Rising dangers of imperial+sub-imperial partnering
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Untenable G7/BRICS+/G20 assimilations within rapacious global capitalism
Patrick Bond (First published by the Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt) 19 October 2024
Following the Johannesburg BRICS summit in August 2023, the new ‘BRICS+’ – whose leadership will be
hosted by Vladimir
Putin in Kazan from October 22-24 – now consist of not only
Brazil, Russia,
India, China and South Africa, but also Egypt, Ethiopia,
Iran and the United
Arab Emirates – with Saudi Arabia potentially joining before
2024 ends, in the
event Donald Trump is not elected
U.S. President on November 5.
And on November 18-19 in Rio de
Janeiro, Inácio Lula
da Silva
will welcome leaders of the Group of 20 major economies.
These regimes comprise
the Western G7 (making up a pro-Israeli ‘Axis of Genocide’
to be reinforced as
its military leaders meet in Naples on October 19), and
after the 2008
financial crisis required more financial collaborations to
bail out Western
banks and governments, new partners from the original five
BRICS plus Argentina,
Australia, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Türkiye, the
European
Union, and, following the Delhi-hosted G20 in 2023, also the
African Union.
In 2025, South African president Cyril
Ramaphosa will host the G20, while Lula will welcome both
the BRICS+ gathering
and the 30th United Nations Climate Summit. In
spite of Western
posturing about pariah states Russia and Iran, and
notwithstanding massive
economic and geopolitical tensions with China, Western
leaders generally
appreciate the potential to assimilate the BRICS+ into a
so-called ‘rules-based
international order’ – i.e., imperialist+sub-imperialist
partnerships – so as
to address some of the most extreme centrifugal tendencies
facing world order.
It is vital to recognize the rising
dangers
associated with these deals, which at least since 2009 have
reinforced status quo
finance, climate-management
and political relations and in many cases amplified the
worst aspects of
predatory global capitalism.
The
logic of durable imperial territorial expansion
The partnership “between a rider and a
horse”
was the way white-supremacist Rhodesian leader Godfrey
Huggins described the
neo-colonial arrangements he foresaw in managing racist rule
(from 1933-53), in
what later became Zimbabwe (cited in Arnold 2005, 383). A
similar partnership
exists between the wealthiest Western economies and ‘middle
powers’ (or
‘emerging economies,’ depending upon who spouts the jargon),
in spite of a
widespread claim that from below, a new mood of
‘multipolarity’ is currently in
the process of replacing Washington-dominated, imperialist
unipolarity.
Like Huggins’ effort to forestall
black
majority rule, the divide-and-conquer partnership strategy
is likely to prevail
for many years, in spite of extreme geopolitical tensions,
the fast-worsening
climate and biodiversity catastrophes, more pandemic
threats, vicious
inequality which appears to be fueling the far right’s rise,
and a combination
of financial volatility and systemic overproduction that
cannot be cured.
In this context, the G7 economic core
powers need
to forge partnerships with the leading layer of emerging
powers, and in venues
such as the G20, Western elites do appear to be succeeding.
But this process
unfolds to the detriment of all but the upper layers of G20
societies, at the
risk of planetary destruction, given how successfully the
ruling-class partnerships
have prevented the genuine resolution of global-scale
crises.
The scope for imperialist assimilation
during
periods of economic and geopolitical stress is enormous but
still embodies
extreme contradictions, dating to the competitive
internecine battles between a
few great European powers in the late 19th
century. Their internal
capitalist-crisis tendencies spurred an unprecedented
geographical expansion
into colonial territories. The process was facilitated by
major financial
markets, which in turn ran into various limits, as Rosa Luxemburg
(1913) was first to explain in The
Accumulation of Capital, thus requiring empire
building. World War I was
about to break out, because of inter-imperial rivalries that
could not be
displaced.
Still, as early forms of imperialism
unfolded
and unraveled, Luxemburg documented better than anyone of
her era, the articulation
of capitalist and non-capitalist relations – as the core
characteristic of
imperial exploitation – that had emerged to the enormous
benefit of the former.
Colonial military power was typically deployed to conquer
territory and
establish formal state management and later, informal
neo-colonial
political-economic power relations. The policing, legal and
monetary systems
that capitalism required were established by the colonial
regimes to subjugate
peoples and to extract resources, dating to the 16th
century in the
British, French, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Belgian
and Italian
spheres of influence, especially when codified in the
1884-85 Berlin conference
that carved up Africa.
In our current age, that imperialist
formula
– capitalist crisis formation in the core, its geographical
displacement,
facilitative financial institutions, and neo-colonial
grabbing of resources and
territory – remains highly relevant, albeit with a much
stronger middle layer
than has heretofore existed. But the main additional element
that became more
vital after World War II and that has been utterly
impossible to avoid since
the 1990s, was the economic, socio-cultural, geopolitical
and military
dominance of the United States.
Such dominance has increasingly been
exercised through Western-headquartered multilateral
institutions whose operations favour the interests of the
largest multinational
corporations and especially financiers. The obvious
policing operation for
these firms has been by the Pentagon, State Department and
the U.S. security
establishment, especially in the form of coups against
governments hostile to
capital, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO). More than 800 U.S.
military bases abroad, and nearly $1 trillion in annual
military spending,
ensure exceptional power (albeit with vulnerabilities such
as were witnessed in
Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and the current Red Sea
maritime route) (Tricontinental
Institute 2024).
Imperialism through neoliberal
multilateralism
When it comes to supporting capital
accumulation processes,
the main imperialist multilaterals include the
World Bank
and International Monetary Fund (IMF), founded in 1944. The
World Trade Organization
(WTO) evolved from what was originally the 1948 General
Agreement on Tariffs
and Trade. The ‘Bretton Woods’ financial institutions and
WTO dramatically
expanded their scope during the 1980s-90s, in the wake of
commercial bank
internationalization and the 1979 ‘Volcker Shock’ – the U.S.
Federal Reserve’s
interest rate increase imposed by Chairman Paul Volcker –
that led to the Third
World Debt Crisis.
Another
facilitative financial institution is the Bank for
International Settlements, a
Swiss-based league of central banks dominated by the U.S.,
UK, European and
Japanese. Increasingly punitive financial regulatory systems
emerged especially
after the Western attack on Muslim banks following Al
Qaeda’s September 2001
attack on New York and Washington, amplified by subsequent
economic sanctions
against Iran and Russia (the latter backfiring when calls
for ‘de-dollarization’
became more earnest). And the Paris-based Financial Action
Task Force (2023)
imposes ‘grey’ and ‘black’ listing of various regimes that
did not cooperate
with Interpol on money laundering, drug trafficking and
terrorism (Gaviyau and Sibindi 2023).
The United States had become the
global
capitalist hegemon after World War II’s destruction of
rivals, strengthening
its power after the Cold War ended and, by the early 2000s,
fusing its military
capacity and corporate interests (often expressed through
neo-liberal policies
imposed by the Bretton Woods Institutions) with a
pro-democracy (ostensibly liberal)
rhetoric. The democracy posturing was regularly unveiled as
enormously
hypocritical, no more so than after Israel’s attacks on Gaza
and indeed all
Palestinians – with Western ‘Axis of Genocide’ support – got
fully underway
after October 2023.
But the 2007-09 global financial
crisis had required
major revisions, especially in terms of assimilating the
political leaders of
G20 emerging economies, at a time when relegitimation and a
financial backstop
were both needed. Whereas in 2008 this was a difficult task
for the
neo-conservative George Bush regime, conveniently he was
replaced in early 2009
by an internationalist more capable of fusing
neo-conservative and neo-liberal
ideology: Barack Obama (Bond 2009, Harvey 2010).
As
a result, the 2010s witnessed new forms of imperial rule,
increasingly
requiring partnerships with a new set of horses that often
do the hardest work,
until the point in 2017 when the ‘paleo-conservative’ (i.e.
dinosaur-type)
Donald Trump replaced Obama. To illustrate with the most
difficult, durable
multilateral problem – ecocide – an imperial/sub-imperial
partnership was
initiated by Obama’s team at the United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate
Change (UNFCCC) from 2009-16 (Bond 2012).
That
body generally served the world’s main corporate fossil fuel
and industrial
interests by delaying imposition of greenhouse gas emissions
cuts, by promoting
market-related strategies (e.g., emissions trading and
offsets) and by relying
upon the promise of technical advances to reduce and
sequester CO2 (innovations
which in turn are typically protected behind WTO
Intellectual Property
regulations, as was the case with what should have been the
most needed public
goods of 2020-23: Covid-19 vaccines and treatments)
(Papamichail 2023).
Imperial partnership with major
sub-imperial
polluters has been vital to maintain this posture, against
demands by poor and
vulnerable countries for both emissions cuts and Loss &
Damage reparations
payments. The partnership process began in 2009 in earnest
at the Copenhagen
UNFCCC summit when Obama barged into a Bella Convention
Centre meeting room to
propose a deal with leaders of the Brazil-South
Africa-India-China ‘BASIC’
group. In his
presidential memoire, Obama (2020,
516) remarked of
this meeting,
After commandeering the
BASIC
leaders’ meeting and threatening to call them out publicly
for non-cooperation,
Obama (2020, 517) recounted how tough talk impressed one of
his aides:
Along with Russia, the BASIC group then took the
name
BRICS as a site for a loose alliance formation based upon
annual conferences
once South Africa was admitted in 2010, and from mid-2023
expanded when five
new countries were invited to join the network: Saudi Arabia
(to be confirmed),
Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Ethiopia. The
group of ten produces
less than 30% of global output but 51% of greenhouse gas
emissions, and hence
is not a force for ending the climate crisis.
What we may describe as an imperial/sub-imperial
fusion
of interests is that both the West and the expanded BRICS
consistently fail to
agree on cuts in greenhouse gas emissions to sustainable
levels – or to phase
out fossil fuels – and they reject a logical principle in
multilateral (and
national) environmental management: polluter-pays
reparations. Instead,
imperialist climate policy-makers prefer gimmicks like
carbon markets that, in
effect, privatize the air, and techno fix mythmaking.
A large network of status
quo NGOs and philanthrocapitalists have become vital
enablers and
legitimators of the West’s so-called
‘ecological-modernization’ approach to
climate policy (favouring markets and technical solutions),
as is also the case
in nearly every other (silo-delimited) sectoral arena of
global public policy (Jäger and Dziwok 2024; Böhm and
Sullivan 2021).
Additional informal networks of
imperial
power – sometimes described as a transnational capitalist
class (Robinson 2003)
– can be found at the Davos-based World Economic Forum,
which has taken on the
mantle of a futuristic brain trust, one formerly adorning
the Bilderberg Group
and U.S. Council on Foreign Relations (Van der Pijl 2012).
Likewise, working to shape public consciousness, the
corporate media and
numerous think tanks with specialist influences are
responsible for ideological
and strategic aspects of imperialist regime maintenance, now
located in capital
cities across the world.
But states remain vital, and military,
geopolitical and economic-managerial collaborations between
powerful capital
cities remain the crucial factor behind imperialism’s
durability. Since the
1970s, the G7 bloc has often coordinated Western state
power, depending upon
the conjuncture. Imperialism’s main
military interests
are coordinated by the U.S. Pentagon-centred North
Atlantic Treaty Organization
revived in recent years, along with Anglophone ‘Five Eyes’
(adding the UK,
Canada, Australia and New Zealand) security and
intelligence collaboration. A
Quadrilateral Security Dialogue fuses Japanese, India,
Australian and U.S.
forces in Asia, mainly against China’s expansion
(Tricontinental 2024).
Sometimes
the imperial powers use the UN Security Council for
broad-based control, albeit
recognizing divisive contradictions associated with
geopolitical and military
antagonisms, and seeking more legitimacy in a half-baked
expansion proposed by
the U.S. in 2024 in which three states – two from Africa,
likely South Africa
and Nigeria, and one from the Caribbean – would be given
non-veto-voting
permanent seats. In September 2024, this caused a major
temporary rupture
within a crucial BRICS+ foreign ministry gathering when
Egypt and Ethiopia
objected (Patrick and Razdan 2024). Occasionally the UN
General Assembly may vote
on the ‘rules-based order’ but the results are not taken
seriously, nor are the
UN’s International Court of Justice and International
Criminal Court when it
comes to prosecuting Israeli genocide.
Militarily, disputes arise within the
Western
imperialist network, such as whether to support the
early-2000s invasions of Afghanistan
and Iraq. But these were subdued as U.S. neo-conservative
leadership
consolidated through both the Bush and Obama administrations
with firm British
backing, and returned with Biden following the erratic
Trump’s 2017-2020 rule (Chomsky and
Prashad 2022).
Aside
from two exceptions at the UN – a 1987 ban on chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and a 2002
medicines fund – and the coordinated 2008-11 and 2020-21 G20
financial bailouts
that mainly benefited vulnerable bankers, neoliberal
policies have been sustained throughout. Important
exceptions prove that this
approach is not inevitable at the national scale, such as
the Covid-19 pandemic
which caused economic lockdowns in 2020-21, at which point
many states engaged
in mild Keynesian income distribution and some industrial
policy intervention.
China remains the leading national
state
capable of major non-market and often anti-market
interventions, such as
banning cryptocurrencies, imposing tough exchange controls,
tightly regulating
Big Data and investing in public goods (especially
environmental
rehabilitation). But this occurs within context: the
sustained
over-accumulation of Chinese productive capital, leading to
a ‘going out’ by
many industrial firms mainly along an uneven Belt & Road
Initiative, also reflecting
extractivist expansion (Bond 2021).
Most of this imperial power requires
comprador elite alliances with victim-country neoliberal
leaders in business
and most governments. Indeed, since the world financial
meltdown of the late
2000s and again during the Covid pandemic, there has been a
vital new feature
of imperial assimilation, especially associated with the
BRICS bloc’s rise to
the global stage. These middle-sized economies are playing
greater roles not
only in the multilateral institutions, but in the G20 group.
The utilization of regional
middle-power
allies to complement the U.S. military agenda is not new,
with Brazil, Turkey
and especially Israel deserving long-standing titles of
‘sub-imperialist.’ It
was with this term that Ruy Mauro Marini
(1973) began
to label Washington-Brasilia relations in the 1960s-70s,
later to be broadly
characterized within the category ‘semi-periphery’ by
Immanuel Wallerstein’s (1974) world-systems
school.
The merits of sub-imperialism to U.S.
power
were articulated by independent
presidential candidate Robert F.
Kennedy, Jr. (2023),
who otherwise was a strong critic of abusive military
spending. But in an
interview in November 2023, RFK Jr pledged that if elected
in late 2024, he
would:
That is a terribly crude, albeit
honest,
version of Washington’s desired sub-imperial allies. A more
general reflection
is in capitalism’s multilateral management, such as when
economic stress rose
in 2008-11 and 2020-22 and both imperial and sub-imperial
regimes used the G20
and IMF to coordinate monetary expansion, bank bailouts and
rapidly-lowered
interest rates, creating what Michael
Roberts (2021)
termed a ‘sugar rush economy.’ The Fed’s tightening of
interest rates from
early 2022 led directly to a round of debt crises across the
poorer countries.
But although debt became a major
feature in
geopolitics (with Western ideologues claiming a Chinese
‘debt trap’ for African
countries based on only 12% of loans from Chinese sources)
and social revolts
(e.g. Kenya and Nigeria in mid-2024), the more serious
reflections of
partnership stresses occurred within what Marini (1973)
termed the
‘antagonistic cooperation’ between imperial and sub-imperial
forces. It is the
partnership between rider and horse over rough
political-economic terrain that
is continually tested and that, at least into 2024, appears
to be holding
notwithstanding multiple fissures.
By way of ideological introduction,
and to
assist with semantics, there are six competing ideologies in
play as I complete
this paper, ranging from paleo-conservative on the
far-right, to the fusion of
neo-conservative and neo-liberal ideologies that have
dominated since the West
since the 1980s, to the faded social-democratic and
over-hyped multipolar
aspirational, to the internationalist new left, with which
we can conclude.
Contradictions
within imperialism/sub-imperialism
Major shifts in capital accumulation
patterns
are reflected in quite dynamic imperialist/sub-imperialist
arrangements. Since
the 1970s, when capitalist crisis tendencies reemerged, East
Asia became an
attractive investment option for firms facing lower profit
rates in the West.
The globalization of trade, investment and finance
accelerated, spurred by the
advent of petrodollars (oil economy reserves) and
Eurodollars which centralized
money in core Western financial havens.
Then, the U.S./British-led neoliberal
financial deregulation from the early 1980s permitted an
explosive growth in
credit, financial product innovations and speculative
capital. Soaring interest
rates – imposed from Washington
in 1979 to address
U.S. inflation – attracted more of the West’s investable
funds into the financial
circuits of capital. And the European Union economy became a
more coherent,
less fragmented unit of capitalist power, with a single
currency by the early
1990s (Bond 2003).
Correspondingly, the multilateral
institutions’ control functions in relation to debtor
countries mainly served
the interests of multinational corporations and banks,
especially once the
1980s debt crisis transferred policy power to the World Bank
and IMF. This
financial component of imperialism is once again a profound
problem, in the
wake of many countries’ Covid-19 debt encumbrances (Hudson
2023).
In this context, various long-standing
geopolitical pressures and military tensions became more
acute during the
2010s, mostly evident as full-blown wars in Ukraine and the
Middle East at
present, but potentially also in conflict liable to break
out at any time in
Central Asia, the Himalayan Mountains, the South China Sea
and the Korean
peninsula.
These divisions can certainly escalate
quickly, submerging broader mutual interests and creating a
‘camp’ mentality:
the West versus a China/Russia-led so-called ‘multipolar’
alignment, which in
turn have profoundly affected anti-imperialist sensibilities
across the world.
There are increasingly fierce debates between those
favouring BRICS (Fernandes 2023)
and those more skeptical of whether
the bloc either represents an actual challenge to global
corporate power (Bond
2023).
The conflicts have extended to labor
migration, trade and finance, as witnessed by the rise of
xenophobia and
rightwing critiques of ‘globalism.’ These were crystallized
in
rightwing-populist victories in three 2016 elections –
Brexit, Trump and
Duterte (Philippines) – followed by others including Brazil,
Italy, Argentina
and the Netherlands, with France and Germany witnessing
strong far-right
upsurges in 2024.
Underlying the lack of faith in
liberal elite
politics is not only mismanagement of what they concede is a
so-called
‘polycrisis’ unfolding in diverse areas of multilateral
responsibility, but
also the decline of most globalization ratios (especially
trade/GDP) after 2008
resulting in a ‘deglobalization’ or what The
Economist (2019)
terms ‘slowbalization,’ or ‘stall-speed’ growth
according to the 2023 UN
Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) Trade and Development Report.
That latter document confesses
“unequal
benefits from trade integration” which since 2021 have begun
to generate “a new
political economy of trade governance” based on “building
resilient supply
chains, supporting a just energy transition, delivering
decent jobs, tackling
corruption and corporate tax avoidance, and developing a
secure digital
infrastructure” – all of which deprioritize “globalization
in general, trade
liberalization specifically” (UNCTAD
2023, pp.33-34).
In addition to these openly-admitted
flaws in
the system, the U.S.-China trade war starting in 2017 and
the 2022 Russian
invasion of Ukraine reflect further contradictions and
limits within capital’s
geographical expansion. The ebb and flow of
paleo-conservative ideology,
against the neo-conservative imperial agenda, will continue
to disorient
imperialist managers and institutions, as was witnessed
during the Trump regime
(and may be again if he wins the 2024 election).
Many such conflicts – born of internal
capitalist contradictions – are not really inter-imperial in
character, but
reflect a ‘rogue’ character within both sub-imperialism –
from which Vladimir
Putin crossed the line by invading Crimea in 2014 and the
rest of Ukraine in
2022 – and imperialism. As for the latter, recall how the
U.S. Treasury took
extreme measures against Russia’s global financial
integration, kicking Moscow
out of the main bank transaction system (SWIFT) and seizing
several hundred
billion dollars of its carelessly-scattered official and
oligarch assets, from
which interest receipts are being to boost Ukraine’s
treasury, as an initial
stage of war reparations, a form of theft in the war between
hostile brothers
that, frankly, is hard to condemn (Bond
2022).
It is difficult to contemplate
contemporary
imperialism without at least touching on all these dynamics
and mentioning the
institutions undergirding imperial power. Since the era of
Lenin’s imperialism,
the system has evolved into a far more complex network
responsible for managing
global capital’s commodification of everything under the
sun, in part by
displacing its crisis tendencies via more extreme uneven and
combined development.
In order to attack each of these processes, we need deeper
conceptual tools,
especially the idea of ‘sub-imperialism,’ although the term
is very alienating
for Third World nationalists. (The Tricontinental [2024]
analysis of
‘hyper-imperialism’ claims “Objectively,
there is no such thing as sub-imperialism...”)
In the process, that would allow us to
transcend a simplistic anti-imperialist rendition of ‘my
enemy’s enemy is my
friend,’ so often found in the so-called ‘campist’ logic
(Robinson 2023). After
all, Vladimir Putin (2022) himself
made clear on
the eve of the Ukraine invasion how stifling he considered
Lenin’s Bolshevik
legacy of
allowing
ethnic nationalities decentralized power, in this
mafioso-style threat: “You want
decommunization? Very well, this
suits us just fine. But why stop halfway? We
are ready to show what real decommunizations would mean
for Ukraine.”
But in spite of that, an
enemy’s-enemy-is-my-friend sentiment – backing Putin’s
invasion, and claiming
China is the world’s socialist vanguard (Tricontinental
2024) – is still part of the ‘new mood,’ as Vijay Prashad
(2023) terms this orientation to Global South
politics. And such sentiments
are regularly expressed by the leadership of the five
largest centre-left
forces here in South Africa: the Economic Freedom Fighters,
the ‘Radical
Economic Transformation’ faction of the ruling African
National Congress (and
its 2024 manifestation as the MK Party), the Communist
Party, and the two
largest wings of organized labor – the Congress of SA Trade
Unions and the
National Union of Metalworkers of SA. Hence formulations
used to address
imperial/sub-imperial power are increasingly important, for
example in
contesting both Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the
Israeli-U.S. genocidal
attacks, with a consistent line of analysis.
Systemic
political-economic processes underlying imperialism
Such consistency arises when seeing
imperialism
not through Lenin’s (1916) version of the term, but instead
via Luxemburg’s
(1913) recognition that due to the “ceaseless flow of
capital from one branch
of production to another, and finally in the periodic and
cyclical swings of
reproduction between overproduction and crisis... the
accumulation of capital
is a kind of metabolism between capitalist economy and those
pre-capitalist
methods of production without which it cannot go on and
which, in this light,
it corrodes and assimilates.”
The stress in Luxemburg’s analysis is
how
imperialism follows from capitalist power confronting
society, nature and early
states: “non-capitalist relations provide a fertile soil for
capitalism; more
strictly: capital feeds on the ruins of such relations, and
although this
non-capitalist milieu is indispensable for accumulation, the
latter proceeds at
the cost of this medium nevertheless, by eating it up.”
Lenin
(1913) considered
such arguments to be ‘rubbish’ and he wrote off Luxemburg’s
book as a ‘shocking
muddle.’ But the subsequent century proved that even during
a period of
relatively non-competitive Western imperialism dominated by
a sole military
superpower, more extreme forms of ‘accumulation by
dispossession’ – as David Harvey
(2003) has renamed such capitalist/non-capitalist
thievery – are often the recourse capitalism takes when
needing to temporarily
displace its contradictions.
Casualized labor, welfare-state
austerity,
privatization and the wider reach of the extractive
industries into what Marx
called the ‘free gifts of nature,’ are obvious
manifestations. The latter point
– environmental appropriation as an
accumulation-by-dispossession strategy – is
ever more crucial, given the extent of capitalism’s
destruction of nature not
only through pollution and especially greenhouse gas
emissions, but also within
exploitative global value chains from which poor countries
suffer uncompensated
extraction of non-renewable resources (Brand and Wissen
2018).
Samir
Amin (2010) described too many accounts of
imperialism
that ignore depletion of non-renewable resources in a
scathing manner in his Law of Worldwide Value:
It took a
wait lasting a century and a half until our
environmentalists rediscovered that
reality, now become blindingly clear. It is true
that historical
Marxisms had largely passed an eraser over the analyses
advanced by Marx on
this subject and taken the point of view of the bourgeoisie
– equated to an
atemporal ‘rational’ point of view – in regard to the
exploitation of natural
resources.”
Two other responses to crisis, crucial
ever
since the first circuits of capital emerged, are what Harvey
(1982) termed the ‘spatial fix,’ which is the
geographical shift of capital
to more profitable sites, and the ‘temporal fix,’ in which
the ability to
displace capital over time relies on ever more sophisticated
financial systems,
so as to pay later but consume now, to mop up the glutted
markets. The result
is a ‘new imperialism’ more dependent than ever upon
shifting, stalling and
stealing, in order to displace capital that over-accumulates
in exposed
economic spaces and sectors, rather than face full-fledged
devalorization of
the 1930s Great Depression type.
That means it is vital to comprehend
which
reforms either proposed or underway will allow that
displacement of
overaccumulated capital to continue, and hence facilitate
imperialism’s revitalization,
and which stand in the way. In his Strategy
for Labor, French sociologist Andre Gorz (1964) derided
minor adjustments that meet broad-based imperialism’s needs
as ‘reformist
reforms,’ and those that undermine the dominant
political-economic logic as
non-reformist reforms. That distinction requires serious
anti-imperialists to
transcend their current fetish with inter-state relations,
in part because of
the way BRICS+ – even Xi Jinping’s China – are assimilated within multilateralism.
Imperialist
assimilation
Enormous influence has emerged above
and
beyond the national state and is found within the core
multilateral imperialist
institutions just discussed. That is why the West has often
worried about an
increasingly arduous – but nonetheless vital – assimilation
of emerging
economies into the structures of world power.
The BRICS+ will be tested, issue by
issue,
especially in light of the way Israel’s genocide has divided
the bloc, into the
new members which are generally faithful U.S. sub-imperial
allies – Saudi Arabia
(on the verge of signing the Abraham Accords before the
October 7 Hamas attack
on Israel), the United Arab Emirates and Egypt (the latter
two had normalized
relations with Tel Aviv in 2021 and 1979 respectively), plus
Ethiopia (which
has historic religious ties to Israel and extensive circular
migration) – as
against durable Washington enemy Iran.
There were two critical voices against
the
Gaza massacres: South Africa and Brazil. Indeed by September
2024 when an
International Court of Justice ruling against Israeli
settler-colonialism came
before the UN General Assembly, nine out of ten BRICS+
governments – with the
exception of Ethiopia – voted in support of Palestinian
rights.
But on the other hand, China and India
still
in mid-2024 engaged in extensive trade (China above $20
billion annually), and
their leading firms share the privatization of Haifa port’s
main quays. India
supplies military material used to kill Palestinians. The
main supplier of coal
to Israel was, by mid-2024, South Africa, followed by Russia
(whose 1.3 million
citizens resident in Israel are among the most
anti-Palestinian). Even Brazil
supplies 9% of Israel’s oil and has regularly engaged in
military partnerships
with Tel Aviv-based Elbit Systems, as is South Africa’s main
private arms firm,
the Paramount Group, whose owner Ivor Ichikowitz is a rabid
Zionist supplying
tefillin spiritual support to Israel’s genocidal military
(Bond 2024a, 2024b).
Yet even with geopolitical and
military
turmoil affecting the West Asian, Eastern European and
Southeast Asian theaters
of conflict, the broader objective of any partnership and
global governance
agenda is assimilation of hostile forces. The G7’s evolution
into the G20
rested upon Beijing’s willingness to boost the world economy
with financial
liquidity in 2008-09. China remains the most important
challenger to U.S.
economic hegemony, and in mid-2014, Barack Obama was asked
by The Economist (2014)
about prospects:
The Economist: “You see countries like China
creating a BRICS bank, for instance—institutions that seem
to be parallel with
the system, rather—and potentially putting pressure on the
system rather than
adding to it and strengthening it. That is the key issue,
whether China ends up
inside that system or challenging it. That’s the really big
issue of our times,
I think.”
Obama: “It is. And I think it’s important
for the United States and Europe to continue to welcome
China as a full partner
in these international norms. It’s important for us to
recognize that there are
going to be times where there are tensions and conflicts.
But I think those are
manageable. And it’s my belief that as China shifts its
economy away from
simply being the low-cost manufacturer of the world to
wanting to move up the
value chain, then suddenly issues like protecting
intellectual property become
more relevant to their companies, not just to US companies.”
Until the mid-2010s, the welcoming
strategy
generally paid off for Western imperialism. On the eve of
Trump’s inauguration,
Xi Jinping (2017) pronounced in
Davos that he would
gladly take the mantle from Obama:
Economic globalization has powered
global
growth and facilitated movement of goods and capital,
advances in science,
technology and civilization, and interactions among peoples…
Whether you like
it or not, the global economy is the big ocean that you
cannot escape from. Any
attempt to cut off the flow of capital, technologies,
products, industries and
people between economies, and channel the waters in the
ocean back into
isolated lakes and creeks is simply not possible.”
The
interpretation by Eric Toussaint (2024), based on a new
exposition by Claudio
Katz (2024), is that “China is now using the same economic
tools that the
United States used systematically – i.e. signing bilateral
free-trade treaties
… it is China that favours the dogma of free trade and the
mutual benefits to
be derived by the various economies if they adopt this type
of agreement.”
From
Katz’s (2024: 73) Buenos Aires view:
“All
the treaties promoted by China reinforce economic
subordination and dependence.
The Asian giant has consolidated its status as a creditor
economy, taking
advantage of unequal trade, capturing surpluses and
appropriating revenues. China does not
act as a dominating imperial power; but neither does it
favour Latin America.
The current agreements exacerbate primarization and the
flight of surplus
value. The external expansion of the new power is guided
by the principles of
profit maximization, not by norms of cooperation. Beijing
is not a simple
partner and is not part of the South.”
Should
the West be worried about an upsurge of anti-imperialism
(much less
anti-capitalism) from a China-led multipolar ideology? A
former BRICS New
Development Bank (NDB) vice president, Paulo Batista
(2023), made the same point as Obama at the Valdai
Club in Russia, in a
wide-ranging autocritique of that institution and of the
Contingent Reserve
Arrangement (CRA) that was meant to be the BRICS alternative
to the IMF:
Nowhere different,
to be more precise. Hence in spite of talk-left critique of
the West, there is
a walk-right coherence with imperialism’s sustenance of
corporate power within
a multilateral agenda that the West and BRICS+ generally
support. The overall
aim of imperial/sub-imperial managerialism remains the
extension of the
principles and practices of commodification into all aspects
of human life and
nature, amplified by Big Data, rising surveillance capacity,
artificial
intelligence and other new technologies.
Even when global public goods are
urgently
needed, such as removing intellectual property from
renewable energy and
storage innovations, or in pandemic vaccine treatment and
management, the WTO
has proven important notwithstanding rare critiques such as
India and South
Africa requesting a waiver to address Covid-19 – a stance
they retreated from
in mid-2022 when Brazil, Russia and China did not help
overcome dogmatic
European (especially German, British, Norwegian and Swiss)
Big Pharma
resistance.
The assimilation process has long
corresponded with the interpenetration of capitals – and a
newly-confident
international capitalist class with tax-haven protection and
multiple
citizenships – during the period of ever-rising trade,
foreign investment and
cross-border financial flows, until the 2008 peak year of
globalization. A
near-universally adopted ideology was vital, the neoliberal
Washington
Consensus, and is still associated with privatization,
deregulation,
outsourcing, casualization, market-based public policy and a
myriad of
public-private pilfering techniques, as austerity policies
are reasserted
(following the momentary 2020-22 pause when both Keynesian
debt-based fiscal
expansion and monetary laxity were deemed necessary to
prevent another
meltdown).
In the case of environmental
management, the ideology
of ecological modernization combines faith in technology and
markets. As for
social policy, attempts to reform imperialism and establish
social pacts
conclusively failed, aside from the 2020-21 years of Covid
emergencies. And one
new threat can be found in ‘financial inclusion’ strategies
to leverage cash
welfare grants through collateralized microfinance debt
encumbrance, as
innovated in an extremely predatory manner in South Africa a
decade ago by the
new World Bank president, Ajay Banga (Bateman et al 2023).
Compare this ideology with that of
past
imperial projects, such as racist colonialism; or Bismarck’s
Germany which
pioneered the welfare state simultaneously with hosting the
1884-85 Scramble
for Africa conference; or the way colonial and neo-colonial
power fostered a labor
aristocracy in the core capitalist countries (Bhambra and Holmwood, 2018); or
the
post-War Keynesianism and social-democratic frameworks in
which U.S. and
European powers projected their alternative to the Soviet
and Chinese paths.
Today’s imperialism is a far more
vicious,
extractive and effective version. Neoliberalism leads to a
no-holds barred
capitalism that shrinks sovereignty and entails such an
all-encompassing global
power structure that even BRICS countries’ firms rely upon
Washington-Geneva-New
York institutions to extract profits up and down the global
value chain, where
Shanghai-Mumbai-Johannesburg-Sao Paulo capital often does
the dirty work of
extraction and manufacture, rarely picking up the bulk of
profits located in Research
and Development (R&D), marketing and financing.
Moscow and other new BRICS+ capitals –
especially Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and Tehran – are vital in a
different way, what
with their petroleum and gas injections that fuel all the
others. The ten
BRICS+ (including Saudi Arabia) are entirely suitable for a
G7+BRICS+ alliance
when it comes to climate negotiations.
Indeed with Lula hosting the G20 in
November
2024, the BRICS+ in mid-2025 and the UN Climate Summit in
late 2025, the veneer
of a more benign multipolar power structure appears, until
Lula’s own dirty
approvals of Petrobras’ new oil drilling from the Foz de Amazonas to South Africa’s
Atlantic and Indian Oceans
appear on society’s radar – making it safe to predict the
the UNFCCC COP30 will
be yet another ‘Conference of Polluters’ farce, replete with
new versions of
G7-BRICS+ ‘gangster shit’.
Anti-imperialist/sub-imperialist
international solidarity
Amidst the UN’s overall acquiescence
to
corporate-neoliberal imperialism, there are, however, two
exceptions which
could be models for internationalism. Before noting these,
we must recognize
that other efforts, such as the 1970s-80s New International
Economic Order and
UN Centre on Transnational Corporations, did not prove
durable. To be sure, a
related UN effort – to end apartheid – did contribute to the
delegitimization
of pre-1994 Pretoria and assisted Western grassroots
activists in
boycott-divestment-sanctions campaigning, against
imperialist interests.
The same potential appears to be
emerging
against Israel, in the form of UN pressure to end genocide
and settler
colonialism against Palestinians, partly through the
International Court of
Justice as a result of South Africa’s case there in early
2024. These are
the type of partnership
potentials that could be more constructively encouraged in a
post-neocolonial
era, were power relations to shift and make the UN finally a
bit more relevant.
Within the UN, substantial success can
be
measured on two fronts: the 1987 banning of ozone-destroying
CFCs and the 2002
medicines fund which fused activist and state capacities.
These addressed, at
the global scale, what were and are indeed global crises.
The Montreal Protocol prevented the growing hole in
the
ozone layer, which even the conservative Reagan, Thatcher
and Kohl regimes
recognized as an existential threat during the 1980s, and
hence a ban was fully
implemented by 1996. (The initial exemptions for
hydrofluorocarbons were
subsequently eliminated in a 2016 Kigali amendment).
That
also saved the planet from what NASA suggests would have
been a potential half
a degree (Celsius) of additional planetary warming by 2100.
Such a ban on the
main sources of CO2 and methane, without emissions-trading
loopholes, is what
the UN should aim for in the UNFCCC, but appears unable to
in time to prevent
catastrophic climate change, due to the adverse balance of
forces.
The
second exception, the advent of a UN Global Fund to fight
AIDS, Tuberculosis
and Malaria which was catalysed during the early 2000s by
black South Africans
living with the Human immunodeficiency virus
(HIV), who in their advocacy
organizations
were initially unable to persuade their national state
leaders (especially
Thabo Mbeki who was president from 1999 until his expulsion
in a 2008 palace
coup) to access the anti-retroviral (ARV) medicines required
to improve immune
systems.
The
Treatment Action Campaign activists found international
allies – especially
Medicins sans Frontiers, the U.S.-based AIDS Coalition to
Unleash Power and
Oxfam – which helped demand and win a waiver on Intellectual
Property for
generic ARVs within the World Trade Organization in 2001. At
the time, more
than 40 million people were living with HIV.
The
UN Global Fund’s (2024)
management, in a
self-congratulatory yet justified manner, describes on its
website what was “an
act of extraordinary global solidarity and leadership… to
fight what were then
the deadliest infectious diseases confronting humanity”
resulting in US$60
billion donated by rich countries, “saving 59 million lives
and reducing the
combined death rate from the three diseases by more than
half.”
Those
are two internationalist approaches to global public goods,
within and against
the logic of multilateral institutions that ordinarily serve
corporate power,
which any critic of imperial/sub-imperial relations must
consider victories.
The
first was, to be sure, a top-down reform within a global
capitalist system in
which a market externality – CFC pollution – was understood
to be
system-threatening and where no emissions-trading or -offset
gimmicks were
considered workable in the context of urgency; whereas the
second was
bottom-up, driven by activists who needed a reform to Big
Pharma’s power and
North-to-South financial resource transfers, to save
millions of poor people’s
lives.
Other
specific battles have inspiring lessons, such as South
Africa’s anti-apartheid
struggle which stands out for at least weakening the racial
power bloc of white
state and capital sufficiently in the mid-1980s through both
local struggle and
international sanctions, that democracy was won here (even
if socio-economic
and environmental conditions worsened).
From
time to time, projects like the Zapatista autonomous
municipalities of Chiapas,
Mexico; Brazilian Movement of Landless Worker farm
occupations; or Rojava
grassroots, feminist, democratic socialists have provided
prefigurative sites
of liberation in particular territories (Kothari et al 2019).
And
we have seen countless other acts of anti-imperialist
internationalism, such as
widespread Palestine-solidarity protest against the Israeli,
U.S., British,
German and French states. Globally-coordinated climate
activism sometimes shows
great promise, and the best local applications – sometimes
under the banner of
‘water defenders’ – provide what Naomi Klein (2014)
terms ‘blockadia’ activism, with many such struggles
evolving from ‘climate
action’ to ‘climate justice.’
However,
as identity-based movements gained traction and as
co-optation occurred to some
degree – leaving us with the likes of an Obama or with what
is termed the
‘lean-in feminism’ of the 1% (Arruzza,
Bhattacharya and
Fraser 2019) – a rightwing doppelganger mirror image
has also emerged, as Klein (2023) warns.
The
formidable rise of a faux anti-imperialism, or more
precisely anti-‘globalism,’
around the networks Steve Bannon has built, are playing a
pernicious,
conspiracy-mongering role uniting proto-fascistic
self-declared ‘populist’
dissidents across the world. On the other hand, the
impressive showing of
Bernie Sanders’ U.S. presidential bids in 2016 and 2020, and
Jeremy Corbyn’s
2017 British leadership campaign included both
appeals to class solidarity and
progressive identity politics.
Corbyn
defanged the UK Independence Party – which had the year
before driven through
Brexit – as he won working-class forces back to the left
using compelling
socio-economic policies. But as the recent German Linke
split shows, the danger
of red-brown political forces making concessions to
xenophobic tendencies
remains acute.
As
for the far-right forces’ success, even if they undermined a
science-based vaccine
campaign against Covid-19, rightwing populism deserves some
credit for having
tackled problems that the left had historically dominated,
such as critiques of
coercive state power, extreme surveillance, excessive
medicalization and crony
corporate-state relations.
The
debates over hate speech and censorship exist nearly
everywhere, as Big Data
generates what Yanis Varoufakis
(2023) terms
techno-feudalism. These will be profound challenges for
anti-imperialists for
decades to come, thanks to the power growing in the U.S.
(Seattle-Silicon
Valley) and Chinese (Shenzhen-Hangzhou) corporate
headquarters of the largest
tech firms, in relation to the inadequate capacities of
Washington-Beijing
regulators.
Going
back in recent history, a quarter century, to the peak
global justice movement
protests against multilateral institutions such as in
Seattle and Washington,
DC in 1999-2000, as well as against the U.S. and British
militaries in 2003 as
the Iraq War began, there are more sobering lessons.
The
World Social Forum (WSF) began well in 2001 in Brazil, but
within a decade had
degenerated into an ideology-free talk shop dominated by
NGOs. Some strong
components persisted – for example, Via Campesina, the World
March of Women and
Water Warriors – and in 2024 a revival was successfully held
in Nepal. Indeed, both
the single-issue and geographically-focused movements showed
they could mobilize
in coherent ways at global and local scales, occasionally
using the WSF to
their and the broader movement’s benefit.
But
it’s obvious enough that the two primary progressive global
movements of recent
months, climate and Palestine solidarity, must win some far
more profound
victories in the period ahead, to avoid burnout and
collapse. As forces
continue to rise and fall and rise again against both
imperialism and also
now sub-imperialism, much
greater attention to the failed Western partnership with
BRICS+ regimes – and
to conflicts between and within these forces – will be vital
for a coherent,
internationalist, bottom-up strategy.
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(The author teaches at
University
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Social Change. In the
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initially
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