On 9/13/2020 5:56 PM, Esteban Mercatante wrote:
The last few decades have been characterized by weak economic growth
in the developed countries, which contrasts with the dynamism shown by
China and other countries on the periphery. What does this tell us
about the relations that characterize the world capitalist system?
In this article I engage with the ideas of David Harvey about
imperialism.
https://www.leftvoice.org/uneven-development-and-imperialism-today-engaging-with-the-ideas-of-david-harvey
Comrade Esteban,
This is much appreciated. But if you want some semi-critical feedback
(with the disclosure-proviso that I did my PhD under Harvey's
supervision, on uneven development in Zimbabwe), I don't think the
binary categories you seem to rely upon are sufficiently nuanced to
address uneven development, especially uneven and combined development.
There is a critical missing category, "sub-imperialism," which is a
concept Ruy Mauro Marini developed in the 1960s-70s to explain Brazil's
location as deputy sheriff to Washington not only in geopolitical terms,
but also with respect to the local trajectory of capital accumulation.
Harvey advanced the concept a bit in the early 2000s, in /The New
Imperialism. /I think he was mistaken by not invoking it in the debate
with John Smith a couple of years ago, especially in the /Review of
African Political Economy. /(My critique is here
<roape.net/2018/04/18/towards-a-broader-theory-of-imperialism/>.)
You correctly say:
Harvey’s statement about a partial reversal in the drainage of
historical wealth could be considered valid: the fact that this
“periphery” has become a receptacle for capital on a larger scale,
hand in hand with an increase in investment by local capitalists (and
in China, above all, by public enterprises), and at the same time
these countries have increased their weight in the generation of
capital exported to other countries... some economies grow and
accumulate at the expense of others, and that those that are showing
the most dynamic growth in GDP, manufacturing exports, or foreign
investment are not at the center but are a rather limited sector of
the periphery.
That "rather limited sector" includes the
Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa bloc, which helps explain why
they line up tightly with imperialism when it comes to amplifying the
damage done by multinational corporations, the IMF and World Bank, the
WTO, the UNFCCC and even FIFA (recall who nurtured Sepp Blatter in 2010,
2014 and 2018). My co-editor of the book /BRICS: An Anti-Capitalist
Critique, /Ana Garcia from Rio, discuss this here
<https://socialistproject.ca/leftstreamed-video/ls305/>.
If we consider as a bloc all the dependent countries (typically
characterized by the multilateral agencies as “emerging” and
“developing” countries, or “middle income” and “poor” countries,
etc.), they have continued to “drain” wealth towards the rich
countries during the last decades.
But these are not "a bloc", they are very distinct in terms of the
emerging global division of labour, in which the West has ceded a great
deal of its primary role in extracting surpluses from the periphery to
semi-peripheral corporations, especially from the BRICS. There are two
new books that deal with this: /BRICS and Resistance in Africa
<https://www.zedbooks.net/shop/book/brics-and-resistance-in-africa/>
/(which I co-edited) and /BRICS and the New American Imperialism /(free
for download here <https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/22401>).
I based this on a 2015 study that reconstructs the net results of
global licit and illicit financial flows — including “development
aid,” wage remittances, net trade balances, debt services, new loans,
foreign direct investment (FDI), portfolio investment, and other flows.
Actually, that particular methodology massively underestimates the
damage done within the broader wealth drain from South to North, because
it ignores what's termed unequal ecological exchange, which in my
definition would highlight the drain of depleted non-renewable natural
resources. In Africa these are typically $150 bn/year worth of
/additional /South-to-North wealth reduction. The World Bank even admits
this scale of unequal exchange
<https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/05/new-evidence-of-africas-systematic-looting-from-an-increasingly-schizophrenic-world-bank/>
by factoring in uncompensated resource depletion. so progressives
shouldn't be so far behind the curve. Samir Amin pointed out this
problem starting in 1972, and it's been one of the core insights of
ecological economics, especially advanced by Herman Daly.
... in the last 20 years the relative weight of the rich (imperialist)
countries and the rest of the world has changed in terms of foreign
direct investment from these countries (destined to productive
enterprises, either by starting them up from scratch or by acquiring
some participation in local companies) and, to a lesser extent, in the
return flow from these countries to other countries. Today, many
“emerging” and “developing” countries also export capital — that is,
their residents make foreign direct investments. Most of these are in
other “emerging” and “developing” countries, but some make their way
to the develop economies
This is where it becomes vital to recognise parts of the "Global North"
that are located in sit of sub-imperialist accumulation such as where
I've mainly been based the last 30 years: Johannesburg, South Africa.
This is not just a branch-plant city but one where voracious extractive
industries have been located since the 1880s when half the world's gold
was discovered underground, sometimes 4km deep. And the accumulation of
capital that occurred here was not just in the circuit of JP Morgan
(co-founder of Anglo American) but also entailed a white patriotic
bourgeoisie that - until early 1990 when Nelson Mandela was released
from jail - was perfectly happy to use Joburg as its hq base. In 1999,
there was a massive flight of Anglo, De Beers and many others of the top
The critical question is whether the /semi-periphery /(not
periphery) is exporting capital (and returning dividends), and whether
this is due to countries in this category, led by China, experiencing
crises of overaccumulation in their own economies. Where I live, South
Africa, this problem has been acute
<https://www.uj.ac.za/faculties/humanities/sociology/Seminars/Documents/Bond%20Malikane%20SA%20inequality,%20macroeconomics%20and%20overaccumulation%20crisis%20-%20Feb%202019%20draft%20for%20Development%20Southern%20Africa.pdf>
(though of variable intensity over time) since the 1980s and has led to
repeated drives to offshore capital. The most formidable example was
exactly a year ago when the African continent's largest firm (by far),
Naspers, suddenly began relocating most of its wealth (a 31% investment
in the Chinese IT firm Tencent) to Amsterdam, in view of the firm's
inability to recirculate capital profitably in South Africa.
That overaccumulation and capital export, in turn, means the rate
at which local capital draws in dividends from abroad, compared to
foreign capital drawing in dividends from South Africa, has been
relatively high at around 60% - though nowhere the level of imperialist
economies like the U.S. which hit 215% in 2015-17. A chart (from this
book <https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/22401>) gives you a
sense of the ratios, as imperialist, sub-imperialist and peripheral
economies' have differential abilities to retain or attract surpluses:
/Profit flows, 2015-17 (average dividend receipts as percent of dividend
payments)/
imperial subimperial dividend flows highlighting BRICS
The fragmentation of production processes and the international
dispersion of tasks and activities within them has led to the
emergence of production systems without borders — which can be
sequential chains or complex networks, and which can be global,
regional, or involve only two countries. These systems are commonly
referred to as global value chains.
These chains are, fortunately, in retreat - as part of a general
deglobalisation of productive capital including trade/GDP, FDI/GDP and
cross-border-finance/GDP ratios. In 2007 the global value chains peaked
at over 28% of productive capital's output, but by 2018 were down to
22%. Much more localisation is now underway. I have some brief
rough-draft lectures on the processes here:
*_<https://vimeo.com/419734611>_*
*_14 - 2000-19 - World economy <https://vimeo.com/433148687>_*
*_<https://vimeo.com/419592712>_*
*_15 - 2010s deglobalisation <https://vimeo.com/419734611>_*
*_16 - 2010s BRICS <https://vimeo.com/419592712>_*
*<https://vimeo.com/419737166>*
Thanks for your stimulating article, keep them coming!
Patrick
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