SPACE/COSMOS

SpaceX launches Starship but fails to repeat booster catch as Trump, Musk look on


SpaceX launched its Starship megarocket Tuesday, attended by President-elect Donald Trump and allies. The Super Heavy booster splashed into the Gulf of Mexico, missing the "chopstick" tower catch. SpaceX cited technical issues, overshadowing the event despite Trump's praise of the engineering feat during his victory speech.


Issued on: 20/11/2024 -
By: NEWS WIRES
Video by: Fraser JACKSON

01:47

The first stage of SpaceX's Starship rocket after landing off the coast of Texas during a test flight on November 19, 2024.

 © Chandan Khanna, AFP


SpaceX flew its latest test flight of its Starship megarocket on Tuesday, with President-elect Donald Trump joining Elon Musk to witness the spectacle firsthand in the latest sign of their ever closer ties.

But the Republican leader was deprived of the chance to see the descending first stage caught in the launch tower's "chopstick" arms, an engineering marvel demonstrated by the company last month and one he personally lauded during his election victory speech.

Instead, the massive Super Heavy booster made a more subdued splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.

Company representatives cited unmet technical criteria, dampening the triumph of an event attended by an array of Trump-world figures.


Space X founder and CEO Musk has been a constant presence at Trump's side since the incoming president's election victory, joining him at a meeting with Argentina's President Javier Milei and even at a UFC bout.

Trump's decision to travel to Musk's home turf was the latest sign of the burgeoning bond between the billionaire duo, which has raised questions over possible conflicts of interests given SpaceX's lucrative contracts with NASA and the Pentagon.

Watch more  Spectacular landing: SpaceX catches giant Starship booster with mechanical arms

Flying in from his Mar-a-Lago home, Trump greeted Musk warmly on Tuesday afternoon, sporting a red MAGA hat as the pair headed off to watch from the control tower of the company's Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, where Starship blasted off at 4:00 pm (2200 GMT).

Tuesday's launch marked the quickest turnaround between test flights for the world's most powerful rocket, a gleaming, 400-foot-tall (121-meter) stainless steel colossus central to Musk's ambition of colonising Mars and making humanity a multiplanetary species.

Musk aims to launch the first uncrewed missions to the Red Planet as early as 2026, coinciding with the next "Mars transfer window" -- a period when the journey between Earth and Mars is at its shortest.

NASA is also counting on a specialised version of Starship to ferry astronauts to the lunar surface later this decade under its Artemis program.
Stuffed banana

Flight six of Starship was seen as a test of whether SpaceX's first booster catch was pure precision or relied on a stroke of luck after Musk -- perhaps inadvertently -- disclosed how close the last flight came to disaster.

In a clip posted to X showcasing his gaming chops in "Diablo IV," sharp-eared fans caught an employee briefing him that the Super Heavy booster was "one second away" from a system failure that could have spelled catastrophe.

Starship's upper stage meanwhile made a partial orbit of Earth, reentered the atmosphere and splashed down in the Indian Ocean around an hour and five minutes after launch.

SpaceX employees erupted in cheers during a live feed watched by nearly nine million viewers, as the upper stage executed a near-vertical daylight splashdown off Australia's northwest coast, sending up a towering plume of water vapor before tipping over.

Key milestones included reigniting Starship's Raptor engines for the first time in space and trialing new heat shield materials. The flight also carried Starship's first ever payload -- a stuffed banana -- and served as a swan song for the current generation of Starship prototypes.

With twice the thrust of the Saturn V rockets that powered Apollo missions, Starship is the most powerful rocket ever built.

Musk has already teased that its successor, Starship V3, will be "3X more powerful" and could take flight in about a year.

The flight comes as Musk is riding high on Trump's November 5 White House win, having campaigned extensively for the returning Republican leader, as well as donating staggering sums from his own fortune to the cause.

His loyalty has paid off. Musk has been tapped to co-lead a new "Department of Government Efficiency" -- or DOGE, a cheeky nod to the meme-based cryptocurrency Musk loves to promote.

That in turn has led to concerns Musk could engage in "self-dealing" as the CEO is poised to straddle the line between government insider and corporate titan.

(AFP)

Unlocking the secrets of the first quasars: how they defy the laws of physics to grow

Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica

 

image: 

AI-generated representation of an accreting supermassive black hole, surrounded by gas spiralling toward it along the equatorial plane (the accretion disk) and emitting powerful winds of matter as it falls in. This representation is based on a NASA's artist's concept that illustrates a supermassive black hole with millions to billions times the mass of our sun.

view more 

Credit: Credits: Emanuela Tortosa

In the article published today in the Astronomy & Astrophysics journal, new evidence suggests how supermassive black holes, with masses of several billion times that of our Sun, formed so rapidly in less than a billion years after the Big Bang. The study, led by researchers of the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), analyses a sample of 21 quasars, among the most distant ever discovered, observed in the X-rays band by the XMM-Newton and Chandra space telescopes. The results suggest that the supermassive black holes at the centre of these titanic quasars, the first formed during the cosmic dawn, may have reached their extraordinary masses through very rapid and intense accretion, thus providing a plausible explanation for their existence in the early stages of the Universe.

Quasars are active galaxies powered by the central supermassive black holes (known as active galactic nuclei), which emit an enormous amount of energy as they attract matter. They are extremely luminous and distant from us. In particular, the quasars examined in this study are among the most distant objects ever observed, dating back to a time when the Universe was less than a billion years old.

In this work, the analysis of X-ray emissions from these objects revealed an entirely unexpected behaviour of the supermassive black holes at their centres: a connection emerged between the shape of the X-ray emission and the speed of the winds of matter ejected by the quasars. This relationship links the wind speed, which can reach thousands of kilometres per second, to the temperature of the gas in the corona, the region that emits X-rays closest to the black hole. Thus, the corona turned out to be connected to the powerful accretion mechanisms of the black hole itself. Quasars with low-energy X-ray emission, and thus a lower temperature in the corona, show faster winds. This indicates a highly rapid growth phase that exceeds a physical limit for the accretion of matter called the Eddington limit, which is why this phase is called "super-Eddington." Conversely, quasars with higher-energy X-ray emissions tend to exhibit slower winds.

"Our work suggests that the supermassive black holes at the centre of the first quasars formed within the first billion years of the Universe's life may have actually increased their mass very rapidly, challenging the limits of physics," says Alessia Tortosa, lead author of the study and researcher at INAF in Rome. "The discovery of this connection between X-ray emission and winds is crucial for understanding how such large black holes could have formed in such a short time, thus providing a concrete clue to solve one of the greatest mysteries of modern astrophysics."

The result was achieved mainly by analysing data collected with the XMM-Newton space telescope of the European Space Agency (ESA), which allowed for approximately 700 hours of observations of the quasars. Most of the data, collected between 2021 and 2023 as part of the Multi-Year XMM-Newton Heritage Programme, under the direction of Luca Zappacosta, a researcher at INAF in Rome, is part of the HYPERION project, which aims at studying hyperluminous quasars during the cosmic dawn of the Universe. The extensive observation campaign was led by a team of Italian scientists and received crucial support from INAF, which funded the program, thereby supporting cutting-edge research on the evolutionary dynamics of the early structures of the Universe.

"In the HYPERION program, we focused on two key factors: on one hand, the careful selection of quasars to observe, choosing the titans, meaning those that had accumulated as much mass as possible, and on the other hand, the in-depth study of their properties in X-rays, something never attempted before on such a large number of objects from the cosmic dawn," says Luca Zappacosta, a researcher at INAF in Rome. We hit the jackpot! The results we're getting are genuinely unexpected, and they all point to a super-Eddington growth mechanism of the black holes."

This study provides important insights for future X-ray missions, such as ATHENA (ESA), AXIS, and Lynx (NASA), which are scheduled for launch between 2030 and 2040. In fact, the results obtained will be useful for refining the next-generation observational instruments and for defining better strategies for investigating black holes and active galactic nuclei in X-rays at more distant cosmic epochs. These are key elements for understanding the formation of the first galactic structures in the primordial Universe.

Related journal article: “HYPERION. Shedding light on the first luminous quasars: A correlation between UV disc winds and X-ray continuum”, di Tortosa A. et al. 2024, Astronomy & Astrophysics.

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Journal

Astronomy and Astrophysics

DOI

10.1051/0004-6361/202449662 

Article Title

HYPERION. Shedding light on the first luminous quasars: A correlation between UV disc winds and X-ray continuum

Article Publication Date

20-Nov-2024

Astronauts found to process some tasks slower in space, but no signs of permanent cognitive decline

Researchers found that astronauts’ processing speed, working memory, and attention slowed down, but a few months in space did not result in lasting cognitive impairment

Frontiers

A stay in space exerts extreme pressures on the human body. Astronauts’ bodies and brains are impacted by radiation, altered gravity, challenging working conditions, and sleep loss – all of which could compromise cognitive functioning. At the same time, they are required to perform complex tasks, and minor mistakes can have devastating consequences.

Little is known, however, about whether astronauts’ cognitive performance changes while in space. Now, working with 25 astronauts who spent an average of six month on the International Space Station (ISS), researchers in the US have examined changes in a wide range of cognitive performance domains. This dataset makes up the largest sample of cognitive performance data from professional astronauts published to date.

“We show that there is no evidence of any significant cognitive impairment or neurodegenerative decline in astronauts spending six months on the ISS,” said Dr Sheena Dev, a researcher at NASA’s Behavioral Health and Performance Laboratory and first author of the Frontiers in Physiology study. “Living and working in space was not associated with widespread cognitive impairment that would be suggestive of significant brain damage.”

Slower, but no less accurate

Astronauts underwent a series of tests developed to assess a range of cognitive domains using 10 subtests. For each of these tests, the researchers measured speed and accuracy at five time points: pre-mission, early and late flight respectively, as well as at 10 and 30 days after landing.

The results showed that responses to tasks assessing processing speed, working memory, and attention were slower than on Earth, but they were no less accurate. These changes, however, did not persist equally long. “Slowed performance on attention, for example, was only observed early during the mission while slowed performance on processing speed did not return to baseline levels until after the mission ended and crew were back on Earth,” Dev pointed out.

Overall, astronauts’ cognitive performance was stable, and the researchers did not find evidence that would suggest damage to the central nervous system during a six-month space mission.

Data for future space missions

The results showed that some cognitive domains were more susceptible to be impacted than others. “Even on Earth, processing speed, working memory, and attention are cognitive domains that can show temporary changes when an individual is under stress. Other domains, such as memory, are less vulnerable to stressors. For example, if you happen to have a really busy day but couldn’t get much sleep the night before, you might feel like it’s hard to pay attention or that you need more time to complete tasks,” explained Dev.

Astronauts are exposed to these stressors, too, but additional stressors that are unique to space also take their toll. “We found that the most vulnerable domains while astronauts are aboard the ISS are the same as those that are more susceptible to stressors on Earth,” Dev said. 

The researchers said that their study can help them understand which changes in cognitive performance might be expected when humans go to extreme environments. What the study didn’t show, however, is why those changes happened, the researchers cautioned. It also didn’t set out to assess whether astronauts’ operational performance suffered. “It could be that even in areas with observed declines, astronauts were still able to compensate and effectively complete their tasks,” Dev said.

Once astronauts start traveling deeper into space – to the moon or Mars, for example – this data from the low Earth orbit can also provide a comparison which can help detect cognitive changes brought about by increased radiation exposure and extended communication delays more quickly, the researchers concluded.

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Journal

Frontiers in Physiology

DOI

10.3389/fphys.2024.1451269 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Cognitive Performance in ISS Astronauts on 6-month Low Earth Orbit Missions

Article Publication Date

20-Nov-2024

Rising Dangers Of Imperial + Sub-Imperial Partnering

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

ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.Donate



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.

Nobel-winning physicist 'unnerved' by AI technology he helped create

Issam AHMED
Tue, October 8, 2024 

John Hopfield was honored for devising the 'Hopfield network' — a theoretical model demonstrating how an artificial neural network can mimic the way biological brains store and retrieve memories (Denise APPLEWHITE) (Denise APPLEWHITE/PRINCETON UNIVERSITY/AFP)


A US scientist who won the 2024 Nobel physics prize for his pioneering work on artificial intelligence said Tuesday he found recent advances in the technology "very unnerving" and warned of possible catastrophe if not kept in check.

John Hopfield, a professor emeritus at Princeton, joined co-winner Geoffrey Hinton in calling for a deeper understanding of the inner workings of deep-learning systems to prevent them from spiraling out of control.

Addressing a gathering at the New Jersey university via video link from Britain, the 91-year-old said that over the course of his life he had watched the rise of two powerful but potentially hazardous technologies -- biological engineering and nuclear physics.


"One is accustomed to having technologies which are not singularly only good or only bad, but have capabilities in both directions," he said.

"And as a physicist, I'm very unnerved by something which has no control, something which I don't understand well enough so that I can understand what are the limits which one could drive that technology."

"That's the question AI is pushing," he continued, adding that despite modern AI systems appearing to be "absolute marvels," there is a lack of understanding about how they function, which he described as "very, very unnerving."

"That's why I myself, and I think Geoffrey Hinton also, would strongly advocate understanding as an essential need of the field, which is going to develop some abilities that are beyond the abilities you can imagine at present."

Hopfield was honored for devising the "Hopfield network" -- a theoretical model demonstrating how an artificial neural network can mimic the way biological brains store and retrieve memories.

His model was improved upon by British-Canadian Hinton, often dubbed the "Godfather of AI," whose "Boltzmann machine" introduced the element of randomness, paving the way for modern AI applications such as image generators.

Hinton himself emerged last year as a poster child for AI doomsayers, a theme he returned to during a news conference held by the University of Toronto where he serves as a professor emeritus.

"If you look around, there are very few examples of more intelligent things being controlled by less intelligent things, which makes you wonder whether when AI gets smarter than us, it's going to take over control," the 76-year-old told reporters.

- Civilizational downfall -

With the meteoric rise of AI capabilities -- and the fierce race it has sparked among companies -- the technology has faced criticism for evolving faster than scientists can fully comprehend.

"You don't know that the collective properties you began with are actually the collective properties with all the interactions present, and you don't therefore know whether some spontaneous but unwanted thing is lying hidden in the works," stressed Hopefield.

He evoked the example of "ice-nine" -- a fictional, artificially engineered crystal in Kurt Vonnegut's 1963 novel "Cat's Cradle" developed to help soldiers deal with muddy conditions but which inadvertently freezes the world's oceans solid, causing the downfall of civilization.

"I'm worried about anything that says... 'I'm faster than you are, I'm bigger than you are... can you peacefully inhabit with me?' I don't know, I worry."

Hinton said it was impossible to know how to escape catastrophic scenarios at present, "that's why we urgently need more research."

"I'm advocating that our best young researchers, or many of them, should work on AI safety, and governments should force the large companies to provide the computational facilities that they need to do that," he added.

‘Godfather of AI’ who warned technology could end humanity wins Nobel prize

Nilima Marshall, PA Science Reporter
Tue, October 8, 2024 



A British-Canadian computer scientist who warned that artificial intelligence (AI) could pose an existential threat to humanity has been awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics.

Professor Geoffrey Hinton, often touted as the “godfather of AI”, shares the honour with US academic John Hopfield for their pioneering work on machine learning, which powers AI.

The announcement was made by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences at a press conference in Stockholm, Sweden.

Prof Hinton, 76, who has warned about the dangers of intelligent machines, said he was “flabbergasted”, adding: “I had no idea this would happen. I’m very surprised.”

The University of Toronto professor resigned from Google last year, saying he was worried about the “existential risk” posed by machines that could outsmart humans.

Speaking on the phone at the event in Stockholm, Prof Hinton described the call about being awarded the Nobel as a “bolt from the blue”, saying: “I am in a cheap hotel in California that does not have an internet connection and does not have a very good phone connection.

“I was going to get an MRI scan today, but I think I’ll have to cancel that.”

Machine learning is a key component of AI which allow machines to perform tasks that mimic human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, and problem solving.


The impact of AI can be seen in every aspect of human lives, from uncovering hidden cancers and editing photos on phones to powering systems such as ChatGPT.

Prof Hinton, who shares a prize fund worth 11m Swedish kronor (£810,000) with Prof Hopfield of Princeton University, said artificial intelligence will have a “huge influence” on humanity that could be comparable with the Industrial Revolution – a period of scientific and technological development in the 18th century.

He added: “But instead of exceeding people in physical strength, it (AI) is going to exceed people in intellectual ability.

“We have no experience of what it is like to have things smarter than us, and it is going to be wonderful in many respects.”

Prof Hinton said that in areas like healthcare, AI will make things “more efficient” with “huge improvements in productivity”.

But he also said he was worried about “a number of possible bad consequences, particularly the threat of these things getting out of control”.


When asked about whether he had any regrets about his groundbreaking work on AI, Prof Hinton said: “There are two kinds of regret – there is regret where you feel guilty because you did something you knew you should not have done, and then then there is regret where you did something that you would do again in the same circumstances.”

He said that he “would do the same again” but was “worried that the overall consequence of this might be systems more intelligent than us that eventually take control”.

Prof Hinton said he uses Chat GPT 4 “whenever I want to know the answer to anything”, but he does not usually trust the chatbot, “because it can hallucinate”.

Commenting on the announcement, Professor Sir Keith Burnett, president of the Institute of Physics, said: “Congratulations to John J Hopfield and Geoffrey E Hinton for winning the Nobel Prize in Physics today.

“It is incredibly exciting to see key ideas and techniques in Physics helping to drive new ways to model and understand the wider world and machine learning is undoubtedly one of the transformational technologies of the future.

“Their work with artificial neural networks is contributing to a whole new generation of smarter, faster and more adaptable processing and thinking systems, which could transform all of our lives.”

Meric Gertler, preseident of the University of Toronto, said: “On behalf of the University of Toronto, I am absolutely delighted to congratulate University Professor Emeritus Geoffrey Hinton on receiving the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics.

“The U of T community is immensely proud of his historic accomplishment.”

Ellen Moons, a member of the Nobel committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said the pair “used fundamental concepts” from physics to “design artificial neural networks” that have “become part of our daily lives, for instance in facial recognition and language translation”.

AI pioneers John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton win Nobel Prize in physics
Gabriela Galvin
Tue, October 8, 2024 at 3:52 AM MDT·3 min read

Artificial intelligence pioneers John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for discoveries that enabled machine learning with artificial neural networks and set the scene for today’s breakthroughs in AI.

Hans Ellegren, secretary general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, awarded the prize Tuesday in Stockholm.

Hopfield, who carries out research at Princeton University in the United States, is known for creating a network in 1982 that can retain and recreate patterns in images and other types of data by identifying the values between points, working through them, and updating the missing values.

Now called Hopfield networks, they can be used to recognise images, correct mistakes, and optimise functions in computer science.

In 1985, Hinton, a computer scientist at the University of Toronto in Canada who is known as the “godfather of AI,” used the Hopfield network to create a new model. After being fed examples, the network – called the Boltzmann machine – can recognise characteristics in data and use that to identify specific elements in images or other patterns.

Hopfield and Hinton’s work, which relied on tools and concepts from physics, set the groundwork for modern machine learning.

“The laureates’ discoveries and inventions form the building blocks of machine learning that can aid humans in making faster and more reliable decisions, for instance when diagnosing medical conditions,” Ellen Moons, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said.

Speaking to journalists, Hinton said that AI-driven advancements will be “comparable with the Industrial Revolution, but instead of exceeding people in physical strength, it’s going to exceed people in intellectual ability”.

That could come with incredible societal benefits, but also “the threat of these things getting out of control,” Hinton said.

Hinton spent a decade working on AI at Google before resigning last year, joining a growing chorus of ex-tech employees to warn about the potential dangers of these systems.

Related

‘Godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton quits Google to warn over the tech’s threat to humanity

Asked about the common AI tools he uses, Hinton said he’s a fan of the chatbot ChatGPT – but with some caveats.

"I actually use GPT-4 quite a lot,” Hinton said. “Whenever I want to know the answer to anything, I just go and ask GPT-4. I don't totally trust it cause it can hallucinate, but on almost everything, it's a not-very-good expert, and that's very useful".
Nobel Prizes through the years

The Nobel Prizes were created by Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who died in 1896. It comes with a cash award of 11 million Swedish kroner, which is nearly €976,000.

From 1901 to 2023, 117 Nobel Prizes were awarded in Physics. The youngest of the 225 laureates was 25, while the oldest was 96.

Last year’s physics award went to Pierre Agostini from Ohio State University in the United States, Ferenc Krausz from the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany, and Anne L’Huillier from Lund University in Sweden.

The trio found a way to create extremely short pulses of light that can be used to measure how the electrons inside atoms and molecules move or change energy.

Related

Quantum dots, mRNA, and attoseconds: What are the discoveries behind the 2023 science Nobel Prizes?

On Monday, American scientists Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of microRNA, tiny RNA molecules that govern how genes are regulated.

The rest of the 2024 prizes, awarded for advancements in chemistry, economics, literature, and toward peace, will be announced throughout this and next week.

The Nobel laureates will receive their prizes at an awards ceremony in Sweden in December.

Former Caltech and Google scientists win physics Nobel for pioneering artificial intelligence

Noah Haggerty

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES
Tue, October 8, 2024 a

Professor John Hopfield, left, of Princeton University, and professor Geoffrey Hinton, of the University of Toronto, won the 2024 Nobel Prize winners in Physics. (Associated Press)


On Tuesday morning, Princeton University professor John Hopfield and University of Toronto professor Geoffrey Hinton won the Nobel Prize in Physics 2024 for their foundational discoveries and inventions that pioneered modern artificial intelligence.

Hopfield joined Caltech as faculty in 1980 and, two years later, published his seminal paper in which he applied principles of the brain to computer circuits, creating a neural network able to hold memory and recognize patterns.

Building off of Hopfield's network, Hinton created a model that could not only distinguish between different patterns or images, but generate new ones altogether. His development later landed him a job at Google after the tech giant bought his company.

"These artificial neural networks have been used to advance research across physics topics as diverse as particle physics, material science and astrophysics," said Ellen Moons, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, at the announcement. "The laureates' discoveries and inventions form the building blocks of machine learning."

Read more: Sex, radiation and mummies: How farms are fighting a pesky almond moth without pesticides

The researchers will split a prize of roughly $1 million.

Hopfield was recruited to Caltech in 1978 after the university appointed a new president with a background in physics.

After years of attempting to model the human brain, Hopfield finally made his breakthrough in early 1980. He called Caltech a "splendid environment" for testing out his various ideas.

Around the same time, Hinton had left UC San Diego for Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, where he developed his model based on Hopfield's.

Called the Boltzmann machine, the model formed the basis of current generative AI models like ChatGPT (the "G" stands for "generative").

Read more: Are tiny black holes zipping through our solar system? Scientists hope to find out

Hinton and two of his students created a company based on the research in 2012, focused on using AI to identify common objects in photos, like flowers and dogs. Shortly after, Google bought it at auction for $44 million.

Hinton quit his job at the tech giant in 2023 so he could publicly voice concerns about the technology he helped invent.

He fears people will no longer be able to distinguish AI-generated images and videos from real ones and opposes the use of AI on the battlefield. Hinton said a part of him regrets his life's work.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

'Godfather of AI' shares Nobel Physics Prize

Georgina Rannard - Science reporter and Graham Fraser - Technology reporter
Tue, October 8, 2024 

BBC

The announcement was made in Stockholm, Sweden [Getty Images]


The Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to two scientists, Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield, for their work on machine learning.

British-Canadian Professor Hinton is sometimes referred to as the "Godfather of AI" and said he was flabbergasted.

He resigned from Google in 2023, and has warned about the dangers of machines that could outsmart humans.

The announcement was made by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences at a press conference in Stockholm, Sweden.

American Professor John Hopfield, 91, is a professor at Princeton University in the US, and Prof Hinton, 76, is a professor at University of Toronto in Canada.

Machine learning is key to artificial intelligence as it develops how a computer can train itself to generate information.

It drives a vast range of technology that we use today from how we search the internet to editing photographs on our phones.

“I had no idea this would happen. I'm very surprised,” said Prof Hinton, speaking on the phone to the Academy minutes after the announcement.

He said he was in a hotel with bad internet in California and thought he might need to cancel the rest of his day's plans.

The Academy listed some of the crucial applications of the two scientists’ work, including improving climate modelling, development of solar cells, and analysis of medical images.

Geoffrey Hinton said on Tuesday that he uses ChatGPT4 [Getty Images]

Prof Hinton's pioneering research on neural networks paved the way for current AI systems like ChatGPT.

In artificial intelligence, neural networks are systems that are similar to the human brain in the way they learn and process information. They enable AIs to learn from experience, as a person would. This is called deep learning.

Prof Hinton said his work on artificial neural networks was revolutionary.

“It’s going to be like the Industrial Revolution - but instead of our physical capabilities, it’s going to exceed our intellectual capabilities," he said.

But he said he also had concerns about the future. He was asked if he regretted his life's work as he told journalist last year.

In reply, he said he would do the same work again, "but I worry that the overall consequences of this might be systems that are more intelligent than us that might eventually take control".

He also said he uses the AI chatbot ChatGPT4 for many things now but with the knowledge that it does not always get the answer right.

Professor John Hopfield invented a network that can save and recreate patterns.

It uses physics that describes a material’s characteristics due to atomic spin.

In a similar way to how the brain tries to recall words by using associated but incomplete words, Prof Hopfield developed a network that can use incomplete patterns to find the most similar.

The Nobel Prize committee said the two scientists' work has become part of our daily lives, including in facial recognition and language translation.

But Ellen Moons, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said "its rapid development has also raised concerns about our future collectively".

The winners share a prize fund worth 11m Swedish kronor (£810,000).

AI chatbots 'may soon be more intelligent than us'


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When Prof Hinton resigned from Google last year, he told the BBC some of the dangers of AI chatbots were "quite scary".

He also said at the time that his age had played into his decision to leave the tech giant.

Earlier this year, in an interview with BBC Newsnight, he said the UK government will have to establish a universal basic income to deal with the impact of AI on inequality, as he was “very worried about AI taking lots of mundane jobs”.

He added that while AI would increase productivity and wealth, the money would go to the rich “and not the people whose jobs get lost and that’s going to be very bad for society”.

In the same interview, he said developments over the last year showed governments were unwilling to rein in military use of AI while the competition to develop products rapidly meant there was a risk tech companies wouldn't “put enough effort into safety”.

Prof Hinton said "my guess is in between five and 20 years from now there’s a probability of half that we’ll have to confront the problem of AI trying to take over".
Previous winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics

2023 - Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L'Huillier for work on attoseconds - extremely short pulses of light that can be used to capture and study rapid processes inside atoms;

2022 - Alain Aspect, American John Clauser and Austrian Anton Zeilinger for research into quantum mechanics - the science that describes nature at the smallest scales;

2021 - Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi were given the prize for advancing our understanding of complex systems, such as Earth's climate;

2020 - Sir Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez received the prize for their work on the nature of black holes;

2019 - James Peebles, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz shared the prize for ground-breaking discoveries about the Universe;

2018 - Donna Strickland, Arthur Ashkin and Gerard Mourou were awarded the prize for their discoveries in the field of laser physics.

AI chatbots 'may soon be more intelligent than us'

Two artificial intelligence leaders win physics Nobel Prize

Clyde Hughes
Tue, October 8, 2024 at 6:50 AM MDT·2 min read

Professor Anders Irback speaks at a press conference at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences after announcing the winners of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, in Stockholm, Sweden, on Tuesday to John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton. Photo by Christine Olsson/EPA-EFE


Oct. 8 (UPI) -- The Nobel Prize in physics was awarded on Tuesday to scientists a pair of scientists hailing from the United States and Canada for their work in artificial intelligence that has become the foundation of powerful machine learning.

The Nobel committee said John Hopfield, of Princeton University, created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data while Geoffrey Hinton, of the University of Toronto, invented a method that can autonomously find properties in data and perform tasks such as identifying specific elements in pictures.

"The laureates' work has already been of the greatest benefit," Ellen Moons, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said in a statement. "In physics, we use artificial neural networks in a vast range of areas, such as developing new materials with specific properties."

The Nobel Committee said the idea of machine learning using artificial neural networks was inspired by how the human brain works. In the artificial neural network, the brain's neurons are represented by nodes that have different values and influence each other through connections.

"This year's laureates have conducted important work with artificial neural networks from the 1980s onward," the committee said.

The committee said the world is just now coming to recognize how the work of Hopfield and Hinton in laying down some of the crucial foundations of artificial intelligence has shaped the global world and will continue to do so.

"With their breakthroughs, that stand on the foundations of physical science, they have shown a completely new way for us to use computers to aid and to guide us to tackle many of the challenges our society faces," the committee said.

Hinton, known as the "Godfather of AI," made headlines last year when he quit Google to focus on AI threat issues and joined hundreds of tech leaders to sign a statement warning about the risk of AI without the proper guardrails.




Two AI pioneers won the Nobel Prize for their work in machine learning

Britney Nguyen
Tue, October 8, 2024 

U.S. physicist John J. Hopfield (top L) and Canadian-British computer scientist and cognitive psychologist Geoffrey E. Hinton displayed on a screen at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden on October 8, 2024. - Photo: JONATHAN NACKSTRAND/AFP (Getty Images)


Two artificial intelligence pioneers were awarded the Nobel Prize for their work in machine learning, which laid the foundation for the current AI boom.

Geoffrey Hinton, also known as the “godfather of AI,” and John Hopfield were named as the 2024 winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday. Hinton and Hopfield, who both started their work in machine learning in the 1980s, were awarded the prize “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement.

Hopfield is known for inventing a network used in machine learning called the “Hopfield network,” which is used for storing and reconstructing images and other patterns in data using physics, according to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Hopfield’s network was then used by Hinton as the foundation for a new network that uses statistical physics, called the “Boltzmann machine,” which “can learn to recognize characteristic elements in a given type of data,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

“The laureates’ work has already been of the greatest benefit,” Ellen Moons, Chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said. “In physics we use artificial neural networks in a vast range of areas, such as developing new materials with specific properties.”

Last May, Hinton left his job on Google’s (GOOGL) AI research team to talk openly about his concerns over the risks of AI.

“I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,” Hinton told The New York Times (NYT).

On Tuesday, Hinton said in response to questions about regrets over his work, that he “would do the same again, but I am worried that the overall consequence of this might be systems more intelligent than us that eventually take control,” Bloomberg reported.

Hopfield and Hinton will share the prize of 11 million Swedish kronor, or $1 million.