On 2026/08/26 22:00, Marv Gandall via groups.io wrote:
...
This has led to Marxists identifying a profusion of "imperialist" and
"sub-imperialist" countries, diluting the concept which once referred
only to those countries which had formal "empires".
No Marv, the initial (and subsequent) adoption of some of this
terminology was not claiming the subimperial sites of capitalism had
'empires.' It was whether the subimperial 'practices' (writ large) of
states and capitalists in places like Brazil - as Ruy Mauro Marini
observed them first in 1965 - were “collaborating actively with
imperialist expansion, assuming in this expansion the position of a key
nation,” while still acknowledging “antagonistic cooperation between the
bourgeoisie of the underdeveloped countries and imperialism.”
That bourgeoisie is distorted, however: “The form which dependent
capital assumes upon reaching the stage of monopolies and finance
capital.” Stagnation occurs due to overaccumulation of capital,
resulting in so-called ‘premature deindustrialisation,’ in turn due to
local capitalist ‘super-exploitation’ (which limits buying power) and
the accompanying repression of poor and working people that is required
to sustain extreme inequality: “Brazilian capitalism is a monster, but a
logical monster: if popular consumption does not provide a market for
what the most dynamic sectors of industry produce, so much the worse for
popular consumption; capital will continue to accumulate without it. The
result of this is a fundamental specialization of the Brazilian economy
which is so logical that it becomes absurd: on the one hand the mass
which produces surplus value and has essentially no access to
consumption; on the other, the groups and strata which accumulate and/or
consume surplus value. The divorce between the classes could not be more
radical.”
Compared to the productive circuits of capital, more profits are then
found in the financial circuit. Profitability in the extractive
industries is contingent upon global commodity price cycles. Hence:
“subimperialism implies two basic components: on the one hand, a medium
organic composition on the world scale of national productive apparatus,
and, on the other, the exercise of a relatively autonomous expansionist
policy, which is not only accompanied by a greater integration in the
imperialist productive system, but also is maintained under the hegemony
exercised by imperialism on an international scale.”
If we work with that sort of mandate from Marini, would you not agree,
that we can then derive these:
*Global and regional practices considered subimperial:*
· State collaboration with imperialist multilateralism (degree of
control and self-interested influence at unreformed Washington-New
York-Geneva multilaterals, especially IMF/WB, WTO, UNFCCC, UNSC, G20)
· Corporate contributions to global value chains (measured by layers of
participation and share of profits)
· Corporate benefits from unequal ecological exchange (measured by the
extent of positionality and uncompensated extraction especially of
non-renewable natural resources)
· Export of surplus capital via FDI, loans and trade (due to
‘overaccumulation crisis’, especially in order to undermine regional
competitors, measured by excess capacity and pricing strategies, e.g.
‘dumping’)
· Military entanglements of a self-interested or regional-hegemonic
nature (e.g. current cases of frictional Chinese border conflicts from
the Himalayas to the South China Sea; Russia’s invasions of Ukraine;
Syria’s carve-up, revealing failures of Russia and Iran; India-Pakistan
conflicts with China backing the latter; South African troops in
Mozambique and DRC; Israel’s genocide of Palestine profiting BRICS
firms; failure of BRICS bloc to retain coherence in relation to Board of
Peace and to U.S.-Israeli wars on Iran and Lebanon)*
*
*Domestic practices consistent with subimperialism: *
· High levels of corporate concentration and financialisation
· Overaccumulation of capital in China, displaced to other BRICS
economies unable to withstand devaluation in spite of tariffs, and
increased dependency on commodity production and export processing
· Ossified class structure with high levels of social repression and
rising inequality
· Accumulation by dispossession especially through neoliberal public
policy and worsening super-exploitation of labour and ecological destruction
· Reactionary official socio-cultural tendencies (examples include
Brazilian evangelicism under Bolsonaro; Russian homophobia; Indian
Islamophobia and patriarchy; Chinese hostility to Muslim Uighurs,
Buddhist Tibetans, ethnic Mongolians and Hong Kong democrats; and South
African xenophobia; plus in the new BRICS regimes, Egyptian militarist
authoritarianism; Ethiopian ethnicism; Indonesian police brutality;
Iranian discrimination based on gender and sexual preference; UAE’s
tribal autocracy)
Corrections are welcome. If you like, I can send more on the way
subsequent Marxists have written about subimperialism, e.g. here in
South Africa both before and after 1994, and in the BRICS:
• Immanuel Wallerstein’s World-Systems ‘semi-periphery’ (1975)
• Ibbo Mandaza’s warning about subimperialism practices of the
apartheid-era South African state and capital (1980)
• David Harvey’s application of the subimperialism concept to post-1970s
footloose capital’s ‘spatial fix’ (2003)
• Sam Moyo’s and Paris Yeros’ application of Marini’s theory to the
BRICS (2013)
• Samir Amin’s labelling of post-apartheid South Africa as
‘subimperialist’ (2019)
• Gorden Moyo’s confirmation that in the African economy, BRICS are
subimperial (2024)
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