Untenable G7/BRICS+/G20 assimilations within rapacious global capitalism
By Patrick Bond
October 19, 2024
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.
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,
“China, India, and South Africa appeared content to let the conference crash and burn and blame it on the Americans… Other than me, the most important player in attendance that day was the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao. He’d brought a giant delegation with him, and the group of them had thus far been inflexible and imperious in meetings, refusing to agree that China should submit to any form of international review of their emissions, confident in the knowledge that through their alliance with Brazil, India, and South Africa, they had enough votes to kill any deal. Meeting one-on-one with Wen I pushed back, warning that even if China saw avoiding any obligation toward transparency as a short-term win, it would prove to be a long-term disaster for the planet.”
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:
“‘I gotta say, boss, that was some real gangster shit back there.’ I did feel pretty good. On the biggest of stages, on an issue that mattered and with the clock ticking, I’d pulled a rabbit out of a hat. Granted, the press gave the interim agreement mixed reviews, but given the chaos of the conference and the obstinacy of the Chinese, I still saw it as a win.”
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:
“Make sure that we have the resources that are critical to us, including the oil resources that are critical to the world, that we have a strike capacity to make sure to be able to protect those. And Israel is critical, and the reason it’s critical is because it’s a bulwark for us in the Middle East. It’s almost like having an aircraft carrier in the Middle East.”
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:
“capitalist accumulation is founded on the destruction of the bases of all wealth: human beings and their natural environment. 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:
“Let me assure you that when we started out with the CRA and the NDB [in 2014], there existed considerable concern with what the BRICS were doing in this area in Washington, DC., in the IMF and in the World Bank. I can testify to that because I lived there at the time, as Executive Director for Brazil and other countries in the Board of the IMF. As time went by, however, people in Washington relaxed, sensing perhaps that we were going nowhere.”
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.
References
Amin, S. 2010. Law of Worldwide Value. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Arnold, G. 2006. Africa: A Modern History. London: Atlantic Press.
Issues discussed in this article will be discussed further at a Webinar on Oct 21st, accessible via the link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82251430827
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,
“China, India, and South Africa appeared content to let the conference crash and burn and blame it on the Americans… Other than me, the most important player in attendance that day was the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao. He’d brought a giant delegation with him, and the group of them had thus far been inflexible and imperious in meetings, refusing to agree that China should submit to any form of international review of their emissions, confident in the knowledge that through their alliance with Brazil, India, and South Africa, they had enough votes to kill any deal. Meeting one-on-one with Wen I pushed back, warning that even if China saw avoiding any obligation toward transparency as a short-term win, it would prove to be a long-term disaster for the planet.”
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:
“‘I gotta say, boss, that was some real gangster shit back there.’ I did feel pretty good. On the biggest of stages, on an issue that mattered and with the clock ticking, I’d pulled a rabbit out of a hat. Granted, the press gave the interim agreement mixed reviews, but given the chaos of the conference and the obstinacy of the Chinese, I still saw it as a win.”
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:
“Make sure that we have the resources that are critical to us, including the oil resources that are critical to the world, that we have a strike capacity to make sure to be able to protect those. And Israel is critical, and the reason it’s critical is because it’s a bulwark for us in the Middle East. It’s almost like having an aircraft carrier in the Middle East.”
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:
“capitalist accumulation is founded on the destruction of the bases of all wealth: human beings and their natural environment. 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:
“Let me assure you that when we started out with the CRA and the NDB [in 2014], there existed considerable concern with what the BRICS were doing in this area in Washington, DC., in the IMF and in the World Bank. I can testify to that because I lived there at the time, as Executive Director for Brazil and other countries in the Board of the IMF. As time went by, however, people in Washington relaxed, sensing perhaps that we were going nowhere.”
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.
References
Amin, S. 2010. Law of Worldwide Value. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Arnold, G. 2006. Africa: A Modern History. London: Atlantic Press.
Issues discussed in this article will be discussed further at a Webinar on Oct 21st, accessible via the link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82251430827
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Patrick Bond is a political economist, political ecologist and scholar of social mobilisation. From 2020-21 he was Professor at the Western Cape School of Government and from 2015-2019 was a Distinguished Professor of Political Economy at the University of the Witwatersrand School of Governance. From 2004 through mid-2016, he was Senior Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal School of Built Environment and Development Studies and was also Director of the Centre for Civil Society. He has held visiting posts at a dozen universities and presented lectures at more than 100 others.
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