired by Navi Pillay — a jurist and a renowned champion of human rights. The report, which concludes that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, includes these lines as well:
“… from 7 October 2023 to 31 July 2025, of the 60,199 Palestinians killed, 18,430 were children, and tens of thousands more were injured, both physically and psychologically.”
And:
“In June 2024, UNRWA’s Commissioner-General reported that, on average, since 7 October 2023, ten children per day have lost one or both legs — and that their amputations were mostly performed without anesthesia due to Israel’s prevention of medical supplies from entering Gaza.”
2.
But this quarter of a century also has other quotations. Here’s one from Dan Wang in his book Breakdown: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future:
“The 4.4 billion tons of cement produced by China between 2018 and 2019 nearly equals the total amount produced by the United States throughout the entire 20th century.”
Or a note closer to Kosovo: in 1990, China had half a million cars — about as many as Kosovo has registered today. In 2024, China had 435 million cars, many of them electric, and many produced domestically.
Or another comparison that again illustrates the dynamics of two superpowers, also from Wang’s book:
In 2008, China decided to build the high-speed rail line between Beijing and Shanghai, at the same time California (which, if independent, would be the world’s fourth-largest economy by GDP) decided to build one between San Francisco and Los Angeles — both roughly 1,300 kilometers long.
China completed its line in three years at a cost of $36 billion. California’s is nowhere near completion, and the estimated cost has now risen to $128 billion. It is expected to be finished somewhere between 2030 and 2033 — within the same three-year window in which the Chinese finished theirs.
Dan Wang has a theory that sounds charming in its simplicity: China is a state of engineers, indeed almost the entire Politburo is composed of them, and engineers do what they do best — they build and produce. Meanwhile, the United States is a state of lawyers: “There are four hundred for every one hundred thousand inhabitants,” and, according to Wang, lawyers are there to do what they do best — to delay processes until everything is fully compliant with the law.
This simplification may be anecdotal, but the notes of economic development and the model itself call for deeper analysis — along with the question that runs throughout Wang’s book: Why is this model of development — the one the Chinese call socialism with Chinese characteristics, but which is in fact an extremely efficient form of state capitalism — so effective, and why is the American one so inefficient in comparison?
3.
An answer to this question comes, in his own way, from Yanis Varoufakis, former Greek Minister of Finance, self-declared contemporary Marxist, and undoubtedly one of Europe’s most imaginative public intellectuals, in his book Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism.
Simplifying his argument (which is both persuasive and inspiring): the capital of the 21st century is us — the users of the Internet, particularly of social networks. By granting permission to the major tech companies that provide us online services to collect our data, we have given them the fundamental capital they use to drive demand in a market that is already personally tailored to each of us.
We, the users of Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and others, are collectively transitioning from open market capitalism to feudal markets — hidden within the advertisements and offers of social media platforms and companies like Amazon.
And these owners of capital — Zuckerberg, Musk, and others — are the same people who will seek to protect the wealth built from our data through a political system that will aim to suppress political competition just as it suppresses economic competition.
4.
Throughout this quarter-century, there is a long list of books that have tried to describe it — a substantial number of books, postulates, premises, starting points, theories, and speculations — most of which carried the prefix post-.
We entered post-modernism, or the post-collapse of the Berlin Wall, or post–Pax Americana, or post-liberalism…
In other words, we entered a century that we still cannot quite describe — not only in terms of the present, but even in terms of what we have left behind.
Until the book or theory emerges that can fully explain what this quarter of a century represents (and that is unlikely to happen with a single book), perhaps we must rely on the books of centuries past.
Today, on October 7, as I write this, it has been two years since Hamas’s attack on Israeli civilians — an orgy of killing whose victims were every child, woman, and man who crossed their path — over a thousand people. What followed was a campaign of collective punishment by Israel that turned into genocide. On each day of these two years, an average of one Palestinian child has been killed.
In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky poses a question to Ivan Karamazov:
“You yourself were the first to teach me that there is no God and no immortality of the soul. Therefore, everything is permitted — man may do whatever he wishes.”
Throughout the 20th and now the 21st century, this exchange between characters has become a popular maxim, attributed to Ivan Karamazov himself: “If there is no God, everything is permitted.”
In other words — if there are no moral norms, no accepted order of values — then everything becomes permissible. And infants shot in the head by snipers are proof of that absence of God — or of the permission for everything.
Returning a little more than a quarter-century backward, Antonio Gramsci, in his Prison Notebooks (1930), wrote:
“The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born: in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
Today, both Dan Wang and Yanis Varoufakis, each from their own perspective, would agree.
In popular media discourse, Gramsci’s quote was rephrased as:
“The old world is dying, and the new one is struggling to be born — now is the time of monsters.”
In our collective fear — of an old world that has died — perhaps even this paraphrase has earned the right to citizenship.